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‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)

• raverbashing 6y ago
  Yes they are. They are the drug pushers of the modern era and the harder the drug the harder it pushes you Sure, it works fine for "normal" content. That's fine. But for "divisive" stuff it's like having someone trying to push you off road at every moment
  • Just1689 6y ago
    Yeah I wonder if in the future we won't see this as a terrible crime (pushing the next dopamine hit to a bunch of addicts) or if humanity needs to evolve to gain much much more self control.
  • Bakary 6y ago
    I prefer the word dope peddlers, as in dopamine. It's not technically accurate but I like the impression it gives.
• thatishard 6y ago
  My youtube sucks, I'm always looking for stuff to kill my time and youtube recommend the same crap videos 500 times in a row. It take a long time to find something I want to watch.
  • tsomctl 6y ago
    I've been loading the Youtube homepage every 15 minutes for the past week (I've been sick). It's the same videos over and over again. If I scrolled past it the first time, I'm still going to scroll past it the 100th time I see it.
    • kenniskrag 6y ago
      get well soon. May you want watching some TED talks instead. :)
    • 3131s 6y ago
      That's actually what prompted me to post this. I don't know how Youtube's algorithms work internally, but lately the front page is just so broken that it's baffling. The sidebar recommendations are another discussion -- those are possibly more pernicious but at least not as obviously dysfunctional. How is it possible to have the largest repository of video content in the world, yet Youtube is only able to recommend me the same videos over and over again (half of which I seen already or quickly clicked out of). There is also a simplistic list of recommended categories, which I would change if I could, and those never change either. If the front page were just completely random, it would be better than it is now. If I could actually tell Youtube to show me videos with a low-to-moderate view count and a high upvote ratio, then that would be fabulous and I probably would encounter new subjects and ideas rather than getting stuck watching the same garbage over and over. I'll never let my future children spend even a second on Youtube, because the stuff that it recommends to kids is so asinine that it just makes me mad. I really believe that collectively we are all much dumber because of the Youtube's pathetically bad algorithms.
      • visarga 6y ago
        You're probably right about the recommender but kid videos are not crap. In fact there's a Cambrian explosion of kid videos, some are amazing.
    • zo1 6y ago
      You know it's bad when one of the reasons for dismissing a video is "I've watched this before". If I didn't know any better, I'd say it's a separate sub-system(gasp, microservice) that doesn't integrate nicely with the service that stores/holds your previous viewing history.
    • combatentropy 6y ago
      Agreed. This tweak to their formula would improve it for me masssively: show the video on my Home page just once. If I click reload, show me an entirely new set. Someone may say, this would bother others, who saw something interesting but didn't click it this time. For me, it would train me to open those in a new tab or save them to my Watch Later list. Or just make it an opt-in feature, this aggressive renewal of the home page.
  • RavlaAlvar 6y ago
    The trick is to actively tell YouTube what you don’t like, it work quite well for me.
    • thatishard 6y ago
      I did try this a few times, but usually it have little effect on my recommendations.
      • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        Yeah I do it, and you have to be relentless. Mark every video you don't want to see. And god help you if you watch even one off-topic video - like another comment mentions, YouTube algorithm then concludes you want to see a million more. Reminds me of a Weird Al lyric about TiVo: "I watched Will and Grace one time, one day. Now TiVo thinks I'm gay."
  • thatishard 6y ago
    Another thing, don't click on a "Clickbait" video because you are curious, it will open the gates of hell and destroy your recommendations for a week.
    • whywhywhywhy 6y ago
      Removing them from your watch history can often fix this.
  • disown 6y ago
    You can thank toxic journalists who attacked youtube recommendations for being "toxic". You can also thank the toxic journalists for all the censorship on youtube. Youtube recommendations 10 years ago was so amazing. Just a refresh or two and you'd get interesting stuff - obscure or popular, new or old. It didn't matter. Now, it's the same corporate, propaganda or popular vids over and over again. You bring up youtube and it's mostly the same exact recommendations from yesterday and the day before. They are literally cycling the same videos over and over again. Why not make the default search and recommendations "PC" to appease the toxic journalists. But give the users the option to revert back to the "normal" search and recommendations. Why can't they do it like they do search. "Safe", "Moderate", "The good old days" modes?
• barrkel 6y ago
  I find YT does a gradient ascent into more popular videos. I start out listening to a song with 1000 views, I get recommended 10k view songs, then 100k, and before you know it it's back in the mainstream. There's no way to surf a niche, to hunt in a pile of bin ends. I imagine it's similar for conspiracy stuff. It'll point you in the direction of the most convincing nonsense.
  • 082349872349872 6y ago
    If you search in non-latin scripts, maybe it still ascends into a mainstream, but it probably won't be your mainstream. (YT does much more cross-script indexing now than it did when I first started playing around with this, but it still tends to silo by writing system, and if it's relevant search works much better in the original script than relying upon auto-transliteration.)
  • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    If conspiracy stuff were the same way you describe music, you would eventually end up with the mainstream opinion, no?
    • harry8 6y ago
      end up with the currently really popular conspiracy stuff. As opposed the nuanced, analysed, subtle thorough and less excitingly paced stuff. 1) CIA is interefering in US elections with evidence-free accuasation of Russia helping candidates who might reign them in to follow the law. Conspiracy? Or something to it? 2) Russia is paying bounties to kill American soldiers. Conspiracy? Or something to it? 3) Hunter Biden might be a bit corrupt. Conspiracy? or something to it? 4) The President has been compromised by Russia. Conspiracy? or something to it? There will be incendiary stuff on all of the above absolutely full of utter nonsense. There will be reasonable stuff also assessing evidence and may even not come up with a clear and definite conclusion on one or another. Which of these will YT reccomendation push you to? I don't know.
    • fabatka 6y ago
      Perhaps in that case the algorithm finds the local extremum, not the global.
• azaras 6y ago
  I don't know how I was wasting my time watching skateboarding and far right videos... I like stakeboarding but I am 41 and I have not practiced skateboarding in years. But I am on the left on politics. I delete the youtube app and put a URL blocker to stop this behavior.
• jpxw 6y ago
  Personally, I find the opposite. When I watch conservative content on YouTube, the recommended video is almost always very milquetoast - almost always an episode of “Uncommon Knowledge” by the Hoover Institute (despite me finding those extremely boring and therefore actively avoiding them), or a speech by Roger Scruton/Jordan Peterson/Douglas Murray - thinkers who are right-wing, but “safe”.
  • raarts 6y ago
    I have two accounts, one for work and one private. One of them is for following political right-leaning stuff, the other for left-leaning. In my experience both accounts do not try to push me to extremes. They DO try to keep me in a bubble, and both are very happy to lead me away from politics in general.
