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I know this is just a fun little easter egg, but features like this seems a little risky to me. It calls attention to the fact that Youtube isn't just serving

by slg 2y ago

I know this is just a fun little easter egg, but features like this seems a little risky to me. It calls attention to the fact that Youtube isn't just serving me videos neutrally, it knows what is being said in those videos at the exact moment it is said. It highlights how much Google analyses the content of its videos in a way that more neutral features like automatic transcripts don't and in turn how much that can teach Google about me based on the videos I watch. It isn't that I didn't know Google had this ability, but foregrounding it underlines Google's Big Brother nature in a way that makes me want to use Youtube less and not more.

gruez 2y ago
> It calls attention to the fact that Youtube isn't just serving me videos neutrally, it knows what is being said in those videos at the exact moment it is said. It highlights how much Google analyses the content of its videos in a way that more neutral features like automatic transcripts don't and in turn how much that can teach Google about me based on the videos I watch. How else do you think the "up next" and "recommended videos for you" feature works? Did you think they were serving up relevant videos purely out of chance? If anything a dumb rule like "highlight the subscribe button if the transcript mentions it" is much more benign then a recommendation engine that can somehow always serve you a relevant video.
- queuebert 2y ago
  The simplest recommender would use videos that were commonly watched afterwards by other people.
  - Minor49er 2y ago
    That would be fun to exploit. Just get a few hundred accounts, have them watch a Mr. Beast video followed by a video you want to boost, and watch the numbers grow
    - xboxnolifes 2y ago
      Not sure even a few thousand accounts would make a dent in a Mr beast video count. Recommendation would go toward the 1 million accounts who watch another Mr beast video after.
      - Minor49er 2y ago
        True, though the recommendation engine on YouTube will suggest other alternatives that are not on the same channel. There would still be a positive effect
- cheeseomlit 2y ago
  You don't necessarily need to analyze every word in every video for recommendations- it could be as simple as 'users who liked this video also liked these other videos'
  - conductr 2y ago
    You can also turn on subtitles and even have them translated, it's pretty obvious Google is doing a lot with the audio part of videos
- everforward 2y ago
  Up Next and recommended videos don't require understanding the content of the videos. They could, as an example, find other users that watch similar videos and pick a video you haven't seen out of the things the other users have watched. It wouldn't surprise me if they use transcripts, but neither feature strictly requires it. I think the real risk here is users extrapolating from "YouTube can automatically respond to the content of videos". The Mr Beast thing is still blowing up, could they automatically identify illegal lotteries? Could they identify things that aren't suitable for YouTube Kids but end up there anyways? So on and so forth, YouTube's moderation is basically always under fire. This seems like a risky mixed message to send. Being able to light up the Subscribe button doesn't imply the technical ability to do better moderation, but I also wouldn't want to be the guy that has to explain that and how it works to the Senate.
  - xattt 2y ago
    It speaks to the fact that things that are most beneficial to Google have been finetuned to exploit eyeballs and pocketbooks. If they wanted to, or if their hand was forced, they’d be able to do the things that benefit the greater good. Don’t get started with the “it’s a slippery slope” kind of shit. Short of living in some society where it’s every man for himself, kids shouldn’t be playing lotteries
    - chgs 2y ago
      Many people in tech are big proponents of the “every man for himself” randian distopyas
    - everforward 2y ago
      There are significant differences in difficulty, but I do agree with the sentiment. Grepping for “like button” in a transcript is much easier and cheaper than training an LLM to check whether a lottery is legal or not. It also helps that there’s no counterparty risk with the like button. I don’t think anyone is trying to “trick” that feature, and it wouldn’t matter if they did.
