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What'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

What'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 ago
Yeah, 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 ago
Systemic 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 ago
  Oh I've been doing that... but it's a lot of tedious manual work (5!!! clicks per recommendation)
- 3131s 6y ago
  Those 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.
  - srean 6y ago
    The rage is strong in those.
  - kace91 6y ago
    Same here! God forbid I watch a video by someone who's ever been in front of a camera with those two guys, I'm immediately pushed into a rain of suggestions. Try watching a comedian that's slightly edgy like bill Burr, you get immediately showered in videos of people "showing feminists what's what" or "shutting up liberals". I'm not even American, not right wing, but YouTube seems to try its hardest anyway.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  Not interested doesn't work. One or two weeks later it 'forgets' your preferences and someone else uploads the same content as a clip so it gets suggested too. Googling around shows there used to be a 'Don't recommend this channel' button which would be awesome to have back. I find it very annoying listening to a two hour debate, understanding difficult topics and then disagreeing with the speaker and being unable to block content from said speaker. There's a bunch of one-topic people pushing their opinions out to the youtube user base and it would be great not to have to see their face in 30 different suggestions after you find yourself deeply disagreeing with their opinions or you're just done with their conversations after hearing all of their views.
  - drivebycomment 6y ago
    > Googling around shows there used to be a 'Don't recommend this channel' button which would be awesome to have back. It's still there on my Chrome desktop or Youtube app on android.
bondarchuk 6y ago
I'm afraid this, too, is because it works. I don't have a specific example at hand but multiple times I've seen people say something like "youtube kept recommending me this so I finally watched it".
52-6F-62 6y ago
I've had the same experience. I use YT to listen to music pretty regularly and if I don't go and actively select a different song it will play the same 5-10 over and over. Even when I do select a song it will make its way back to those same 5-10 songs. There's a lot to discover on there so I still use it, but it's also pushing me back to my other services or libraries.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  Not just that, but I get super annoyed that I exclusively listen to YouTube music on my desktop, and exclusively watch shows etc on my Apple TV. And for some reason YouTube cannot figure out that no, I don’t want to watch these music videos on my Apple TV, and no I don’t want to watch this documentary on my desktop. And yeah even within music videos, the recommendations seem really basic. Compared to Spotify, Google is looking like real amateurs when it comes to recommendations.
  - 52-6F-62 6y ago
    It works well enough for me in some categories. Like if I'm listening to some guitar demo or pedal maker demo or shootout, I'll get similar videos coming through and I've stumbled onto some great ones that way (JHS pedals has a great channel). But yeah, the music cycle is funny. And for some reason, no matter how many times I say "please don't show me this video", YouTube really wants me to listen to Mandolin Orange. I can't escape that recommendation even though I think I listened to them once and decided it wasn't to my taste and have always removed them from the queue. (Sorry, I'm sure they're nice but it's just not for me)
  - rapnie 6y ago
    > Compared to Spotify, Google is looking like real amateurs when it comes to recommendations. I agree about Google bad recommendations, but for me Spotify it at that same bad place too. It used to be way better, but now 80% of my daily recommended playlists are stuff that I have in my own music library, just shuffle played. It's absolutely terrible.
- redisman 6y ago
jimktrains2 6y ago
Not just the same categories, but videos I've seen before and videos it's been "recommending" for months that I don't watch.
klmadfejno 6y ago
I use YouTube infrequently. Usually for binging random content like comedy sketches or speedrunning. No matter what I'm on, there's always a few videos in my recommendations that make no sense and look like trash. Not generically, but specific videos that ALWAYS appear. One of them is "I PAID FIVE BASSISTS ON FIVR TO PLAY AN IMPOSSIBLE BASSLINE" ... Why is this so bad? What are your hundreds of data scientists doing?
- tristanMatthias 6y ago
  Hahah! I get this one too.
- jack_pp 6y ago
  They stop appearing if you specifically mark them as not interested
  - esperent 6y ago
    Every so often I do that. I spend five minutes selecting channels I'm not interested in, because I watched a gamedev video once and now I'm being suggested hundreds of gamedev videos, or whatever. Pretty soon, it's like the algorithm just... gives up and starts suggesting me generic videos about celebrities and other vapid things that I'd never click on in a million years.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    The fact that feature exists shows that even YouTube know their algorithm needs help.
