8 ms·

The reccomendation system is absolutely dangerous. Just this summer, I watched one video on peppers out of curiousity. By the end of summer I've got multiple

by swalsh 5y ago

The reccomendation system is absolutely dangerous. Just this summer, I watched one video on peppers out of curiousity. By the end of summer I've got multiple different varieties growing, and all the accessories to support them. I'm really enjoying my garden, but it's very unlikely I would have started one without the youtube algorithm. Similarly my doctor reccomended I exercise more, so I started running. Then I googled how to improve, and soon I'm purchasing gear, and trying supplements. The amount of economic activity driven directly from Youtube has to be HUGE.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
Read it as “video on preppers” and everything still worked for the most part, but you didn’t mention freeze dried food or holsters so figured I read something wrong.
- a1369209993 5y ago
  Same here, though I caught on at "multiple different varieties [of preppers?] growing" (WTF?).
marderfarker2 5y ago
Huh, not YouTube but the companies paying content creators to make videos featuring their product.
jeffwask 5y ago
It's sad because I remember being able to find new and interesting creators passively. Now the main page is all corporate BS and the algorithm locks you in. We played a bit of WOW Classic last year and all of a sudden I was just flooded with Asmongold videos and videos of people clipping and replaying Asmongold. It took a day of "never show this again" to make it stop.
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  As someone who had a bit of a YouTube hobby and is trying to get back into it, I've generally found that the algorithm brings me a larger audience than I would have otherwise. I've published three videos in the last 28 days, and my analytics says I've gotten 5200 views across all my content in that time. I have about a hundred subscribers. Search is still king, but 15% of those views have come from suggested. I've got a 7.8% CTR so it's suggesting it to quite a few people.
  - cma 5y ago
    Like Facebook now does for "boosting" post shares, I wonder when the YT algorithm will start incorporating pay to win mechanics.
    - steveklabnik 5y ago
      It seems like YouTube has realized that winner-takes-all is bad for the health of the platform, and is trying to grow smaller creators. I suspect they won't do this, because they realize that it ultimately strangles growth. Mr. Beast (for example) is already spending about $4MM/month on making videos; if they allowed this kind of stuff, well... not many people could compete. We'll see though!
      - cma 5y ago
        After I made the post I remembered they already do it. Brands can pay to sponsor existing videos that put them in a good light. These recomendations do have an [Ad] tag, but the extra views and impressions are allow to feed into the algorithm which then doesn't have to maintain the [Ad] tag going forward: https://support.google.com/google-ads/thread/10007177/using-someone-else-s-youtube-video-as-my-youtube-ad https://support.google.com/google-ads/thread/10007177/using-...
      - frosted-flakes 5y ago
        Occasionally I will see a "Rising Creator" section on the Explore/Trending page showcasing a single channel. This channel typically has less than 5k subscribers and posts regularly.
- DocEasyE 5y ago
  check yolo comics on youtube, they are korean but have subtitles and make amazing prank videos not like US pranks
- kenjackson 5y ago
  What corporate stuff do you have on your main page? Mine is all pretty much filled with content that matches what I watch.
  - yummypaint 5y ago
    This seems pretty tautological. What you watch will reflect your reccomendations because there is a causal relationship there, unless you never use youtube for discovery. I alledge that what people spend time watching is more heavily shaped by reccomendations than they are aware of.
    - dkarl 5y ago
      When you depart from your usual intake, some departures are a lot more powerful than others. Sometimes you watch something new and YouTube spends days pushing similar stuff into your face. Other times you watch something new and only see one or two relevant recommendations mixed into your usual fare. My hypothesis is that YouTube knows that particular topics and particular content are associated with usage patterns that make money for them, and the algorithm is alert to any possibility of pushing users into those patterns.
    - kroltan 5y ago
      I'm not who you're replying to, but at least for me, I've found a way of keeping the recommendations on check. https://i.imgur.com/XIRW4U2.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/XIRW4U2.jpeg When opening videos that are sent to me by others, I always use a private window, so my main account is pretty low "variance". When I find a creator I like, I do a "fake binge", by queuing all their recent videos and some old ones too and playing them unattended. I also try to minimize my use of the recommendation sidebar, since it usually shows content related to the current video rather than the more general recommendations of the home page. When something foreign sneaks its way to my home page, I immediately click "not interested", paying attention to not hover the thumbnail. Overall, Youtube has got me trained pretty well, but at least I get some nice recommendations out of it, so much so in fact that over half the recommendations I get are usually videos I have already watched (even if Youtube thinks I haven't yet for whatever reason).
- Asmod4n 5y ago
  I’m hitting never show this again on one type of content all the time. There are days where my feed consists of like 33% of that stuff and it happens all the time. I’m at the point where it only recommends me my subscribed channels or the stuff I tell it not to show at all some days too. It’s so frustrating.
  - dkarl 5y ago