  - mcphage 2y ago
- mathverse 2y ago
  If u are from a small country and you travel a lot it absolutely throws google off. I never get any relevant ads or videos for me :(.
  - conductr 2y ago
    I mostly use Youtube to watch home improvement / DIY / construction related stuff. They show me ads in Spanish. I'm probably the most stereotypical American white dude in Finance that speaks only English. What's weird is I've been using Google Search/Gmail basically since they became available and have bought their products and services for other stuff over the years and they have me pretty dialed in on their marketing elsewhere. YT specifically thinks otherwise.
- slg 2y ago
  >How else do you think the "up next" and "recommended videos for you" feature works? Did you think they were serving up relevant videos purely out of chance? It is absolutely possible to serve recommendations in a content agnostic way based on other user behavior. That is how the Youtube's recommendations worked at least initially. It should be obvious that they didn't have this ability to analyze content when Youtube started almost 20 years ago. And even in a content aware system, there is a difference between matching up keywords and understanding what those words mean. That is why an automatic transcript feels more neutral. That just transcribes what is being said. There is no implication of any analysis on the meaning of what is being said. >If anything a dumb rule like "highlight the subscribe button if the transcript mentions it" is much more benign then a recommendation engine that can somehow always serve you a relevant video. I'm not saying this feature is scarier than the recommendation engine. I'm saying Google revealing how much they know about the content of the video makes everything they do, including their recommendation engine, a little scarier.
  - 8note 2y ago
    around 20 years ago mark all kinds of things would happen at different times of a video, with the tool tips, and end cards and what have you. CSS animations werent there I guess, but given a manual transcription, either by the submitter, or by a person watching, youtube definitely had the capability to do exactly this, maybe with the button being some flash animation.
    - slg 2y ago
      >...but given a manual transcription... youtube definitely had the capability to do exactly this... I mean the "given a manual transcription" condition means the very much didn't have "the capability to do exactly this". The animation itself isn't the interesting part here.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Google owned YouTube'a ability to analyze content at scale for copyrighted music is the only reason YouTube is still around today. That the engine that does that analysis might be doing more seems like not a stretch at all. How much easier is it to detect "smash that subscribe button" that "the > 30 seconds of music is possibly a copyrighted song of all the known songs"?
- OJFord 2y ago
  I'm not saying I thought this was the case, but I can think of: 1) similarity to other users (people who watched this also watched) 2) similarity in words in title or description (or the generated transcript)
munk-a 2y ago
Was this not already highlighted by ContentID, automatic topic tagging/recommendations, and auto-caption? I honestly suspect this feature is just implemented as a side effect as the auto-captioning... and now I'm a bit curious if carefully crafted manual captions can trigger it to go off continuously.
vngzs 2y ago
It's not a complete mitigation, but you can pause your video history which may decrease the amount of information Google retains over time from this sort of analytics. I haven't dug into the privacy policy and I'm not sure it mentions if this feature affects backend data collection, however.
stuaxo 2y ago
I mean, they have auto generated subtitles so of course they have a text to reference.
crawshaw 2y ago
There isn't a feature a company as scrutinized as Google could launch that can't be described as "a little risky".
johnfn 2y ago
> it knows what is being said in those videos at the exact moment it is said. How did you think they did automated closed captioning..?
- slg 2y ago
