6 ms·

So the user opens the app - what is the first video you show them? How does 'the user decide' from the millions upon millions of videos there are? If the user

So the user opens the app - what is the first video you show them? How does 'the user decide' from the millions upon millions of videos there are? If the user can search like in Youtube then how do you rank the results? That's also an algorithm. It isn't pretty easy to solve at all.

noprocrasted 5mo ago
> what is the first video you show them Whatever is latest posted across their followings/subscriptions?
- hug 5mo ago
  That’s also an algorithm. An unsophisticated one, but an algorithm nonetheless. You can (and should) argue that such a simple algorithm doesn’t “count”, but fundamentally the exact wording of the grandparent post never works, legislatively. Lawyers will lawyer.
  - NekkoDroid 5mo ago
    > That’s also an algorithm. An unsophisticated one, but an algorithm nonetheless. The problem always has been "(personalized) opaque algorithms". Time sorted by followers isn't really opaque, nor is "sorted by likes" or whatever. The problem is always pulling in parameters that a users either has no active control over or are so variable they effectively could be random.
  - xigoi 5mo ago
    It’s not about whether there is an algorithm, but whether it’s controlled by the user.
  - alkonaut 5mo ago
    Can everyone just please stop saying "well ackshually sorting is done with an algorithm" and just assume at least not-idiotic-intent here? No no one will ban "algorithms" or suggests anything of that kind. Yes it's a terrible name. Yes it will be hard to formulate what's allowed and what isn't. But a very simple litmus test is: what are the inputs to the algorithm? users coarse geographic location? Fine AI detected language of the content? Fine global popularity of the video clip? fine user's past behavior: number of videos with similar content they watched? Average number of seconds this particular user usually waits until scrolling further? The pattern is obvious. Personalized algorithms is what's targeted. Let's keep the discussion intelligent.
    - anjc 5mo ago
      Your litmus test isn't correct and your assumption of personalisation isn't correct either. All of the criteria that you see as fine are controlled under the relevant legislation and are considered personalisation, requiring transparency etc. Furthermore, bills have been brought to EU parliaments that have erroneously attempted to ban all forms of ranking, which would include even the most basic information retrieval algorithms. So it isn't obvious at all what is meant by 'algorithm'.
- vasco 5mo ago
  If they just signed up they have no followings or subscriptions. So now what, you need to show accounts to follow first? Thats the same problem as deciding what the first video to show is. How do you decide who they should follow? Or the vision is that you can only have friends as if it's 2005 and you can't discover anything serendipitously? I don't consume any content from my friends on something like tiktok where I'm interested in discovering people that have good content under topics I'm interested in. I don't know who those people are and I want to discover new ones that come up not just follow some already popular accounts.
  - Gigachad 5mo ago
    Undoubtably the change needed here will introduce friction, will reduce viewing time, and society will be better off for it. The whole idea here is to make content consumption more deliberate and mindful rather than just opening the app and veging out to an endless feed of slop.
    - vasco 5mo ago
      You have a lot of certainties. Say will people in hospital bed for 2 weeks agree with you?
  - hhjinks 5mo ago
    >So now what, you need to show accounts to follow first Youtube won't show you anything at all if you have a new account with watch history turned off. It says something like "turn on watch history and watch videos so we can recommend some for you".
pessimizer 5mo ago
This seems to be consciously dishonest. Show them "most recent" or "most upvoted" or "A to Z." Pretending like this is hard is bizarre. People have always selected sort and filter algorithms, until companies started taking them away.
Computer0 5mo ago
I made a new YouTube account recently and my homepage was blank. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053817
- walthamstow 5mo ago
  Same thing happens on LinkedIn if you don't follow anybody, the feed is just blank
wyre 5mo ago
These are multi-billion dollar companies. Its okay if they have some hard problems to solve.
- SecretDreams 5mo ago
  Won't anyone think of the multibillion dollar technolords? They are people too!
alkonaut 5mo ago
In the case of Instagram: You show the videos from the people you follow on instagram, then no more short videos at all. Possibly a search box. If you search on youtube then it can rank any way it wants, just not use e.g. anything from the viewing history. No "related videos" column. That's what YouTube used to be. But YouTube (unlike TikTok) worked well before it had rabbit holes. For TikTok the situation is worse. Their whole app just doesn't exist unless you have the custom feeds. This would make YouTube be 2010 youtube, Instagram be 2010 Instagram (great!) but it would effectively be a ban of TikTok's whole functionality (again, great!).
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- HPsquared 5mo ago
  There is no going back to the 2010 internet unless you confiscate everyone's phones.
  - alkonaut 5mo ago
    Not sure what confiscation would accomplish that regulation couldn’t? I mean we’re all aware that if regulators target TikTok then a new app would pop up and take its place. But the thing about regulation is that it doesn’t need to be water tight. You can just target a small handful of large players and it will improve the situation in practice. It doesn’t matter if 998/1000 apps use addictive feeds if the largest two apps don’t and they have 90% of users/views.
    - Aurornis 5mo ago
