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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

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.
  - qwerty456127 6y ago
    > ALL of the recommendations become stupid videos because those videos have better metrics. Youtube actively guides me away from educational content. Back when I was not particularly into YouTube and hadn't had many great recommendations YouTube insisted I should watch Sapolsky's Harvard lectures - these probably had particularly good metrics. Once I started to watch them (and was very satisfied) more and more great recommendations started to appear. > It's quality stuff, but you gotta find it yourself. People should start sharing curated lists of high-quality no-bullish YouTube videos/channels. Kind of like those awesome-everything on GitHub.
    - minkowski 6y ago
      Conversely, at some point I decided to watch Sapolsky lectures based on human recommenders, but this caused YouTube to recommend not only other science lectures but also sensational videos purporting to be about quantum mechanics, medicine, etc. but which were obviously total pseudoscience.
  - freebuju 6y ago
    Not saying YouTube's recommendation algorithm is perfect but you could try to interact with the feedback popups. That seems to clear up stuff I don't need on my 1st page. If all else fails, create a new Google account for separate exclusive use should do the trick.
- vl 6y ago
  The most simple way to adjust recommendations is to delete videos you didn’t like from your watch history.
- monkeypizza 6y ago
  I have this problem too occasionally; but if you spend 2 minutes hitting "do not recommend videos like this" + "do not recommend this channel", all the good content beneath will rise to the top.
- floatrock 6y ago
  > The algorithm doesn't care, it just recommends. And isn't that terrifying, in the Parable of the Paperclip Maximizer kinda way? We can make the well-its-your-individual-responsibility bootstraps argument, but that kinda works only if you believe in the supremacy of an individual's autonomy and that the mind can't be hacked or hijacked. Everything from addictive products to the marketing industry shows that isn't the case. The youtube paperclip maximizer is maximizing for your mind's engagement. We can say "well, it's just feeding people what they want!" But you can say the same thing about airdropping crates of opium onto the streets.
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    It is only terrifying if you assume people are mindless spiritless bots. In which case (if you truly believe that), we are all fucked anyway. Then who cares? Is youtube really your biggest problem? > is maximizing for your mind's engagement. So has media been doing for a long time, also all writers and poets, etc. Mind's engagement is not the only meaning of life, and most people act out this deep knowledge. I don't see a problem.
    - floatrock 6y ago
      Yes, it was called "yellow journalism" before it was called "clickbait". I agree, that's not new. What's new and disturbing is 1) the degree of algorithmic personalization, and 2) that personalization goes to the highest bidder. Put together, we've built a marketplace for population-scale behavioral nudges, and the people who play that game have war-chests, not human-sized wallets. The Facebook/Myanmar genocide is the Godwin's Law reference of the social media debate, but you don't need to look any further than the politicization of what should be neutral medical facts being fueled by recommendation-hole conspiracy theories to see the danger of all this. I don't believe people are mindless spiritless bots, but I do believe our industry thrives on engineering ways to hack people's attention circuits. And what's terrifying is we've put a paperclip maximizing machine at the helm of all this.
jcutrell 6y ago
The problem is that most people don’t understand The chain reaction problem here. Watching one calming video is unlikely to lead you to become addicted to calming videos. YouTube is optimized for the hook, and calming videos aren’t hooky. The much more salient videos tend to be the sensational ones, and people who don’t have the understanding of that fact are much more easily hooked. So while it can be a fountain of knowledge for one group of people, the insidious nature of the hooking algorithms still lurk beneath that surface.
scrollaway 6y ago
Same experience here. I have to actively curate them by removing some one-off dumb videos from my watch history, but my YouTube recommendations are by far extremely high quality. Youtube is the only service I know of that has actually achieved working content recommendations for me. My Watch Later has hundreds of hours of content from things that I definitely want to watch but I'm either not yet in the mood for or too long to get to now. Seriously, youtube for all its flaws is an incredible human achievement on par with wikipedia.
- _0ffh 6y ago
  I don't use the "watch later" feature anymore. It's always a bit irritating when you want to catch up on the list only to find that a video has been removed in the mean time. So I switched to archiving using youtube-dl. Also nice to have a few backup videos in case of an internet outage.
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    I rarely have that problem with watch later, but it does happen. When I want to ensure a video is available down the line, i send the url to the web archive; they have a special archiver for youtube videos.
    - wolco2 6y ago
      What's the link?
      - scrollaway 6y ago
        Just prefix any URL with this exactly: https://web.archive.org/save/ https://web.archive.org/save/ Example: https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUF4afxMpQk https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v... If it's already saved, it'll do a new snapshot, but I believe the archive is smart enough not to duplicate saved youtube videos.
        6y ago
yowlingcat 6y ago
> 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. Indeed. It's a bad enough problem that one wonders whether the company is liable for its effects upon society.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
Everyday I open a private browsing window on Firefox and keep YouTube whatever on that. Same for Amazon and other stuff. At the end of the day, close the window and all gone.
slothtrop 6y ago
Uh, I had done the same you did for years - no account, cleared cookies - and consistently found conspiracy videos in recommendations. Now less than before, but all the same. It's not from watching "stupid destructive stuff", in the least. Plenty of full music albums often link to it, and amateur stuff.
silicon2401 6y ago
This is exactly how I feel about many things in our modern world. People complain about so many things, but don't realize that it's often their fault, or at least they often have more influence than they realize. I'm glad to hear you have such a great experience with youtube. I generally have the same experience: great videos that relate surprisingly well to my interests, the worst I ever see is ads if I'm on the mobile app since I block ads on browsers.
andrewzah 6y ago
> Better watch anonymously so you can always clean the cookies and get out of the pit. Eh, you can always remove a video from your history. I just don't watch certain things, or watch them in a throwaway firefox container. Being able to maintain playlists and subscriptions is worthwhile. Like you I get amazing music recommendations and educational content. It took concerted effort but my recommendations spot on for the most part.
swiley 6y ago
Try opening youtube in private mode. You get a ton of garbage that it expects you to watch. I binged Nilered once and felt pretty terrible, I can't imagine how I would feel after a day of "peppa pig plays minecraft."
wildpeaks 6y ago
It's a mixed bag: I usually only watch very niche low views tech things, so it's easy to see which recommendations are truly based on what I watch and which ones are based on what Youtube wants me to watch (because it has millions of views and from unrelated topics). The ones based on my views are pretty good recommendations, the other type is usually extremist ragebait.
subpixel 6y ago
I concur, but that's because I use YouTube for very narrow niche content that the algorithm helps me find. If I was open to YouTube helping me figure out what to get interested in, I have every reason to believe it would be as horrible as what Spotify tries to get me to listen to or the sponsored posts Instagram shoves down my feed. For the record, YouTube is full of amazing German-language TV documentaries, and since many of them are posted by unofficial accounts (read: not the broadcaster's channel), it's the algorithm that surfaces them, not search.
