Link topics can now display additional "source" info beyond the domain - currently enabled for YouTube and Twitter
I've just deployed a small change that can show some additional info for some link topics, depending on which domain they link to. So far, it's only enabled for YouTube and Twitter links, where it will show the channel name and tweet author respectively. A good place to see this in action is on a search for "trailers".
Currently, this info is only displayed in the topic listings, but we should be able to extend it elsewhere, as well as utilize it for searching/filtering (like "show me all topics that link to this YouTube channel").
What other sites/domains would be good to apply this to? Links to reddit aren't particularly common, but it could probably work well there by showing the source subreddit, something like "reddit: /r/blog". What other sites are "platform-like" where additional info about the source/author is important instead of just the domain?
Possibly medium?
Definitely a good one, and I think I should already have the author info for it. Thanks!
That linked search returns empty results for me. I changed the tag to
trailertoo, no effect.For suggestions, I think Mastodon is a good candidate if Twitter is available. But IDK if it is easy to know if a linked page is a toot or not (given you can't tell it from the URL alone). Github/Gitlab repos (or users if linked directly to a repo). Mailing list names (and maybe senders?) if a Mailman server.
Ah, would probably be blank if you have your time period on "last 3 days". I edited the link to a new one that specifies "all time".
Good suggestions for other sites too, thanks.
Turns out it was blank because I wasn't subscribed to ~movies. TIL that behaviour.
You're welcome!
Oh, that makes sense. I'll switch to using search instead.
Bandcamp, Spotify, and Soundcloud, looking for artist info. That'll basically cover music streams when combined with youtube channels. Links to all the relevant APIs and such are in this old post.
YouTube accounts aren't shown in ~music, and for good reason I assume... since a lot of music doesn't come from Official sources there. I think those APIs are probably better used to help recommend titles and fill out metadata like genres, rather than used to automatically include the "artist name" (which is many cases is just going to be some random youtube account name not associated with the artist at all).
Actually, you'd be surprised. Youtube has been really, really vicious lately (compared to even last year) shutting down pirate music. Almost every band has a youtube channel, and so do most labels, and that's generally what youtube search will return. There's also these strange pseudo-channels that pop up now, probably due to some kind of integration with google music. They always have the album cover and usually say something like 'provided to youtube by time warner music group' in the video comment. Either way, though, all of those are legit, legal, pay-the-artist streaming links. The only other edge case is channels like MrSuicideSheep or 666MrDoom that are kinda like music bloggers, they get permission to repost the artist's music and drive a fuck-ton of views to those artists.
It's reached the point where running a pirate music youtube channel is no longer easy or profitable. There's still plenty of pirate music there, but it's mostly older, out of print material (like the content of /r/vintageobscura) and youtube doesn't seem to care about old or obscure music the same way they care about music that might still be able to sell copies of records.
The artist and label names are typically part of youtube's account metadata now. That stuff is getting populated even in random cat videos by whatever algorithms they have that are listening to the audio and searching for music tracks.
That may be true, and perhaps my perspective is skewed because I focus primarily on live music and coversongs, which are (even now) almost never posted by an official account. But either way, I think the error rate for using YouTube accounts as the "artist name" would still be unreasonably high, so unless there was a way for us to manually correct it afterwards, I wouldn't recommend relying on the YouTube account to auto-populate the "artist name" in ~music topics.
What you're after is the 'artist name' tag in the youtube metadata. It'll either be there and right, or not be there and can be left off the post depending on what comes back. There's an entire spreadsheet of data attached to every youtube video, so Tildes can cherry-pick just the variables that are relevant. That data hasn't got anything to do with the channel name. It's usually provided by the submitter or populated at a later date by youtube's army of AIs that are constantly trying to get metadata applied to everything in their service. It was pretty spotty a few years ago but it's gotten a lot better. I'd bet Tildes would have a success rate over 99% looking this stuff up now. It'll either be there and right or just be blank.