    I think there are some intersections of interest that make the algorithm hypothesize that you're a certain kind of person. Like if you watch a lot of strength training content, and then you watch one lecture on Heidegger, YouTube is like, oh, we finally figured this guy out, he's a white supremacist or at the very least a gun nut. But if I watch a video about cupcakes, I'll only get a few suggestions about baking, not any associated interests, because cupcakes don't combine with any of my other interests to trigger a stereotype.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    I always get those "calming meditation" music videos in recommendations, or "5 Powerful Psalms to Help You Sleep" which is on my homepage right now. Every video is from a different channel named something like "Calming Truth", and I can tell at one glance of the thumbnail that it's one of "those" videos. I have never, ever watched one, and I always click Not Interested, or Don't Recommend Channel. But they keep on coming. There seems to be an endless supply of them.
- grumbel 5y ago
  That's why I started using multiple accounts, makes it a lot easier to keep the algorithm on topic and not get side tracked just because you searched for a song or game once. In the end the core problem with the recommendation system is simply that there is only one list of recommendations, which makes it damn near impossible to switch to a different topic unless you start account hopping. The new topic-bar helps a little, but still offers no way to get rid of an unwanted topic completely.
  - jeffwask 5y ago
    I did this till I started paying for premium then it sucked.
    - FalconSensei 5y ago
      If you use different channels, premium should work for all, right?
    - Uupis 5y ago
      I use the family plan for multiple accounts. Might not fit if you actually use it as a family plan, but it's working out for me so far.
  - quakeguy 5y ago
    „Using multiple accounts“ „Makes it easier“ That may work indeed, but i wouldnt call it easy in any way, or convenient. Instead try to subscribe to as many channels you find interesting as possible. Thats what worked for me in the end getting rid of the clutter that is suggested.
    - grumbel 5y ago
      I find subscriptions completely useless when it comes to recommendation, as the recommendations seem to be build up of what I watched in the last week, while my subscriptions have little to no visible impact at all. There are numerous channels I am subscribe to that I haven't seen in months or years, just because I didn't watch them for a week or two and they fell out of the recommendation cycle.
- stevofolife 5y ago
  You started playing WoW Classic and it was able to recommend WoW-related videos. It did its job. What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow? That's not recommendation, that's mass surveillance and psychological manipulation. But on a useful note, maybe YouTube needs to provide a function to see a list of random videos that are unexplored or new.
  - dgritsko 5y ago
    > What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow? Actually, I think they kind of are trying to do this (in a sense), if you read the article: > Our system then compares your viewing habits with those that are similar to you and uses that information to suggest other content you may want to watch. So if you like tennis videos and our system notices that others who like the same tennis videos as you also enjoy jazz videos, you may be recommended jazz videos, even if you’ve never watched a single one before.
    - brendoelfrendo 5y ago
      This is probably how both I and many of my friends who share interests managed to fall down the same city planning YouTube rabbit hole this summer.
    - stevofolife 5y ago
      That is true. But the word “next” makes all the difference in the world. If you know what I mean.
  - matttb 5y ago
    I want it to diversify a lot more. There's a lot of room between 'WoW related videos' and 98% of your sidebar is one particular creator (asmon).
  - jeffwask 5y ago
    It's a matter of degrees... Imagine if I went to church for the first time in a decade and the next day three monks show up at my door with a cassock and vows. ...that's the YouTube algorithm in my experience. I show a passing interest in one thing so it floods me with every drop of content they have on the subject to the exclusion of things that I have watched every week for years. There are creators I watch every week or every drop. Somehow the algorithm chooses to not surface their videos regularly and surface 46,123 videos on Terraform because I watched a quick tutorial.
- gremloni 5y ago
  This is not my experience at all. Everything on my page is from independent creators.
ahoka 5y ago
Because why would you do things for free, when you can pay for them?
5faulker 5y ago
It's a consumption-driven economy, where those who are economically useless are driven out of the game.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  this is the best one-liner here all week +++ me: art, philosophy, religion, culture -- avidly me on youTube: Rizin/UFC re-runs, live concerts of commercially successful bands, D&D themed games
- amelius 5y ago
  Yes, few people realize it but fixing Google's algorithms could be the best thing that ever happened to the climate, and the worst thing that ever happened to our economy (depending on how you look at it).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
isk517 5y ago
Running is a hobby that feels like it should be cheap but gets surprisingly expensive. Two quick pieces of advice to save you from a bit of hurt. 1. Track your miles, shoes need to be replaced every 300-500 and 2. Go get a foot orthotic and gait assessment done. Wearing the right type of shoes and finding out if you require orthotics is a easy way to prevent injuries that won't pop up for another year or two down the line.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I know quite a few casual runners (5K to 10K) and been running for over 15 years myself. Other than a $120 pair of running shoes every year or two, what is the expense? Maybe the water backpack things if you are into extreme running? It is not even a separate expense for me, as I just use my running shoes as my regular shoes. Also, maybe it is my gait or my lack of weight, but I estimate my shoes last 1k miles.
  - isk517 5y ago