criley2 6y ago
>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. When you sign in, you can view your history and remove things you don't want the algo to work on. Here's what to do instead: Sign in, and use your account to curate what you want to see. As you say, music, education, and for me, it's cookingtube, some non-toxic video game people for sim games and the like, etc. And my algo recommendations are wonderful. The biggest issue is it forgetting about cool channels and hiding them, and I don't use the bell because I hate notifications, but generally speaking it does a great job. But if you want to watch something that you DO NOT want the algo matching on: Open a private tab (or clean out your history). It's actually not bad to keep it under control. Oh, and when Youtube drops a redpill propaganda video in, or something similar, (it always will try to indoctrinate you into a radical ideology, no matter what), make sure to use the menu and tell it to fuck off and never show it again. I've got it trained now. No politics! No radicalism! Just good, relaxing, well-made content.
KaiserPro 6y ago
The problem I've found is that it takes some tuning to get it to stop recommending horrid clickbait, extremist recruiting fodder or just copyright fraud. You have to actively click "not I don't like this" when you see something low quality. This means that the average joe will be spammed by low quality shite, where as the power user will get decent recommendation. I do have a container tab just for youtube, to avoid polluting my recommends with embedded shite.
- shmageggy 6y ago
  Yes, this is the problem, and the article nails it. I just did all experiment to proceed it to myself too: open YouTube in a private tab, search for anything gaming related, click something random on the front page, and bam: in my recommendations "Ronda Rousey destroys feminist". Of course once you click that you're down a black hole of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
levosmetalo 6y ago
Wow, I watch high-quality, beautiful, comforting and inspiring, knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics, cool, useful and healthy. The others watch stupid, destructive, worse kind of content. I guess everyone can claim the same because all these properties of what someone watch are highly subjective and a matter of taste, preferences and pure opinion.
jancsika 6y ago
> 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. It's also important to note that a lot of users similar to you never make it to this paragraph. They just assume the reports about the dangers are overblown.
renlo 6y ago
When I watch junk on YouTube I need to open the link using Chrome's incognito mode. When are companies going to give us more control over what inputs we give their recommendation algorithms? There should be a button that says "hey, I'm going to watch this because I'm only human, but please, don't show this junk to me". Or, "hey, I understand this content creator has thousands of videos and uploads content daily, but, I'm only interested in this one video, not in their daily vblog from today" I literally watch 1/3 - 1/2 of all my videos now in incognito mode on YouTube, just because their algorithm is so aggressive when it comes to recommending junk / 'content creator' noise.
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  > When are companies going to give us more control over what inputs we give their recommendation algorithms? My guess is that they'll never do this, because they want you to go bad and watch as much of that junk as possible.
- dave5104 6y ago
  I've had pretty good luck simply deleting the junk videos from my watch history. I can't recall ever seeing a similar junk video being recommended after religiously taking that action.
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  You can on YouTube. You can finally ban channels from your recommendations and tell it now to show you things like that anymore with the submenu by the video thumb.
pimlottc 6y ago
> 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. There definitely needs to be a "reset" button on these services, or at least a better way for your to actively monitor your algorithmically-determined interests and give feedback (I swear, you watch one SNL video...). Another poster in the thread said you can do this by editing your watch history, which frankly would have never occurred to me as a way to influence the algorithm. It should be a more explicit feature for any sort of recommendation engine.
- shawnz 6y ago
  You can also click the three dots icon next to the video thumbnail of recommendations and select "Not interested"
  - GreenWatermelon 6y ago
    Yup, that's what I always do, and unsurprisingly my recommendations are great.
  - pimlottc 6y ago
    This is useful but it's pretty opaque to the user as to what exactly this does.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      It tells the algorithm that you’re “not interested” in videos like that one?
  - monkeypizza 6y ago
    Every few days if you notice the algo giving too many fast-food style videos, it's worth it to aggressively use this to unfollow all these topics. Miraculously, the next time you refresh your feed, all those old interesting topics you used to be into will come back. Overall the algo is very very recency-influenced. You can watch videos from a niche interest for a year straight, but if you then spend a week watching nascar, you'll never see anything but nascar videos for months unless you say "not interested". I imagine they have found that for the average user, having a longer history doesn't improve G's metrics.
1experience 6y ago
When an user becomes aware of the algorithm and purposely avoids clicking on videos that interest him slightly because it can radically change his suggestions for days or weeks, it is a sign imho that the algorithm is not well designed.
bob33212 6y ago
It reminds me of the "Kill your TV" stickers in the 90s. Obviously plenty of people wasted huge amounts of time watching garbage. On the other hand you could watch NOVA and Ken Burns. The more things change the more they stay the same.
CodeGlitch 6y ago
Exactly this. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I don't think you should avoid signing in, when you see something you don't like just mark it as such and the algorithm seems to be pretty good at filtering in the future.
ctr_ctr 6y ago
YouTube recommended me Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights". Treasure.
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  Check out Angra's cover of the same song. Great track.
nicoburns 6y ago
Same. I had the good fortune to have my laptop (and youtube account) used as the communal music playing device for about a year in a household with really good music taste. Consequently my YouTube suggestions are excellent (much, much better than Spotify).
dorkwood 6y ago
Your recommendations must work different to mine. Second video from the top for me is "Jordan Peterson explains why you should never lie." I've never willingly watched a Jordan Peterson video in my life. I mainly use YouTube to watch tutorials related to my industry. As a test I decided to scroll through my recommendations and count when the first tutorial specific to my niche appeared. It was #119.
LordNight 6y ago
It's actually much easier. Some time ago YouTube added a new tab 'Watch history'. You can open it and manually delete any 'junk' videos from your history with just one click. Algorithm changes accordingly, I've checked.
davidhalter 6y ago
Same here. Since I am not as good with ignoring stupid stuff, I just open stuff I don't want to see in my recommendations in a private window. Works great!
phone8675309 6y ago
You definitely don't sound like an outlier.
margo209320 6y ago
The main advantage of using YouTube with an account, is being able to see what's new from all your subscriptions. To get rid of the annoying stuff, I added this to my uBlock Origin filters: www.youtube.com###comments www.youtube.com###related www.youtube.com##.ytp-show-tiles.videowall-endscreen.ytp-player-content.html5-endscreen This of course also eliminates ads.
- lobocinza 6y ago
  You can follow channels through RSS.
13415 6y ago