Kinda moot though since we're sticking to submitter names in ~music and that's as it should be, so that tastemakers can shine here. This stuff is more suitable to a blurb in the sidebar, once Tildes starts populating data about the links in the sidebar for submissions where that's possible.
You remember the stuff raddit-bot could pull up in listentothis? That's the stuff that'd look mighty good in the Tildes sidebar of any given submission. That raddit-bot reply was 4 years ago when this stuff was new and not ubiquitous like it is now. We can totally do better now - a lot better.
Imagine having the artist, label, pics, bio, wikipedia link, links to their pages on major streaming services, etc - all auto-populated in the sidebar here. Now take this concept and do it for movies, tv shows, books, etc - anything that's got the databases out there to support it. That's something no other site does - look up all the relevant info for you, and make it accessible to you somehow. All the other sites spam you with links that keep you on-site, so doing something like this doesn't really fit their business model. ;)
Do you have any links to where artist or song name is available in the YouTube metadata? Because Embedly Extract doesn't fetch that, only "authors" (aka channel ID)... and AFAICT that particular metadata isn't listed as queryable anywhere in the YouTube Data API documentation either.
Let me do some digging, now that I have an internet connection faster than 14kbps I can actually contribute again. ;)
It's possible they changed something, last time I took a deep dive into this was like right when Tildes went online, and even most of that was cribbed from old listentothis research back when we were thinking about botifying all of this into reddit. I'm positive this info is in there, though - it has to be there for their copyright enforcement to function.
I think it could possible be scraped from video descriptions in the rare cases where the artist/album is automatically included there by YouTube, which AFAIK only happens when Content ID nails an unofficial upload and monetizes it on behalf of the artist (E.g. like in this video's description)... but I don't think that is metadata included in most videos or readily available for 3rd parties to query through the API anymore.
Aha, they do have it, and they don't expose it with the API - yet. Raddit was scraping it from the pages. Seems like the silver bullet here is the ISNI number if we can get that from youtube's data somehow.
If anyone's curious, this is what you can get out of the API.
Oh, and there's another way to do this - form based submission pages. Presumably, the submitter knows the artist and album/track name. We can use what they give us during submission, just like we did in l2t, and it does work. That might even be the better way since it isn't relying just on metadata.
Here's an example of the data that I'm getting from the YouTube API right now, this is for @cfabbro's Manu Delago Ensemble topic from the other day:
The tags are remarkably good there. Is that common or just because the folks who uploaded it are doing their jobs properly I wonder?
As for the rest, a quick musicbrainz search is handy for all the external links and bio. Musicbrainz does return a confidence rating, so you can set a threshold for things that are iffy. Musicbrainz will even take you to the right discogs page.
Musicbrainz will let you download a VM (which has its own auto-update scripts) and the same web api the site itself exposes, or you can download and set up your own instance of their database (it's using postgres). It's around 30-40gb last time I looked, though they may offer smaller subsets of data - Tildes may only need a few tables, not the whole smash. The 'external links' section is the real goldmine. Those always go back to official artist resources, including official youtube channels and the like.
AFAIK YouTube tags (and hashtags) can only be added by the uploader in the video manager and are not auto-populated or user submitted in any way. But docs on YouTube's tags mechanics are virtually nonexistant... so who knows?
Here I was thinking how easy this would all be if the first tag/couple of tags were always the artist. That's out the window then. :/
Yeah, but again, I'm pretty sure that only applies to videos claimed by a rights-holder other than the original uploader and doesn't apply to anything not flagged by Content ID and subsequently claimed... which is the vast majority of official music on YouTube. :P
You can see this is the case by visiting most official VEVO videos... none of them have that info in the description anywhere... only unofficial videos later claimed/monetized by the official rights holder has that info listed.
Take the easy way then - grab it from the submitter, and cross reference it in musicbrainz and discogs, both of which allow for local copies and contain all relevant info. That'll do until youtube does expose this data more easily.
