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Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
- s9w 6y agoThey just can't help their political activism. They're in deep shit with massive cuts to their technical operations. But they still do politics guns blazing.
- aloisdg 6y agoMozilla is quite clear about that. They consider Firefox as a political (yeah privacy is a political stance) product like another. A costly one.
- zpeti 6y agoWhy does privacy have anything to do with conspiracy theories and “disinformation”. Privacy should in fact be about respecting the individual and choices, and believing in people being intelligent enough (as groups) to make good choices. Basically the opposite of this pro censorship Mozilla stance.
- dexen 6y agoRecommendation bubbles are partly privacy matter -- without the ability to track users, there would be no recommendation bubbles. It may sound like a far-fetched possibility -- how to maintain privacy of logged in users? But I figure it is doable from technical standpoint; the key question would be how to transform the financial part of the operation to keep Youtube afloat. At this point, even the awareness of recommendation bubbles and their shape & size can help quite a bit. It's a valid research. It grates me that Mozilla seems to take very one-sided view on the politics of it, but hey, it's a start. Hopefully others will follow to counter-balance the Mozilla's slant.
- auganov 6y agoYou can recommend just based on content. I hardly ever open the youtube homepage. And often open links in incognito mode. Still get to see all these recommendations next to a video. I don't see how you could not have a "recommendation bubble" as long as you have recommendations. Even if they were to be 100% manual it's still a bubble of some kind. Not only that, you effectively have these bubbles outside the internet too. A book will recommend further reading, friends will recommend certain things and so forth. There's no escaping it. When I go to the YouTube homepage these recommendations are absolute junk. Links friends send me are much more relevant and influential. IMO the most charitable reading of this initiative is that they believe the algorithm is somehow biased towards exposing and warming people to harmful content in an unobvious way.
- throwaway316943 6y agoAnother name for recommendation bubble is sub-culture. Google has decided that there should be only one and the results are just as inane as a high school clique taking over the school newspaper.
- gostsamo 6y agoMaybe because rationality could be exercised only if a person is given diverse high-quality information. Being tracked means being figured out, put in a Turing box, and utilized in accordance with someone else's agenda. This research seems to attempt observing how digital bubbles form and how they could be circumvented.
- dgb23 6y agoCensorship? It seems to me that they want to use the data for research.
- higerordermap 6y agoThere is politics as in FSF / GNU and there is politics as in Mozilla. Lot of mozilla activism is not relevant to privacy / open web. Not to mention it also limits many people from donating to them.
- toomim 6y agoYep: this project is funded by donations, and donations tend to favor the politics of the donors.
- jonny383 6y agoMozilla: Born 1998. Died 2022.
- ldng 6y agoOh no it will survive. Yahoo-ificating itself in the process.
- FiReaNG3L 6y agoWhat's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you will be fed on your recommendation page for months.
- cloogshicer 6y agoYeah, it especially annoys me that it recommends videos I've already watched. Even if I say "don't recommend this" and give "I've already watched the video" as the reason, YT will still keep recommending videos I've watched.
- dexen 6y agoSystemic fixes are needed. In the meantime you can improve your own experience (and hopefully others a bit too). When you hover over a recommendation, there's a menu icon to the right side (three vertical dots, gray). Clicking it opens menu with option to indicate "Not interested" and "Report". The former is supposed to train your own instance of recommendation algo, the later does the usual reporting. According to the current scuttlebutt lore, Youtube makes a concerted effort to steer users towards authoritative sources (typically the big media brands), especially on spicier subjects. This is in response to the recent slew of articles accusing Youtube of user radicalization.
- FiReaNG3L 6y agoOh I've been doing that... but it's a lot of tedious manual work (5!!! clicks per recommendation)
- 3131s 6y agoThose don't do shit. I tried getting it to stop recommending me fucking Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro videos for years, but I guess I just can't escape the angry 30-something category. I think Youtube's recommendation algorithm is an abomination that has caused real harm to society.
