6 ms·

Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely. They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or y

Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely. They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.

makeitdouble 3y ago
I think it's probably pushing pattern it sees in other users. There's videos I'll watch multiple times, music videos are the obvious kind, but for some others I'm just not watching/understanding it the first time and will go back and rewatch later. But I guess youtube has no way to understand which one I'll rewatch and which other I don't want to see ever again, and if my behavior is used as training data for the other users like you, they're probably screwed.
- godshatter 3y ago
  A simple "rewatch?" line along the top would make this problem not so brain dead bad, imho. Without it you just think the algorithm is bad (although maybe it is? I don't know).
sakesun 3y ago
Install "Unhook" chrome extension. That changed my life.
998244353 3y ago
For what it's worth, I do not remember a time when YouTube's suggestions or search results were good. Absurdities like that happened 10 and 15 years ago as well. These days my biggest gripe is that they put unrelated ragebait or clickbait videos in search results that I very clearly did not search for - often about American politics.
- peoplenotbots 3y ago
  Long long time ago; youtube "staff" would manually put certain videos on the top of the front page when they started. Im sure there we're biases and prioritization of marketing dollars but at least there was human recommending it compared to poorly recorded early family guy clips. I dont know when they stopped manually adding "editors/staff" choice videos but I recall some of my favorite early youtubers like CGPGgrey claim that recommendation built the career.
  - superluserdo 3y ago
    See this >15-year-old video "How to get featured on YouTube" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uzXeP4g_qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uzXeP4g_qA, which I remember as being originally uploaded to the official Youtube channel but looks like it's been removed now, this reupload is from October 2008.
- FullstakBlogger 3y ago
  15 years ago, I used to keep many tabs of youtube videos open just because the "related" section was full of interesting videos. Then each of those videos had interesting relations. There was so much to explore before hitting a dead-end and starting somewhere else. Now the "related" section is gone in favor of "recommended" samey clickbait garbage. The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. The old Markov-chain style works with the human, and lets them recognize what kind of space they've gotten themselves into, and make intelligent decisions, which ultimately benefit the system. If you judge the system by the presence of negative outliers, rather than positive, then I can understand seeing no difference.
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    >The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. I would go further and say that it is impossible. Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes. Imagine that all the videos on the internet would be on one big video website. You would watch car videos, movie trailers, listen to music, and watch porn in one place. Could the algorithm correctly predict when you're in the mood for porn and when you aren't? No, it couldn't. The website might know what kind of cars, what kind of music, and what kind of porn you like, but it wouldn't be able to tell which of these categories you would currently be interested in. I think current YouTube (and other recommendation-heavy services) have this problem. Sometimes I want to watch videos about programming, but sometimes I don't. But the algorithm doesn't know that. It can't know that without being able to track me outside of the website.
    - FullstakBlogger 3y ago
      >I would go further and say that it is impossible. Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes. Theres a general problem in the tech world where people seem to inexplicably disregard the issue of non-reducibility. The point about the algorithm lacking access to necessary external information is good. A dictionary app obviously can't predict what word I want to look up without simulating my mind-state. A set of probabilistic state transitions is at least a tangible shadow of typical human mind-states who make those transitions.