• wrnr 6y ago
  Does anyone else find these toxic post on HN to be toxic, not even trying to make a cheap point here. At least on twitter and YT I can consistently ban thinks that play on cheap emotions.
• curiousllama 6y ago
  I literally only watch one type of video on YouTube (chess games). The entirety of my recommendations are Jordan Peterson. Wtf
  • jgalt212 6y ago
    And then if you watch one Jordan Peterson video, all of sudden Youtube thinks you are a Proud Boy. another interesting example from the past, I watched a few science/nature focused videos on Antarctica. Then youtube decided I wanted to see Antarctica conspiracy videos about aliens, secret buried worlds, and Nazi holdouts. That being said, I think the recs have become much cleaner lately. i.e. no more Russia Today videos in my feed.
• albertgoeswoof 6y ago
  I’m quite enjoying it- I don’t watch anything political, and if anything comes up that’s a bit strange I just don’t watch it and eventually it goes away. It’s recommending me some great old footage of shows and some interesting new channels, mostly around engineering etc. I suspect if you try and use it as a news source or anything other than entertainment it would be dangerous.
  • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    Yeah. Like literally everything else it's a nice place as long as politics aren't shitting everything up.
• hackeraccount 6y ago
  I find youtube recommendations crap because if I watch something on one subject it seems to assume the subject is now the love of my life and proceeds to offer a zillion on just that subject. regarding what the article is talking about ... eh, it seems like they're saying it works fine but sometimes puts up videos whose politics they don't like. Short of going in and removing the stuff you don't like so that other people won't get to see it I don't see how you fix this. It's presumably the same algorithm that's working most of the time that's surfacing the crap.
  • kruxigt 6y ago
    Spot on.
  • kryogen1c 6y ago
    >it seems to assume the subject is now the love of my life christ, no kidding. this was my first clue that google has fundamentally changed as a company and it was time for me to leave. ive been using gmail since it came out and watching YouTube with a signed-in, non adblocked experience for years. the algorithim doest give a SHIT. if i watch one "The Office" clip, thats suddenly 60-80% of my feed despite the fact that i dont particularly like the show. im not sure what theyve doing with all my data theyve been harvesting like gollum, but it sure isnt being used for my benefit. (i dont have kide, no one else uses my account, dont watch youtube through vpn, etc etc) and dont get me started on the ads. ive never installed an anime girl fighting game, from gplay or anywhere else. stop it.
    • gaudat 6y ago
      Oh the ads. I cannot underestimate the annoyance it has caused to viewers. Seeing the numerous memes making fun of those asset flip adware turned "games" makes me die a little inside. Now I actively push my normie friends to install uBlock Origin on their devices. And Vanced or NewPipe when it worked.
      • jimktrains2 6y ago
        The midrolls are nearly always in an awful spot in the video and especially when watching something on a serious topic so jaring. At least most television ads are placed in a slot designed for ads to be there. Though I still find them jaring for shows that arent up-beat. To be honest, tv ads are the reason we dont watch a lot of TV anymore. The ad:content ratio is too high, and youtube has definitely as high or higher without an adblocker.
• newlikeice 6y ago
  so how does it work so go on me? I find urges to check the feed all the time. But the content rarely engages me. I watch a couple minuets then switch. What is going on here? why am I gravitated towards it? Can I use the same process to my benefit? Like can you build your own algorithm to get you addicted o healthy information? Can anyone point me in the right direction?
  • tsukurimashou 6y ago
    Define healthy information, also I think too much information (good or bad for whatever it means) is always bad for anybody
  • Timpy 6y ago
    I think being aware of what's happening to you is the right direction. The content rarely engages you, and that's part of the feature that's trapping you. Partial reinforcement is extremely addicting. If you gave somebody a pile of dimes and said "put these in this slot machine, pull the lever and get 11 cents every time" nobody would play that game. But the randomness of a slot machine means that when it hits, your brain lights up. Youtube's "recommended for you" section is a slot machine for whatever will engage you. For me it's novelty, for a lot of people it's an irresistible clickbait title. Nobody is immune to it, although I feel the hacker news crowd might be suspect to clickbait much more specific than whatever youtube chums the waters with on their front page when you're not logged in and have no history (open Youtube in an incognito window to see what I'm talking about, it's terrible).
• nbzso 6y ago
  Educate your non tech friends to use adblockers, vpn and cleaning browser data after each session. Actually YouTube has decent search with filters. Don’t use any suggested video search an build a profile ( if you wish).
  • wintermutestwin 6y ago
    YT has terrible search. It totally fails to use the + operator.
• haunter 6y ago
  I don't even know anymore what's the word "toxic" means and what do people think it means.
• bewareFB00 6y ago
  Beware the filter bubbles: https://youtu.be/B8ofWFx525s https://youtu.be/B8ofWFx525s Using scientific unification as a cognitive guide to understand this holistically: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375714499/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375714499/ Developers! Startups! Cap tables! Unicorns! Disrupt YC and tune it out.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• loloquwowndueo 6y ago
  Terrible recommendations. One can start watching relatively harmless “list of Pokémon with illustrations” or “evolution of super Mario characters” videos and instantly it will start recommending videos of violent games or live-streaming gamers swearing - so it goes from something age-appropriate to something totally opposite. Also don’t get me started on getting bombarded and suggested only “sound variations” videos which are noisy, rude and an attack on the senses - pure garbage content. Definitely a huge leap to assume I’ll find this interesting based on my previous choices. Maybe instead of complaining here I should just go ahead and delete YouTube :)
• H8crilA 6y ago
  Protip if this annoys you: go to myactivity.google.com, delete everything and pause all further collection. Now only your subscriptions and likes count (and maybe a few other things that are not considered "activity"). It's so much better! Did it once and now I don't want to go back.
  • peanutbutterjly 6y ago
    I didn't even know that was a thing, thanks!
  • everdrive 6y ago
    Thanks for the tip -- I didn't realize this affected Youtube. Curious to see how it improves my experience.
  • aphexairlines 6y ago
    It's too bad YouTube doesn't let you keep your history (so you can go back and find something you saw before) without it feeding into recommendations.
    • jimktrains2 6y ago
      Just like how google maps won't store your search history or use your current location to help narrow search results if I don't let it store my location history indefinitely?
    • 2sk21 6y ago
      Its available with YouTube premium. Complete ad removal and the ability to download videos is well worth the cost.
      • wasdfff 6y ago
        You can get those features from freeware browser extensions.
        • 6y ago
• Darmody 6y ago
  That's why I'm never logged in. And I also clear my cookies everytime I close the browser. Youtube to me now is more like a blank page where I search for stuff instead of a weird aggregator.