- dexen 6y agoSemi related: there's a browser plugin[1] available to "de-mainstream" Youtube. It removes from recommendations the well known channels of the big name media brands[2]. You can add more to the list. -- [1] https://demainstream.com/ https://demainstream.com/ [2] https://github.com/miscavage/De-Mainstream-YouTube-Extension/blob/master/lib/js/background/channels.js https://github.com/miscavage/De-Mainstream-YouTube-Extension...
- zobzu 6y agoThis works pretty well (I use it) because it removes recommendations and search results (which are really recommendations) that are artificially inserted/ranked at the top every single time. That said I don't think it's what Mozilla and many commenters here are looking for, they're looking for banning content they disagree with (i.e. censorship).
- untog 6y ago> they're looking for banning content they disagree with (i.e. censorship). That's an extremely unfair read of the situation. The extension doesn't even ban anything. It is a research project attempting to understand why the YouTube algorithm recommends the videos it does. Whether or not you think Plandemic (a nonsense conspiracy theory video) should be banned or not you can still see research into the YouTube algorithm as a worthwhile endeavour.
- im3w1l 6y agoLiterally the first sentence of the article is about dangerous recommendations. And the second is about harmful content. This is not just an open-ended inquiry of what youtube is recommending. It's about finding the bad and getting rid of it. EDIT: I also want to remind people about how Mozilla used its push notifications to call for a Facebook boycott over objectionable content.
- untog 6y ago> YouTube recommendations can be delightful, but they can also be dangerous. The platform has a history of recommending harmful content — from pandemic conspiracies to political disinformation — to its users, even if they’ve previously viewed harmless content. What part of this is untrue? And again, you're saying "getting rid of it" without evidence. It's a study. It does not mention banning anything, anywhere. If the argument is that they should not study this because it might lead to bans in the future then you're being pro-censorship in order to promote anti-censorship which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
- pluc 6y agoThis is what you're gonna do with the money saved from the firings?
- ChrisSD 6y agoNo. This is the Mozilla Foundation not Mozilla Corp.
- arkitaip 6y agoI don't know why people pretend like the distinction matters.
- bzb5 6y agoBecause they want to pretend that Mozilla aren’t throwing money down the drain.
- ChrisSD 6y agoIn terms of where money goes, it does. Mozilla Corp both makes and spends vast sums of money (browsers are fantastically expensive). Mozilla Foundation, in contrast, makes and spends relatively little compared to that. Seriously how much do you think this crowd-sourced project is costing the Foundation?
- srtjstjsj 6y agoSeems silly Why not just build a better (user-configurable) recommendations engine?
- klmadfejno 6y agoOver a database of videos they don't own? That changes rapidly in ways they can't control?
- gostsamo 6y agoMainly, because most people won't be exposed to it. They will be exposed to the Youtube's one and the effects over the majority are those that matter for the goals of the study.
- zobzu 6y agoI don't think it's a bad suggestion, though their plan is most likely to influence people to complain to Google. Same as politics, you want a maximum of people to be convinced by your idea/opinion/etc to make it happen faster. If you build your idea it might be great but if no one is convinced of it it won't work.
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- claydavisss 6y agotl;dr: Why do people get recommendations for videos that aren't aligned politically with Mozilla's thought leaders? How can Mozilla pressure YouTube to eliminate "incorrect" content? How can we smear our opponents as "promoters of hate"? Its not enough that YouTube is also full of videos catering to the tastes of Mozilla's thought leaders...they feel the need to actively purge opposing views. This is apparently a "justice" agenda...you just don't get a say in what is "just"
- m0llusk 6y agoThis claims that YouTube recommendations are opaque, but often YouTube cites that viewers of a specific video like another. YouTube also tags content which might be extended to note related or contrasting content or to map how videos that share a tag relate.
- srean 6y agoA few months ago YouTube was flighting a feature I liked a lot. The homepage would group my interest into named categories "Cute dog videos", "Strangeloop", "Debussy", "PyData", "Algebraic Topology" and so on. I really liked that because I could choose which deep end to sink into. Not just that it would also serve as a reminder on what I had been interested in, but have become too distracted to remember. They seem to have stopped this and now the recommendations featured on my homepage are all over the place.
