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>by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch. I get what your advice is about but to add some nuance which didn't cover... you should consider t

by jasode 2y ago

>by Alec's excellent video which I recommend everyone watch. I get what your advice is about but to add some nuance which didn't cover... you should consider that I learned of Alec's Technology Connections channel 9 years ago because the Youtube algorithm suggested it to me. Why did Youtube do that? It was because I had watched Ben's Applied Science excellent video showing vinyl grooves under an electron microscope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8 So the first Alec video I got exposed to was his related topic on vinyl records (click "Oldest" to see them) : https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections/videos https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections/videos I'd argue that the Youtube algorithm is very good at finding adjacent videos of interest especially in educational topics and DIY repair tutorials. You're suggesting people go to Youtube subscriptions feeds but people have a list of favorites in their subscriptions often because of the algorithm. There's a bit of chicken-vs-egg situation going on there. What a good algorithm does is help users with the Explore-vs-Exploit tradeoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitation_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati... - Explore --> Youtube algorithm sidebar recommendations of related videos. - Exploit --> add a worthy creator to subscription feed and get alerted to new releases from that person The "explore" part is helped by algorithms because they can suggest videos you would have never thought of because you don't know the keywords or jargon to type into a Youtube search box to get to it directly. "You don't know what you don't know." But don't use the algorithm for politics or click on anything that has a thumbnail with the shocked Pikachu face. That just starts a feedback loop of crap. Arguably, the algorithms could put one into a non-productive engagement loop never to escape. Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more. So... Algorithms can be bad ... but you can also make them work for you.