• tomaszs 6y ago
  The impact of such algorytms is devastating. Not only because they recommend engaging content that may lead to addiction and waste of time, the most precious thing every human being has. What is even worse such algorytms force creators to become part of this harmful scheme. Knowledge is the thing that is hurt also. It should be out there. For decades people learned how to explain complex things in an easy way. Because there is no other way we can as people evolve and learn. But now these algorytms promote the opposite. People who have nothing to say, people who complicate simple stuff beyond imagination are paid for doing so. On the other hand people who have something to say are bashed because they are not engaging enought, they don't do videos that fit needs of video addicts. So they are not paid. Such algorytms are the worst thing humand kind invented in last years. The devastating effect of these can be compared to drugs and gambling. It should be banned.
  • kovac 6y ago
    I feel that this is becoming true of much of the internet. The number of lame, banal blog posts that I come across is just insane. A lot of the tech blogs are just cheap ripoffs of original documentation/examples or just fluff. This is madness.
• vikbytes 6y ago
  I have confused feelings on the "efficiency" of their recommendations. As many others attest to, their recommendations lean heavily on popularity, and any one video in your history can change dramatically the majority of videos you get recommended. Even if most of your history is on completely different topics, that one video will dominate the recommendations. People tend to suggest this is intended behavior, my question is instead: Is the recommendation engine all that good to begin with, given how a lot of people find their recommendations confusing, lackluster, or downright bad?
• idiocrat 6y ago
  My uBlock Origin filters: www.youtube.com###dismissable:-abp-contains(Recommended for you) www.youtube.com###dismissable:-abp-contains(M views) www.youtube.com###dismissable:-abp-contains(LIVE NOW) (edit: formatting)
• TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  The YouTube algorithm's incentives seem to be responsible for so many videos being excessively long. Everything wants to waste your time because YouTube and the creator make more money that way.
  • wintermutestwin 6y ago
    Yep. I watch everything on 1.5 speed these days and skip around like crazy due to this. YT is going to give me ADD.
• Havoc 6y ago
  Anything recommendation driven seems suspect these days. I find if you seed it carefully though it can be OK. e.g. Mine is mostly full of tech and trance videos. Hard for that to get toxic. Politics, news, opinion pieces etc...and you quick get sucked into one of the echo chambers. I suppose a case could be made that trance is my preferred echo chamber though...
• radoslawc 6y ago
  I'm bit dissatisfied that ' 15 minute compilation of cats vomiting' video linked in article is no longer available.
• gfxgirl 6y ago
  I know I'm old but dang for some reason I really dislike recommendations from almost any company. For media I grew up in the 70s and had the TV Guide. I'd look through to see what I wanted to watch, circle some things and then watch. No spying what-so-ever. So, I like for example HN where AFAIK I'm not tracked so much and I choose what I want from the top of the list. Conversely I mostly hate Amazon, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and all the ad services and any other service that uses some algorithm to decide what to put in my face. It's to the point that 3 out 4 time I'll open videos in private windows so they don't get added to my profile and used for recommendations. I don't mind going to a tech sight and seeing ads for tech or a car site and seeing ads for cars. Do mind visiting an apartment listing site and then going around the net and having every other sight shove ads for apartments in my face.
  • gaudat 6y ago
    It's like the media company is taking the driver seat of your mind and decides you need to watch these videos over and over. Where have individualism and creativity gone?.
    • Retric 6y ago
      The search function still exists, recommendations are really aimed at low effort engagement. YouTube recommendations are only aiming for the equivalent quality of channel surfing when most user generated content is really bad. Sadly, it’s largely your own history that clogs the recommendations. The less you use a recommendation engine the more relevant it becomes.
      • jimktrains2 6y ago
        How does one search for what one doesn't know exists?
      • ceejayoz 6y ago
        > The search function still exists... The search function recommends results that match your query. It's part of the same system!
• izacus 6y ago
  I mean, the dumb algorithm keeps recommending videos I've watched a day ago. No wonder it's a disaster.
• tmakks 6y ago
  > Chaslot noted that divisive and sensational content is often recommended widely: conspiracy theories, fake news, flat-Earther videos Not true at all. In many countries, content from Corona-deniers is instantly removed, even in live streams, and their creators are banned for 1 or 2 weeks. Edit: Downvoters, please just comment
  • ceejayoz 6y ago
    COVID misinformation is a bit of an outlier in how the various social networks are treating content, though.
    • tmakks 6y ago
      I agree but still a good example that OP's statements are questionable.
      • ceejayoz 6y ago
        No, it's not. It's like saying smoking is good for you because there's this one 120 year old smoker. COVID misinformation is being tackled with specific manual attention because the algorithm was prioritizing it, and because it's receiving fairly unique amounts of attention. Google's (and Facebook's and Twitter's) hands were forced here. They'd much rather be leaving it alone like they do with other conspiracy theories.
      • rsynnott 6y ago
        Wait, they're claiming that Youtube recommends a lot of conspiracy bullshit, which is pretty well documented. You're pointing out that Youtube bans one specific narrow type of conspiracy bullshit, which is true but irrelevant. I don't see how that makes their statements questionable.
      • em500 6y ago
        Note that the article dates to June 2019, based on Chaslot's experiences from earlier years (which were probably still largely true when the article was written, but hard to check right now one way or another).
• peanut_worm 6y ago
  I always thought the recommendations were fine but today I was setting up an old Mac Mini I found and I saw the default recommendations because I wasn’t logged in, there were a weird amount of videos about Muslims and conspiracies for some reason.
• qwerty456127 6y ago
  For me YouTube recommendations are not toxic, they are so amazing I some times wonder how comes the world around is not heaven when everybody has free access to this. That's because I always watch high-quality educational content and some beautiful comforting and inspiring music. So for me YouTube is a fountain of knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics etc. Every day I get inspiration, healthy kind of fun and learn something cool, useful and healthy. But people who watch stupid and destructive stuff (even once) are doomed because they are going to get the same and worse kind of content recommended over and over. This is a particularly underestimated social problem indeed. That's why I recommend to avoid signing-in into YouTube. Better watch anonymously so you can always clean the cookies and get out of the pit.
  • Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    It doesn't seem that hard to get out of a pit, even with the account. It just takes a couple of days of browsing of the new type of content, along with maybe clicking "don't recommend this channel"/"not interested" 3-4 times, and the algorithm switches to the new things... The algorithm doesn't care, it just recommends.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • murgindrag 6y ago
      I want Youtube to recommend educational videos, a la Extra History and 3B1B. That's most of what I watch on Youtube. Youtube recommends stupid crap based on what other people like. If I watch one stupid video not in incognito, ALL of the recommendations become stupid videos because those videos have better metrics. Youtube actively guides me away from educational content. Even within educational videos, if I click on a click-baity channel once, that channel dominates things I've watched MANY more time. It seems to all be about click-through metrics. I've never had Youtube recommend really upscale educational content like Zach Star before. It's quality stuff, but you gotta find it yourself.