- deelowe 6y agoSame. It was refreshing to see options for computer science, electrical engineering, etc... instead of the usual stuff. Found a few new channels the day or so that feature was up.
- jw1224 6y agoI still see these category groupings on the YouTube Apple TV app today. I agree, they’re a really good way to browse.
- duskwuff 6y agoI'm pretty sure they're still testing that feature. I see it show up occasionally. Interestingly, I think there are a couple of variants for the number of videos to display on the home page, too.
- srean 6y agoHow can I get myself on the better side of their A/B test ?
- duskwuff 6y agoUnfortunately, I don't think there's any (public?) way to force it. I've seen the feature disappear or reappear on a reload -- it's not consistent across a session, let alone on a user-by-user basis. Try refreshing the home page until it shows up, maybe?
- WealthVsSurvive 6y agoI'm sorry, but the crowd has run out of money. Try the people that print and take it.
- worldmerge 6y agoYouTube recommendations, for me, are the greatest music discovery resource. I've found more new artists through YouTube's algorithm than Spotify, Pandora or Amazon Prime Music.
- cblconfederate 6y ago> recommendations can be delightful They are really not. I struggle pages after pages to find something interesting. And then days later i stumble on a link that has interesting stuff randomly. Even search is bad. And there's always the knowledge that google is censoring stuff and manipulating people. There's definitely space for better youtube/video recommendation site.
- awinter-py 6y agofacebook got muy upset when propublica used a similar approach (browser plugin) to surveil their ads ecosystem https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-tools https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...
- rayuela 6y agoCouldn't care less about this. Just put out a paid version of Firefox that dedicates this revenue stream exclusively to continued Firefox development and I will happily pay fist fulls of money for it. Seriously, Firefox adds so much value to my life and I'd happily pay for it.
- darkhorse13 6y agoSame. Firefox is a great browser.
- ColanR 6y agoExcept for the memory leaks.
- mlindner 6y agoChrome eats a lot more memory for me than Firefox.
- ColanR 6y agoThe difference is, chrome allocates what it needs upfront, and that's all it uses. Firefox keeps increasing its usage. That means that when I want to leave a website open on my server for a month, I use chrome because I know exactly how much memory it's going to use. If it was firefox, at the end of the month even the swap would be filled.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoIf you try to open something else after that month, does your computer crash or does Firefox happily give up the memory?
- ColanR 6y agoThe only way to free up the memory is to close firefox. Closing tabs doesn't do anything. I can 'killall firefox' and then reopen it to the same 50 tabs, and the memory usage after they're loaded again will be several GB lower. I don't know if you count memory exhaustion as a 'crash' per se.
- anjc 6y agoI'm always mind-blown reading comment threads like this regarding recommendation, with people annoyed that explicit feedback helps recommenders, or exasperated that they're recommended one item that they haven't approved while also wanting novel recommendations. 1000s of hours of videos are uploaded every minute. 5+ billion videos are watched daily. Are you not rather quite pleased that YouTube can deliver highly relevant top-20 recommendations within milliseconds from such a large and changing corpus, while keeping track of your past preferences, your interactions, your social circle's preferences, popularity and trends, content features, etc? It's pretty amazing to me. I think people expect recommender systems to read minds.
- throwaway316943 6y agoThe complaints are due to a significant decline in the quality of recommendations. It’s like that scene from 2001 where HAL is slowly lobotomized by Dave.
- anjc 6y agoSince when, do you think? I personally think that they're better than ever. On the other hand, I think they moved to more deep learning approaches over the last 3-5 years (based on their research output at least) so perhaps recommendations are perceivably different since then
- throwaway316943 6y agoI’d say more within the last 3. Definitely in the last 2. It’s much worse for me, just repeats the same channels and categories.
- thesuitonym 6y agoConsider that a lot of the complains are that YouTube constantly recommends already watched videos, instead of new and relevant ones. Then, if a user watches a single video on a topic outside of their usual interest scope, YouTube replaces any semi-relevant recommendations with with that new category, regardless of if the user is actually interested in the topic.