    I suppose things aren't as expensive if you are a casual but I'm still surprised you can get 1k out of a pair of shoes. My mother also runs and is significantly lighter than myself and she gets shin splints if she doesn't change runners out at 500 miles. My current system is to run a pair of shoes for about 350 - 450 miles then downgrade them to a pair of walking shoes in till they fall apart. I started running fairly casually but eventually started doing marathons. I run about 110 miles a month so I'm switching out shoes every 3 months. My feet suck so I'm also replacing a pair of orthotics every 2 years. I got a full set of summer and winter running gear and enough of each to last me a week. I also have a hydration vest, a GPS watch (not necessary but very useful), a set of Aftershokz bone conductive headphones so that I can listen to music while maintaining situational awareness, a pair of good sunglasses specifically for running (I sweat a lot and would not want to ware the same pair for everyday use), I have a few soft flasks that go in my hydration vest, and I've had to invest in a pretty decent treadmill to run on during the worst parts of winter. Not everything I've listed is 100% necessary but as with most hobbies it finds ways to become expensive the more dedicated you are to it.
vl 5y ago
All it means that it is working as intended. Few years ago YT switched to life-time-value optimization. But when you get it to the logical end, ideal consumer for Google is a healthy person with disposable income that spends all of it. Since Google/YT essentially are shaping you thoughts and behaviours, logical optimization for them is to shape you to be a working sportsman that spends all disposable income on services, experiences and goods bought online.
skybrian 5y ago
I'm wondering what you mean by "dangerous" and what level of irony you're at. :-)
- el_benhameen 5y ago
  No irony, it’s dangerous. Wait until you get into woodworking youtube … you might be missing parts of your fingers, and you’ll definitely be missing most of your wallet.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    I don’t know, blaming YouTube for that is kind of weird? Also your original examples seem more positive. If more people started exercising and gardening because of YouTube, I think that would be amazing.
robbomacrae 5y ago
YouTube's recommendation system (and googles search engine if you see the comments in the other post today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764) somehow escapes the flak that other systems, such as Facebook news & posts, get but I find it's equally damaging to society. There seems to exist a downward spiral where content that is prioritized to be attention grabbing over all else gets the most clicks and then drives more content to focus on this. The quality of the content itself seems to be increasingly inconsequential and has fallen off a cliff in the face of click spam. Anecdotal evidence 1: I used to watch youtube videos for investment ideas and now all of these streamers pump out the same low quality, not very researched content with their face plastered on top with a shocked look on their mug. Anecdotal evidence 2: My son was shown youtube by one of our nannies (despite my rules on no youtube) and has since become semi-addicted to the most brain dead content of toys being made into knock offs of the reasonable shows he used to watch or some adult man child being a weird clown in public. Idiocracy will be due to memes as much as genes.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Kara Swisher of The New York Times (previously ReCode) has been absolutely biting in her criticisms of Google generally, Youtube specifically, and other current tech monopolies. Directly to Susan Wojcicki's face in a live public interview: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zKrQzJgFWdw https://youtube.com/watch?v=zKrQzJgFWdw (Starting about 1:50 into the interview.) Also numerous times in her column and podcast (I can chase those down if requested, though they should be prominent). See "Algorithms Won’t Fix What’s Wrong With YouTube" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/opinion/youtube-algorithm.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/opinion/youtube-algorithm... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20184282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20184282)
- iszomer 5y ago
  I came to a similar conundrum and concluded that a split across two Google accounts was necessary to keep youtube subscriptions and recommendations in check. Initially, I wanted to separate betwween personal and work but it has now more or less turned into a generic filter between intelligent and casual topics. Incidentally, political content along with it's secondary and tertiary discourse gets the same treatment with little to no exceptions.
dsclough 5y ago
I'd recommend anyone looking to take better control of their habits in this regard to install the DF Youtube extension. Turn it off when you want to tumble down rabbitholes and keep it on at all other times. Really makes a difference in how youtube usage works over time. On a related note it would be interesting if someone has made some "rabbithole resolving" software - I've noticed that these things terminate in extremely similar ways for most people, and have had a number of conversations laughing with others about how we've gone down the exact same content route. Write some code to find the bottom for us and save all the headache (fun)!
AdrianB1 5y ago
I got in the same situation with videos on otters (popular in South Korea, it seems) by watching accidentally one in the feed, but the music recommendations are either missing or missing my preferences, so the system does not really work for me.
jumpkick 5y ago
“Gear” is slang for steroids so I assume this is the joke, right? :p
sigmar 5y ago
The same thing happened to me with plants. I knew nothing about plants last year. Now I tell people I was radicalized by youtube into a house plant and pepper plant obsession.
beckman466 5y ago
What makes you share such an unrelated anecdotal story here? Seriously? Is it 'telling 'cute' stories to distract from the black box youtube algorithm that creates white supremacists' -time? It comes across as incredibly unempathetic, gaslighty and dismissive, posting on a thread that is discussing an important societal problem; especially using the word 'dangerous' in the sarcastic way in which you used it here. It's frustrating that the readers themselves have to replace YouTube's cryptic and doublespeak-y 'borderline' label in this article with the word 'white supremacist' and/or 'alt-right' to get the real picture.