      It’s naive to think that regulation is going to cover the entire global internet. If you regulated domestic companies out of existence, global options would pop up in their place. You could try to block them all in app stores but people would go to the web views.
      - alkonaut 5mo ago
denismi 5mo ago
The first unwatched video from the user's followed/subscribed channels. Chronological, reverse chronological, sorted alphabetically, by the user's channel prioritisation, by likes, by views... whatever the user chooses. And then an end of feed. For new users? A search bar and a set of (human? AI?) curated seed recommendations that the platform is comfortable with being held liable for.
butlike 5mo ago
Do it like a library. When a person walks into a library, they're presented with a short curated list of books suggested from the librarian. All visitors to the library see the same books. From there, the visitor can go about their business searching for what they want. If they don't know what they want, perhaps a good use case for the newfangled LLM-search we have now would be "What's an interesting or popular topic I haven't searched for before?" to which the AI will respond with a list of newly searchable terms.
- aembleton 5mo ago
  How often can the librarian update the curated list of books? Once a day? Once per minutes? Once per ms?
thinkingtoilet 5mo ago
It's very easy. "So the user opens the app - what is the first video you show them?" You don't. How about that?
phtrivier 5mo ago
Of course it's easy: such decisions were taken _before_ the feeds where algorithmically built. You rely on unambigous, "physical" properties of the videos. There is a physical property of all the videos: the time of publication. There is a physical property of all the channels: did you subscribe to it, or not ? So, you show, in (reverse) chronological order of publication, the list of videos published by the channels you subscribed to. Now, of course, a brand new user would have no subscription - you show them a search box. But then, now, your search algorithm has to weight the various channels that match - but your algo can be relatively transparent, relatively auditable, and the same for all users (unless given explicit preferences, and of course national laws, etc, etc...) I'm sorry, but, I have a "subscriptions" page in youtube or substack, and they're chronological, and they show me what I want to watch. You keep that. There is a "home" page in both service that is algoritmically built, and they show me crap that the algo want me to watch. You get rid of that. Do this, and I can consider you a "neutral" actor, and accept that you shift the blame to content producer. Or, keep the algo feed, but don't take money from advertiser when I watch yet another flat earther video because YOU decided it was trending. If you want to decide what I watch, and make money from that decision - congrats, you are an editor. You get the earnings, and the responsibility. Please don't tell me, with a straight face, that the people who build the algo don't "decide" what I watch. If they want to tweak the algo to downgrade the flamewars and outrage and conspiracy theories and violence and abuse, they can. They do not want to, for business reasons. [1] That's fair, up to a point - we need publications with editors that agree on having "edgy" content. I'm not advocating for blanket censorship. I did not like social network preventing me from _sharing_ articles about Biden's son laptop (this was actually beyond the law, but somehow they managed to find the resources and programmers to implement _that_, because, at the time, the execs where cozying with a different administration.) I'm advocating for "accepting your responsibility as an editor". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Haugen#October_5,_2021_U.S._Congress_testimony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Haugen#October_5,_2021...
mc32 5mo ago
You know old reddit, Flickr, etc., had ways of presenting content based on different things besides impulsive engagement.
threetonesun 5mo ago
The internet solved the problem of millions of millions in it's implementation details, you share a URL. You follow people, they share URLs, it grows organically, same way every website worked pre... Instagram? I'm not sure who moved to the algorithmic feed first.
graemep 5mo ago
I would say, no *personalised* algorithms other than those based on deliberate user choices would solve the problem. So, what user chooses to follow, or the same for everyone in the country.
mrighele 5mo ago
> If the user can search like in Youtube then how do you rank the results? That's also an algorithm. Any ordering is an algorithm technically, so yes just "banning algorithm" doesn't work. A better alternative could be "the algorithm must be public and reproducible by the user". "Sort the posts of the people I follow in chronological order" you're good "Sort the posts by the output of a blackbox trained on user data" too bad you're a publisher and are responsible for what people post.
- alkonaut 5mo ago
  > Any ordering is an algorithm technically, so yes just "banning algorithm" doesn't wor Algorithm in this context (and presumably in any proposed legal text) is about personalization and purpose. No one worries about presenting content based on total popularity, coarse geography. user's browser language, or anything like that, regardless of whether the actual ranking algorithm (in the CS sense) is an algorithm. Yes it's a terrible name for what's being discussed, but let's not lose focus on the purpose because of that.
SirMaster 5mo ago
Don't show any video. Make the user search for what they want to see. Rank them by best keyword match from their search query, if match is equal, order them newest posted to oldest posted. Done.
irusensei 5mo ago
Enumerate by creation time in descending order the unwatched videos posted from the accounts the user follows. Like social media 1.0.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

noprocrasted 5mo ago

> what is the first video you show them Whatever is latest posted across their followings/subscriptions?