    - Redoubts 6y ago
      Everyone lauds TikTok’s algorithm for some reason, but they have the same thing and it seems just as worthless there.
      - zobzu 6y ago
        Tiktok by design has more fresh content and by being newer is not gamed as much as Youtube's algorithm. With enough time Tiktok will look as bad. I.e. I don't think it's algorithm related "for the most part"
srean 6y ago
For me it has been the opposite as in it has so little hysteresis. Just one day I watch something I do not usually watch, say cat videos, and for weeks I will get only cat videos as recommendations. I think their algorithm needs to be cognizant of and adapt to temporal shifts in a viewers interest. Some users may like change in focus at slightest of deviations, others may prefer more hysteresis.
- pharke 6y ago
  It's both for me. It locks on to a few categories or channels and occasionally, almost randomly decides to start showing some other category or channel based entirely upon a single view. This is not the same algorithm that they've always used. It began changing somewhere around 3 or 4 years ago and it's completely different now. Honestly, I think they've intentionally broken it. I used to derive a lot of enjoyment from going on an algorithm enhanced "wikiwalk" of YouTube content, discovering many interesting and bizarre videos. It's impossible to do that now, you just wind up stuck on a channel or going around in circles. To put it plainly, I think YouTube has decided to bury all of the fringe and weird one off content in favour of mainstream channels because they can't monetize the former. Good job Google, you killed another golden goose.
- phreenet 6y ago
  Because of this, when I'm sent video links to watch I will open them up in a Private Window / Incognito so I do not pollute my account.
  - boogies 6y ago
    I never use non-private windows, so I use Invidious or mpv for this. I put control + alt + m notify-send "mpv loading $(xclip -o)"; mpv --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui "$(xclip -o)" || notify-send 'mpv error' in my ~/.config/sxhd/sxhkdrc to conveniently play any youtube-dl supported url I’ve copied or highlighted.
    - dankerr 6y ago
      Thank you for this tip, just added it to my sxhkdrc.
SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
Yup. I'm somehow bored by the greatest collection of human knowledge ever captures on video because it can't seem to find anything new for me to watch, even with hundreds and thousands of hours of content created every hour.
ckastner 6y ago
> (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). This applies to YouTube music as well. I find this incredibly annoying. Know what's even worse? Searching for something, then liking that song. On my end, that generates an incessant stream of titles from the same artist that no amount of downvotes can stop. YM sees the pattern +--------------------- and yet continues to predict +.
JamesSwift 6y ago
Same thing for my 'google news' app on my phone. If I ever (god forbid) google a persons name, I get stories about that person for months. I also get the same results (mixed into new results) for days and sometimes a week at a time. Are they really that bad at recommendation that they can't find another option that ranks higher in my "interest" score?
amadeuspagel 6y ago
It's ironic to see a complaint that youtube recommendations are stale, in the comments of a complaint that they lead people to discover offensive things. Can't have it both ways. Either you let people discover new things (some of which might be offensive) or not.
- jimktrains2 6y ago
  Just because every now and then it shows something interesting or different doesn't mean that they aren't stale for the most part.
  - amadeuspagel 6y ago
    This misses my point entirely. I'm not commenting on whether youtube recommendations are stale or not. I'm pointing out that it's contradictory to complain both that the recommendations are too stale and that people discover offensive things.
    - jimktrains2 6y ago
      My point is that it's not. Mostly stale doesn't mean there is never something outside the norm. As such, I do not believe I am missing your point, but that you are willfully and incorrectly assuming that everything is always an absolute.
the_arun 6y ago
I found Youtube recommendations are much better than recommendations at other places. Eg. Netflix. When I say recommendation, I mean - "Helping me with discovery of new stuff". They also have a problem - they keep showing what I already have seen - I don't know - whether this is by design or a bug.
brudgers 6y ago
[semi-speculation presented as if I actually know] Youtube recommendations are best effort. That effort has a computational budget and a time limit. The fastest and least computationally intensive recommendation is to pull the last set of recommendations out of the on-device local cache. The next fastest thing is to recommend whatever is cached near the edge of your internet connection whether it fits your previous viewing or not. It generally does not do this. Instead it recommends edge-cached material with cosign similarity to your preferences. However, there might not be much of that if your preference is for outlying content. The slowest and most computationally intensive recommendation would be to compute a new tensor of your preferences and run cosign similarity across the entire vector space of Youtube. It doesn't do this for obvious reasons even though that's what we all want. Of course, this ignores the issue of Google revenue. Advertisers targeted you, target you based on the videos you've watched. So there's that too. Google recommends videos for which it has relevant advertisers.