joe_the_user 5y ago
I'd just note some things Youtube doesn't have. It doesn't have any "the key words I'm interested are" section. It doesn't have any fine grained "show me less like this" or "show me more like that" options. That all the filters of net (Google, FB, etc) have convinced users that an out-of-their control recommendation system is a triumph of this sort of system. If you just demand the recommendation system be different, you're just asking users be controlled in a different way. Edit: whenever I mention this, I get "but the users are morons and need to be lead". I'd say instead, users are often unthinking and need to be educated.
- poink 5y ago
  > I'd say instead, users are often unthinking and need to be educated. Oh, is that all?
- rtpg 5y ago
  What? YouTube has both of these features? Are you just using it without logging in?
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  YouTube has the "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" buttons, as well as upvotes, upvotes, downvotes, and subscriptions.
  - grumbel 5y ago
    Downvotes on Youtube do nothing, as the system still counts them as engagement and continues to recommend the videos. The issue with the "Not interested/Don't recommend channel" is that it's the nuclear option. It does make content go away, but more often than not, what I really want is just to watch something else right now. The content might be perfectly fine and up to my taste, but when Youtube keeps recommending the same stuff again and again, there is no easy way to just reduce that a little without nuking it completely.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    As mentioned, downvotes do nothing. But the main thing missing isn't video-by-video like/dislike. The thing that's missing is something like a control panel. It would show "these are topics/tags I'm especially interested in", "these are topics/tags I want to avoid entirely", "these are things to show occasionally" "show topics similar to what I'm current watch" or not. All "but they have that objections" here seem very around "but it does have ways to give the opaque recommender suggestions" - yes, but how the recommender works is still unknown, "magical", opaque and how the suggestions will effect the recommender is also unknown. I mean, I happen to know the only way the only affect the recommender is to actually remove items from your history. That's pretty klunky. And it makes it impossible to say "give me X but not Y kind of X"
blitzar 5y ago
> I watched one video on peppers out of curiousity. I watched one video on preppers out of curiousity - and my feed is now full of videos about machine guns, shot guns and the correct military gear to pretend you are in the army.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
Weird. If I watch a music video I get recommendations to watch crackpots challenging vaccines or claiming that Nancy Pelosi is passing Sharia Law. Maybe I should watch more supplements videos, that seems to be the sell from the recommended videos.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I very much avoid YouTube across the board because this is so consistent.
andrepd 5y ago
On a more serious side, I searched for a 20s video of a funny gaffe by the President of my country, and immediately my feed was flooded by videos from the local right-populist party's fake news propaganda channel. It's that easy for an unwary person just out to watch a funny video to become exposed to a torrent of bullshit. Anecdotally (n=1, I know), I watch/listen to a lot of leftist lectures and speeches and my feed does not get inundated with them nearly as much... Really makes you think.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  I know for a fact that a sizable portion (if not a majority) of far-right content gets heavily downranked (and in many cases filtered completely from) in the algorithm as "low quality content". The problem is that the right is much better at producing flashy, low-attention/low-commitment content - the kinds of things that excel in the metrics the algorithm would naively optimize for. Case in point, the lectures you watch are nearly the exact opposite of that popular, easily-digestible content.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    Hmm, that makes sense. I actually watch plenty of non-leftist lectures and speeches too (keeping my mind open, you know), and neither those start flooding my feed x) I guess the problem lies in the metrics the algorithm is optimising for.
- watwut 5y ago
  I watched "Triumph of will" once. The youtube started to push on me nazi apologists, holocaust did not happen conspiracy theorists and what not. And for some reason, gaming videos. It was seriously disturbing. I watched that movie because I read about it in a book. Now they removed movie and left there only very bad unwatchable commentary of it. Let's pretend it solves the problem.
knubie 5y ago
I can totally relate to this myself. My father also recently just purchased a small sawmill which I think Youtube had a not so insignificant role in...
jiggawatts 5y ago
I have the same problem. We watched the videos about those 13 Thai kids that were stuck in a cave. Since then, YouTube has assumed that I'm into cave diving and mountclimbing, so my feed has filled up with videos of related topics. I've never cave dived, never will, and mountain climbing makes my palms sweaty. But all of that pales in comparison to their Tik-Tok clone attempt of short videos. Talk about "chum"! They're clearly highly optimised to pull people in and get them hooked. Luckily, I know digital drugs when I see them. I was one of those freaky people that could recognise the "hooks" in games like World of Warcraft and simply stop playing before the "endgame" mechanics sucked your life down the drain just so that Blizzard can get their recurring revenue. Seems like this data driven optimisation for addicting people to low-quality content is the mental opiod epidemic of the current era...
mackrevinack 5y ago
you know things are getting stupid when you have to stop and think about whether you should open a youtube video in incognito mode or not