For me it's the opposite, for some reason practically all Youtube recommendations outside of the subscribed channels are completely useless and I would never watch them. There are only few exceptions. It's not that the recommendations are toxic, they are just extremely bad. The algorithm doesn't seem to be able to learn what interests me. My suspicion is that this is so because I have a lot of diverging interests that change from month to month. Still, this does not explain why Youtube keeps recommending channels and topics even when I never watch them.
api 6y ago
YouTube links and embedded videos will tilt your search experience too. The problem is that the algorithm seems biased so that one or two visits to shit causes you to fall down into a spiral of shit. That's probably because statistically when averaged across the entire YouTube user-base, shit leads to more time on the site. Shit is usually more divisive, inflammatory, etc., and negative emotions are the easiest path to engagement. Virtually everything wrong with social media can be summarized by "negative emotions are the easiest path to engagement." Want to keep people on your site? Anger, offend, or scare them.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >The problem is that the algorithm seems biased so that one or two visits to shit causes you to fall down into a spiral of shit. after months of having a fairly normal youtube experience basically only playing music I clicked on one Jordan Peterson video that was in a news article, and for the next few weeks all I got was alt-right content in my feed. I even tried to get rid of it by explicitly saying I don't want it recommended to me, which gets rid of the individual channels but similar stuff just keeps popping up. Youtube overfits what people click on so badly, I have no idea how this isn't fixable by honstly just turning the recommendation system off and just giving me random crap, even that would be an improvement.
  - api 6y ago
    Yeah I’ve had that experience too. It’s easy to see how YouTube perhaps almost single handedly caused an explosion of fascism among passive media consumers. You hit one of those videos and it rabbit holes you.
yodsanklai 6y ago
> 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. Not really my experience. I'm not sure but I have the impression that the recommendation heuristic is very time-sensitive. Let say I watch sailing videos for a few days, it tends to forget I was interested in guitars the previous week.
- notahacker 6y ago
  It's also reasonably good at context sensitivity, so when I'm playing a backing track for my guitar 90% of the recommendations are for other backing tracks, with the rest being decent song and music theory channel recommendations rather than whatever else I've been looking at this week. The flip side is, I somehow appear to have accidentally clicked subscribe on some insane Trumpist 'news' channel I probably stumbled on via a forum link, and it very quickly took over the push notifications on my phone. That might be subscribe functionality working as intended, but it took more effort to identify the source of nonsense spam and unsubscribe from it...
- wccrawford 6y ago
  I've noticed the same, except that it occasionally remembers and pops something up that I haven't watched in a while. I think, "Oh, I haven't seen one of those in a while!" about once a week now.
vl 6y ago
First of all, article is incorrect: for a long time now YT optimizes recommendations not for watch time, but for life-time engagement. YT probably has the most advanced QT ML in the world. Second, it’s trivial to re-adjust recommendations: go to history and delete everything you didn’t like, and recommendations instantly will become much better.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  > First of all, article is incorrect: for a long time now YT optimizes recommendations not for watch time, but for life-time engagement. YT probably has the most advanced QT ML in the world. Lifetime engagement is a function of watch time, right?
  - vl 6y ago
    No, it turns that if you optimize for immediate watch time, people watch a lot at once and then didn’t return. It’s more profitable if people watch a little bit everyday for the rest of their life.
wpietri 6y ago
I'm glad it works for you, but dedicated individual action by someone especially capable and focused on the topic isn't a solution to systemic problems like this. Indeed, hero stories are often used to diminish problems. Systemic problems need systemic solutions.
Ar-Curunir 6y ago
"Just don't watch bad stuff"
soledades 6y ago
Alternative Option: Turn off watch history, then only the videos you explicitly like will affect your recommendations. Bonus Points: Use extension to turn off recommended panel on side of videos, then you only see recommendations when you go to home screen.
Allower 6y ago
You think you are anonymous when you don't sign in?? BAAHAHAHAHA - might as well sign in and allow all tracking..
raydev 6y ago
> 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. You must never be curious about things outside of your passions. I play Fortnite with my kids casually. I looked up a howto a few weeks ago, and my recommendations are still 25% Fortnite related content, even though I only watched one video one time. It's been happening for years. I looked up one old Norm Macdonald standup bit, and my recos changed immediately to Joe Rogan and adjacent talking heads. I watch one MKBHD video, and I'm overwhelmed with recos for unboxing and tech reviews. The stuff I genuinely care about, music theory, is impossible to keep in my home page because YouTube doesn't value that engagement.
- dr_zoidberg 6y ago
  > I play Fortnite with my kids casually. I looked up a howto a few weeks ago, and my recommendations are still 25% Fortnite related content, even though I only watched one video one time. In general I've noticed that YouTube favors your "newest outliers" (let's call them) over stuff you've historically looked at. Probably the rationale (optimization metric?) is trying to capture you into content that might add to your total watch time on the platform.
nojito 6y ago
Being logged out and in incognito doesn't help. https://algotransparency.org/?date=23-12-2020 https://algotransparency.org/?date=23-12-2020
raobit 6y ago
I do the same, things and topics which is one time watch and don't need recommendation related to it, i watch in incognito
dokem 6y ago
I mostly agree with you except I find it’s easy to steer the recommendation algorithm which is part of why I like it. Sometimes I go on a political/toxic YouTube binge for an evening or two but feel I am able to steer my front page back to more constructive content pretty easily.
stephen_cagle 6y ago
Yeah, it is absurd. All of my youtube subscriptions (all 60+ of them) are educational or personal interest things. But let your reptilian brain click on one stupid video of a scantily clad woman and your recommendations will just go down the freaking drain...
- CapricornNoble 6y ago
  This is why my YT feed is full of women's longjump and polejump vids, and the comment sections on those "sports" vids are a bunch of guys joking about how no one is there because they follow athletics. https://youtu.be/RQBIreEyCc4 https://youtu.be/RQBIreEyCc4
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Yeah it really is an echo chamber type algorithm. I like it too because if I see garbage I hit the back button. Hopefully that trains it more. I generally watch DIY, history, video game reviews, and a few different genres of music and youtube has certainly helped me find more of the same. However if you're watching conspiracy videos and right wing propaganda you're gonna get more of that and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of drek and dumpster fire videos.
sreejithr 6y ago
I don't think people who say "For me YouTube recommendations are not toxic" actually get the point. Although I won't judge your opinions or preferences, the real issue with Youtube or any recommender system is the way it games your dopamine system. Studies have shown how the prospect of an unknown reward riles up users of social media platforms. Is this a bad thing? It might depend on who you ask. For someone like me, who has been through multiple addictions (cigarattes, drugs), I know that abusing dopamine affects quality of life, productivity and happiness in general. In that way, I think recommendation systems which optimize for higher engagement is toxic. I think there's value in having an AI do the heavy-lifting of choosing the right content for us. But, the AI's rewards should align with what I need, which is quality content tailored for me (whether or not it increases my engagement on that platform).