      • 6y ago
• nottorp 6y ago
  That's okay, I've noticed google has started to make it completely useless in any case. I tried to watch a speed run for a game (~2 hours) recently and google deemed to interrupt me with an ad every 3-5 minutes. Not even TV does that. I just found something similar on twitch, which for some reason didn't give me any ads. I wonder how long that will last...
• chrisa 6y ago
  Giant tip: look at https://www.youtube.com/feed/history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history and remove any videos you don't want included for recommendations - it really helps clean up your suggested videos. Doing that, combined with liberally using incognito mode for one-off video watching, helps keeps suggestions actually reasonable.
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    More people in these comments need to know about the history page. I personally recommend just clearing it from time to time. Obviously when you're getting bad recommendations. But even when you're getting good recommendations, it's easy to find yourself in a rut of watching the same stuff and reseeding the recommendations system can help you find new content. I like Youtube's recommendations. They just seem to get too narrow too fast instead of experimenting with showing you videos that it's less confident you might like. Thus resetting history is necessary.
• Alterlife 6y ago
  I hide the front page and recommendations with ublock rules and go directly to the 'subscriptions' page instead. It's the only way to see new videos from creators I care about.
• neallindsay 6y ago
  Recommendation engines are the monkey's paw of social media companies.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  The one that really annoys me is when $famous_author is on a book tour and I watch a talk. After doing so, YT recommendations repeatedly include more videos of the same author giving the same talk on the same book at various other locations in the book tour. The algorithm delivers far, far less novelty than I want in anything except music. I very,very rarely want to see a dozen nearly identical videos on the same topic.
• megameter 6y ago
  The ultimate result of the YT algorithm for me has been that the videos are increasingly a jukebox for background noise. Sometimes the noise is music(as in the popular "lofi hiphop study beats" or old anime soundtracks, or 80's pop hits) and sometimes the noise is man talks into camera(as in tech reviewers, music theory teachers, and video essayists) but it's basically inoffensive, interchangable background with an occasional moment that makes me pay attention or even comment. By their metrics it probably looks great: lots of watch time! Interaction! But it's basically leaving the possibilities unfulfilled. Now, I remember early days YT as well. It was much better at getting you circulating through a niche, but it did have the problem of getting stuck in a cycle of the same few videos. Modern YT just gradually moves you towards popular categories. Occasionally it does surprise, as with the months where "Steamed Hams" edits were recommended daily, or more recently, the train station ghost story song with no title. But that's mostly the exception. Edit: And a big part of why I seem to have this feed is simply because I have "liked and subscribed" to channels in these categories. If you do that, the recommender biases heavily back towards them.
• bArray 6y ago
  The recommendations are now almost completely inescapable if you want to continue using their service. They recently did away with email notifications for new content [1] and now the RSS export feature for subscriptions has been removed [2]. I refuse to interface with their algorithm, so I've begun hunting down alternative video hosts and the personal sites of the creators I can find and am preparing to leave their platform. Alternatives are now very viable, with a platform such as BitChute soon to offer functionality such as live streaming [3]. [1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/15/youtube-will-end-email-notifications-for-new-videos-on-august-13/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/15/youtube-will-end-em... [2] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/85275454?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/85275454?hl=en [3] https://www.bitchute.com/funding/livestream/ https://www.bitchute.com/funding/livestream/
  • 082349872349872 6y ago
    recommendations are entirely escapable via search. (but I never subscribe to anything, so maybe you want a different experience?)
  • wasdfff 6y ago
    Weird, my RSS feeds have been unaffected.
    • bArray 6y ago
      They are for now, but if they have removed the export button you can guarantee the RSS will be killed off soon.
  • gavreh 6y ago
    I turn off YouTube watch history and use the "subscriptions" page exclusively. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
  • triangleman 6y ago
    You could use a greasemonkey-style script to modify youtube.
• em500 6y ago
  I skimmed/read the entire article (dated June 2019). It does not not contain anything new or surprising for most of the HN audience (not a critique of the article itself, which is aimed at a broad audience). There are some very fundamental questions that I don't think we have really good answers to yet. - Like all social media, Youtube's algo is aimed at maximizing aggregate view time, and people working there are directly rewarded for that so it's difficult to change. You could bring up some obvious criticism, that recommending crap will destroy the value/brand in the long term. But that's extremely hard to measure/proof, especially when all short term KPIs point in the opposite direction. So you need the top leadership (who still has to answer to the Board/shareholders) to take the contrarian position on faith. - The article/Chaslot claims that Youtube's recommendations are not about "what the viewer wants". The obvious question is then, how do you measure "what the viewer wants"? Youtube / social media's main metrics, engagement minutes does not seem obviously flawed. Even if they were, I have not seen any practical alternative (either in this article, or many other discussions). People often bring up analogies with nicotine and other addictive substances, that engagement is largely involuntary. But the main issue with nicotine is clearly harmful for health. If it weren't, there would probably wouldn't be much legislation around it, even given the adddictiveness. The more apt analog may be soft drugs like cannabis, where the legislative momentum seems to move in the other direction. - The fundamental issue is not that social media is not giving people "what they want". It's that often people want things can be bad for themselves and/or for society. This is very difficult to resolve without taking a strongly authoritarian/paternalistic standpoint.
  • jowsie 6y ago
    Nit picky, but nicotine itself isn't really harmful unless you have blood pressure issues to start with. It's tobacco (specifically smoking it) that's the real danger.
  • vl 6y ago
    Article is just incorrect: few years ago, YT realized that optimizing for watch time decreases engagement, which is obviously most critical for life-time profits, and switched to optimizing for life-time engagement. I.e. watch less today, but return tomorrow. It’s very tricky ML problem, so by now YT ML is probably the most advanced in the world in this area. PS. Trigger for investigation was the event named “boobacalipse” - when recommender recommended videos with boobs on the first page for couple days.
• dijit 6y ago
  This feels a bit like stating the obvious. I felt the "pull" of the alt-right because of YouTube; It begins innocuously enough, someone shares something that's a thoughtful piece on "googles culture" or something which is left leaning, then in the recommendations there is a response, usually a passionate argument against SJW's or whatever, once you watch one it's basically game over (at least this was the case 1-2 years ago); My entire feed was completely inundated with 'Ben Shapiro owns the libs" or "SJW owned compilation" usually featuring that very loud and aggressive feminist lady with the dyed red hair in the thumbnail. it was only with concerted effort (IE; clicking "Not interested"... a lot!) that I was able to eventually save my account, but I still get the odd Jordan Peterson and even right now I got a recommendation for "Power&Panic; the last days for Christian nationalism" by "The Thinking Atheist". What's worse is YouTube used to require me to give a predefined reason to not recommend something; and "too political" was not one of those choices. I'm absolutely certain that the same thing happens for others too towards the left. It's incredibly radicalising. I just do not give a fuck about politics, my YouTube watch history is all music and conference talks.