by swalsh 5y ago

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

Read it as “video on preppers” and everything still worked for the most part, but you didn’t mention freeze dried food or holsters so figured I read something wrong.

a1369209993 5y ago
Same here, though I caught on at "multiple different varieties [of preppers?] growing" (WTF?).

marderfarker2 5y ago

Huh, not YouTube but the companies paying content creators to make videos featuring their product.

jeffwask 5y ago

It's sad because I remember being able to find new and interesting creators passively. Now the main page is all corporate BS and the algorithm locks you in. We played a bit of WOW Classic last year and all of a sudden I was just flooded with Asmongold videos and videos of people clipping and replaying Asmongold. It took a day of "never show this again" to make it stop.

steveklabnik 5y ago
As someone who had a bit of a YouTube hobby and is trying to get back into it, I've generally found that the algorithm brings me a larger audience than I would have otherwise. I've published three videos in the last 28 days, and my analytics says I've gotten 5200 views across all my content in that time. I have about a hundred subscribers. Search is still king, but 15% of those views have come from suggested. I've got a 7.8% CTR so it's suggesting it to quite a few people.
- cma 5y ago
  Like Facebook now does for "boosting" post shares, I wonder when the YT algorithm will start incorporating pay to win mechanics.
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    It seems like YouTube has realized that winner-takes-all is bad for the health of the platform, and is trying to grow smaller creators. I suspect they won't do this, because they realize that it ultimately strangles growth. Mr. Beast (for example) is already spending about $4MM/month on making videos; if they allowed this kind of stuff, well... not many people could compete. We'll see though!
    - cma 5y ago
      After I made the post I remembered they already do it. Brands can pay to sponsor existing videos that put them in a good light. These recomendations do have an [Ad] tag, but the extra views and impressions are allow to feed into the algorithm which then doesn't have to maintain the [Ad] tag going forward: https://support.google.com/google-ads/thread/10007177/using-someone-else-s-youtube-video-as-my-youtube-ad https://support.google.com/google-ads/thread/10007177/using-...
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      Occasionally I will see a "Rising Creator" section on the Explore/Trending page showcasing a single channel. This channel typically has less than 5k subscribers and posts regularly.
DocEasyE 5y ago
check yolo comics on youtube, they are korean but have subtitles and make amazing prank videos not like US pranks
kenjackson 5y ago
What corporate stuff do you have on your main page? Mine is all pretty much filled with content that matches what I watch.
- yummypaint 5y ago
  This seems pretty tautological. What you watch will reflect your reccomendations because there is a causal relationship there, unless you never use youtube for discovery. I alledge that what people spend time watching is more heavily shaped by reccomendations than they are aware of.
  - dkarl 5y ago
    When you depart from your usual intake, some departures are a lot more powerful than others. Sometimes you watch something new and YouTube spends days pushing similar stuff into your face. Other times you watch something new and only see one or two relevant recommendations mixed into your usual fare. My hypothesis is that YouTube knows that particular topics and particular content are associated with usage patterns that make money for them, and the algorithm is alert to any possibility of pushing users into those patterns.
  - kroltan 5y ago
    I'm not who you're replying to, but at least for me, I've found a way of keeping the recommendations on check. https://i.imgur.com/XIRW4U2.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/XIRW4U2.jpeg When opening videos that are sent to me by others, I always use a private window, so my main account is pretty low "variance". When I find a creator I like, I do a "fake binge", by queuing all their recent videos and some old ones too and playing them unattended. I also try to minimize my use of the recommendation sidebar, since it usually shows content related to the current video rather than the more general recommendations of the home page. When something foreign sneaks its way to my home page, I immediately click "not interested", paying attention to not hover the thumbnail. Overall, Youtube has got me trained pretty well, but at least I get some nice recommendations out of it, so much so in fact that over half the recommendations I get are usually videos I have already watched (even if Youtube thinks I haven't yet for whatever reason).
Asmod4n 5y ago
I’m hitting never show this again on one type of content all the time. There are days where my feed consists of like 33% of that stuff and it happens all the time. I’m at the point where it only recommends me my subscribed channels or the stuff I tell it not to show at all some days too. It’s so frustrating.
- dkarl 5y ago
  I think there are some intersections of interest that make the algorithm hypothesize that you're a certain kind of person. Like if you watch a lot of strength training content, and then you watch one lecture on Heidegger, YouTube is like, oh, we finally figured this guy out, he's a white supremacist or at the very least a gun nut. But if I watch a video about cupcakes, I'll only get a few suggestions about baking, not any associated interests, because cupcakes don't combine with any of my other interests to trigger a stereotype.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  I always get those "calming meditation" music videos in recommendations, or "5 Powerful Psalms to Help You Sleep" which is on my homepage right now. Every video is from a different channel named something like "Calming Truth", and I can tell at one glance of the thumbnail that it's one of "those" videos. I have never, ever watched one, and I always click Not Interested, or Don't Recommend Channel. But they keep on coming. There seems to be an endless supply of them.
grumbel 5y ago
That's why I started using multiple accounts, makes it a lot easier to keep the algorithm on topic and not get side tracked just because you searched for a song or game once. In the end the core problem with the recommendation system is simply that there is only one list of recommendations, which makes it damn near impossible to switch to a different topic unless you start account hopping. The new topic-bar helps a little, but still offers no way to get rid of an unwanted topic completely.
- jeffwask 5y ago
  I did this till I started paying for premium then it sucked.
  - FalconSensei 5y ago
    If you use different channels, premium should work for all, right?
  - Uupis 5y ago
    I use the family plan for multiple accounts. Might not fit if you actually use it as a family plan, but it's working out for me so far.
- quakeguy 5y ago
  „Using multiple accounts“ „Makes it easier“ That may work indeed, but i wouldnt call it easy in any way, or convenient. Instead try to subscribe to as many channels you find interesting as possible. Thats what worked for me in the end getting rid of the clutter that is suggested.
  - grumbel 5y ago
    I find subscriptions completely useless when it comes to recommendation, as the recommendations seem to be build up of what I watched in the last week, while my subscriptions have little to no visible impact at all. There are numerous channels I am subscribe to that I haven't seen in months or years, just because I didn't watch them for a week or two and they fell out of the recommendation cycle.
stevofolife 5y ago
You started playing WoW Classic and it was able to recommend WoW-related videos. It did its job. What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow? That's not recommendation, that's mass surveillance and psychological manipulation. But on a useful note, maybe YouTube needs to provide a function to see a list of random videos that are unexplored or new.
- dgritsko 5y ago
  > What else do you expect from a recommendation system? Predict what you're interested next or what you're going to do tomorrow? Actually, I think they kind of are trying to do this (in a sense), if you read the article: > Our system then compares your viewing habits with those that are similar to you and uses that information to suggest other content you may want to watch. So if you like tennis videos and our system notices that others who like the same tennis videos as you also enjoy jazz videos, you may be recommended jazz videos, even if you’ve never watched a single one before.
  - brendoelfrendo 5y ago
    This is probably how both I and many of my friends who share interests managed to fall down the same city planning YouTube rabbit hole this summer.
  - stevofolife 5y ago
    That is true. But the word “next” makes all the difference in the world. If you know what I mean.
- matttb 5y ago
  I want it to diversify a lot more. There's a lot of room between 'WoW related videos' and 98% of your sidebar is one particular creator (asmon).
- jeffwask 5y ago
  It's a matter of degrees... Imagine if I went to church for the first time in a decade and the next day three monks show up at my door with a cassock and vows. ...that's the YouTube algorithm in my experience. I show a passing interest in one thing so it floods me with every drop of content they have on the subject to the exclusion of things that I have watched every week for years. There are creators I watch every week or every drop. Somehow the algorithm chooses to not surface their videos regularly and surface 46,123 videos on Terraform because I watched a quick tutorial.
gremloni 5y ago
This is not my experience at all. Everything on my page is from independent creators.