- grufkork 6y ago
  With most sufficiently large companies it all boils down to making money (which usually is why they have been able to grow so large to begin with). It is a very fine line between making as much profit as possible from users and not exploiting them so much that they leave. Google does not have that much interest in serving new, interesting videos over what earns the most clicks and therefore advertising. A lot of users might also be pretty fine with what is already served. Although I have seen more and more alternatives popping up, several with a monthly payment plan instead. While free content is nice, a paid plan incites different business practices than one where revenue is closely coupled with the number of clicks.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  >Of course, this ignores the issue of Google revenue. Advertisers targeted you, target you based on the videos you've watched. So there's that too. Google recommends videos for which it has relevant advertisers. I think this is exactly the problem. Contrast this with the recommendations I get from my paid spotify account where I don't get ads: It's absolutely Excellent. Seriously, whoever worked on Spotify's recommender system algo deserves a huge pat on the back. They have the best recommender I've encountered anywhere on the net, and I pay a lot of attention to recommenders. It's just light years ahead of everyone else.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. I think part of it is them removing certain content from the recommendations. I would be happy with a chronological order of all videos from all my subscriptions. Perhaps with groups of subscriptions, so I can make a group of comedians, a group of nerds, a group of girls dancing, etc. The real problem is that youtube is still so much better than everyone else at just playing videos. How has it been 10 years and there is still no real competition in the realm of usability. Even most paid services are not as good. I think a bunch of the streaming services should pool their resources and come up with a good open source player with libraries for all the major frontends and backends. Instead of all of them poorly reinventing the wheel over and over.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  The fact Google makes the browser and the OS for most users certainly puts them at an advantage. Video is much much more complex than a .mp4 file on a server - the effort required to get the first frame from the server to the users screen as quickly as possible, and then not drop any frames after that, is pretty high to begin with, but it's even higher if you don't have control of the exact way the browser allocates CPU/GPU time for example...
- Bjartr 6y ago
  > I would be happy with a chronological order of all videos from all my subscriptions. Is this not the subscription view? I've never noticed a video from any channel I subscribe to that didn't show up there.
disown 6y ago
> What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. There isn't any more "depth" to recommendations anymore. Right now it's the same recommendations over and over again. Lots of celebrity, corporate media, etc. When youtube wanted to grow, their recommendation was so good. You could go down that rabbit hole forever really and actually discover content/creators. Now that they have a monopoly position, it's about limiting options and guiding you to established content.
remram 6y ago
That's my experience as well. It will only recommend videos that I assume are popular globally, and old videos from channel I've watched in the past (including videos I've already watched), until I watch enough of something new and it suddenly switches to only recommending that. There's gotta be some middle ground... I don't understand how the recommendation algorithm seems so brittle, given that advertising is their core business, and that I am manually doing so much of the work by subscribing to channels I enjoy. A simple feed of recent updates from channels I subscribe to would be an improvement; in fact I think I mostly find videos to watch from Twitter.
- sprafa 6y ago
  The YT algo used to be crazy and recommend insane stuff and you could learn from it and do a deep dive, a lot like Wikipedia. Not anymore.
nojito 6y ago
The recommendations are designed to be videos you will most likely click on...not necessarily match your current interests.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Try clicking novel suggestions from the home page. It will start altering your profile in a few days. Also don't do this from a browser session tied to a Google account. There will still be a profile attached to the cookie but it isn't permanently linked to you.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Accidentally clicking on an ad from the President's re-election campaign made YouTube think that I'd be interested in watching videos of different people getting destroyed by facts and logic, or watching sweaty people get really angry at pop culture for some reason.