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.
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  > ALL of the recommendations become stupid videos because those videos have better metrics. Youtube actively guides me away from educational content. Back when I was not particularly into YouTube and hadn't had many great recommendations YouTube insisted I should watch Sapolsky's Harvard lectures - these probably had particularly good metrics. Once I started to watch them (and was very satisfied) more and more great recommendations started to appear. > It's quality stuff, but you gotta find it yourself. People should start sharing curated lists of high-quality no-bullish YouTube videos/channels. Kind of like those awesome-everything on GitHub.
  - minkowski 6y ago
    Conversely, at some point I decided to watch Sapolsky lectures based on human recommenders, but this caused YouTube to recommend not only other science lectures but also sensational videos purporting to be about quantum mechanics, medicine, etc. but which were obviously total pseudoscience.
- freebuju 6y ago
  Not saying YouTube's recommendation algorithm is perfect but you could try to interact with the feedback popups. That seems to clear up stuff I don't need on my 1st page. If all else fails, create a new Google account for separate exclusive use should do the trick.
vl 6y ago
The most simple way to adjust recommendations is to delete videos you didn’t like from your watch history.
monkeypizza 6y ago
I have this problem too occasionally; but if you spend 2 minutes hitting "do not recommend videos like this" + "do not recommend this channel", all the good content beneath will rise to the top.
floatrock 6y ago
> The algorithm doesn't care, it just recommends. And isn't that terrifying, in the Parable of the Paperclip Maximizer kinda way? We can make the well-its-your-individual-responsibility bootstraps argument, but that kinda works only if you believe in the supremacy of an individual's autonomy and that the mind can't be hacked or hijacked. Everything from addictive products to the marketing industry shows that isn't the case. The youtube paperclip maximizer is maximizing for your mind's engagement. We can say "well, it's just feeding people what they want!" But you can say the same thing about airdropping crates of opium onto the streets.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  It is only terrifying if you assume people are mindless spiritless bots. In which case (if you truly believe that), we are all fucked anyway. Then who cares? Is youtube really your biggest problem? > is maximizing for your mind's engagement. So has media been doing for a long time, also all writers and poets, etc. Mind's engagement is not the only meaning of life, and most people act out this deep knowledge. I don't see a problem.
  - floatrock 6y ago
    Yes, it was called "yellow journalism" before it was called "clickbait". I agree, that's not new. What's new and disturbing is 1) the degree of algorithmic personalization, and 2) that personalization goes to the highest bidder. Put together, we've built a marketplace for population-scale behavioral nudges, and the people who play that game have war-chests, not human-sized wallets. The Facebook/Myanmar genocide is the Godwin's Law reference of the social media debate, but you don't need to look any further than the politicization of what should be neutral medical facts being fueled by recommendation-hole conspiracy theories to see the danger of all this. I don't believe people are mindless spiritless bots, but I do believe our industry thrives on engineering ways to hack people's attention circuits. And what's terrifying is we've put a paperclip maximizing machine at the helm of all this.