ahoka 5y ago

Because why would you do things for free, when you can pay for them?

5faulker 5y ago

It's a consumption-driven economy, where those who are economically useless are driven out of the game.

mistrial9 5y ago
this is the best one-liner here all week +++ me: art, philosophy, religion, culture -- avidly me on youTube: Rizin/UFC re-runs, live concerts of commercially successful bands, D&D themed games
amelius 5y ago
Yes, few people realize it but fixing Google's algorithms could be the best thing that ever happened to the climate, and the worst thing that ever happened to our economy (depending on how you look at it).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

isk517 5y ago

Running is a hobby that feels like it should be cheap but gets surprisingly expensive. Two quick pieces of advice to save you from a bit of hurt. 1. Track your miles, shoes need to be replaced every 300-500 and 2. Go get a foot orthotic and gait assessment done. Wearing the right type of shoes and finding out if you require orthotics is a easy way to prevent injuries that won't pop up for another year or two down the line.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
I know quite a few casual runners (5K to 10K) and been running for over 15 years myself. Other than a $120 pair of running shoes every year or two, what is the expense? Maybe the water backpack things if you are into extreme running? It is not even a separate expense for me, as I just use my running shoes as my regular shoes. Also, maybe it is my gait or my lack of weight, but I estimate my shoes last 1k miles.
- isk517 5y ago
  I suppose things aren't as expensive if you are a casual but I'm still surprised you can get 1k out of a pair of shoes. My mother also runs and is significantly lighter than myself and she gets shin splints if she doesn't change runners out at 500 miles. My current system is to run a pair of shoes for about 350 - 450 miles then downgrade them to a pair of walking shoes in till they fall apart. I started running fairly casually but eventually started doing marathons. I run about 110 miles a month so I'm switching out shoes every 3 months. My feet suck so I'm also replacing a pair of orthotics every 2 years. I got a full set of summer and winter running gear and enough of each to last me a week. I also have a hydration vest, a GPS watch (not necessary but very useful), a set of Aftershokz bone conductive headphones so that I can listen to music while maintaining situational awareness, a pair of good sunglasses specifically for running (I sweat a lot and would not want to ware the same pair for everyday use), I have a few soft flasks that go in my hydration vest, and I've had to invest in a pretty decent treadmill to run on during the worst parts of winter. Not everything I've listed is 100% necessary but as with most hobbies it finds ways to become expensive the more dedicated you are to it.