dghughes 6y ago
What freaks me out is how invasive YouTube/Google is. I have browser ad blockers, script blockers, privacy addons. Sure I am logged in though which pretty much defeats the purpose of all those. My often used example is the time I went car shopping with my sister. She was buying a new car I went with her (age old women vs salesman bias). The dealership was over an hour from my town, my sister lives in a different town. I didn't do anything other than stand there, no info of mine given, no forms filled out. Back home two hours later YouTube has showing on recommendations for me videos for new car shopping.
- khyryk 6y ago
  I'd guess location tracking (if you have an Android phone) with you stopped at a particular place for long enough.
ss3000 6y ago
I honestly don't understand this either... Youtube knows exactly which videos I've watched and which I haven't. Why does it think it's a good idea to ever recommend videos that I've already watched?
- jldugger 6y ago
  I think there's a category or two where it makes sense: - fitness videos - music - how-to & instructional videos
- krisoft 6y ago
  I had the same question! On mobile YT suggested me to watch an old video from a channel I'm subscribed to. It's a good video but since I have watched it already (with my account logged it) and remember it who cares about it. This one time the interface asked me if it's a good suggestion! So I clicked the bad suggestion link, and then the app asked me to categorise why is it a bad suggestion. All the options were about the video itself. The categories were "overly sexualised", "gory", "boring" etc. There was no option to say "I have seen it already you silly". Way to set up a feedback system to get no useful information out of it.
powersnail 6y ago
Youtube's recommendation algorithm is just dumb, in my opinion. At least half of the time on Youtube, I watch classical music, and you would think Youtube would recommend me some classical performances that I haven't yet seen. Nope. It keeps feeding me exactly the same videos I've already watched, despite being basically the largest catalogue of classical music videos. What's the point of a recommendation system if it doesn't even recommend new video of the same category I like? Might as well just shuffle my watching history.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
  Same problem with music, I thought I somehow broke their engine because it keeps feeding me some random hit songs I liked 5 years ago and does it for the past 5 years. You would think they want to show me something new for their engagement metrics but I guess not.
- brilee 6y ago
  It's because a large segment of classical music watchers are using it as a background music playlist, and listen to the same recordings repeatedly.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    They should be able to distinguish between users who always play the same video in a loop vs. users who never watch anything twice (or anything intermediate between the two extremes) and adjust the recommendations based on that. But maybe their recommendation engine is hyper-focused on the matrix-completion framework and doesn't use any information other than which users watched which videos.
- kenhwang 6y ago
  Every Google product I've used has had hilariously awful recommendations. For a company that has so much of my data and indexes the entire internet, it sure is surprising how bad they are at recommendations.
- ruricolist 6y ago
  Contrary data point: I watch a lot of classical music on YouTube and it gives me consistently excellent recommendations. (Although I only take recommendations from the front page, and ignore the playlists entirely.)
pseudo0 6y ago
Some of this blandness may be by design, at least when it comes to political content. YouTube caught a lot of flak in 2018 for allegedly being a "radicalization pipeline", but research[0] shows that their "next video" recommendations consistently direct users away from fringe content and towards mainstream media outlets. One of the authors of that paper made a website to visualize their results[1], which is pretty neat. The research in question was limited by not using logged-in accounts with a significant view history, but it's still the best attempt to quantify the YouTube algorithm's influence that I've seen so far. Mozilla's initiative sounds interesting, but the fact that they're asking users to only report negative interactions rather than getting a representative snapshot of all YouTube use makes me suspect that Mozilla is approaching this from the perspective of advocacy, not scientific inquiry. --- [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211.pdf [1] https://recfluence.net/ https://recfluence.net/
vernie 6y ago
Comparing my TikTok "For You" page on an account that doesn't follow any other accounts with my YouTube Home on an account with tons of subscribed channels that are relevant to my interests I'm astonished at how fucking terrible the YouTube recommendations are. Absolute dogshit. Awful.