pests 2y ago
I agree with you almost completely. I never used YT as a content source until a few years ago - I’d never open the app and only watch videos linked or embedded / looking up a specific how to video. Now it’s different though. I never go to my subscription feed - the front page algo keeps me up to date on any new content from people I want to see updates on. I’ve noticed too it almost has a “shadow subscription” where even though I am not subscribed to certain channels, it knows I watch every video by them so it gets on my front page too. The front page really has a “vibe” that follows my interests around. Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more of the front page being those topics. Get a new interest in pyramids? Devlogs? Nature? The front page slowly decays old interests and promotes new ones. Which is again why I don’t check my sub feed - it’s a graveyard of interests, many of which I don’t care about right now. The algo surfaces the ones I do.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more In my experience it's "watch one video outside of your recommendations and then half your next set of recommendations will be related to that". I'm scared to click on anything I'm not already subscribed to for fear of trashing the home page.
  - gtirloni 2y ago
    You can (almost) always tell you're not interested in those videos and it slowly stops suggesting them. You can also ask it to never recommend a certain channel.
    - TylerE 2y ago
      You can’t, however stop it from suggestion huge blocks of shorts or crappy free to play games.
      - dmd 2y ago
        You somehow must be able to, as everyone I know has feeds full of that sort of thing, and I've never seen even one short or game on my youtube home page.
        immibis 2y ago
        Nope. You specifically can't disable shorts, no matter how much you want to - so much that YouTube Revanced has this feature.
        zimpenfish 2y ago
        > You specifically can't disable shorts You can use the three dots to say "Not Interested" on the Shorts shelf but it only hides it for 30 days and then the insidious little worm comes right back.
      - 2y ago
tom_usher 2y ago
Thanks, this is an important nuance. Recommendation algorithms are absolutely useful, and if you're so inclined you can absolutely make them work for you, but this is about making educated, conscious decisions about what you click next in your 'Related videos' section. Algorithmic feeds don't give us that opportunity - they're designed to require minimal effort and to keep the dopamine coming without any conscious decisions.
alpinisme 2y ago
One point to observe here is that there’s a difference between a “related content” section when viewing specific content and the more general algorithmic feed that is designed to be the primary mode of discovery and interaction.
Terr_ 2y ago
Yeah, pro/anti "algorithms" is too reductive, especially since the old status-quo was also an algorithm of people and processes. I'd rather use a lens more like all the open-source/free-software concerns about controlling your own computer: 1. Can I see how the recommendation algorithm is intended to work? The site-owner says it works for my benefit, but what if they're mistaken, or lying? 2. What has it recorded about my interests, and how can I fix bad records that don't represent them? 3. When it's not working well--or harmfully exploiting my baser weaknesses--how can I change to a different one?
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Kind of comes down to one of Neil Postman's questions "Whose problem is it that it solves?" It's possible to get some benefit from an algorithm/process, just as a side effect, that was never designed to work in your interest and is an opaque cloud service. Maybe the service is solving the network owner's problem of selling you to advertisers. If you want to maximise for "interest and relevance to my life goals" there's nothing to stop you running your own "algorithm" of course, except any obstacles put in your way by the data network owner. For that reason it's more important to pay attention to the freedom of the network (open API, federated, maximally distributed etc) than the algorithms that run on it. If you control the former you control the latter. HN (the network) seems to allow a lot from the plethora of viewers I've seen.
  - DavidPiper 2y ago
    This seems like the perfect place to once again recommend "Amusing Ourselves To Death" :-) I also read "Technopoly" recently, and while it didn't have quite the same impact on me, I can't deny that it accurately describes the techno-political moment we're currently living in. Well worth the time.
harrall 2y ago
I dislike any politics or clickbait too and it doesn’t come back. I have no complaints about my Instagram and YouTube feeds. They give good recommendations.
- xenophonf 2y ago
  You're basically training their advertising model for them, so yay for the Algorithm, I guess.
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  > I dislike any politics TikTok in particular sneaks politics into everything. Even if it's not explicitly political. I asked Deepseek once to walk me through what it knows about TikTok and it claimed the Chinese version uses an RL approach to sprinkle socialist core values into your feed even if you explicitly don't want politics. It also claimed TikTok absolutely promises it doesn't do this in the US. I'm not really convinced Deepseek knows what it's talking about but it was pretty plausible technically. But in practice it's easy to tell if someone even in the US spends a lot of time on TikTok base on their strongly held opinions even when they explicitly say they never watch political content. I doubt other social media companies do this because they aren't created specifically for political propaganda like TikTok is, but it's possible they do.
  - tehjoker 2y ago
    good, they should sprinkle socialist values in. what's the other option, passive acceptance of capitalist exploitation? people need to be educated.
    - ants_everywhere 2y ago
      You may want to do some basic background reading on what socialism actually is. People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model. Mixed economies with social welfare guarantees are mainstream economics. Actual socialism in the style practiced in reality by countries implementing socialism is mainly characterized by the absence of human rights (including zero worker rights), mass murder, poverty, and a ruling elite that are functionally oligarchs who have enslaved the rest of the population. And on top of this, all socialist states that I'm aware of have re-introduced markets in some form but retaining the dictatorship structure. Socialism in the past (e.g. in the 18th century) has referred to other ideas, but it doesn't really anymore. But even if you were to believe somehow that there's some morally redeemable version of socialism that has somehow just managed to hide all this time, the actual version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US.
ants_everywhere 2y ago
> Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more. This may also be an artifact of the fact that you are the sort of person who seeks out educational content. I.e. you have a high need for intellectual stimulation. That makes you an outlier among all people who use social media. Personally I think technical people underestimate the negative impacts of the models that drive the algorithms. We are basically training humans via a reward function that maximizes watch time. We are also heavily correlating errors in knowledge because popular stuff gets boosted so much. Correlated errors are bad for rubustness.
- jazzdev 2y ago
  YouTube seems less of a social media site than Facebook and Twitter to me. But maybe that's because I mostly use it for educational content also. I want a good recommendation engine, but I don't care what videos my friends and neighbors are watching.
pj_mukh 2y ago
In today's ChatGPT age, I'm sure people are attempting to build contextually aware alternatives to feeds? Something that will filter out the anger, but keep the insight. I vaguely remember someone posting about a tldr for twitter. Anyone know of tools like that?
karmakaze 2y ago
I started using Youtube as a frequent content source in the past year. I've been aggressively curating my recommendations by clicking "Not interested" on anything I don't want to see a lot of. If I'm curious I'll watch the one video but in Incognito. If a channel gets repeatedly re-recommended I don't hesitate to use "Don't recommend channel". I also +like everything I've watched and subscribe to channels I'll more likely watch than not watch new content. Getting recommendations pruned feels like getting to a zero email Inbox.
- chipsrafferty 2y ago
  Unfortunately, it doesn't really work like that. If you say "Don't recommend channel", the channel may in fact be recommended and similar channels will definitely still be recommended. "Not interested" works even less accurately.
  - karmakaze 2y ago
    IME, Not interested at least prevents that single video from showing in my feed. It may reduce similar content from same or other channels--I see some reductions. Don't recommend channel always works for me as far as I noticed, except in search results which seems correct. I never expected it to not recommend similar channels, e.g. I filtered out Linus Tech Tips but watch similar content. It probably helps that I only permit a handful of specific topics: physics, fun math, synthesizers (but not modular), tiny bit of music theory/training, StarCraft 2 (not SC1/BW), and recently the Nvidia/AMD GPU release saga.
nativeit 2y ago
RIYL: Tom Scott's There Is No Algorithm For Truth [1] delivered to the Royal Society in October 2019. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU
danaris 2y ago
I'd be very skeptical of applying anything we knew about the YouTube algorithm 9 years ago to it, or any algorithm, today. Google, Facebook, and the other algorithm-driven tech companies have been aggressively enshittifying their products at least since 2020. "I got fun/useful videos out of the YouTube algorithm in 2016" says nothing about what that algorithm is like in 2025, given that they can change it silently on a whim.
wh0knows 2y ago
The issue is that algorithms are like a casino for your time. We all know that gambling addicts exist and how destructive it is to their lives, the casino exploits behaviors and gets all their money. As a result people know casinos are dangerous, reasonable people avoid them, are warned about them, and the government forces regulation to reduce their ability to exploit vulnerable people. Imagine if none of these controls existed and nobody talked about or generally knew that casinos were dangerous. Imagine if the casinos were 100x better at exploiting you and you were forced to walk through a casino every time you leave your house. You’d get a lot more people having their lives destroyed. So what this video tries to do is important, naming the term, “algorithmic complacency”, allows it to be recognized, discussed, and actively kept in check by users. Ideally regulated by the government as well, just like casinos. The casino also provides a service, entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with a reasonable person attending, spending some money and being entertained. But we as a society recognize that a company exploiting behaviors to get all of a person’s money, is bad, and try to limit that negative outcome even though we still allow casinos to exist. Time, attention, and focus is so abstract people don’t even realize they’re spending it, or how modified their behavior has become because of the algorithm’s exploitation. As a result we let companies who are 100x better at manipulation than casinos operate without so much as mentioning they’re doing it, and steal increasing amounts of a user’s time.
Nickolya 2y ago
You make a valid point about the benefits of algorithms in content discovery. While they can enhance our experience by introducing relevant material, it's crucial to maintain control over our consumption to avoid potential echo chambers. On a related note, for those looking to access diverse content without regional restrictions, reliable proxy services can be invaluable. NodeMaven offers high-quality proxies that ensure secure and unrestricted browsing. I can drop a link for everyone as Iir realy helped me during mu thesis https://nodemaven.com/proxies/residential-proxies/ https://nodemaven.com/proxies/residential-proxies/.
computably 2y ago
> Arguably, the algorithms could put one into a non-productive engagement loop never to escape. Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more. In my personal experience, "edutainment" can certainly be addictive, and more often than not, consuming it is "unproductive" because (1) consuming content aimlessly is intrinsically mostly passive, (2) passive consumption is ineffective for retaininig knowledge or building understanding, (3) content is often superficially interesting because of a spectacular and/or highly simplified presentation. This is only a counterpoint to the idea that educational content is limited in its potential to be addictive/unproductive; there is still, obviously, a great positive potential to high-quality educational content.