- pgcj_poster 6y agoI use a ublock filter to block YouTube recommendations. I think they're unhealthy.
- soylentcola 6y agoThere are a few good "un-frak your youtube" extensions as well. I've got mine set to disable autoplay, trending, chat, "related" at the end of video playback, and recommendations. Helps quite a bit.
- skymt 6y agoSeconded. Here are the filters I use for blocking recommendations on YT, in case anyone else finds them useful: youtube.com##.ytp-suggestions youtube.com##.ytp-pause-overlay youtube.com##.videowall-endscreen youtube.com###related youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"]
- zobzu 6y agoCrowdsourcing censorship!
- thrusong 6y agoYouTube recommendations suck so hard. I'm subscribed to all this stuff but it never seems to give me similar content, it recommends all the videos I've already watched. If I happen to watch something new, like a People's Court segment, then all I see is People's Court stuff. There never seems to be balance. Then there's the problem where a new video (like Gourmet Makes from BA) gets posted on a channel I like. I'll watch it with my partner on his machine, but then YouTube just chokes up, wondering why I never click on it, and then shoves it in my face ad nauseum. Like, their search engine doesn't even seem to scratch the surface of content they're holding. It seems to be really stupid machine learning or AI. Why can't it show me balanced recommendations from everything I watch or subscribe to, toss in some new things which are similar/popular, and maybe differentiate between content likely to be consumed multiple times (music videos) vs stuff people don't often watch a rerun of? They seem to have so much data they could work with. They have amazing engineers and Google's expertise in algorithms. Facebook even had problems with news feed being overrun with low quality content early on but seems to have figured it our fairly well- at least in my experience on the site (I know there are big echo chamber problems over there as well, don't get me wrong). Even a lot of my non-techie friends seem to complain often about how terrible YouTube's recommendations are.
- robotnikman 6y agoI feels like YouTube's recommendations were better around 2010 to 2015. I think back then they recommended videos based on the tags a video had, seemed to work much better
- izacus 6y agoI'm assuming there were less people adding fake tags to earn more views then as well.
- cxcorp 6y agoWas trying to find the source for the extension, looks like the link was in the privacy notice. Github link here for those who are also looking for it: https://github.com/mozilla-extensions/regrets-reporter https://github.com/mozilla-extensions/regrets-reporter
- satya71 6y agoFundamental flaw with this approach. Since I don't click on or watch conspiracy theories, none of my YouTube recommendations are those. But I have seen people watch incendiary and conspiracy theory videos exclusively on autoplay.
- hal9000-tng 6y agoThis must be part of Mozilla's new focus on profit.
- thesuitonym 6y agoI guess I just don't understand why Mozilla would spend money on this? Google is under no obligation to care about their findings. Why not spend money in areas that will actually benefit people? What do they hope to gain by this?
- cma 6y agoIt could build the case internally for them to build something like peertube or support it.
- logicalmonster 6y agoAm I incorrect in assuming that Mozilla’s goal was at one time to expand access of information to the world? I don’t see any other likely outcome of this “research” other than a fresh new media hue and cry detailing chains of “wrong-think” that will lead to activists who masquerade as journalists calling for more content they deem unfit for the plebs consumption.
- enturn 6y agoI previously used my partner's Google account to watch on YouTube and it had built up recommendations based on what I previously watched since I didn't use the subscriptions, but one day it all just disappeared and only showed recommendations from my partner's subscriptions. I'd prefer if they implemented a user driven exploration system rather than attempting to guess what I want but it must be useful to be able to change how it works without modifying the user interface. I eventually gave up and used my own account with now 32 subscriptions and it's better than it was although it shows a lot of videos I've already watched. It throws in a few videos from other channels but it's mostly from the subscriptions.
- mitchtbaum 6y agohttp://blog.kaleidoscopestoyou.com/tag/how-a-teleidoscope-works/ http://blog.kaleidoscopestoyou.com/tag/how-a-teleidoscope-wo...
- zkid18 6y agohttps://github.com/mozilla-extensions/regrets-reporter https://github.com/mozilla-extensions/regrets-reporter