cloogshicer 6y ago

Yeah, 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 ago

Systemic 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 ago
Oh I've been doing that... but it's a lot of tedious manual work (5!!! clicks per recommendation)
3131s 6y ago
Those 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.
- srean 6y ago
  The rage is strong in those.
- kace91 6y ago
  Same here! God forbid I watch a video by someone who's ever been in front of a camera with those two guys, I'm immediately pushed into a rain of suggestions. Try watching a comedian that's slightly edgy like bill Burr, you get immediately showered in videos of people "showing feminists what's what" or "shutting up liberals". I'm not even American, not right wing, but YouTube seems to try its hardest anyway.
friendlybus 6y ago
Not interested doesn't work. One or two weeks later it 'forgets' your preferences and someone else uploads the same content as a clip so it gets suggested too. Googling around shows there used to be a 'Don't recommend this channel' button which would be awesome to have back. I find it very annoying listening to a two hour debate, understanding difficult topics and then disagreeing with the speaker and being unable to block content from said speaker. There's a bunch of one-topic people pushing their opinions out to the youtube user base and it would be great not to have to see their face in 30 different suggestions after you find yourself deeply disagreeing with their opinions or you're just done with their conversations after hearing all of their views.
- drivebycomment 6y ago
  > Googling around shows there used to be a 'Don't recommend this channel' button which would be awesome to have back. It's still there on my Chrome desktop or Youtube app on android.

bondarchuk 6y ago

I'm afraid this, too, is because it works. I don't have a specific example at hand but multiple times I've seen people say something like "youtube kept recommending me this so I finally watched it".

52-6F-62 6y ago

I've had the same experience. I use YT to listen to music pretty regularly and if I don't go and actively select a different song it will play the same 5-10 over and over. Even when I do select a song it will make its way back to those same 5-10 songs. There's a lot to discover on there so I still use it, but it's also pushing me back to my other services or libraries.

stingraycharles 6y ago
Not just that, but I get super annoyed that I exclusively listen to YouTube music on my desktop, and exclusively watch shows etc on my Apple TV. And for some reason YouTube cannot figure out that no, I don’t want to watch these music videos on my Apple TV, and no I don’t want to watch this documentary on my desktop. And yeah even within music videos, the recommendations seem really basic. Compared to Spotify, Google is looking like real amateurs when it comes to recommendations.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  It works well enough for me in some categories. Like if I'm listening to some guitar demo or pedal maker demo or shootout, I'll get similar videos coming through and I've stumbled onto some great ones that way (JHS pedals has a great channel). But yeah, the music cycle is funny. And for some reason, no matter how many times I say "please don't show me this video", YouTube really wants me to listen to Mandolin Orange. I can't escape that recommendation even though I think I listened to them once and decided it wasn't to my taste and have always removed them from the queue. (Sorry, I'm sure they're nice but it's just not for me)
- rapnie 6y ago
  > Compared to Spotify, Google is looking like real amateurs when it comes to recommendations. I agree about Google bad recommendations, but for me Spotify it at that same bad place too. It used to be way better, but now 80% of my daily recommended playlists are stuff that I have in my own music library, just shuffle played. It's absolutely terrible.
redisman 6y ago

jimktrains2 6y ago

Not just the same categories, but videos I've seen before and videos it's been "recommending" for months that I don't watch.

klmadfejno 6y ago

I use YouTube infrequently. Usually for binging random content like comedy sketches or speedrunning. No matter what I'm on, there's always a few videos in my recommendations that make no sense and look like trash. Not generically, but specific videos that ALWAYS appear. One of them is "I PAID FIVE BASSISTS ON FIVR TO PLAY AN IMPOSSIBLE BASSLINE" ... Why is this so bad? What are your hundreds of data scientists doing?

