5 ms·
Really cool project, going to play around with it, since I wanted to experiment with alternative algorithms for these kind of platforms for a while, but didn't
by smoe 6y ago
Really cool project, going to play around with it, since I wanted to experiment with alternative algorithms for these kind of platforms for a while, but didn't found time to get started.
My biggest gripe with YouTube recommendations, or any service of that kind (Spotify, Amazon, etc.), is that they don't understand what aspects of the content I value. So it is a huge hit and miss. Sometimes it works, because I guess I just happen to value the same things that the majority of people do, other times, I might watch an hour long very in-depth video about a topic, then YouTube for a week or so tries to get me to watch 5 minute, rather shallow introduction videos that are way more popular. There is nothing wrong with those videos per se, they are often really well made, but it is not what I'm looking for.
Other times it picks stuff up from the long tail that seemingly gets into a feedback loop, suddenly reaching millions of view, with practically zero relevance to me.
Then there are some personal tastes of mine, e.g. that I can't stand the, I guess I'd call it the "Youtube Voice" where creators go completely over the top instead of talking like a normal person.
I wonder what metric could be used as a proxy to get better recommendations? Or if a better approach would be, to just build a better custom search so I can tweak it to what I'm looking for at this moment in time.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI wish I could explicitly tell YouTube “don’t ever recommend videos I’ve seen.”
- ChrisLovejoy 6y agoamen! I wish you could crank up exploration cf. exploitation in your settings or something
- ma2rten 6y agoIt would be cool in general if recommendation algorithms or search algorithms were more customizable. I would imagine you could put some code into your settings that controls which recommendations you see. The platform, like YouTube in this case, could compute features that enable different kind of recommendation algorithms. There could be communities of people who tinker with this and share their recommendation algorithms.
- sincerely 6y agoSteam added this feature recently (https://store.steampowered.com/recommender/ https://store.steampowered.com/recommender/ lets you add weights for "niche/popular" and "older/newer") and I've never had so much fun browsing a store. I hope other platforms take note
- amelius 6y ago* Except for music.
- rollingchunder 6y agoAwhile back I started using a video's 'like' button simply as a mechanism by which I could tell if I had watched something before since I did get repeat recommendations. Then, if I clicked a recommended video again later, I'd know I had already seen it. Over time, as far as I could tell, YT stopped recommending videos I'd seen before as there were fewer and fewer videos I would check out that I had already seen. May also be attributed to something else, or I'm getting old, but it seems to have been a fortunate outcome.
- JSavageOne 6y agoThis option would single-handedly fix their completely broken music recommendation algorithm that only seems to auto-play the same 5 or so songs that I recently listened to and thumbs-upped.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI get the same behavior, only I've never thumbs-upped anything.
- gibolt 6y agoThey have two options under the triple dot menu (at least on Android feed) that you are not interested in this video or this channel. May help curate once you start getting those recommendations.
- ianbooker 6y agoThen you cut out videos you were interested in the first place.
- Alphaeus 6y agoWhen it asks you why you're not interested, one of the options is "I've already watched this video".
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI used to do that, but it was a lot of work & I didn't notice an improvement to the search results.
- etripe 6y agoI experienced exactly the same. I suspect that since they're optimising for engagement, already having watched a video is some indication that you'll engage with it again.
- TobTobXX 6y agoI once watched a few videos about US politics. After that YouTube just kept spanning half my recommendations with vids about USpol. While they were addicting, they didn't really interest me. I then took the effort to flag tem as 'not interesting' (about 3x, refreshing the browser) and it works, I have gotten very few recommendations about that since then.
- powerapple 6y agoDon't ever recommend videos from 9 years ago please. This is the part I don't understand, how is Google doing so bad at this. You get slightly better experience if you use Chrome. It (on purposely?) keeps asking you to click 3 buttons to play a video Edge, and won't even show comments.
- dancek 6y agoOur tastes are so different. I'd much rather watch a great video from 2005 than a good one from 2020. I'm irritated by the recommendation algorithms pushing new content. Why would I care whether the video was published last night or last year?
- atoav 6y agoIf e.g. you want political thinking in current events than you'd probably value recent videos more. If you wanna see a great video on some obscure implementation detail of some electronics gear from the soviet era it doesn't really matter if it was uploaded a year ago or 8 years ago.
- powerapple 6y agoYes, recommendation should be personalized anyway, so you can get videos from 9 years ago and I don't.
- powerapple 6y agoWhat I mean is it displays a button to click after I clicked play on video when I use Edge, which is my main drive nowadays. And the comments are not displaying. It cannot be only my experience I hope :S so I get downvoted because my taste not liking old videos :/
- brylie 6y agoAlso, if a video thumbnail/title displays on my screen and I don't click it, it is a sign of disinterest. Stop suggesting videos I have repeatedly scrolled past. Use the lack of engagement as a feature.
- namrog84 6y agoOnce I tried disliking or dismissing a video as enforced dislike. Then it said "ok disengaging the entire category" and I was like wtf no. That's not at all what I wanted. And there was no way to undo. So its frustrating trying to teach those algorithms things I don't like. It was on google somewhere. It was like I wanted to dislike a particular author or that particular programming language they were talking about, but took it as me not wanting to hear about anything technological ever again. It was frustrating as heck.
- rasz 6y agoinject those two styles into YT website: a #video-title { color: red !important;} a:visited #video-title { color: black !important;}
- bra-ket 6y agoagreed, it's strange that with all their legions of machine learning PhDs Youtube recommendations still suck. The worst part is when it gets stuck on particular video/topic and just keeps recommending the same thing for months.
- selestify 6y agoI’m sure the YT algorithms are optimized just fine for whatever revenue metrics they’re maximizing. You and I might just be part of the edge cases that they haven’t bothered improving their models on just yet
- bigfoot675 6y agoThis is such an insightful comment. I find myself falling into the trap of complaining about things that are "broken" all the time too, but you're right: if you're on HN then you're not the customer that most companies are targeting.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agounless one can prove that there is something special about being on HN that makes a person intrinsically different than other consumers I don't think this is a reasonable conclusion. It may be that this can be proven but I would like to see the proof. If someone posts on a crafting forum, complains about youtube being broken is the conclusion that they are not the customer that most companies are targeting? or any number of other fora, I doubt the predictor of a single interest is enough to differentiate the person so significantly.
- kortilla 6y agoYes, just posting on a forum alone puts you in the tiny minority of consumers. There are huge swaths of people that barely like to read content, let alone write. Look at how many youtube videos dominate search results with hundreds of thousands of views for “how to” X when X is trivially described in a few lines of text.
- shostack 6y agoI want this for Spotify. Especially the ability to say "wipe your recommendation model you have on me for the weekly list and start from scratch."