by jasode 2y ago

pests 2y ago

I agree with you almost completely. I never used YT as a content source until a few years ago - I’d never open the app and only watch videos linked or embedded / looking up a specific how to video. Now it’s different though. I never go to my subscription feed - the front page algo keeps me up to date on any new content from people I want to see updates on. I’ve noticed too it almost has a “shadow subscription” where even though I am not subscribed to certain channels, it knows I watch every video by them so it gets on my front page too. The front page really has a “vibe” that follows my interests around. Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more of the front page being those topics. Get a new interest in pyramids? Devlogs? Nature? The front page slowly decays old interests and promotes new ones. Which is again why I don’t check my sub feed - it’s a graveyard of interests, many of which I don’t care about right now. The algo surfaces the ones I do.

zimpenfish 2y ago
> Watch a few too many Minecraft videos or car repair and soon you start seeing more and more In my experience it's "watch one video outside of your recommendations and then half your next set of recommendations will be related to that". I'm scared to click on anything I'm not already subscribed to for fear of trashing the home page.
- gtirloni 2y ago
  You can (almost) always tell you're not interested in those videos and it slowly stops suggesting them. You can also ask it to never recommend a certain channel.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    You can’t, however stop it from suggestion huge blocks of shorts or crappy free to play games.
    - dmd 2y ago
      You somehow must be able to, as everyone I know has feeds full of that sort of thing, and I've never seen even one short or game on my youtube home page.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Nope. You specifically can't disable shorts, no matter how much you want to - so much that YouTube Revanced has this feature.
        zimpenfish 2y ago
        > You specifically can't disable shorts You can use the three dots to say "Not Interested" on the Shorts shelf but it only hides it for 30 days and then the insidious little worm comes right back.
    - 2y ago

tom_usher 2y ago

Thanks, this is an important nuance. Recommendation algorithms are absolutely useful, and if you're so inclined you can absolutely make them work for you, but this is about making educated, conscious decisions about what you click next in your 'Related videos' section. Algorithmic feeds don't give us that opportunity - they're designed to require minimal effort and to keep the dopamine coming without any conscious decisions.

alpinisme 2y ago

One point to observe here is that there’s a difference between a “related content” section when viewing specific content and the more general algorithmic feed that is designed to be the primary mode of discovery and interaction.