tristanMatthias 6y ago
Hahah! I get this one too.
jack_pp 6y ago
They stop appearing if you specifically mark them as not interested
- esperent 6y ago
  Every so often I do that. I spend five minutes selecting channels I'm not interested in, because I watched a gamedev video once and now I'm being suggested hundreds of gamedev videos, or whatever. Pretty soon, it's like the algorithm just... gives up and starts suggesting me generic videos about celebrities and other vapid things that I'd never click on in a million years.
- onion2k 6y ago
  The fact that feature exists shows that even YouTube know their algorithm needs help.
  - Redoubts 6y ago
    Everyone lauds TikTok’s algorithm for some reason, but they have the same thing and it seems just as worthless there.
    - zobzu 6y ago
      Tiktok by design has more fresh content and by being newer is not gamed as much as Youtube's algorithm. With enough time Tiktok will look as bad. I.e. I don't think it's algorithm related "for the most part"

srean 6y ago

For me it has been the opposite as in it has so little hysteresis. Just one day I watch something I do not usually watch, say cat videos, and for weeks I will get only cat videos as recommendations. I think their algorithm needs to be cognizant of and adapt to temporal shifts in a viewers interest. Some users may like change in focus at slightest of deviations, others may prefer more hysteresis.

pharke 6y ago
It's both for me. It locks on to a few categories or channels and occasionally, almost randomly decides to start showing some other category or channel based entirely upon a single view. This is not the same algorithm that they've always used. It began changing somewhere around 3 or 4 years ago and it's completely different now. Honestly, I think they've intentionally broken it. I used to derive a lot of enjoyment from going on an algorithm enhanced "wikiwalk" of YouTube content, discovering many interesting and bizarre videos. It's impossible to do that now, you just wind up stuck on a channel or going around in circles. To put it plainly, I think YouTube has decided to bury all of the fringe and weird one off content in favour of mainstream channels because they can't monetize the former. Good job Google, you killed another golden goose.
phreenet 6y ago
Because of this, when I'm sent video links to watch I will open them up in a Private Window / Incognito so I do not pollute my account.
- boogies 6y ago
  I never use non-private windows, so I use Invidious or mpv for this. I put control + alt + m notify-send "mpv loading $(xclip -o)"; mpv --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui "$(xclip -o)" || notify-send 'mpv error' in my ~/.config/sxhd/sxhkdrc to conveniently play any youtube-dl supported url I’ve copied or highlighted.
  - dankerr 6y ago
    Thank you for this tip, just added it to my sxhkdrc.

SketchySeaBeast 6y ago

Yup. I'm somehow bored by the greatest collection of human knowledge ever captures on video because it can't seem to find anything new for me to watch, even with hundreds and thousands of hours of content created every hour.

ckastner 6y ago

> (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). This applies to YouTube music as well. I find this incredibly annoying. Know what's even worse? Searching for something, then liking that song. On my end, that generates an incessant stream of titles from the same artist that no amount of downvotes can stop. YM sees the pattern +--------------------- and yet continues to predict +.

JamesSwift 6y ago

Same thing for my 'google news' app on my phone. If I ever (god forbid) google a persons name, I get stories about that person for months. I also get the same results (mixed into new results) for days and sometimes a week at a time. Are they really that bad at recommendation that they can't find another option that ranks higher in my "interest" score?

amadeuspagel 6y ago

It's ironic to see a complaint that youtube recommendations are stale, in the comments of a complaint that they lead people to discover offensive things. Can't have it both ways. Either you let people discover new things (some of which might be offensive) or not.

jimktrains2 6y ago
Just because every now and then it shows something interesting or different doesn't mean that they aren't stale for the most part.
- amadeuspagel 6y ago
  This misses my point entirely. I'm not commenting on whether youtube recommendations are stale or not. I'm pointing out that it's contradictory to complain both that the recommendations are too stale and that people discover offensive things.
  - jimktrains2 6y ago
    My point is that it's not. Mostly stale doesn't mean there is never something outside the norm. As such, I do not believe I am missing your point, but that you are willfully and incorrectly assuming that everything is always an absolute.

the_arun 6y ago

I found Youtube recommendations are much better than recommendations at other places. Eg. Netflix. When I say recommendation, I mean - "Helping me with discovery of new stuff". They also have a problem - they keep showing what I already have seen - I don't know - whether this is by design or a bug.

