31 votes

Topic deleted by author

20 comments

  1. [10]
    Amarok
    Link
    I watched a pair of Andrew Yang interviews on shapiro and the ruben report. Ever since, youtube is determined to turn me into an alt-right nutjob. I get constant spam of topics like redpill...

    I watched a pair of Andrew Yang interviews on shapiro and the ruben report. Ever since, youtube is determined to turn me into an alt-right nutjob. I get constant spam of topics like redpill coaching, the worst tedx talks, jordan peterson, stefan molyneux, crowder, etc. That's been going on for months because of watching two interviews. Scrubbed it all out of my history, all that did was drop the frequency a bit for a little while. I primarily prefer science content and youtube treats that stuff like it's a second class citizen.

    Its ability to tell that I like music is similarly useless. All it does is spam the same pop crap that someone is paying them to promote. It has no sense of my tastes even at the most primitive level of genre or era. Worse, it's decided that I should be watching something called 'music reaction videos' rather than actually listening to music.

    At this point if I were running youtube I'd nuke the entire recommendation system from orbit, fire everyone who ever worked on it, and rely just on searches. It's an asspile that makes me think the fears about AI are vastly overstated. If this is the best google can do with all their talent and money, I'm not impressed. In fact, looking at this kind of abject failure after billions of dollars of investment is hilarious in a way. If I were giving this mechanism a grade it'd be about 15/100 and I'd fail the student. Any user-based recommendation system would run circles around this crap and cost nothing to implement and maintain by comparison.

    20 votes
    1. arghdos
      Link Parent
      You seem to be assuming that the goal of the recommendation system is to serve up good / interesting content catered to your interests. Instead consider that it was likely trained to maximize...

      You seem to be assuming that the goal of the recommendation system is to serve up good / interesting content catered to your interests. Instead consider that it was likely trained to maximize engagement / clicks / ad revenues. This method can function as a crude recommendation system e.g., I am more likely to watch another YT video if they serve me up a live John Hartford tape I haven't heard, however we all know that 'controversy' / inflammatory content is the baseline method for grabbing eyeballs these days. What you're seeing as a poor algorithm is really likely to be a learned behavior of their NN (or whatever) that will funnel you alt-right nonsense as long as there's a 0.1% chance it can hook you, because the reward payoff (in ad money for Google) is so big.

      As you (or someone else on l2t) once told me, gotta reset those Bayesian spam priors man :p.

      17 votes
    2. [6]
      MimicSquid
      Link Parent
      You can specifically say that you don't like a given recommendation, and to not recommend things to you based upon the video it's using as the jumping off point for that recommendation.

      You can specifically say that you don't like a given recommendation, and to not recommend things to you based upon the video it's using as the jumping off point for that recommendation.

      5 votes
      1. [5]
        Amarok
        Link Parent
        I've been quite generous in handing out dislikes to all the crap it's been spamming at me. That doesn't seem to change anything about what it thinks I want, topic wise. It may remove one...

        I've been quite generous in handing out dislikes to all the crap it's been spamming at me. That doesn't seem to change anything about what it thinks I want, topic wise. It may remove one particular channel from the spam after I dislike a few things, but it'll just replace it with another channel that's still the exact same sort of topic. It's as if I can't like/dislike the topic itself, only any given channel.

        5 votes
        1. [4]
          cfabbro
          (edited )
          Link Parent
          AFAIK disliking videos doesn't actually lead to them being removed from your autoplay/recommended list, and in fact that may actually be making it worse for you because of how YouTube views even...

          AFAIK disliking videos doesn't actually lead to them being removed from your autoplay/recommended list, and in fact that may actually be making it worse for you because of how YouTube views even dislikes as "engagement" which it conflates with interest/worth (at least that's how it works/worked with comments).

          I'm pretty sure that on videos you don't want to see anymore, or don't want to see similar topics on, you specifically need to select "not interested", which is located in the vertical … menu that shows up on the right side of the video titles on the autoplay/recommended list when you mouse-over them.

          13 votes
          1. [3]
            Amarok
            Link Parent
            I'll give that a try and see if it makes a difference. I'm not holding my breath, though. :P

            I'll give that a try and see if it makes a difference. I'm not holding my breath, though. :P

            3 votes
            1. determinism
              Link Parent
              I had positive results from doing this. Sometimes, I'll have to refresh my feed and perform the process on everything I don't like several times. Eventually it will settle on videos that I'm...

              I had positive results from doing this. Sometimes, I'll have to refresh my feed and perform the process on everything I don't like several times. Eventually it will settle on videos that I'm actually interested in.

              1 vote
            2. Grzmot
              Link Parent
              It worked for me. Watched a short Joe Rogan clip once, Youtube tried sending me down that rabbithole with recommandations on my front page. I just used the either "I don't like this video" or "I'm...