vl 5y ago

All it means that it is working as intended. Few years ago YT switched to life-time-value optimization. But when you get it to the logical end, ideal consumer for Google is a healthy person with disposable income that spends all of it. Since Google/YT essentially are shaping you thoughts and behaviours, logical optimization for them is to shape you to be a working sportsman that spends all disposable income on services, experiences and goods bought online.

skybrian 5y ago

I'm wondering what you mean by "dangerous" and what level of irony you're at. :-)

el_benhameen 5y ago
No irony, it’s dangerous. Wait until you get into woodworking youtube … you might be missing parts of your fingers, and you’ll definitely be missing most of your wallet.
- skybrian 5y ago
  I don’t know, blaming YouTube for that is kind of weird? Also your original examples seem more positive. If more people started exercising and gardening because of YouTube, I think that would be amazing.

robbomacrae 5y ago

YouTube's recommendation system (and googles search engine if you see the comments in the other post today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764) somehow escapes the flak that other systems, such as Facebook news & posts, get but I find it's equally damaging to society. There seems to exist a downward spiral where content that is prioritized to be attention grabbing over all else gets the most clicks and then drives more content to focus on this. The quality of the content itself seems to be increasingly inconsequential and has fallen off a cliff in the face of click spam. Anecdotal evidence 1: I used to watch youtube videos for investment ideas and now all of these streamers pump out the same low quality, not very researched content with their face plastered on top with a shocked look on their mug. Anecdotal evidence 2: My son was shown youtube by one of our nannies (despite my rules on no youtube) and has since become semi-addicted to the most brain dead content of toys being made into knock offs of the reasonable shows he used to watch or some adult man child being a weird clown in public. Idiocracy will be due to memes as much as genes.

dredmorbius 5y ago
Kara Swisher of The New York Times (previously ReCode) has been absolutely biting in her criticisms of Google generally, Youtube specifically, and other current tech monopolies. Directly to Susan Wojcicki's face in a live public interview: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zKrQzJgFWdw https://youtube.com/watch?v=zKrQzJgFWdw (Starting about 1:50 into the interview.) Also numerous times in her column and podcast (I can chase those down if requested, though they should be prominent). See "Algorithms Won’t Fix What’s Wrong With YouTube" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/opinion/youtube-algorithm.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/opinion/youtube-algorithm... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20184282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20184282)
iszomer 5y ago
I came to a similar conundrum and concluded that a split across two Google accounts was necessary to keep youtube subscriptions and recommendations in check. Initially, I wanted to separate betwween personal and work but it has now more or less turned into a generic filter between intelligent and casual topics. Incidentally, political content along with it's secondary and tertiary discourse gets the same treatment with little to no exceptions.

dsclough 5y ago

I'd recommend anyone looking to take better control of their habits in this regard to install the DF Youtube extension. Turn it off when you want to tumble down rabbitholes and keep it on at all other times. Really makes a difference in how youtube usage works over time. On a related note it would be interesting if someone has made some "rabbithole resolving" software - I've noticed that these things terminate in extremely similar ways for most people, and have had a number of conversations laughing with others about how we've gone down the exact same content route. Write some code to find the bottom for us and save all the headache (fun)!

AdrianB1 5y ago

I got in the same situation with videos on otters (popular in South Korea, it seems) by watching accidentally one in the feed, but the music recommendations are either missing or missing my preferences, so the system does not really work for me.

jumpkick 5y ago

“Gear” is slang for steroids so I assume this is the joke, right? :p

sigmar 5y ago

The same thing happened to me with plants. I knew nothing about plants last year. Now I tell people I was radicalized by youtube into a house plant and pepper plant obsession.

beckman466 5y ago

What makes you share such an unrelated anecdotal story here? Seriously? Is it 'telling 'cute' stories to distract from the black box youtube algorithm that creates white supremacists' -time? It comes across as incredibly unempathetic, gaslighty and dismissive, posting on a thread that is discussing an important societal problem; especially using the word 'dangerous' in the sarcastic way in which you used it here. It's frustrating that the readers themselves have to replace YouTube's cryptic and doublespeak-y 'borderline' label in this article with the word 'white supremacist' and/or 'alt-right' to get the real picture.