  I don't know why you quoted this snippet to ask this question when I addressed it literally in the next sentence of my original comment, but I guess I need to reiterate it. Automatic transcripts/ closed captioning suggest Google heard what was said. This feature suggests Google understands what was said. Think of it like reading a foreign language that uses the same alphabet. You can give me some French text and I can read it well enough for a French speaker to understand it. That doesn't mean that I myself understand what I read. Transcripts are the former and this feature is the latter.
  - 8note 2y ago
    Does this feature suggest they understand what was said? I'd expect the button to light up at random times in a video about "smash the like button" causing the button to light up, rather than in the end call to action for the video where the video author actually wants the watcher to click the button. Similarly, I doubt it can properly understand when the video presenter implies the term "smash the like button" while instead say, leaving an empty space where they would usually say such a thing. If I pointed you at some french text and asked you to point at the term "le Chateau" you'd be able to do that without understanding french.
    - slg 2y ago
      Now this is just a semantic debate about whether a computer can even "understand" anything. The system is conditionally responding based upon the content of what was said. That indicates a level of sophistication in analyzing the content of the video that a transcript does not. I don't really care if you define that as "understanding" or not.
  - pb7 2y ago
    Does it understand it or does it have a regex for "smash that subscribe button"?
zisguyislow 2y ago
[flagged]
seydor 2y ago
> at the exact moment it is said. I mean, it has autogenerated captions, translated (which i use to learn languages, fun)
hammock 2y ago
I've got bad news about your Gmail...
- seanthemon 2y ago
  This is why I keep a buffer if 20k emails of junk. Goodluck finding out anything, I can't.
zamadatix 2y ago
Apart from whether or not it's really something new to users, it'd be interesting how many are actually concerned with the concept Google/YouTube has analyzed the content of videos it serves vs interested in what things that means are done (automatic video sections, better find in video, automatic summaries, whatever it is someone might want). The biggest issues tend to be when "Big Brother" style companies perform that kind of analysis on your content like the Microsoft AI screenshotting backlash.
- pndy 2y ago
  > the Microsoft AI screenshotting backlash I think I've missed this - what happen?
dakial1 2y ago
That's not an easter egg, that feature probably increased the number of likes in videos since it made the button easier to spot when users were looking for it (which is when it is mentioned on videos). So that sweet engagement KPI is positively impacted and Youtube's CRO/experiment/Ab testing team gets their cookies. There are probably various small tweaks like this in the UI.
- anticensor 2y ago
  Interaction reminders were actually against YouTube guidelines before this change has been implemented.
xcv123 2y ago
I don't like Google but this is not a Big Brother scenario. The videos are hosted on their own servers and are publicly available. They are not snooping on your private videos on your personal hard drive. How could they provide this service without analyzing the content of the videos? The cost of hiring humans to review and classify all of the content uploaded every day is prohibitive.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"It highlights how Google analyses the content of its videos..." Google analyses the content of the uploaders' videos yet "YouTube search", from the end user's perspective, is seemingly searching strings in titles, maybe tags. These titles generally suck for this purpose, even containing unicode garbage. Throw in all the "recommended" crap in the "results", videos that do not contain the strings being searched, and it barely feels like search at all. The end user is sent "results" she never asked for.
root_axis 2y ago
I'm not seeing the risk. It's mostly common knowledge that YouTube analyzes video content for dozens of reasons like Content ID, flagging for sensitive content, etc (e.g. applying covid19 warning labels). There's a whole bunch of lore about the types of words and phrases (such as slurs and profanity) that can affect algorithm rankings, monetization, or child-restriction. Doing a regex search for "smash that like button" is trivial by comparison.
xbmcuser 2y ago
comments like these are the same thing as wolf is coming and one major reason why more and more people ignore about encroaching on privacy by corporations