              It worked for me. Watched a short Joe Rogan clip once, Youtube tried sending me down that rabbithole with recommandations on my front page. I just used the either "I don't like this video" or "I'm not interested in this channel" button and it did wonders.

    3. babypuncher
      Link Parent
      I refuse to watch anything with politics in it on YouTube after I had a similar experience. I'm back to a point where it rarely if ever suggests that kind of shit. Now my feed is just science,...

      I refuse to watch anything with politics in it on YouTube after I had a similar experience. I'm back to a point where it rarely if ever suggests that kind of shit. Now my feed is just science, engineering, and gaming content plus random old episodes of GMM.

      2 votes
    4. Adys
      Link Parent
      Yeah. I never click on anything in my recommendations unless it's from a channel I've already vetted, or I know clicking it will be a non-issue. Once in a while I'll find a recommendation I'm...

      Yeah. I never click on anything in my recommendations unless it's from a channel I've already vetted, or I know clicking it will be a non-issue. Once in a while I'll find a recommendation I'm curious about and unless I'm REALLY sure about it, I'll open it in incognito.

      Overall I'm pretty happy about the recommendations but they're next to useless because most of the channels showing up there I'm already subscribed to.

      This is what my YT homepage looks like if you're curious: https://imgur.com/a/A4pfBqi

      One thing I've come to systematically do as well btw when vetting a channel is look at how many of their videos are between 10:01 and 11:00 minutes long. If there's too many, that's a hard pass from me. The 10 minute mark is a monetization mark for youtube and I've actually seen channels artificially slow down their videos so they last at least 10 minutes just to hit the mark.

      2 votes
  2. [5]
    Rocket_Man
    Link
    I'm curious why my experience with YouTube is so much different than the one this article paints. I use it everyday, and while I mainly only glance at the home section before going to see if there...

    I'm curious why my experience with YouTube is so much different than the one this article paints. I use it everyday, and while I mainly only glance at the home section before going to see if there are any new videos on the subscriptions page my recommendations aren't too crazy. This is how they appear at the moment and about half are just videos from people I'm subscribed to. The others are honest recommendations about things I may be interested in.

    But my point is that they aren't filled with hate, and I think one reason for this is that I completely ignore the recommendations placed next to a video that I'm watching. That seems to be the primary way people go from watching about kids falling over to cars exploding. The issue is that not everybody understands how to manipulate these websites to behave. If you can't make the algorithms show you the right things they're likely to lead you down into some crazy shit.

    11 votes
    1. [2]
      TheJorro
      Link Parent
      Are you engaging in searches like the author describes? Yours looks like mine, which is basically only looking at channels or outlets I trust to give me decent content. I bet you look up content...

      Are you engaging in searches like the author describes? Yours looks like mine, which is basically only looking at channels or outlets I trust to give me decent content. I bet you look up content by channel, not by search terms?

      Occasionally I've caught the algorithm sneaking into my recommendations. Whenever there's an interesting guest on Joe Rogan that I search for, click on, and view, I'll find an errant recommendation for something I know I won't be into. And I know if I click on that, the algorithm well send more of that my way. So I block it and tell YouTube why: I don't like this channel.

      I've caught things trying to sneak into my YT frontpage this way many times. Just last week, a JonTron video was shared because I watched some Dunky.

      6 votes
      1. Rocket_Man
        Link Parent
        I think you're right, I mainly focus on channels and as @Seven described trust is a big factor in that. I'm wary of channels that look low quality or I haven't heard of from other sources....

        I think you're right, I mainly focus on channels and as @Seven described trust is a big factor in that. I'm wary of channels that look low quality or I haven't heard of from other sources. Although I watch a lot of odd videos through reddit and sometimes tildes and none of those seem to be reflected in my recommendations.

        2 votes
    2. ThyMrMan
      Link Parent
      Your experience is similar to mine, I haven't had pretty much any issue ever with recommendations. It almost always shows me stuff from channels I already watch or have watched, or is very similar...

      Your experience is similar to mine, I haven't had pretty much any issue ever with recommendations. It almost always shows me stuff from channels I already watch or have watched, or is very similar to the channel I'm currently watching.

      Even when I jump over to a channel I would expect to maybe give me some odd sidebar recommendations, Inside A Mind which does videos about "hidden lores from movies, TV Shows, and Web Series", which is a style of channel that I would expect to produce some different results. But still the sidebar stays with content I would expect myself to watch, with the first 12 or so being good and decent recommendations. It isn't till I scroll down to like 20+ do them start getting a bit off topic and odd, and honestly I don't know why they even keep doing that many possible recommendations. And I find it pretty obvious when those recommendations aren't something I want to watch.

