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I noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video
by dmix 9mo ago
I noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video long enough the next one is likely to be another dog video.
- pandemic_region 9mo agoI've been insta-skipping tennis video's for months now. Still getting Federer on a daily basis.
- randysalami 9mo agoI’ve noticed the same thing and this creates such a negative user experience. Every short is a reaction test and if I fail, I get slop. Makes the whole experience very jarring (for better or for worse).
- datsci_est_2015 9mo agoFor better or worse with regards to my addiction, my subscriptions are all either science channels or high effort / high production comedy skits (e.g. DropoutTV). I still get slop, but I never subscribe and it mostly remains background noise
- AreShoesFeet000 9mo agoThat’s the point though. It may seem as if you’re not in control when scrolling, but you can adjust your behavior to get the content you’re looking for almost intuitively. That’s actually something good in my honest opinion.
- Jensson 9mo agoWhy is it good that you need self control to not get slop? Its much better if you can just turn that off and relax rather than having to stay alert to avoid certain content that it tries to trick you to serve you more slop. Distancing yourself from temptations is an effective and proven way to get rid of addictions, the programs constantly trying to get you to relapse is not a good feature. Like imagine a fridge that constantly puts in beer, that would be very bad for alcoholics and people would just say "just don't drink the beer?" even though this is a real problem with an easy fix.
- AreShoesFeet000 9mo agoIt’s because content curation is inherently impossible to reach the same level of relevance as direct feedback from user behavior. You mix in all kinds of biases, commercial interests, ideology of the curator, etc, and you inevitably get irrelevant slop. The algorithm puts you in control a little bit more.
- Jensson 9mo ago> The algorithm puts you in control a little bit more. Why not let you choose to get a less addictive algorithm? Older algorithms were less addictive, so its not at all impossible to do this, many users would want this.
- kylecazar 9mo agoThey're optimizing for time spent on the platform.
- Jensson 9mo agoAnd that is why these algorithms needs to be regulated. People don't want to pick the algorithm that makes them spend the most time possible on their phones, many would want an algorithm that optimizes for quality rather than quantity on the app so they get more time to do other things. But corporations doesn't want to provide that because they don't earn anything from it.
- direwolf20 9mo agoI have YouTube Premium. They should be doing the opposite. Getting me off the platform as quickly as possible so they get to keep a bigger cut of my fixed payment.
- AreShoesFeet000 9mo agoI just don’t think that the addiction is exclusively due to the algorithm. There’s really a lack of affordable varied options for learning trade and entertainment. We say in Portuguese: You shouldn’t throw the baby away along with the water you used to bathe.
- Forgeties79 9mo agoI don’t agree tbh. This is part of how people wind up down extremist rabbit holes. If you’re just lazily scrolling it can easily trap you in its gravity well.
- AreShoesFeet000 9mo agoBut you can get into extremist rabbit holes independently of control surface. Remember 4chan? Dangerous content is a matter of moderation regardless of interfacing.
- Forgeties79 9mo ago4chan is nothing like TikTok, though yes I agree heavy moderation is necessary for both.
- boelboel 9mo ago4chan has a lot less extremism than people imagine, rspecially compared to platforms like Instagram or Facebook. It's mostly concentrated on certain boards. The reputation of being extremist did more 'in favour' of its extremism than the original userbase and design ever did.
- Forgeties79 9mo ago4chan is only outdone by 8chan. “It’s only concentrated on certain boards” is the same lame excuse Reddit used to ignore /r/thedonald and now /r/conservative.
- boelboel 9mo ago4chan doesn't use algorithms to push users to certain boards afaik, makes it better than the others in its design. I'm not arguing 4chan is great but it's not nearly as impactful as Facebook, Twitter or TikTok in creating extremism.
- 9mo ago
- xp84 9mo agoI try to react as “violently” as possible to any slop and low-quality crap (e.g. stupid “life hacks” purposely bad to ragebait the comments). On YouTube it’s called “Don’t recommend this channel” and on Facebook it’s multiple taps but you can “Hide All From…” Basically, I don’t trust that thumbs down is sufficient. It is of course silly, since there are no doubt millions of bad channels and I probably can’t mute them all.
- MengerSponge 9mo agoThey built a slop machine, not something tuned for positive UX. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- HappMacDonald 9mo agoAt the risk of going off on a tangent about that maxim; I feel like it's just misusing the word "purpose". Maybe it would be cleaner to state that a system has no purpose (at least not until it is sentient), instead it has behaviors. Then one can observe that the purpose of the designers or maintainers of a system simply happens to be at odds (or as AI safety researchers would say, are "out of alignment with") the behavior of the system. That all of course presupposes that one can accurately deduce the purposes of the designers/maintainers.. In the case of TikTok, I'd bet that we are all in agreement that their purpose is nothing more nor less than maximal value-extraction from people wishing to express themselves with videos multiplied against an audience of people who wish to view videos multiplied again against advertisers who want to insert propaganda into eyeballs.
- direwolf20 9mo agoIf a system is not fulfilling its purpose, the system is changed. If the system is not changed, it is fulfilling its purpose.
- BoxOfRain 9mo agoOne of my gripes with youtube at the moment is that they break my adblock filters to remove shorts more often than they break the filters stopping the actual ads.
- sidharthv 9mo agoI naively searched in the mobile app settings for a way to turn off shorts, before realising there will not be one.
- ffsm8 9mo agoYou can't turn it off entirely, but if you keep using "show less shorts" from the 3 dot menu it eventually goes away, mostly...
- direwolf20 9mo agoIt comes back. It acts like it executed shortiness+=1 every day, and "show fewer shorts" does shortiness-=10 or thereabouts. The shorts position on the home screen is based on this hidden shortiness variable. It always bubbles back to the top unless you keep pressing "show fewer shorts" whenever you see it.
- ffsm8 9mo agoStrange, for me it only comes back up if I get baited into clicking on any short (or have one linked to me)
- mghackerlady 9mo agoIf you're on android it's better to just use revanced or something
- notpushkin 9mo agoYou can use NewPipe or YouTube ReVanced, or set up a “child” account and disable Shorts in the parental restrictions settings.
- beAbU 9mo agoFacebook does the same. The longer I dwell on an image post, the more likely the next batch of posts would be similar
- coliveira 9mo agoThe right way to look at these networks is that people are being trained by the algorithm, not the other way around. The ultimate goal is to elicit behaviors in humans, normally to spend more time and spend more money in the platform, but also for other goals that may be designed by the owners of the network.
- touristtam 9mo agoIs amazon using the same thing??? I can't count the number of times I am getting recommended the EXACT same type of product I just purchased.
- beAbU 9mo agoOn amazon.ie I'm convinced they are running only two ads, because all I'm ever seeing are ads for grime brushes and window squeegees. Literally nothing else.
- kgeist 9mo agoIt creates a weird feedback loop: after I watch video A, it recommends a similar video B, and if I make the mistake of watching that too, it then recommends video C on the same topic. Suddenly my feed is nothing but Stranger Things shorts for two whole days (literally not a single video about anything else). Skipping or disliking didn't help, then somehow it went back to normal after two days.
- rjh29 9mo agoyoutube's algorithm seems to be "oh you watched this video? now here's every other video by this creator, pretty much without a break, until you downvote it" It never reliably gives me videos similar but not exactly the same, i.e. things I might be interested in.
- sensanaty 9mo agoFor me it's the same exact 5 videos on repeat, over and over and over again. I've gotten in a loop a lot of times, where it'll autoplay the same video I just watched, it's absolute madness