by slg 2y ago

gruez 2y ago

> It calls attention to the fact that Youtube isn't just serving me videos neutrally, it knows what is being said in those videos at the exact moment it is said. It highlights how much Google analyses the content of its videos in a way that more neutral features like automatic transcripts don't and in turn how much that can teach Google about me based on the videos I watch. How else do you think the "up next" and "recommended videos for you" feature works? Did you think they were serving up relevant videos purely out of chance? If anything a dumb rule like "highlight the subscribe button if the transcript mentions it" is much more benign then a recommendation engine that can somehow always serve you a relevant video.

queuebert 2y ago
The simplest recommender would use videos that were commonly watched afterwards by other people.
- Minor49er 2y ago
  That would be fun to exploit. Just get a few hundred accounts, have them watch a Mr. Beast video followed by a video you want to boost, and watch the numbers grow
  - xboxnolifes 2y ago
    Not sure even a few thousand accounts would make a dent in a Mr beast video count. Recommendation would go toward the 1 million accounts who watch another Mr beast video after.
    - Minor49er 2y ago
      True, though the recommendation engine on YouTube will suggest other alternatives that are not on the same channel. There would still be a positive effect
cheeseomlit 2y ago
You don't necessarily need to analyze every word in every video for recommendations- it could be as simple as 'users who liked this video also liked these other videos'
- conductr 2y ago
  You can also turn on subtitles and even have them translated, it's pretty obvious Google is doing a lot with the audio part of videos
everforward 2y ago
Up Next and recommended videos don't require understanding the content of the videos. They could, as an example, find other users that watch similar videos and pick a video you haven't seen out of the things the other users have watched. It wouldn't surprise me if they use transcripts, but neither feature strictly requires it. I think the real risk here is users extrapolating from "YouTube can automatically respond to the content of videos". The Mr Beast thing is still blowing up, could they automatically identify illegal lotteries? Could they identify things that aren't suitable for YouTube Kids but end up there anyways? So on and so forth, YouTube's moderation is basically always under fire. This seems like a risky mixed message to send. Being able to light up the Subscribe button doesn't imply the technical ability to do better moderation, but I also wouldn't want to be the guy that has to explain that and how it works to the Senate.
- xattt 2y ago
  It speaks to the fact that things that are most beneficial to Google have been finetuned to exploit eyeballs and pocketbooks. If they wanted to, or if their hand was forced, they’d be able to do the things that benefit the greater good. Don’t get started with the “it’s a slippery slope” kind of shit. Short of living in some society where it’s every man for himself, kids shouldn’t be playing lotteries
  - chgs 2y ago
    Many people in tech are big proponents of the “every man for himself” randian distopyas
  - everforward 2y ago
    There are significant differences in difficulty, but I do agree with the sentiment. Grepping for “like button” in a transcript is much easier and cheaper than training an LLM to check whether a lottery is legal or not. It also helps that there’s no counterparty risk with the like button. I don’t think anyone is trying to “trick” that feature, and it wouldn’t matter if they did.
- mcphage 2y ago
mathverse 2y ago
If u are from a small country and you travel a lot it absolutely throws google off. I never get any relevant ads or videos for me :(.
- conductr 2y ago
  I mostly use Youtube to watch home improvement / DIY / construction related stuff. They show me ads in Spanish. I'm probably the most stereotypical American white dude in Finance that speaks only English. What's weird is I've been using Google Search/Gmail basically since they became available and have bought their products and services for other stuff over the years and they have me pretty dialed in on their marketing elsewhere. YT specifically thinks otherwise.
slg 2y ago
>How else do you think the "up next" and "recommended videos for you" feature works? Did you think they were serving up relevant videos purely out of chance? It is absolutely possible to serve recommendations in a content agnostic way based on other user behavior. That is how the Youtube's recommendations worked at least initially. It should be obvious that they didn't have this ability to analyze content when Youtube started almost 20 years ago. And even in a content aware system, there is a difference between matching up keywords and understanding what those words mean. That is why an automatic transcript feels more neutral. That just transcribes what is being said. There is no implication of any analysis on the meaning of what is being said. >If anything a dumb rule like "highlight the subscribe button if the transcript mentions it" is much more benign then a recommendation engine that can somehow always serve you a relevant video. I'm not saying this feature is scarier than the recommendation engine. I'm saying Google revealing how much they know about the content of the video makes everything they do, including their recommendation engine, a little scarier.
- 8note 2y ago
  around 20 years ago mark all kinds of things would happen at different times of a video, with the tool tips, and end cards and what have you. CSS animations werent there I guess, but given a manual transcription, either by the submitter, or by a person watching, youtube definitely had the capability to do exactly this, maybe with the button being some flash animation.
  - slg 2y ago
    >...but given a manual transcription... youtube definitely had the capability to do exactly this... I mean the "given a manual transcription" condition means the very much didn't have "the capability to do exactly this". The animation itself isn't the interesting part here.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Google owned YouTube'a ability to analyze content at scale for copyrighted music is the only reason YouTube is still around today. That the engine that does that analysis might be doing more seems like not a stretch at all. How much easier is it to detect "smash that subscribe button" that "the > 30 seconds of music is possibly a copyrighted song of all the known songs"?
OJFord 2y ago
I'm not saying I thought this was the case, but I can think of: 1) similarity to other users (people who watched this also watched) 2) similarity in words in title or description (or the generated transcript)

munk-a 2y ago

Was this not already highlighted by ContentID, automatic topic tagging/recommendations, and auto-caption? I honestly suspect this feature is just implemented as a side effect as the auto-captioning... and now I'm a bit curious if carefully crafted manual captions can trigger it to go off continuously.

vngzs 2y ago

It's not a complete mitigation, but you can pause your video history which may decrease the amount of information Google retains over time from this sort of analytics. I haven't dug into the privacy policy and I'm not sure it mentions if this feature affects backend data collection, however.