hug 5mo ago
That’s also an algorithm. An unsophisticated one, but an algorithm nonetheless. You can (and should) argue that such a simple algorithm doesn’t “count”, but fundamentally the exact wording of the grandparent post never works, legislatively. Lawyers will lawyer.
- NekkoDroid 5mo ago
  > That’s also an algorithm. An unsophisticated one, but an algorithm nonetheless. The problem always has been "(personalized) opaque algorithms". Time sorted by followers isn't really opaque, nor is "sorted by likes" or whatever. The problem is always pulling in parameters that a users either has no active control over or are so variable they effectively could be random.
- xigoi 5mo ago
  It’s not about whether there is an algorithm, but whether it’s controlled by the user.
- alkonaut 5mo ago
  Can everyone just please stop saying "well ackshually sorting is done with an algorithm" and just assume at least not-idiotic-intent here? No no one will ban "algorithms" or suggests anything of that kind. Yes it's a terrible name. Yes it will be hard to formulate what's allowed and what isn't. But a very simple litmus test is: what are the inputs to the algorithm? users coarse geographic location? Fine AI detected language of the content? Fine global popularity of the video clip? fine user's past behavior: number of videos with similar content they watched? Average number of seconds this particular user usually waits until scrolling further? The pattern is obvious. Personalized algorithms is what's targeted. Let's keep the discussion intelligent.
  - anjc 5mo ago
    Your litmus test isn't correct and your assumption of personalisation isn't correct either. All of the criteria that you see as fine are controlled under the relevant legislation and are considered personalisation, requiring transparency etc. Furthermore, bills have been brought to EU parliaments that have erroneously attempted to ban all forms of ranking, which would include even the most basic information retrieval algorithms. So it isn't obvious at all what is meant by 'algorithm'.
vasco 5mo ago
If they just signed up they have no followings or subscriptions. So now what, you need to show accounts to follow first? Thats the same problem as deciding what the first video to show is. How do you decide who they should follow? Or the vision is that you can only have friends as if it's 2005 and you can't discover anything serendipitously? I don't consume any content from my friends on something like tiktok where I'm interested in discovering people that have good content under topics I'm interested in. I don't know who those people are and I want to discover new ones that come up not just follow some already popular accounts.
- Gigachad 5mo ago
  Undoubtably the change needed here will introduce friction, will reduce viewing time, and society will be better off for it. The whole idea here is to make content consumption more deliberate and mindful rather than just opening the app and veging out to an endless feed of slop.
  - vasco 5mo ago
    You have a lot of certainties. Say will people in hospital bed for 2 weeks agree with you?
- hhjinks 5mo ago
  >So now what, you need to show accounts to follow first Youtube won't show you anything at all if you have a new account with watch history turned off. It says something like "turn on watch history and watch videos so we can recommend some for you".

pessimizer 5mo ago

This seems to be consciously dishonest. Show them "most recent" or "most upvoted" or "A to Z." Pretending like this is hard is bizarre. People have always selected sort and filter algorithms, until companies started taking them away.

Computer0 5mo ago

I made a new YouTube account recently and my homepage was blank. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053817

walthamstow 5mo ago
Same thing happens on LinkedIn if you don't follow anybody, the feed is just blank

wyre 5mo ago

These are multi-billion dollar companies. Its okay if they have some hard problems to solve.

SecretDreams 5mo ago
Won't anyone think of the multibillion dollar technolords? They are people too!

alkonaut 5mo ago

In the case of Instagram: You show the videos from the people you follow on instagram, then no more short videos at all. Possibly a search box. If you search on youtube then it can rank any way it wants, just not use e.g. anything from the viewing history. No "related videos" column. That's what YouTube used to be. But YouTube (unlike TikTok) worked well before it had rabbit holes. For TikTok the situation is worse. Their whole app just doesn't exist unless you have the custom feeds. This would make YouTube be 2010 youtube, Instagram be 2010 Instagram (great!) but it would effectively be a ban of TikTok's whole functionality (again, great!).

