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I don't think that's the underlying problem. The youtube algorithm sees people searching for something, watching a video and then liking it. How should it not c

by planb 4y ago

I don't think that's the underlying problem. The youtube algorithm sees people searching for something, watching a video and then liking it. How should it not conclude that the content was useful for the watcher? Probably it even _was_ useful and gave them the info needed to solve their problem. So why did they consume this content on YouTube and not on Stack Overflow? Because that's the way they are used to searching for answers. Probably because they feel videos are in general easier to understand. Or they come from a background where YouTube videos usually provide the best quality answers (home improvement comes to mind immediately). For those of us that know how these videos are made, they feel like spam at best and a giant scam that rips off Stack Overflow at worse (though this use is allowed by the license), but I don't see what incentives Youtube should have to ban them.

NonNefarious 4y ago
"So why did they consume this content on YouTube and not on Stack Overflow? Because that's the way they are used to searching for answers" No, it's because they searched on a technical topic and the Stack Overflow hits ranked lower than this spam. There's a shitload of spam-bucket, search-trap sites that scrape Stack Overflow and re-host its text in a column full of ads. I mean... pages of hits of them. Now we have auto-generated videos doing it. Again, Google's vaunted algorithms don't do shit about it; even worse, Google REMOVED the ability to block specific sites from search results. Despicable.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Yeah. On top of that google seems to prefer giving videos, categorically. Youtube results are shown first for many, but not all, types of queries. Not entirely clear what the distinction is. But it's not like it alternates video, web link, video, implying that they're sorted in terms of match rate even ignoring gross SEO. It's just video first.
- planb 4y ago
  100% agreed on the decline of Google's algorithm. Those SO rip off sites make me furious, too [1]! But people know they are clicking on a video link and do so not just because it's ranked higher than the text ones, but because they feel a video is easier to understand. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26436490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26436490

by planb 4y ago

NonNefarious 4y ago

"So why did they consume this content on YouTube and not on Stack Overflow? Because that's the way they are used to searching for answers" No, it's because they searched on a technical topic and the Stack Overflow hits ranked lower than this spam. There's a shitload of spam-bucket, search-trap sites that scrape Stack Overflow and re-host its text in a column full of ads. I mean... pages of hits of them. Now we have auto-generated videos doing it. Again, Google's vaunted algorithms don't do shit about it; even worse, Google REMOVED the ability to block specific sites from search results. Despicable.

spywaregorilla 4y ago
Yeah. On top of that google seems to prefer giving videos, categorically. Youtube results are shown first for many, but not all, types of queries. Not entirely clear what the distinction is. But it's not like it alternates video, web link, video, implying that they're sorted in terms of match rate even ignoring gross SEO. It's just video first.
planb 4y ago
100% agreed on the decline of Google's algorithm. Those SO rip off sites make me furious, too [1]! But people know they are clicking on a video link and do so not just because it's ranked higher than the text ones, but because they feel a video is easier to understand. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26436490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26436490