      I feel like if you just don't click on those recommendations, and don't let yourself just drawn down the rabbit hole you don't have any issues. Now that doesn't solve the issue that comes with kids watching youtube and getting these recommendations. Most likely the only way to stop or reduce these issues would be to have an option to disable recommendations all together. If they aren't there to click, you can't get rabbit holed into the recommendation hell.

      3 votes
    3. Seven
      Link Parent
      My experience has been quite similar to yours when it comes to recommendations. Half of them are from people I sub to, and the other half are videos on topics I would be interested in, usually...

      My experience has been quite similar to yours when it comes to recommendations. Half of them are from people I sub to, and the other half are videos on topics I would be interested in, usually topics similar to videos I've very recently watched. If I start going down the rabbit hole of a new channel, YouTube will pick up on that and start showing me more and more videos from that channel on my recommended. I think @TheJorro is right when he says that he only looks at channels or outlets he trusts, and that results in good recommendations. I exclusively use the search bar to find either a specific video or channel I've heard of or seen before, never just to find new content. I find that if I keep watching the channels I trust, the algorithm will pick up on similar channels and recommend them to me. Because of that, I don't need to use the search bar at all

      2 votes
  3. Flashynuff
    Link
    It's not quite the point of the topic, but I really like that zoom in scroll effect. It evokes the "rabbit hole" of youtube quite well.

    It's not quite the point of the topic, but I really like that zoom in scroll effect. It evokes the "rabbit hole" of youtube quite well.

    9 votes
  4. [3]
    Sahasrahla
    Link
    I really like my YouTube recommendations because they help me discover so much new music from so many cultures and genres that I'd otherwise never know about. Some things I probably wouldn't have...

    I really like my YouTube recommendations because they help me discover so much new music from so many cultures and genres that I'd otherwise never know about. Some things I probably wouldn't have discovered anyway:

    Point is, my recommendations are working for me so far by providing a wide variety of videos I've enjoyed. Articles like this though (and the other comments in this thread) make me really careful about what I watch in YouTube. It seems very, very easy to break your recommendations. Most things non-music, mainstream music, and random links get opened in a new private window. Anything with weird recommendations in the sidebar gets immediately deleted from my history and I don't watch it (unless I put it in a private window first). Even for normal seeming videos in the sidebar I'll sometimes open them in a private window first and then only watch them normally if I like them. I guess this is what's necessary to keep YouTube from serving up a bunch of alt-right personalities.

    Edit: I also go through and say "not interested" in to the drop down menu on videos I really don't want to see more of.

    6 votes
    1. [2]
      Amarok
      Link Parent
      Clearly I need to work more on this, that's the kind of stuff I'd love to see in my music recs.

      Clearly I need to work more on this, that's the kind of stuff I'd love to see in my music recs.

      2 votes
      1. Sahasrahla
        Link Parent
        One thing that I've found works well is to try to force YouTube to keep showing you a certain type of music. e.g. I've been trying to learn Mandarin lately and I thought it might help with...

        One thing that I've found works well is to try to force YouTube to keep showing you a certain type of music. e.g. I've been trying to learn Mandarin lately and I thought it might help with motivation to listen to some Chinese music but I didn't really know any and most of what I found was either saccharine ballads or bland pop. So, I tried to get YouTube to show me the good stuff. I think my process was something like this:

        • I started by searching "chinese indie music" and "taiwan indie music". My recommendations were also already a bit primed by having listened to some guzheng and other traditional music after meeting a friend who played one.
        • Most of what I found still wasn't quite to my liking but I found some giant playlists and compilations that were a good starting place to find songs I liked.
        • When I found something I liked I'd favourite it, follow some of the recommendations next to it, check out the automated playlist built off it, and look up the artist. (I mean, as the mood struck me. I wasn't super methodical about it.)
        • Mostly I just kept following random recommendations for the kind of stuff I might like to see and occasionally I'd find something good that sent me down a rabbit hole of other good music.
        • As I followed my interests I found more songs and artists I liked and the recommendations got better. Many of them were still just songs I had already listened to or older items from my favourite list, but there was often some new stuff to try out.

        Having done this for a little bit now I've found some Chinese music I'm into: GoodBand, 9m88, No Party for Cao Dong, Enno Cheng, SelfKill, Elephant Gym, and other random things like drama soundtracks, traditional instrument bands, and whatever this is. Do this for enough different styles of music and it should probably help YouTube recommendations to be a bit more useful.

        2 votes
  5. moocow1452
    Link
    I eventually turned off watch and search history and cleared them both out, so I get recommendations based on my subscriptions and whatever else Google has on me. I think I like it better, but it...

    I eventually turned off watch and search history and cleared them both out, so I get recommendations based on my subscriptions and whatever else Google has on me. I think I like it better, but it makes music recommendations kinda basic.

    3 votes