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
HPsquared 5mo ago
There is no going back to the 2010 internet unless you confiscate everyone's phones.
- alkonaut 5mo ago
  Not sure what confiscation would accomplish that regulation couldn’t? I mean we’re all aware that if regulators target TikTok then a new app would pop up and take its place. But the thing about regulation is that it doesn’t need to be water tight. You can just target a small handful of large players and it will improve the situation in practice. It doesn’t matter if 998/1000 apps use addictive feeds if the largest two apps don’t and they have 90% of users/views.
  - Aurornis 5mo ago
    It’s naive to think that regulation is going to cover the entire global internet. If you regulated domestic companies out of existence, global options would pop up in their place. You could try to block them all in app stores but people would go to the web views.
    - alkonaut 5mo ago

denismi 5mo ago

The first unwatched video from the user's followed/subscribed channels. Chronological, reverse chronological, sorted alphabetically, by the user's channel prioritisation, by likes, by views... whatever the user chooses. And then an end of feed. For new users? A search bar and a set of (human? AI?) curated seed recommendations that the platform is comfortable with being held liable for.

butlike 5mo ago

Do it like a library. When a person walks into a library, they're presented with a short curated list of books suggested from the librarian. All visitors to the library see the same books. From there, the visitor can go about their business searching for what they want. If they don't know what they want, perhaps a good use case for the newfangled LLM-search we have now would be "What's an interesting or popular topic I haven't searched for before?" to which the AI will respond with a list of newly searchable terms.

aembleton 5mo ago
How often can the librarian update the curated list of books? Once a day? Once per minutes? Once per ms?

thinkingtoilet 5mo ago

It's very easy. "So the user opens the app - what is the first video you show them?" You don't. How about that?

phtrivier 5mo ago

Of course it's easy: such decisions were taken _before_ the feeds where algorithmically built. You rely on unambigous, "physical" properties of the videos. There is a physical property of all the videos: the time of publication. There is a physical property of all the channels: did you subscribe to it, or not ? So, you show, in (reverse) chronological order of publication, the list of videos published by the channels you subscribed to. Now, of course, a brand new user would have no subscription - you show them a search box. But then, now, your search algorithm has to weight the various channels that match - but your algo can be relatively transparent, relatively auditable, and the same for all users (unless given explicit preferences, and of course national laws, etc, etc...) I'm sorry, but, I have a "subscriptions" page in youtube or substack, and they're chronological, and they show me what I want to watch. You keep that. There is a "home" page in both service that is algoritmically built, and they show me crap that the algo want me to watch. You get rid of that. Do this, and I can consider you a "neutral" actor, and accept that you shift the blame to content producer. Or, keep the algo feed, but don't take money from advertiser when I watch yet another flat earther video because YOU decided it was trending. If you want to decide what I watch, and make money from that decision - congrats, you are an editor. You get the earnings, and the responsibility. Please don't tell me, with a straight face, that the people who build the algo don't "decide" what I watch. If they want to tweak the algo to downgrade the flamewars and outrage and conspiracy theories and violence and abuse, they can. They do not want to, for business reasons. [1] That's fair, up to a point - we need publications with editors that agree on having "edgy" content. I'm not advocating for blanket censorship. I did not like social network preventing me from _sharing_ articles about Biden's son laptop (this was actually beyond the law, but somehow they managed to find the resources and programmers to implement _that_, because, at the time, the execs where cozying with a different administration.) I'm advocating for "accepting your responsibility as an editor". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Haugen#October_5,_2021_U.S._Congress_testimony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Haugen#October_5,_2021...

mc32 5mo ago

You know old reddit, Flickr, etc., had ways of presenting content based on different things besides impulsive engagement.

threetonesun 5mo ago

The internet solved the problem of millions of millions in it's implementation details, you share a URL. You follow people, they share URLs, it grows organically, same way every website worked pre... Instagram? I'm not sure who moved to the algorithmic feed first.

graemep 5mo ago

I would say, no *personalised* algorithms other than those based on deliberate user choices would solve the problem. So, what user chooses to follow, or the same for everyone in the country.

mrighele 5mo ago

> If the user can search like in Youtube then how do you rank the results? That's also an algorithm. Any ordering is an algorithm technically, so yes just "banning algorithm" doesn't work. A better alternative could be "the algorithm must be public and reproducible by the user". "Sort the posts of the people I follow in chronological order" you're good "Sort the posts by the output of a blackbox trained on user data" too bad you're a publisher and are responsible for what people post.

alkonaut 5mo ago
> Any ordering is an algorithm technically, so yes just "banning algorithm" doesn't wor Algorithm in this context (and presumably in any proposed legal text) is about personalization and purpose. No one worries about presenting content based on total popularity, coarse geography. user's browser language, or anything like that, regardless of whether the actual ranking algorithm (in the CS sense) is an algorithm. Yes it's a terrible name for what's being discussed, but let's not lose focus on the purpose because of that.

SirMaster 5mo ago

Don't show any video. Make the user search for what they want to see. Rank them by best keyword match from their search query, if match is equal, order them newest posted to oldest posted. Done.

irusensei 5mo ago

Enumerate by creation time in descending order the unwatched videos posted from the accounts the user follows. Like social media 1.0.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]