stuaxo 2y ago

I mean, they have auto generated subtitles so of course they have a text to reference.

crawshaw 2y ago

There isn't a feature a company as scrutinized as Google could launch that can't be described as "a little risky".

johnfn 2y ago

> it knows what is being said in those videos at the exact moment it is said. How did you think they did automated closed captioning..?

slg 2y ago
I don't know why you quoted this snippet to ask this question when I addressed it literally in the next sentence of my original comment, but I guess I need to reiterate it. Automatic transcripts/ closed captioning suggest Google heard what was said. This feature suggests Google understands what was said. Think of it like reading a foreign language that uses the same alphabet. You can give me some French text and I can read it well enough for a French speaker to understand it. That doesn't mean that I myself understand what I read. Transcripts are the former and this feature is the latter.
- 8note 2y ago
  Does this feature suggest they understand what was said? I'd expect the button to light up at random times in a video about "smash the like button" causing the button to light up, rather than in the end call to action for the video where the video author actually wants the watcher to click the button. Similarly, I doubt it can properly understand when the video presenter implies the term "smash the like button" while instead say, leaving an empty space where they would usually say such a thing. If I pointed you at some french text and asked you to point at the term "le Chateau" you'd be able to do that without understanding french.
  - slg 2y ago
    Now this is just a semantic debate about whether a computer can even "understand" anything. The system is conditionally responding based upon the content of what was said. That indicates a level of sophistication in analyzing the content of the video that a transcript does not. I don't really care if you define that as "understanding" or not.
- pb7 2y ago
  Does it understand it or does it have a regex for "smash that subscribe button"?

zisguyislow 2y ago

[flagged]

seydor 2y ago

> at the exact moment it is said. I mean, it has autogenerated captions, translated (which i use to learn languages, fun)

hammock 2y ago

I've got bad news about your Gmail...

seanthemon 2y ago
This is why I keep a buffer if 20k emails of junk. Goodluck finding out anything, I can't.

zamadatix 2y ago

Apart from whether or not it's really something new to users, it'd be interesting how many are actually concerned with the concept Google/YouTube has analyzed the content of videos it serves vs interested in what things that means are done (automatic video sections, better find in video, automatic summaries, whatever it is someone might want). The biggest issues tend to be when "Big Brother" style companies perform that kind of analysis on your content like the Microsoft AI screenshotting backlash.

pndy 2y ago
> the Microsoft AI screenshotting backlash I think I've missed this - what happen?

dakial1 2y ago

That's not an easter egg, that feature probably increased the number of likes in videos since it made the button easier to spot when users were looking for it (which is when it is mentioned on videos). So that sweet engagement KPI is positively impacted and Youtube's CRO/experiment/Ab testing team gets their cookies. There are probably various small tweaks like this in the UI.

anticensor 2y ago
Interaction reminders were actually against YouTube guidelines before this change has been implemented.

xcv123 2y ago

I don't like Google but this is not a Big Brother scenario. The videos are hosted on their own servers and are publicly available. They are not snooping on your private videos on your personal hard drive. How could they provide this service without analyzing the content of the videos? The cost of hiring humans to review and classify all of the content uploaded every day is prohibitive.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"It highlights how Google analyses the content of its videos..." Google analyses the content of the uploaders' videos yet "YouTube search", from the end user's perspective, is seemingly searching strings in titles, maybe tags. These titles generally suck for this purpose, even containing unicode garbage. Throw in all the "recommended" crap in the "results", videos that do not contain the strings being searched, and it barely feels like search at all. The end user is sent "results" she never asked for.

root_axis 2y ago

I'm not seeing the risk. It's mostly common knowledge that YouTube analyzes video content for dozens of reasons like Content ID, flagging for sensitive content, etc (e.g. applying covid19 warning labels). There's a whole bunch of lore about the types of words and phrases (such as slurs and profanity) that can affect algorithm rankings, monetization, or child-restriction. Doing a regex search for "smash that like button" is trivial by comparison.

xbmcuser 2y ago

comments like these are the same thing as wolf is coming and one major reason why more and more people ignore about encroaching on privacy by corporations