jcutrell 6y ago

The problem is that most people don’t understand The chain reaction problem here. Watching one calming video is unlikely to lead you to become addicted to calming videos. YouTube is optimized for the hook, and calming videos aren’t hooky. The much more salient videos tend to be the sensational ones, and people who don’t have the understanding of that fact are much more easily hooked. So while it can be a fountain of knowledge for one group of people, the insidious nature of the hooking algorithms still lurk beneath that surface.

scrollaway 6y ago

Same experience here. I have to actively curate them by removing some one-off dumb videos from my watch history, but my YouTube recommendations are by far extremely high quality. Youtube is the only service I know of that has actually achieved working content recommendations for me. My Watch Later has hundreds of hours of content from things that I definitely want to watch but I'm either not yet in the mood for or too long to get to now. Seriously, youtube for all its flaws is an incredible human achievement on par with wikipedia.

_0ffh 6y ago
I don't use the "watch later" feature anymore. It's always a bit irritating when you want to catch up on the list only to find that a video has been removed in the mean time. So I switched to archiving using youtube-dl. Also nice to have a few backup videos in case of an internet outage.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  I rarely have that problem with watch later, but it does happen. When I want to ensure a video is available down the line, i send the url to the web archive; they have a special archiver for youtube videos.
  - wolco2 6y ago
    What's the link?
    - scrollaway 6y ago
      Just prefix any URL with this exactly: https://web.archive.org/save/ https://web.archive.org/save/ Example: https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUF4afxMpQk https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v... If it's already saved, it'll do a new snapshot, but I believe the archive is smart enough not to duplicate saved youtube videos.
      - 6y ago

yowlingcat 6y ago

> 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. Indeed. It's a bad enough problem that one wonders whether the company is liable for its effects upon society.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

2Gkashmiri 6y ago

Everyday I open a private browsing window on Firefox and keep YouTube whatever on that. Same for Amazon and other stuff. At the end of the day, close the window and all gone.

slothtrop 6y ago

Uh, I had done the same you did for years - no account, cleared cookies - and consistently found conspiracy videos in recommendations. Now less than before, but all the same. It's not from watching "stupid destructive stuff", in the least. Plenty of full music albums often link to it, and amateur stuff.