Terr_ 2y ago

Yeah, pro/anti "algorithms" is too reductive, especially since the old status-quo was also an algorithm of people and processes. I'd rather use a lens more like all the open-source/free-software concerns about controlling your own computer: 1. Can I see how the recommendation algorithm is intended to work? The site-owner says it works for my benefit, but what if they're mistaken, or lying? 2. What has it recorded about my interests, and how can I fix bad records that don't represent them? 3. When it's not working well--or harmfully exploiting my baser weaknesses--how can I change to a different one?

nonrandomstring 2y ago
Kind of comes down to one of Neil Postman's questions "Whose problem is it that it solves?" It's possible to get some benefit from an algorithm/process, just as a side effect, that was never designed to work in your interest and is an opaque cloud service. Maybe the service is solving the network owner's problem of selling you to advertisers. If you want to maximise for "interest and relevance to my life goals" there's nothing to stop you running your own "algorithm" of course, except any obstacles put in your way by the data network owner. For that reason it's more important to pay attention to the freedom of the network (open API, federated, maximally distributed etc) than the algorithms that run on it. If you control the former you control the latter. HN (the network) seems to allow a lot from the plethora of viewers I've seen.
- DavidPiper 2y ago
  This seems like the perfect place to once again recommend "Amusing Ourselves To Death" :-) I also read "Technopoly" recently, and while it didn't have quite the same impact on me, I can't deny that it accurately describes the techno-political moment we're currently living in. Well worth the time.

harrall 2y ago

I dislike any politics or clickbait too and it doesn’t come back. I have no complaints about my Instagram and YouTube feeds. They give good recommendations.

xenophonf 2y ago
You're basically training their advertising model for them, so yay for the Algorithm, I guess.
ants_everywhere 2y ago
> I dislike any politics TikTok in particular sneaks politics into everything. Even if it's not explicitly political. I asked Deepseek once to walk me through what it knows about TikTok and it claimed the Chinese version uses an RL approach to sprinkle socialist core values into your feed even if you explicitly don't want politics. It also claimed TikTok absolutely promises it doesn't do this in the US. I'm not really convinced Deepseek knows what it's talking about but it was pretty plausible technically. But in practice it's easy to tell if someone even in the US spends a lot of time on TikTok base on their strongly held opinions even when they explicitly say they never watch political content. I doubt other social media companies do this because they aren't created specifically for political propaganda like TikTok is, but it's possible they do.
- tehjoker 2y ago
  good, they should sprinkle socialist values in. what's the other option, passive acceptance of capitalist exploitation? people need to be educated.
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    You may want to do some basic background reading on what socialism actually is. People in the US tend to think it refers to things that are actually mixed economies or primarily market economies with strong social guarantees. Think things like the Nordic model or the European model. Mixed economies with social welfare guarantees are mainstream economics. Actual socialism in the style practiced in reality by countries implementing socialism is mainly characterized by the absence of human rights (including zero worker rights), mass murder, poverty, and a ruling elite that are functionally oligarchs who have enslaved the rest of the population. And on top of this, all socialist states that I'm aware of have re-introduced markets in some form but retaining the dictatorship structure. Socialism in the past (e.g. in the 18th century) has referred to other ideas, but it doesn't really anymore. But even if you were to believe somehow that there's some morally redeemable version of socialism that has somehow just managed to hide all this time, the actual version of socialism embraced by China and promoted on TikTok is fully authoritarian, anti-democratic, and does nothing to improve economic equality in the US.

ants_everywhere 2y ago

> Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more. This may also be an artifact of the fact that you are the sort of person who seeks out educational content. I.e. you have a high need for intellectual stimulation. That makes you an outlier among all people who use social media. Personally I think technical people underestimate the negative impacts of the models that drive the algorithms. We are basically training humans via a reward function that maximizes watch time. We are also heavily correlating errors in knowledge because popular stuff gets boosted so much. Correlated errors are bad for rubustness.

