4 ms·
YouTube recommendations could be made enormously more useful with two trivial (really!) fixes: SELECT * FROM videos WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM votes WH
by l0b0 6y ago
YouTube recommendations could be made enormously more useful with two trivial (really!) fixes:
SELECT *
FROM videos
WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM votes WHERE video_id = videos.id AND user_id = $user_id)
AND NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM not_interested WHERE video_id = videos.id AND user_id = $user_id);
Aka don't recommend anything I've already voted on or already explicitly told you I'm not interested in. That would remove at least 98% of my recommendations.
Even without that improvement, though, YouTube is an amazing service, and the reliability is first class. I can't remember the last time it was actually down. Personally I suspect the YouTube team is just tasked with keeping things ticking over, and that they're too busy putting out fires and coping with tech debt to actually develop useful features.
- sovok_x 6y agoYeah, they probably just plain economize on compute there.
- l0b0 6y agoConsidering the computation necessary to downscale every video I'd suggest this join would be a small drop in a big ocean.
- sovok_x 6y agoMaybe there are some differences between offline and online compute like page response times, cluster specifics, database latency etc. There are no hard timing or effectiveness requirements for processing videos after all.
- cameldrv 6y agoThe recommender is not there to be useful to you. If it is, that is just a side effect. The recommender is there to make you watch more YouTube. Even if you've explicitly said you're not interested in something, that doesn't necessarily mean you won't watch it. Believe me, the YouTube recommender has plenty of resources allocated to it, because it's what makes YouTube such a huge business. If YouTube cared about being useful, they wouldn't constantly reenable autoplay after you turn it off. Autoplay turns back on because it makes you watch more YouTube.
- sovok_x 6y agoThat doesn't really explain why they re-recommend previously acted-on videos though. You won't watch them anyway so they basically eat screenspace that can be used for some novel videos with ads that you will watch with a higher probability, there is no real lack of those now.
- cameldrv 6y agoPeople re-watch videos. If it's showing up in your recommendations, the recommender thinks you may act on it.
- sovok_x 6y agoAnd youtube knows exactly what videos they re-watch often enough so it can clearly mind this stuff, plus they will probably use the search if they want to re-watch something specific anyway. It is no reason to re-recommend every one of those including explicitly uninteresting. Or am I missing some research that shown novelty less effective at driving the clicks here?
- cameldrv 6y agoI don't have research to cite about specifically whether novel recommendations get clicked more often. However, YouTube makes $15 billion in revenue. The recommender is responsible for an enormous fraction of that revenue. Google and YouTube have an enormous group of talented ML engineers. I am certain that they have tested changing the proportion of novel recommendations, and whatever proportion they use is the proportion that maximizes engagement. Personally, I hate the YouTube recommender as well. It's particularly aggravating that I'm stuck with it and its lack of configurability even though I pay YouTube to make the ads go away, so they get no additional revenue when I watch more. However, Netflix does many of the same things as YouTube, including autoplay, because they have found that autoplay makes you watch more, and if you watch more, you're more likely to renew your subscription.
- 6y ago