  • traverseda 6y ago
    Why don't you just delete the underlying videos from your youtube history? I've had history turned off for a while, so my recommendations are only based on likes, subscriptions, and the actual content I'm watching at that moment. It seems like cleaning/clearing the history would solve the problem?
    • dijit 6y ago
      It could, but I’ve watched a lot of videos since then. I was not aware that this was possible back then. Good advice though, I would suspect it works, I would hope it would. :)
    • crispyambulance 6y ago
      How do you know that deleting your history does anything? I mean, yes, deleting your history hides what you've been looking at (from you), but does that restrict the recommendation algorithm? Is there a way to know for sure?
• the_snooze 6y ago
  A lot of the comments here are in the spirit of "just clear your history" or "just be careful about what you watch." If you have to go out of your way to step over eggshells in order to get good recommendations, that indicates the problem is with the designers and decision-makers instead.
  • slothtrop 6y ago
    Not only that, it's wrong. I can have zero "conspiracy" videos in my history/cookies and still sometimes see recommendations for it. Granted it was worse years ago.
    • 3131s 6y ago
      I actually like conspiracy videos (for fun), but Youtube did something a few years back so that they are recommended with much less frequency. Also to get a totally clean slate, which is still not perfect as you said, you have to delete subscriptions and likes as well as watch history. I've tried it a few times, but since I keep my subscriptions I always end up back on the same topics.
• nobleach 6y ago
  At the end of 2016, I was bored and decided to watch a flat earth video. I spent a few evenings going down that conspiracy rabbit-hole as it was completely fascinating. (I couldn't tell if these folks were expertly trolling, or if they were serious). Once I was back to reality (2017) I was done wanting to see anything conspiracy related. It took a year for that stuff to disappear from my right-hand column. I just kept telling myself, "you deserve this... you asked for it".
  • GreenWatermelon 6y ago
    Why didn't you click on "Not interested"? It only takes a couple of days for interesting stuff to disappear.
    • Minor49er 6y ago
      My luck with this has been pretty mixed. I tell YouTube that I'm really not interested in things like Jordan Peterson or ASMR by telling them to not recommend that video or that channel whenever they come up. If I'm lucky enough, those suggestions will die down a bit, sometimes for a few weeks it seems. But eventually, they will start popping back up.
      • RyJones 6y ago
        I have said not interested in living on boats, making boats, repairing boats, or anything boat related and yet they still pump these videos at me. I wish there was a way to say “never show me a video about boats, in any context”
  • tokamak-teapot 6y ago
    I watched some of one video whose content would be described by half of the US as political opinion and protected speech. It was mainly misogyny and incitement to racial hatred. YT’s algorithm seemed to think that I needed to keep being exposed to this, so filled my recommendations with more. Like the parent, it has taken over a year of me choosing ‘not interested’ for YT to stop trying to persuade me that I should hate most of mankind and actively seek to hurt people who are different from me. I’m not sure how far from ‘Do no evil’ it is possible to get but this seems like it’s the opposite to me.
• tehwebguy 6y ago
  Love to use the algorithm that brought billions and billions of views to videos titled like “OPENING $10,000,000 DARK WEB MYSTERY BOX” and other excellent content.
• Shivetya 6y ago
  The only toxic with youtube is in settings where you cannot block the incessant ads. Twelve dollars is just ridiculous to watch ad free user created content. worse the ad play is wholly random feeling where you can end up with multiple ads even in a short video only you have none in the next. the recommendations for me have been fine if not repetitive, just because I watched one video on a subject doesn't mean I want all the rest
• ManlyBread 6y ago
  I gave up on the recommendations completely. It has been nothing but videos I've already watched (about 90% of what I saw came from my playlists and subscriptions) and videos that have nothing to do with what I'm watching right now. So I did the following: - installed a plugin that redirects me from Home to Subscribtins page, effectively disabling the Home page completely - deleted all history from YouTube - disabled all possible tracking and data collection The recommened videos on the left of the video player are a lot better as a result. It sucks that these mostly focus on the author of the video but scrolling down usually reveals new content. It's not as good as what it used to be in the late 2000s but it's far better than the default settings.
  • everdrive 6y ago
    What's the redirection plugin? I was considering this myself.
• methodsignature 6y ago
  The Matrix gets it wrong. There won't need to be a war.
• leetcrew 6y ago
  I just find them to be dumb. 50% of my recommendations are videos I've already watched.
  • lostmsu 6y ago
    That's because there's not really that much great content on YouTube.
    • pjc50 6y ago
      There is undoubtedly more great content than one could watch in a lifetime on youtube. The challenge is to identify and find it among the thousand lifetimes of trash.
  • 93po 6y ago
    I have this problem too. It's stuff I've watched or it's stuff I've scrolled past uninterested in a dozen times. Basically the only time I casually find something I want to watch is when a subscription uploads new content
  • pimlottc 6y ago
    I wouldn't mind this as much if YouTube were better about indicating which ones you've watched. In theory you can just look for the little red bar under the thumbnail but they seem to "forget" after a while. This makes it tricky to go through the backlog of a channel's content without watching it all in order. Sure, at first any random video will be new to you, but eventually you will start seeing more and more repeats, forcing you to start choosing videos more methodically from the videos page. Even then, it's tricky when the ones you've seen are not always marked consistently. It doesn't seem like too much data to story for a company that offers gigs of free email. (And no, I don't have a auto-deletion policy set up, I just double-checked)
  • pjc50 6y ago
    It could really benefit from a simple "suggest things I've already seen y/n" UI toggle. Sometimes you do want it to do that, such as for music, but most of the time you don't.
• unnouinceput 6y ago
  My YT recommendations are usually my already browsed songs, so it's a good thing for me. I also don't login on YT as I don't have a google account. Well, technically I do have one, I created one for my Android emulator but I don't care what's in that account.
• kibwen 6y ago
  After realizing that I would sometimes spend hours caught in the YouTube recommendation trap--to the detriment of my sleep, my work, my hobbies, my family--I've taken steps to manage my borderline addiction to YouTube. Prior to this I'd tried blocking it entirely, but the problem is that there is sometimes valuable educational content that I benefit from watching (even if only to briefly unwind after a day of work). Ideally there could be an option in the YouTube settings to turn off all recommendations, or perhaps a browser extension to remove them from the page, but to solution I ended up with was quite simple: RSS! I went to every channel with useful educational content that I like to watch, subscribed to their feed (or even indivial playlists) with my RSS reader of choice (Feedly), and the videos get delivered and displayed inline in the RSS reader. No more YouTube binging because I don't find myself with the urge to visit the site, and so I'm never exposed to the recommendations. On the rare occasion where I want to watch an arbitrary video, I open a private browsing session so that the recommendations are uselessly generic.