brudgers 6y ago

[semi-speculation presented as if I actually know] Youtube recommendations are best effort. That effort has a computational budget and a time limit. The fastest and least computationally intensive recommendation is to pull the last set of recommendations out of the on-device local cache. The next fastest thing is to recommend whatever is cached near the edge of your internet connection whether it fits your previous viewing or not. It generally does not do this. Instead it recommends edge-cached material with cosign similarity to your preferences. However, there might not be much of that if your preference is for outlying content. The slowest and most computationally intensive recommendation would be to compute a new tensor of your preferences and run cosign similarity across the entire vector space of Youtube. It doesn't do this for obvious reasons even though that's what we all want. Of course, this ignores the issue of Google revenue. Advertisers targeted you, target you based on the videos you've watched. So there's that too. Google recommends videos for which it has relevant advertisers.

grufkork 6y ago
With most sufficiently large companies it all boils down to making money (which usually is why they have been able to grow so large to begin with). It is a very fine line between making as much profit as possible from users and not exploiting them so much that they leave. Google does not have that much interest in serving new, interesting videos over what earns the most clicks and therefore advertising. A lot of users might also be pretty fine with what is already served. Although I have seen more and more alternatives popping up, several with a monthly payment plan instead. While free content is nice, a paid plan incites different business practices than one where revenue is closely coupled with the number of clicks.
Enginerrrd 6y ago
>Of course, this ignores the issue of Google revenue. Advertisers targeted you, target you based on the videos you've watched. So there's that too. Google recommends videos for which it has relevant advertisers. I think this is exactly the problem. Contrast this with the recommendations I get from my paid spotify account where I don't get ads: It's absolutely Excellent. Seriously, whoever worked on Spotify's recommender system algo deserves a huge pat on the back. They have the best recommender I've encountered anywhere on the net, and I pay a lot of attention to recommenders. It's just light years ahead of everyone else.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. I think part of it is them removing certain content from the recommendations. I would be happy with a chronological order of all videos from all my subscriptions. Perhaps with groups of subscriptions, so I can make a group of comedians, a group of nerds, a group of girls dancing, etc. The real problem is that youtube is still so much better than everyone else at just playing videos. How has it been 10 years and there is still no real competition in the realm of usability. Even most paid services are not as good. I think a bunch of the streaming services should pool their resources and come up with a good open source player with libraries for all the major frontends and backends. Instead of all of them poorly reinventing the wheel over and over.

londons_explore 6y ago
The fact Google makes the browser and the OS for most users certainly puts them at an advantage. Video is much much more complex than a .mp4 file on a server - the effort required to get the first frame from the server to the users screen as quickly as possible, and then not drop any frames after that, is pretty high to begin with, but it's even higher if you don't have control of the exact way the browser allocates CPU/GPU time for example...
Bjartr 6y ago
> I would be happy with a chronological order of all videos from all my subscriptions. Is this not the subscription view? I've never noticed a video from any channel I subscribe to that didn't show up there.

disown 6y ago

> What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. There isn't any more "depth" to recommendations anymore. Right now it's the same recommendations over and over again. Lots of celebrity, corporate media, etc. When youtube wanted to grow, their recommendation was so good. You could go down that rabbit hole forever really and actually discover content/creators. Now that they have a monopoly position, it's about limiting options and guiding you to established content.

remram 6y ago

That's my experience as well. It will only recommend videos that I assume are popular globally, and old videos from channel I've watched in the past (including videos I've already watched), until I watch enough of something new and it suddenly switches to only recommending that. There's gotta be some middle ground... I don't understand how the recommendation algorithm seems so brittle, given that advertising is their core business, and that I am manually doing so much of the work by subscribing to channels I enjoy. A simple feed of recent updates from channels I subscribe to would be an improvement; in fact I think I mostly find videos to watch from Twitter.

sprafa 6y ago
The YT algo used to be crazy and recommend insane stuff and you could learn from it and do a deep dive, a lot like Wikipedia. Not anymore.

nojito 6y ago

The recommendations are designed to be videos you will most likely click on...not necessarily match your current interests.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

Try clicking novel suggestions from the home page. It will start altering your profile in a few days. Also don't do this from a browser session tied to a Google account. There will still be a profile attached to the cookie but it isn't permanently linked to you.