LOL... Yeah, that's basically what I said at the very start of this conversation that you seemingly disagreed with. ;)
Well, I would like to program most of it away, but if we can't get there that way, the old school method of cribbing it from the title like we do on reddit will have to get the job done. Users like well formatted titles, too - we had flamewars in listentothis until we forced it all to be standardized. Every so often someone bitches about the titles being so rigid and the users flame them into oblivion in the threads. Who knew sane titling was so popular? ;)
You will get no argument from me there. I'm with you 100% on that. Sane titling rules are absolutely, undeniably necessary when it comes to music related communities, IMO. Without them, music communities inevitably go to absolute shit with clickbait titles leading the charge. E.g. "THE BEST COVER EVER!!!!", which is not only obnoxious, but makes finding that song again later virtually impossible, especially on reddit where there are no tags.
And I had similarly strict title rules in /r/coversongs for that very reason too.
I still feel bad about it a bit, though. Trying to type in a title for a listentothis track that the bots will accept from a mobile interface is a nightmare since you have to keep toggling to the alternate keyboards to get your hands on () and []. It'd all be so much easier if we could just get everything from the link and auto-populate it so the users can just proof and tweak it instead of typing the whole damn thing. I badly want that kind of lazy submission process. :D
Our bots still eat a full 2/3 of all daily submissions over there. That's rather a lot of frustrated users. I just tell them to kick spez' ass and leave the l2t mods out of it. :P
Yeah definitely... it's just unfortunate that currently YouTube doesn't provide many options for that. So without a bunch of custom scraping (which is prone to breaking on every UI change) and API cross-referencing, users are going to have to shoulder most of the burden... but hey, at least we can edit titles here, unlike reddit, so that helps a lot. :)
We're probably going to run into this a lot, too - not just with music. I can imagine that looking up info on books or films or science journals is going to run into a similar morass of disconnected media/databases. All the info is out there but it's scattered and takes a lot of cross-referencing to tie together. Curious that nobody is really doing that, too - you'd think by now other forums/communities would have picked up on this stuff.
Ah well, Tildes will get there someday, and embarrass everyone else in the process. <3
Excellent additional feature... but breaking the habit of including the YouTube account in the title is probably gonna take me a while. :P
p.s. Do you think it's worth going back and removing them from previously submitted stuff or naw?
I wouldn't worry about it, leaving it on old topics won't hurt anything. If you see a topic with it and you want to fix it in passing that'd be good, but I wouldn't go out of your way to do it.
Ooh, just noticed the YouTube account isn't shown in ~music submissions, A lot of music videos aren't from official sources, so the YouTube account name showing wouldn't be a benefit. That's a nice touch IMO.
Isn't that because it was decided that the users submitting was more important that the source on this topic? Accounting for a familiarity with frequent posters taste, and it being a recommendation from this user as opposed the site or youtube channel in this case.
More important than the artist? No... that's pretty dang important to a music submission. :P But since the YouTube account is often not the artist's account there is really no point in including it, IMO. And I would assume that's why Deimos didn't include it in ~music submissions from YouTube.
Could certain publications such as Ars Technica or The Verge have the exact author in the source location? There's definitely journalists I want to read and others I want to avoid from these sorts of sites.
I like to see this too. It's high time reputation for writing good news or science articles went back to the writer, rather than whatever publication is paying them duckets for this week's article.
It's definitely possible (and I generally already have that data), but I feel like that might be too much information for most people. I read a lot of news sites, but there aren't many author names overall that I recognize.
What would you think of having it displayed near the link when you're on the topic's comments page, but not having it in the listings?
That honestly sounds just fine. I'm not fussed by the particular placement. I'm glad you're willing to consider it though. Useful metadata is king and I'd love to see Tildes enriching submissions with as much relevant information is possible. It's off to a good start.
Love this change! Thanks.