silicon2401 6y ago

This is exactly how I feel about many things in our modern world. People complain about so many things, but don't realize that it's often their fault, or at least they often have more influence than they realize. I'm glad to hear you have such a great experience with youtube. I generally have the same experience: great videos that relate surprisingly well to my interests, the worst I ever see is ads if I'm on the mobile app since I block ads on browsers.

andrewzah 6y ago

> Better watch anonymously so you can always clean the cookies and get out of the pit. Eh, you can always remove a video from your history. I just don't watch certain things, or watch them in a throwaway firefox container. Being able to maintain playlists and subscriptions is worthwhile. Like you I get amazing music recommendations and educational content. It took concerted effort but my recommendations spot on for the most part.

swiley 6y ago

Try opening youtube in private mode. You get a ton of garbage that it expects you to watch. I binged Nilered once and felt pretty terrible, I can't imagine how I would feel after a day of "peppa pig plays minecraft."

wildpeaks 6y ago

It's a mixed bag: I usually only watch very niche low views tech things, so it's easy to see which recommendations are truly based on what I watch and which ones are based on what Youtube wants me to watch (because it has millions of views and from unrelated topics). The ones based on my views are pretty good recommendations, the other type is usually extremist ragebait.

subpixel 6y ago

I concur, but that's because I use YouTube for very narrow niche content that the algorithm helps me find. If I was open to YouTube helping me figure out what to get interested in, I have every reason to believe it would be as horrible as what Spotify tries to get me to listen to or the sponsored posts Instagram shoves down my feed. For the record, YouTube is full of amazing German-language TV documentaries, and since many of them are posted by unofficial accounts (read: not the broadcaster's channel), it's the algorithm that surfaces them, not search.

criley2 6y ago

>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. When you sign in, you can view your history and remove things you don't want the algo to work on. Here's what to do instead: Sign in, and use your account to curate what you want to see. As you say, music, education, and for me, it's cookingtube, some non-toxic video game people for sim games and the like, etc. And my algo recommendations are wonderful. The biggest issue is it forgetting about cool channels and hiding them, and I don't use the bell because I hate notifications, but generally speaking it does a great job. But if you want to watch something that you DO NOT want the algo matching on: Open a private tab (or clean out your history). It's actually not bad to keep it under control. Oh, and when Youtube drops a redpill propaganda video in, or something similar, (it always will try to indoctrinate you into a radical ideology, no matter what), make sure to use the menu and tell it to fuck off and never show it again. I've got it trained now. No politics! No radicalism! Just good, relaxing, well-made content.

KaiserPro 6y ago

The problem I've found is that it takes some tuning to get it to stop recommending horrid clickbait, extremist recruiting fodder or just copyright fraud. You have to actively click "not I don't like this" when you see something low quality. This means that the average joe will be spammed by low quality shite, where as the power user will get decent recommendation. I do have a container tab just for youtube, to avoid polluting my recommends with embedded shite.

shmageggy 6y ago
Yes, this is the problem, and the article nails it. I just did all experiment to proceed it to myself too: open YouTube in a private tab, search for anything gaming related, click something random on the front page, and bam: in my recommendations "Ronda Rousey destroys feminist". Of course once you click that you're down a black hole of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

levosmetalo 6y ago

Wow, I watch high-quality, beautiful, comforting and inspiring, knowledge, visual and musical aesthetics, cool, useful and healthy. The others watch stupid, destructive, worse kind of content. I guess everyone can claim the same because all these properties of what someone watch are highly subjective and a matter of taste, preferences and pure opinion.

jancsika 6y ago

> 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. It's also important to note that a lot of users similar to you never make it to this paragraph. They just assume the reports about the dangers are overblown.

renlo 6y ago

When I watch junk on YouTube I need to open the link using Chrome's incognito mode. When are companies going to give us more control over what inputs we give their recommendation algorithms? There should be a button that says "hey, I'm going to watch this because I'm only human, but please, don't show this junk to me". Or, "hey, I understand this content creator has thousands of videos and uploads content daily, but, I'm only interested in this one video, not in their daily vblog from today" I literally watch 1/3 - 1/2 of all my videos now in incognito mode on YouTube, just because their algorithm is so aggressive when it comes to recommending junk / 'content creator' noise.

burntoutfire 6y ago
> When are companies going to give us more control over what inputs we give their recommendation algorithms? My guess is that they'll never do this, because they want you to go bad and watch as much of that junk as possible.
dave5104 6y ago
I've had pretty good luck simply deleting the junk videos from my watch history. I can't recall ever seeing a similar junk video being recommended after religiously taking that action.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
You can on YouTube. You can finally ban channels from your recommendations and tell it now to show you things like that anymore with the submenu by the video thumb.

pimlottc 6y ago

> 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. There definitely needs to be a "reset" button on these services, or at least a better way for your to actively monitor your algorithmically-determined interests and give feedback (I swear, you watch one SNL video...). Another poster in the thread said you can do this by editing your watch history, which frankly would have never occurred to me as a way to influence the algorithm. It should be a more explicit feature for any sort of recommendation engine.