heavyset_go 6y ago

Accidentally clicking on an ad from the President's re-election campaign made YouTube think that I'd be interested in watching videos of different people getting destroyed by facts and logic, or watching sweaty people get really angry at pop culture for some reason.

dghughes 6y ago

What freaks me out is how invasive YouTube/Google is. I have browser ad blockers, script blockers, privacy addons. Sure I am logged in though which pretty much defeats the purpose of all those. My often used example is the time I went car shopping with my sister. She was buying a new car I went with her (age old women vs salesman bias). The dealership was over an hour from my town, my sister lives in a different town. I didn't do anything other than stand there, no info of mine given, no forms filled out. Back home two hours later YouTube has showing on recommendations for me videos for new car shopping.

khyryk 6y ago
I'd guess location tracking (if you have an Android phone) with you stopped at a particular place for long enough.

ss3000 6y ago

I honestly don't understand this either... Youtube knows exactly which videos I've watched and which I haven't. Why does it think it's a good idea to ever recommend videos that I've already watched?

jldugger 6y ago
I think there's a category or two where it makes sense: - fitness videos - music - how-to & instructional videos
krisoft 6y ago
I had the same question! On mobile YT suggested me to watch an old video from a channel I'm subscribed to. It's a good video but since I have watched it already (with my account logged it) and remember it who cares about it. This one time the interface asked me if it's a good suggestion! So I clicked the bad suggestion link, and then the app asked me to categorise why is it a bad suggestion. All the options were about the video itself. The categories were "overly sexualised", "gory", "boring" etc. There was no option to say "I have seen it already you silly". Way to set up a feedback system to get no useful information out of it.

powersnail 6y ago

Youtube's recommendation algorithm is just dumb, in my opinion. At least half of the time on Youtube, I watch classical music, and you would think Youtube would recommend me some classical performances that I haven't yet seen. Nope. It keeps feeding me exactly the same videos I've already watched, despite being basically the largest catalogue of classical music videos. What's the point of a recommendation system if it doesn't even recommend new video of the same category I like? Might as well just shuffle my watching history.

9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
Same problem with music, I thought I somehow broke their engine because it keeps feeding me some random hit songs I liked 5 years ago and does it for the past 5 years. You would think they want to show me something new for their engagement metrics but I guess not.
brilee 6y ago
It's because a large segment of classical music watchers are using it as a background music playlist, and listen to the same recordings repeatedly.
- yorwba 6y ago
  They should be able to distinguish between users who always play the same video in a loop vs. users who never watch anything twice (or anything intermediate between the two extremes) and adjust the recommendations based on that. But maybe their recommendation engine is hyper-focused on the matrix-completion framework and doesn't use any information other than which users watched which videos.
kenhwang 6y ago
Every Google product I've used has had hilariously awful recommendations. For a company that has so much of my data and indexes the entire internet, it sure is surprising how bad they are at recommendations.
ruricolist 6y ago
Contrary data point: I watch a lot of classical music on YouTube and it gives me consistently excellent recommendations. (Although I only take recommendations from the front page, and ignore the playlists entirely.)

pseudo0 6y ago

Some of this blandness may be by design, at least when it comes to political content. YouTube caught a lot of flak in 2018 for allegedly being a "radicalization pipeline", but research[0] shows that their "next video" recommendations consistently direct users away from fringe content and towards mainstream media outlets. One of the authors of that paper made a website to visualize their results[1], which is pretty neat. The research in question was limited by not using logged-in accounts with a significant view history, but it's still the best attempt to quantify the YouTube algorithm's influence that I've seen so far. Mozilla's initiative sounds interesting, but the fact that they're asking users to only report negative interactions rather than getting a representative snapshot of all YouTube use makes me suspect that Mozilla is approaching this from the perspective of advocacy, not scientific inquiry. --- [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211.pdf [1] https://recfluence.net/ https://recfluence.net/

vernie 6y ago

Comparing my TikTok "For You" page on an account that doesn't follow any other accounts with my YouTube Home on an account with tons of subscribed channels that are relevant to my interests I'm astonished at how fucking terrible the YouTube recommendations are. Absolute dogshit. Awful.