- Narishma 3y ago
  I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display. Or when they would show more than 3 results before spamming irrelevant videos. Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video. Or when they had a dislike button so you would know to avoid wasting time on low quality videos.
  - WWLink 3y ago
    > I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display. Wait what?! You "Consume Content" on a COMPUTER? What are you some kinda grandpa? Why aren't you consuming content from your phone like everyone else? Or casting it from your phone to your SMART TV! Great way to CONSUME CONTENT! CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT
    - skydhash 3y ago
      Lol, Youtube on Apple TV is great. Mostly because I either need to find something fast or I switch it off because the remote is not conducive to skipping. But the only time I watch Youtube on my computer is for a specific video. The waste of space is horrendous. Same with Twitter (rarely visited), just a 3/4 inches wide column of posts on my 24 inch screen.
    - Aerroon 3y ago
      I'm not consuming the content on my phone, because the user experience of using these services on my phone sucks. Just the app vs website difference with urls is a difference in behavior I hate let alone all the UI differences that make the mobile experience awkward. I don't know about the TV though.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    > Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video. On desktop Chrome, a modern ad-blocking browser extension will block 100% of YouTube adverts. I haven't watched one, literally, in years. I don't watch YouTube from a mobile phone, but I think the situation is different. (Can anyone else comment about the mobile experience?)
- alovelace 3y ago
  It all depends on your use case but a lot of people seem to be in agreement it fell off in the mid to late 10s and the suggestions became noticeably worse.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  YouTube seems to treat popular videos as their own interest category and it’s very aggressive about recommending them if you show any interest at all. If you watch even one or two popular videos (like in the millions of views), suddenly the quality of the recommendations drops off a cliff, since it is suggesting things that aren’t relevant to your interest categories, it’s just suggesting popular things. If I entirely avoid watching any popular videos, the recommendations are quite good and don’t seem to include anything like what you are seeing. If I don’t entirely avoid them, then I do get what you are seeing (among other nonsense).
layer8 3y ago
This is happening to me to, but from the kind of videos it's suggested for I suspect that people actually do tend to rewatch those particular videos, hence the recommendation.
gverrilla 3y ago
YT Shorts recommendations are a joke. I'm an atheist and very rarely watch anything related to religion, and even so Shorts put me in 3 or 4 live prayers/scams (not sure) the last few months.
- jasonfarnon 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - bitwize 3y ago
    That's a feature, not a bug.
- AlexCoventry 3y ago
  YT Shorts itself is kind of a mystery to me. It's an objective degradation of the interface; why on earth would I want to use it? It doesn't even allow adjustment of the playback speed or scrubbing!
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    Solid point. Not to mention that Shorts content is mainly linkbait and/or garbage.
  - barnabyjones 3y ago
    I think there is a large demo of people now who actually prefer to watch videos in portrait.
    - skydhash 3y ago
      If you’re watching a single subject of interest video on your phone (TikTok type of content), it’s great. But landscape videos is more pleasant and there’s a reason we move from 4:3 for media. But that actually means watching the videos, but what I see is a lot of skipping.
      - 3y ago

Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely. They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.

makeitdouble 3y ago

I think it's probably pushing pattern it sees in other users. There's videos I'll watch multiple times, music videos are the obvious kind, but for some others I'm just not watching/understanding it the first time and will go back and rewatch later. But I guess youtube has no way to understand which one I'll rewatch and which other I don't want to see ever again, and if my behavior is used as training data for the other users like you, they're probably screwed.

godshatter 3y ago
A simple "rewatch?" line along the top would make this problem not so brain dead bad, imho. Without it you just think the algorithm is bad (although maybe it is? I don't know).

sakesun 3y ago

Install "Unhook" chrome extension. That changed my life.

998244353 3y ago

For what it's worth, I do not remember a time when YouTube's suggestions or search results were good. Absurdities like that happened 10 and 15 years ago as well. These days my biggest gripe is that they put unrelated ragebait or clickbait videos in search results that I very clearly did not search for - often about American politics.

peoplenotbots 3y ago
Long long time ago; youtube "staff" would manually put certain videos on the top of the front page when they started. Im sure there we're biases and prioritization of marketing dollars but at least there was human recommending it compared to poorly recorded early family guy clips. I dont know when they stopped manually adding "editors/staff" choice videos but I recall some of my favorite early youtubers like CGPGgrey claim that recommendation built the career.
- superluserdo 3y ago
  See this >15-year-old video "How to get featured on YouTube" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uzXeP4g_qA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uzXeP4g_qA, which I remember as being originally uploaded to the official Youtube channel but looks like it's been removed now, this reupload is from October 2008.
FullstakBlogger 3y ago
15 years ago, I used to keep many tabs of youtube videos open just because the "related" section was full of interesting videos. Then each of those videos had interesting relations. There was so much to explore before hitting a dead-end and starting somewhere else. Now the "related" section is gone in favor of "recommended" samey clickbait garbage. The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. The old Markov-chain style works with the human, and lets them recognize what kind of space they've gotten themselves into, and make intelligent decisions, which ultimately benefit the system. If you judge the system by the presence of negative outliers, rather than positive, then I can understand seeing no difference.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  >The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. I would go further and say that it is impossible. Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes. Imagine that all the videos on the internet would be on one big video website. You would watch car videos, movie trailers, listen to music, and watch porn in one place. Could the algorithm correctly predict when you're in the mood for porn and when you aren't? No, it couldn't. The website might know what kind of cars, what kind of music, and what kind of porn you like, but it wouldn't be able to tell which of these categories you would currently be interested in. I think current YouTube (and other recommendation-heavy services) have this problem. Sometimes I want to watch videos about programming, but sometimes I don't. But the algorithm doesn't know that. It can't know that without being able to track me outside of the website.
  - FullstakBlogger 3y ago
    >I would go further and say that it is impossible. Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes. Theres a general problem in the tech world where people seem to inexplicably disregard the issue of non-reducibility. The point about the algorithm lacking access to necessary external information is good. A dictionary app obviously can't predict what word I want to look up without simulating my mind-state. A set of probabilistic state transitions is at least a tangible shadow of typical human mind-states who make those transitions.
Narishma 3y ago
I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display. Or when they would show more than 3 results before spamming irrelevant videos. Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video. Or when they had a dislike button so you would know to avoid wasting time on low quality videos.
- WWLink 3y ago
  > I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display. Wait what?! You "Consume Content" on a COMPUTER? What are you some kinda grandpa? Why aren't you consuming content from your phone like everyone else? Or casting it from your phone to your SMART TV! Great way to CONSUME CONTENT! CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT
  - skydhash 3y ago
    Lol, Youtube on Apple TV is great. Mostly because I either need to find something fast or I switch it off because the remote is not conducive to skipping. But the only time I watch Youtube on my computer is for a specific video. The waste of space is horrendous. Same with Twitter (rarely visited), just a 3/4 inches wide column of posts on my 24 inch screen.
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    I'm not consuming the content on my phone, because the user experience of using these services on my phone sucks. Just the app vs website difference with urls is a difference in behavior I hate let alone all the UI differences that make the mobile experience awkward. I don't know about the TV though.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  > Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video. On desktop Chrome, a modern ad-blocking browser extension will block 100% of YouTube adverts. I haven't watched one, literally, in years. I don't watch YouTube from a mobile phone, but I think the situation is different. (Can anyone else comment about the mobile experience?)
alovelace 3y ago
It all depends on your use case but a lot of people seem to be in agreement it fell off in the mid to late 10s and the suggestions became noticeably worse.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
YouTube seems to treat popular videos as their own interest category and it’s very aggressive about recommending them if you show any interest at all. If you watch even one or two popular videos (like in the millions of views), suddenly the quality of the recommendations drops off a cliff, since it is suggesting things that aren’t relevant to your interest categories, it’s just suggesting popular things. If I entirely avoid watching any popular videos, the recommendations are quite good and don’t seem to include anything like what you are seeing. If I don’t entirely avoid them, then I do get what you are seeing (among other nonsense).

layer8 3y ago

This is happening to me to, but from the kind of videos it's suggested for I suspect that people actually do tend to rewatch those particular videos, hence the recommendation.

gverrilla 3y ago

YT Shorts recommendations are a joke. I'm an atheist and very rarely watch anything related to religion, and even so Shorts put me in 3 or 4 live prayers/scams (not sure) the last few months.

jasonfarnon 3y ago
[flagged]
- bitwize 3y ago
  That's a feature, not a bug.
AlexCoventry 3y ago
YT Shorts itself is kind of a mystery to me. It's an objective degradation of the interface; why on earth would I want to use it? It doesn't even allow adjustment of the playback speed or scrubbing!
- fuzztester 3y ago
  Solid point. Not to mention that Shorts content is mainly linkbait and/or garbage.
- barnabyjones 3y ago
  I think there is a large demo of people now who actually prefer to watch videos in portrait.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    If you’re watching a single subject of interest video on your phone (TikTok type of content), it’s great. But landscape videos is more pleasant and there’s a reason we move from 4:3 for media. But that actually means watching the videos, but what I see is a lot of skipping.
    - 3y ago