  • pedro1976 6y ago
    I feed you. Can you share some of your educational channels?
• freebuju 6y ago
  The problem I have with YouTube recommendations is that it keeps suggesting me MOST of the big content providers MOST of the time. Sometimes I want to see a video from that indie creator I subbed to a few months back, even if just to catch up. Not all the time MKBHD or LTT on the front.
• kipchak 6y ago
  I really like my YouTube recommendations after a lot of time on the site and manually clicking "I'm not interested" on a good number of them. I've also wound up with several accounts over the years that all have slightly different but overlapping content - my most recent account gets more stuff like Rambalac for example.
• offtop5 6y ago
  Youtube, like all social media tends to give you more of what you consume. If you watch social commentary, or God forbid anything to do with race or gender you'll be feed the worst parts of the internet. Watch videos on the X86 instruction set, you'll get more of that. I tend to stick to music and programing. I did find a gem where someone animated the original Star Wars episode 9 script, but even that was a rare diamond in the rough. For that one video , you have hundreds of people whining about how Disney ruined everything.
• Kim_Bruning 6y ago
  The Paperclip Maximizer is a thought experiment that shows that if you apply a powerful AGI to something completely innocuous, things can go hilariously wrong over time. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer People are amused to read the story, and then go on their way. But what happens if you apply a rather less powerful AI to something else even just a little bit less innocuous? (like optimizing to grab people's attention, as is happening here). I think you can get spectacular results. And of course even if the AI is low powered, it can still work as an effective amplifier for human activity, both good and bad: (See: Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica, etc)
  • nullc 6y ago
    I once contemplated a notion of optimization process risks where we should consider how narrow a target out of the space of all possible universes the process could pull ours into. Unfortunately, I realized that even a simple phase-locked loop -- like what you use to condition an oscillator to be in sync with TAI using GPS -- can actually hit absurdly narrow targets... e.g. two oscillators a continent apart humming away within parts per billion of each other, yet that kind of process isn't particularly dangerous. Even brining millions of oscillators into sync isn't going to cause some great harm. I'm not sure how to reason about it, but I think people are much too concerned about AGI risks relative to dumb optimization process risks. It's similar to fretting about movie-plot villains when most actual evil in the world comes from indifference and bad incentives or people trying to "help".
    • Kim_Bruning 6y ago
      Would fitness landscapes help for part of it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape They're typically used for reasoning about other things, but there's a few useful intuitions you can draw. Notably, you can't optimize to a point that is not on the fitness landscape in the first place... so the following comic can't happen: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/ http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/ Which doesn't mean there can't be any surprises of course!
• biql 6y ago
  I learned to like it over time. YouTube recommendations helped me find incredibly valuable content which I don't think I would be able to find without the algorithm being new to the topic and not quite knowing where to look. These days, if I find myself interested in a new topic, I intentionally make a few searches knowing that YT will bring something relevant in the future and it's generally going to be even better than the web search because for some topics, the barrier to making a good YT video is much higher than making a high ranking article or a web site.
• Dumblydorr 6y ago
  YT algorithm is great for me. I learn a ton about: woodworking, violin technique, folk music, StarCraft, math, coding, home improvement, DIY projects, etc. What is toxic is the viral ideology that infects the mind of many, many humans. We need education and social interaction to counterbalance the anti-truth conspiracy infection that social media is spreading.
  • mschuster91 6y ago
    > We need education and social interaction to counterbalance the anti-truth conspiracy infection that social media is spreading. The problem is, this will not (ever) work. Most people are mentally and/or physically exhausted after a long day of work, they don't have the mental firewalls to protect themselves against "cheap and easy" proposals (like, for example, to "build a wall"). I see conspiracy crap like cigarettes: even though everyone should know for decades now that smoking kills, the only way to effectively get rid of cigarettes is to ban their marketing and make them expensive. Going after the vendors is what must be done. And if that includes jailing the worst offenders, be it.
• mschip 6y ago
  Don't forget you feed the algorithm. I use Youtube mostly for hobbies. A couple examples are cooking and small engine repair - I find it super valuable to watch multiple people do the same thing in different ways. Anecdotally, the algorithm does a really good job giving me more content/channels both narrowly related and slightly expanding the interests. Sure, it can be frustrating if you watch a clickbaity video that spawns a genre of clickbaity content recommendations - but it doesn't take long for those to stop showing up so long as you don't watch them.
• qwerty1234599 6y ago
  If you want a glimpse of the average person's youtube experience, open the site in incognito and go to the "trending" tab. It's a completely different site depending on what you initially search for when you start using it. The problem is, 80% of youtube userbase never really typed a search query for anything in the first place, and as a result the stuff they get recommended and watch is pure shit.
  • galuggus 6y ago
    I believe trending is hand curated by youtube
    • CodeGlitch 6y ago
      I looked at trending once. Never again. There is great content on YouTube, but what I consider great is completely different from the next person, which is why trending makes no sense...
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • lopmotr 6y ago
        I expect it's like how stamp collecting used to be the world's most popular hobby. It might not have been anybody's favorite activity, but it was commonly accessible to everyone. They call these things "lowest common denominator". If you have to pick something for everybody, that's probably a better choice than any niche group's favorite thing.
    • thelastwave 6y ago
      I really hope they are not hand picking only My Best Friend and NBA videos.
  • crispyambulance 6y ago
    We don't actually know what the "ingredients" are for recommendations. I don't think it's possible to draw conclusions from one's own experience with youtube recommendations and extrapolate it to others or to any sort of judgement about the quality of the algorithms. We are simply not privy to what, exactly, youtube is doing. I think it's wise to heed Guillaume Chaslot's warnings. In the same way that youtube exploited (inadvertently or not) glitches in the brains of preschoolers (remember "Spiderman and Heidi" videos? if not, don't look it up). There's reason to believe these things can fly under our radar and influence adults in ways that are not perceptible and not something we would approve of in advance.
• rdsubhas 6y ago
  What I hate is, it's orders of magnitude more toxic for kids. Hyper-amplification of bad recommendations. For sure, Youtube's (bad) impact on current generation children will be felt (in a bad way) for many upcoming generations to come. At this point, it's literally technology gone rogue.