joe_the_user 5y ago

I'd just note some things Youtube doesn't have. It doesn't have any "the key words I'm interested are" section. It doesn't have any fine grained "show me less like this" or "show me more like that" options. That all the filters of net (Google, FB, etc) have convinced users that an out-of-their control recommendation system is a triumph of this sort of system. If you just demand the recommendation system be different, you're just asking users be controlled in a different way. Edit: whenever I mention this, I get "but the users are morons and need to be lead". I'd say instead, users are often unthinking and need to be educated.

poink 5y ago
> I'd say instead, users are often unthinking and need to be educated. Oh, is that all?
rtpg 5y ago
What? YouTube has both of these features? Are you just using it without logging in?
frosted-flakes 5y ago
YouTube has the "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" buttons, as well as upvotes, upvotes, downvotes, and subscriptions.
- grumbel 5y ago
  Downvotes on Youtube do nothing, as the system still counts them as engagement and continues to recommend the videos. The issue with the "Not interested/Don't recommend channel" is that it's the nuclear option. It does make content go away, but more often than not, what I really want is just to watch something else right now. The content might be perfectly fine and up to my taste, but when Youtube keeps recommending the same stuff again and again, there is no easy way to just reduce that a little without nuking it completely.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  As mentioned, downvotes do nothing. But the main thing missing isn't video-by-video like/dislike. The thing that's missing is something like a control panel. It would show "these are topics/tags I'm especially interested in", "these are topics/tags I want to avoid entirely", "these are things to show occasionally" "show topics similar to what I'm current watch" or not. All "but they have that objections" here seem very around "but it does have ways to give the opaque recommender suggestions" - yes, but how the recommender works is still unknown, "magical", opaque and how the suggestions will effect the recommender is also unknown. I mean, I happen to know the only way the only affect the recommender is to actually remove items from your history. That's pretty klunky. And it makes it impossible to say "give me X but not Y kind of X"

blitzar 5y ago

> I watched one video on peppers out of curiousity. I watched one video on preppers out of curiousity - and my feed is now full of videos about machine guns, shot guns and the correct military gear to pretend you are in the army.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

Weird. If I watch a music video I get recommendations to watch crackpots challenging vaccines or claiming that Nancy Pelosi is passing Sharia Law. Maybe I should watch more supplements videos, that seems to be the sell from the recommended videos.

eyelidlessness 5y ago
I very much avoid YouTube across the board because this is so consistent.

andrepd 5y ago

On a more serious side, I searched for a 20s video of a funny gaffe by the President of my country, and immediately my feed was flooded by videos from the local right-populist party's fake news propaganda channel. It's that easy for an unwary person just out to watch a funny video to become exposed to a torrent of bullshit. Anecdotally (n=1, I know), I watch/listen to a lot of leftist lectures and speeches and my feed does not get inundated with them nearly as much... Really makes you think.

LordDragonfang 5y ago
I know for a fact that a sizable portion (if not a majority) of far-right content gets heavily downranked (and in many cases filtered completely from) in the algorithm as "low quality content". The problem is that the right is much better at producing flashy, low-attention/low-commitment content - the kinds of things that excel in the metrics the algorithm would naively optimize for. Case in point, the lectures you watch are nearly the exact opposite of that popular, easily-digestible content.
- andrepd 5y ago
  Hmm, that makes sense. I actually watch plenty of non-leftist lectures and speeches too (keeping my mind open, you know), and neither those start flooding my feed x) I guess the problem lies in the metrics the algorithm is optimising for.
watwut 5y ago
I watched "Triumph of will" once. The youtube started to push on me nazi apologists, holocaust did not happen conspiracy theorists and what not. And for some reason, gaming videos. It was seriously disturbing. I watched that movie because I read about it in a book. Now they removed movie and left there only very bad unwatchable commentary of it. Let's pretend it solves the problem.

knubie 5y ago

I can totally relate to this myself. My father also recently just purchased a small sawmill which I think Youtube had a not so insignificant role in...

jiggawatts 5y ago

I have the same problem. We watched the videos about those 13 Thai kids that were stuck in a cave. Since then, YouTube has assumed that I'm into cave diving and mountclimbing, so my feed has filled up with videos of related topics. I've never cave dived, never will, and mountain climbing makes my palms sweaty. But all of that pales in comparison to their Tik-Tok clone attempt of short videos. Talk about "chum"! They're clearly highly optimised to pull people in and get them hooked. Luckily, I know digital drugs when I see them. I was one of those freaky people that could recognise the "hooks" in games like World of Warcraft and simply stop playing before the "endgame" mechanics sucked your life down the drain just so that Blizzard can get their recurring revenue. Seems like this data driven optimisation for addicting people to low-quality content is the mental opiod epidemic of the current era...

mackrevinack 5y ago

you know things are getting stupid when you have to stop and think about whether you should open a youtube video in incognito mode or not