shawnz 6y ago
You can also click the three dots icon next to the video thumbnail of recommendations and select "Not interested"
- GreenWatermelon 6y ago
  Yup, that's what I always do, and unsurprisingly my recommendations are great.
- pimlottc 6y ago
  This is useful but it's pretty opaque to the user as to what exactly this does.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    It tells the algorithm that you’re “not interested” in videos like that one?
- monkeypizza 6y ago
  Every few days if you notice the algo giving too many fast-food style videos, it's worth it to aggressively use this to unfollow all these topics. Miraculously, the next time you refresh your feed, all those old interesting topics you used to be into will come back. Overall the algo is very very recency-influenced. You can watch videos from a niche interest for a year straight, but if you then spend a week watching nascar, you'll never see anything but nascar videos for months unless you say "not interested". I imagine they have found that for the average user, having a longer history doesn't improve G's metrics.

1experience 6y ago

When an user becomes aware of the algorithm and purposely avoids clicking on videos that interest him slightly because it can radically change his suggestions for days or weeks, it is a sign imho that the algorithm is not well designed.

bob33212 6y ago

It reminds me of the "Kill your TV" stickers in the 90s. Obviously plenty of people wasted huge amounts of time watching garbage. On the other hand you could watch NOVA and Ken Burns. The more things change the more they stay the same.

CodeGlitch 6y ago

Exactly this. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I don't think you should avoid signing in, when you see something you don't like just mark it as such and the algorithm seems to be pretty good at filtering in the future.

ctr_ctr 6y ago

YouTube recommended me Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights". Treasure.

herodoturtle 6y ago
Check out Angra's cover of the same song. Great track.

nicoburns 6y ago

Same. I had the good fortune to have my laptop (and youtube account) used as the communal music playing device for about a year in a household with really good music taste. Consequently my YouTube suggestions are excellent (much, much better than Spotify).

dorkwood 6y ago

Your recommendations must work different to mine. Second video from the top for me is "Jordan Peterson explains why you should never lie." I've never willingly watched a Jordan Peterson video in my life. I mainly use YouTube to watch tutorials related to my industry. As a test I decided to scroll through my recommendations and count when the first tutorial specific to my niche appeared. It was #119.

LordNight 6y ago

It's actually much easier. Some time ago YouTube added a new tab 'Watch history'. You can open it and manually delete any 'junk' videos from your history with just one click. Algorithm changes accordingly, I've checked.

davidhalter 6y ago

Same here. Since I am not as good with ignoring stupid stuff, I just open stuff I don't want to see in my recommendations in a private window. Works great!

phone8675309 6y ago

You definitely don't sound like an outlier.

margo209320 6y ago

The main advantage of using YouTube with an account, is being able to see what's new from all your subscriptions. To get rid of the annoying stuff, I added this to my uBlock Origin filters: www.youtube.com###comments www.youtube.com###related www.youtube.com##.ytp-show-tiles.videowall-endscreen.ytp-player-content.html5-endscreen This of course also eliminates ads.

lobocinza 6y ago
You can follow channels through RSS.

13415 6y ago

For me it's the opposite, for some reason practically all Youtube recommendations outside of the subscribed channels are completely useless and I would never watch them. There are only few exceptions. It's not that the recommendations are toxic, they are just extremely bad. The algorithm doesn't seem to be able to learn what interests me. My suspicion is that this is so because I have a lot of diverging interests that change from month to month. Still, this does not explain why Youtube keeps recommending channels and topics even when I never watch them.

api 6y ago

YouTube links and embedded videos will tilt your search experience too. The problem is that the algorithm seems biased so that one or two visits to shit causes you to fall down into a spiral of shit. That's probably because statistically when averaged across the entire YouTube user-base, shit leads to more time on the site. Shit is usually more divisive, inflammatory, etc., and negative emotions are the easiest path to engagement. Virtually everything wrong with social media can be summarized by "negative emotions are the easiest path to engagement." Want to keep people on your site? Anger, offend, or scare them.

Barrin92 6y ago
>The problem is that the algorithm seems biased so that one or two visits to shit causes you to fall down into a spiral of shit. after months of having a fairly normal youtube experience basically only playing music I clicked on one Jordan Peterson video that was in a news article, and for the next few weeks all I got was alt-right content in my feed. I even tried to get rid of it by explicitly saying I don't want it recommended to me, which gets rid of the individual channels but similar stuff just keeps popping up. Youtube overfits what people click on so badly, I have no idea how this isn't fixable by honstly just turning the recommendation system off and just giving me random crap, even that would be an improvement.
- api 6y ago
  Yeah I’ve had that experience too. It’s easy to see how YouTube perhaps almost single handedly caused an explosion of fascism among passive media consumers. You hit one of those videos and it rabbit holes you.

yodsanklai 6y ago

> 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. Not really my experience. I'm not sure but I have the impression that the recommendation heuristic is very time-sensitive. Let say I watch sailing videos for a few days, it tends to forget I was interested in guitars the previous week.