  • baryphonic 6y ago
    My wife and I recently made the decision to totally remove YT Kids from the kids' iPads (which they mainly use for long car rides). It's completely toxic in a way I didn't even realize it would be, and the videos aimed at the kids are the lowest quality garbage imaginable. I had thought maybe YouTube Kids wouldn't be as bad as the InstaSnapFaceTwit, but it's just as bad. The content recommendations are so bad that frequently videos will be in Russian or Korean (our native language is English). And YouTube Kids encourages kids to have zero attention span by showing all sorts of recommendations all the time. My youngest can hardly get through a single ten minute YouTube video without clicking something else. Our new rule is they can have some occasional screen time (though playing with real toys and playing outside are preferred), but when we do have screen time, we can do activities that are creative or imaginative or strategic (like games or making art or writing). If we're using tech as a consumption box, reading is best, followed by good movies that we can watch together. I'm honestly happy now that YouTube Kids has been banned from my house. I'd commend every parent to do the same.
• mehulmandania 6y ago
  I've drastically improved my YouTube experience by removing all recommendations and comments from my YouTube experience using the "Remove YouTube Recommended Videos, Comments" Chrome/Firefox extension. Combining this with an ad blocker makes YouTube a joy. It works for me, not the other way around. Sure, I may miss out on watching a few good videos, but I find at most I'll miss out on a good piece of trivia, at best I am more focused and in control over my attention.
• Bakary 6y ago
  This is yet another version of the argument that democracy is good BUT people can't be trusted to make good decisions on their own and should only be exposed to carefully curated content. In other words, an implicit contradiction.
• shmerl 6y ago
  Also, what's the story with Youtube deleting and disabling all comments for autogenerated music videos? That was a really messed up move.
• amadeuspagel 6y ago
  I discovered so many wonderful documentaries thanks to youtube, some about things I had never heard of before. "It’s in YouTube’s interest to keep us watching for as long as possible", and the way youtube keeps me watching as long as possible is to recommend stuff that I want to watch. I don't understand the problem with this metric. Is it that some people watch things they don't really want to see, like a trainwreck? But why do these people who compulsively watch things that they don't really want to watch keep checking youtube at all? Why don't they hit the dislike button? Wouldn't that adjust the algorithm?
• hnarn 6y ago
  Can we call this the Oppenheimer Syndrome? I see so many opinion pieces from software engineers lamenting how they've created this "horrible thing" by working on social media recommendation algorithm X, and it all fits neatly into this painfully predictable trope of how we should all live in a camper and use a Nokia from the 90s. Yeah, I'm jaded and of course there's merit at the bottom of all this, but I really can't be arsed to read another high and mighty essay about how one person in the course of their duty led the entirety of humanity astray by recommending what people are engaged by online.
  • Merman_Mike 6y ago
    These pieces also bother me. We're supposed to praise these people for coming forward or something? This guy spent years of his life making the world a worse place to live in, while taking home a fat salary, and now has somehow found his moral compass and wants to let us know. Yeah, no thanks.
  • CM30 6y ago
    I really want to write an article now where I say how my work as a web developer/software engineer has made the world a better place, and why we should be happy with modern technology and the internet as it is today. Of course I've not worked at Facebook or Google, so maybe it'd be better if we saw a Facebook or Google engineer write that sort of article instead. Would be interesting to hear from someone who loves the company they work for, thinks their work improves humanity and considers their tech the coolest thing in the world.
  • kbelder 6y ago
    The engagement engine doesn't end at YouTube. It's always active, everywhere, and this type of article exploits it.
• galang 6y ago
  I like that the author doesn't even see the irony in the fact that his article is toxic and written in a sensationalist way just to get more clicks and more ad revenue.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• tasty_freeze 6y ago
  I recently took the radical step of buying a youtube family subscription. I was ad-blocking anyway, but if we only consume free things, then we should expect to be exploited in some way by the websites we consume. The family subscription is $18/month, and I am also spending about $30/month on patreon support. I'm hoping as a paying customer the company/providers will take my needs more seriously than the people who they have to milk for attention. It very likely won't make a bit of difference unless enough people do the same, and I have little hope of that happening. Most people would rather complain about free stuff than pay for anything.
• AlexCoventry 6y ago
  There are chrome extensions which disable the recommendations sidebar in YouTube. I recommend using one. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-youtube-recommende/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-youtube-rec... Not sure if this is the one I use, because I'm on mobile ATM. But it's a similar idea, at least.
  • aendruk 6y ago
    A simpler solution is to just use your ad blocker: www.youtube.com###related It's worth taking moment to familiarize yourself with adding this kind of filter.
    • AlexCoventry 6y ago
      Thanks.
• sreejithr 6y ago
  you don't say
• biohax2015 6y ago
  Firefox add-on that can remove various addicting components of YouTube: Search for "Remove YouTube Recommended Videos, Comments"
• whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  Honestly it’s all I’m watching anymore during lockdown. I’ve exhausted Netflix and Amazon Prime. I honestly use it so much I’d love like a Reroll button to show me completely fresh algorithm picks. Yeah they’re toxic whatever don’t care, they’re excellent. Alcohol is bad for me too but I’m not gonna stop doing that either.
• rconti 6y ago
  I primarily use YouTube on my AppleTV, and man, the UI is awful. The recommendations change every time the home screen comes up, and there's no easy way to flag things. So if I see 3 recommendations I need to watch, I have to try to remember what they were before I watch one, because when I finish with the first video, the others will be gone. Netflix is even worse (and they all seem to suffer from this to some degree). When I start it, it's an ad for some random thing. To find what I was watching last I have to either remember whether that miniseries is considered a movie or a TV show or what.. or, I can scroll down to Home, and "continue watching.." will be buried 3 rows deep and 2 columns over. So incredibly strange and unintuitive. I guess they want their algos to be drive more engagement rather than just take you back to what you almost certainly opened the app to watch?
• vfc1 6y ago
  You have to fine tune the recommendations yourself, by manually removing and choosing the option "I don't like the video". It works surprisingly well, and well worth the effort.
• ramon 6y ago
  Even as guest Youtube wants to do the recommendation algorithm it's great what can I say besides privacy is the last thing they're worried about anyways. They're almost like: You know you're being monitored, don't worry about it we'll get you some great videos along the way.
  • WaitWaitWha 6y ago
    This becomes very apparent when traveling and using hotel Internet, or built in YT on room's "smart" TV. The YT recommendations are very targeted, not only for local business but culture, and aggregate viewing patterns. Go to Washington DC, and check YT search patterns. Then, go to Seattle, WA, Memphis, TN, Austin, TX and compare these to each other. It is a fascinating window into what YT thinks about the local population.
• verisimilitude 6y ago
  Here are some CSS selectors I block on YouTube to remove recommendations and other annoyances: div#secondary .videowall-endscreen .ytp-pause-overlay .iv-promo-video .ytp-cards-teaser .ytp-button That first one is super-nice -- using that, I no longer need superhuman self-control to prevent my brain from falling into a YouTube black hole powered by millions of iterations of A/B testing targeted at my lizard brain. I just watch one video and then... close the tab.