jazzdev 2y ago
YouTube seems less of a social media site than Facebook and Twitter to me. But maybe that's because I mostly use it for educational content also. I want a good recommendation engine, but I don't care what videos my friends and neighbors are watching.

pj_mukh 2y ago

In today's ChatGPT age, I'm sure people are attempting to build contextually aware alternatives to feeds? Something that will filter out the anger, but keep the insight. I vaguely remember someone posting about a tldr for twitter. Anyone know of tools like that?

karmakaze 2y ago

I started using Youtube as a frequent content source in the past year. I've been aggressively curating my recommendations by clicking "Not interested" on anything I don't want to see a lot of. If I'm curious I'll watch the one video but in Incognito. If a channel gets repeatedly re-recommended I don't hesitate to use "Don't recommend channel". I also +like everything I've watched and subscribe to channels I'll more likely watch than not watch new content. Getting recommendations pruned feels like getting to a zero email Inbox.

chipsrafferty 2y ago
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work like that. If you say "Don't recommend channel", the channel may in fact be recommended and similar channels will definitely still be recommended. "Not interested" works even less accurately.
- karmakaze 2y ago
  IME, Not interested at least prevents that single video from showing in my feed. It may reduce similar content from same or other channels--I see some reductions. Don't recommend channel always works for me as far as I noticed, except in search results which seems correct. I never expected it to not recommend similar channels, e.g. I filtered out Linus Tech Tips but watch similar content. It probably helps that I only permit a handful of specific topics: physics, fun math, synthesizers (but not modular), tiny bit of music theory/training, StarCraft 2 (not SC1/BW), and recently the Nvidia/AMD GPU release saga.

nativeit 2y ago

RIYL: Tom Scott's There Is No Algorithm For Truth [1] delivered to the Royal Society in October 2019. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU

danaris 2y ago

I'd be very skeptical of applying anything we knew about the YouTube algorithm 9 years ago to it, or any algorithm, today. Google, Facebook, and the other algorithm-driven tech companies have been aggressively enshittifying their products at least since 2020. "I got fun/useful videos out of the YouTube algorithm in 2016" says nothing about what that algorithm is like in 2025, given that they can change it silently on a whim.

wh0knows 2y ago

The issue is that algorithms are like a casino for your time. We all know that gambling addicts exist and how destructive it is to their lives, the casino exploits behaviors and gets all their money. As a result people know casinos are dangerous, reasonable people avoid them, are warned about them, and the government forces regulation to reduce their ability to exploit vulnerable people. Imagine if none of these controls existed and nobody talked about or generally knew that casinos were dangerous. Imagine if the casinos were 100x better at exploiting you and you were forced to walk through a casino every time you leave your house. You’d get a lot more people having their lives destroyed. So what this video tries to do is important, naming the term, “algorithmic complacency”, allows it to be recognized, discussed, and actively kept in check by users. Ideally regulated by the government as well, just like casinos. The casino also provides a service, entertainment, there’s nothing wrong with a reasonable person attending, spending some money and being entertained. But we as a society recognize that a company exploiting behaviors to get all of a person’s money, is bad, and try to limit that negative outcome even though we still allow casinos to exist. Time, attention, and focus is so abstract people don’t even realize they’re spending it, or how modified their behavior has become because of the algorithm’s exploitation. As a result we let companies who are 100x better at manipulation than casinos operate without so much as mentioning they’re doing it, and steal increasing amounts of a user’s time.

Nickolya 2y ago

You make a valid point about the benefits of algorithms in content discovery. While they can enhance our experience by introducing relevant material, it's crucial to maintain control over our consumption to avoid potential echo chambers. On a related note, for those looking to access diverse content without regional restrictions, reliable proxy services can be invaluable. NodeMaven offers high-quality proxies that ensure secure and unrestricted browsing. I can drop a link for everyone as Iir realy helped me during mu thesis https://nodemaven.com/proxies/residential-proxies/ https://nodemaven.com/proxies/residential-proxies/.

computably 2y ago

> Arguably, the algorithms could put one into a non-productive engagement loop never to escape. Personally, I don't think it's a big risk for educational/DIY topics because your brain gets saturated with "too much information" and hits a stopping point where you don't want to learn any more. In my personal experience, "edutainment" can certainly be addictive, and more often than not, consuming it is "unproductive" because (1) consuming content aimlessly is intrinsically mostly passive, (2) passive consumption is ineffective for retaininig knowledge or building understanding, (3) content is often superficially interesting because of a spectacular and/or highly simplified presentation. This is only a counterpoint to the idea that educational content is limited in its potential to be addictive/unproductive; there is still, obviously, a great positive potential to high-quality educational content.