notahacker 6y ago
It's also reasonably good at context sensitivity, so when I'm playing a backing track for my guitar 90% of the recommendations are for other backing tracks, with the rest being decent song and music theory channel recommendations rather than whatever else I've been looking at this week. The flip side is, I somehow appear to have accidentally clicked subscribe on some insane Trumpist 'news' channel I probably stumbled on via a forum link, and it very quickly took over the push notifications on my phone. That might be subscribe functionality working as intended, but it took more effort to identify the source of nonsense spam and unsubscribe from it...
wccrawford 6y ago
I've noticed the same, except that it occasionally remembers and pops something up that I haven't watched in a while. I think, "Oh, I haven't seen one of those in a while!" about once a week now.

vl 6y ago

First of all, article is incorrect: for a long time now YT optimizes recommendations not for watch time, but for life-time engagement. YT probably has the most advanced QT ML in the world. Second, it’s trivial to re-adjust recommendations: go to history and delete everything you didn’t like, and recommendations instantly will become much better.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
> First of all, article is incorrect: for a long time now YT optimizes recommendations not for watch time, but for life-time engagement. YT probably has the most advanced QT ML in the world. Lifetime engagement is a function of watch time, right?
- vl 6y ago
  No, it turns that if you optimize for immediate watch time, people watch a lot at once and then didn’t return. It’s more profitable if people watch a little bit everyday for the rest of their life.

wpietri 6y ago

I'm glad it works for you, but dedicated individual action by someone especially capable and focused on the topic isn't a solution to systemic problems like this. Indeed, hero stories are often used to diminish problems. Systemic problems need systemic solutions.

Ar-Curunir 6y ago

"Just don't watch bad stuff"

soledades 6y ago

Alternative Option: Turn off watch history, then only the videos you explicitly like will affect your recommendations. Bonus Points: Use extension to turn off recommended panel on side of videos, then you only see recommendations when you go to home screen.

Allower 6y ago

You think you are anonymous when you don't sign in?? BAAHAHAHAHA - might as well sign in and allow all tracking..

raydev 6y ago

> 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. You must never be curious about things outside of your passions. I play Fortnite with my kids casually. I looked up a howto a few weeks ago, and my recommendations are still 25% Fortnite related content, even though I only watched one video one time. It's been happening for years. I looked up one old Norm Macdonald standup bit, and my recos changed immediately to Joe Rogan and adjacent talking heads. I watch one MKBHD video, and I'm overwhelmed with recos for unboxing and tech reviews. The stuff I genuinely care about, music theory, is impossible to keep in my home page because YouTube doesn't value that engagement.

dr_zoidberg 6y ago
> I play Fortnite with my kids casually. I looked up a howto a few weeks ago, and my recommendations are still 25% Fortnite related content, even though I only watched one video one time. In general I've noticed that YouTube favors your "newest outliers" (let's call them) over stuff you've historically looked at. Probably the rationale (optimization metric?) is trying to capture you into content that might add to your total watch time on the platform.

nojito 6y ago

Being logged out and in incognito doesn't help. https://algotransparency.org/?date=23-12-2020 https://algotransparency.org/?date=23-12-2020

raobit 6y ago

I do the same, things and topics which is one time watch and don't need recommendation related to it, i watch in incognito

dokem 6y ago

I mostly agree with you except I find it’s easy to steer the recommendation algorithm which is part of why I like it. Sometimes I go on a political/toxic YouTube binge for an evening or two but feel I am able to steer my front page back to more constructive content pretty easily.

stephen_cagle 6y ago

Yeah, it is absurd. All of my youtube subscriptions (all 60+ of them) are educational or personal interest things. But let your reptilian brain click on one stupid video of a scantily clad woman and your recommendations will just go down the freaking drain...

CapricornNoble 6y ago
This is why my YT feed is full of women's longjump and polejump vids, and the comment sections on those "sports" vids are a bunch of guys joking about how no one is there because they follow athletics. https://youtu.be/RQBIreEyCc4 https://youtu.be/RQBIreEyCc4

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Yeah it really is an echo chamber type algorithm. I like it too because if I see garbage I hit the back button. Hopefully that trains it more. I generally watch DIY, history, video game reviews, and a few different genres of music and youtube has certainly helped me find more of the same. However if you're watching conspiracy videos and right wing propaganda you're gonna get more of that and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of drek and dumpster fire videos.

sreejithr 6y ago

I don't think people who say "For me YouTube recommendations are not toxic" actually get the point. Although I won't judge your opinions or preferences, the real issue with Youtube or any recommender system is the way it games your dopamine system. Studies have shown how the prospect of an unknown reward riles up users of social media platforms. Is this a bad thing? It might depend on who you ask. For someone like me, who has been through multiple addictions (cigarattes, drugs), I know that abusing dopamine affects quality of life, productivity and happiness in general. In that way, I think recommendation systems which optimize for higher engagement is toxic. I think there's value in having an AI do the heavy-lifting of choosing the right content for us. But, the AI's rewards should align with what I need, which is quality content tailored for me (whether or not it increases my engagement on that platform).