• bvcvbuiy 6y ago
  At some point I as listening a lot of nursery rhymes song with my child. When doing this I just let the recommendation algorithm choose the next song for me because I don't really care what to watch next. After a few week I was stuck in a two song loop where song N+1 was equal to song N-1...
• nromiun 6y ago
  In my experience YouTube's recommendations are pretty predictable. If you watch a specific type of content it will keep recommending videos from that type until you search for something else. Sure, it makes some mistakes but you can always customize it to not show some type of videos or channels. If you are getting toxic recommendation all the time there is a high chance that you watch a lot of toxic content.
• ce4 6y ago
  Relevant xkcd and TheOatmeal comics (the latter is a bit longer and about the whole internet but I see the Mona Lisa part as a referral to YouTube): https://theoatmeal.com/comics/making_things https://theoatmeal.com/comics/making_things https://xkcd.com/202/ https://xkcd.com/202/
• cratermoon 6y ago
  A pure recommendation engine of the sort we learn about in class would simply aggregate user preferences based on whatever content-appropriate properties are available. A real-life recommendation engine is written and deployed as part of a business plan. I think it's fair to say that all recommendation engines deployed by for-profit companies have some element of recommending things that drive more revenue for the company. The question is, how much does end user give up, in terms of getting actually interesting recommendations vs being recommended something that is more profitable for the company, in exchange for getting things of interest to their attention. I've seen enough to be convinced, anecdotally, that YouTube's recommendation engine is heavily skewed towards revenue-driving. For example, how much of what YouTube recommends is influenced by their big-money media customers? What users get is as marginally interesting as necessary to addict viewers.
• gxx 6y ago
  Google and YouTube video search are terrible. I find the result poorly matches the query I typed, the results are hard to browse, and of course favor videos on YouTube ignoring better videos that may be on other sites. Bing video search is by far better. Assuming you use DuckDuckGo type your search and follow it with !bv. The result is an excellent browsable display of videos that match your search well, that can be previewed by hovering over them, and the results aren't biased to just YouTube. You can also add emphasis to words in your search with the +/- operators and quotes. Also the "up next" YouTube video is rarely as good as going back to the Bing search and choosing another video.
• vram22 6y ago
  One at least poor (if not dumb) and unwanted kind of recommendation I keep getting is for videos I have very recently watched, and completely - and both the watching and then the recommendation happen in the same YouTube app on the same phone, often within minutes or seconds of each other. Unless there is some reason I don't know of, this seems useless, a waste of processing cycles, and potentially irritating to the user.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  Let’s be honest - toxic here just means “people are accessing content that doesn’t agree with my personal politics”. This word doesn’t have meaning anymore, like “fascism”.
• DidISayTooMuch 6y ago
  I actually miss the Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Feminists recommendations that I was getting 2 years ago. It was kinda fun. Now they have toned it down so much that it's hard to find engaging content. Their music recommendation is still good.
• throwawaymanbot 6y ago
  i have randomly been shown alt right stuff... i have not sought it out... you tube algorithm is garbage.
• stevematzal 6y ago
  More people should find out about this.
• mlacks 6y ago
  I have three rules for Youtube: 1. I have two or three accounts specifically for what i want to view. I have an account where I only see video editing tips/how-to's, and a separate account for real estate, a separate account for personal interests, etc. 2. When I invariably see something interesting outside of my normal account's spectrum, sure I watch it - but I make sure and delete it from my history. 3. I aggressively click "don't recommend this again" for anything that falls outside of the account's focus.
• supelr 6y ago
  I fought with Instagram algorithm, and now my instagram explore feed delights me. I get cool new content that I actually like and enjoy. I fought with Youtube algorithm, and it's really really lame. I don't get any new creators or quality content. Even the education content it tends to suggest is absolute garbage.
• triangleman 6y ago
  No one in this thread has mentioned that YouTube recommendations have dramatically changed in 2017, from the heavy conspiracy/sensational/lies videos to something much more "toned down" and IMO rather annoying. It's driving everyone to the mainstream, or perhaps into the mainstream of two camps. At least before, flat earth did not fit into the mainstream of anything.
• Sander3Utile 6y ago
  On a slightly related note, I really am enjoying the browser extension "remove youtube suggestions" My home page and completely blank and any video that I watch has no recommendations on the side. I like it this way because I won't get sucked into a rabbit hole of youtube videos. I also have comments turned off
• aorth 6y ago
  On a related note, I'm surprised nobody mentioned the Clickbait Remover for YouTube addon. Highly recommended! It's on Mozilla addons (and probably Chrome, not sure): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-remover-for-youtube/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem... I always use YouTube signed out anyways, but there's also this Privacy Redirect addon that redirects YouTube links to Invidious, Twitter to Nitter, etc: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redir...
• darepublic 6y ago
  Found tons of good music via YouTube recommendations. As an adult I know enough not to blindly start watching flat earth videos should they be recommended and lose all sense of reality. Please don't destroy the good in a vain hope of protecting everyone from themselves.
• blitz_skull 6y ago
  This website is literally unusable on mobile. The ads make it impossible to scroll. What a load of garbage.
• droptablemain 6y ago
  The author claims that RT is a "state-sponsored propaganda outlet." That paints an unfortunate and misleading image about RT programming. RT, for example, is the home of On Contact -- a Chris Hedges program, as well as former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, and "conservative comedian" Dennis Miller. To imply that these people are useful stooges in a foreign propaganda apparatus is rather insulting.
• goatcode 6y ago
  > We’ve designed our systems to help ensure that content from more authoritative sources is surfaced prominently in search results So Google also doesn't necessarily recommend what the user wants.
• klmadfejno 6y ago
  I like to have video game speed runs in the background every now and then. Now my suggestions are full of videos with outraged titles about how someone CHEATED in a mario speed run. EXPOSED. LIAR. PATHETIC CHEATER PRETENDS TO BE BLINDFOLDED. ffs
• krono 6y ago
  The other day I watched some video from this bearded British Linux nerd about awk, and since then, YouTube just won't stop recommending me videos involving Arabic expats to English-speaking countries. Thanks YouTube
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• JSavageOne 6y ago
  Youtube prioritizing "watch time" is why Youtubers take 1 minute of content and stretch it out to 10 minutes. It's an enormous waste of everyone's time, and it's crazy to think about the enormous power and influence Google has over humanity's behavior. I always wondered why Youtube never tried to get their algorithm to optimize for quality. For example, one way to do this would be to look at comment lengths and threads. I'd imagine that for more quality videos, you'd have people writing longer comments and responding to each other. I'd be in favor of regulation enabling users to have some semblance of control over the recommendation algorithm given that it has such an enormous effect on their lives. Ideally you'd have competitors driving improvements like this, but Youtube is effectively a monopoly at this point.