Seems like the quality of youtube suggestions & shorts have been spammed by bots & other people hacking the system. Why is Google not doing anything about this?
Recommendation system is long time broken. I am subscribed to 100+ channels and check 10 channels on a weekly basis, meaning I watch all the new videos these creators make. So that means I want the new stuff from the frequented ones on my front page ASAP. Yet, it's a hit and miss. From the remaining 90 channels I never get anything recommended. Why?
If I subscribe to a new channel it gets recommended like hell, then it forgets about it.
BUT! Totally irrelevant things that I never watch, is kept on my front page for weeks. Like it wants me to check it or wants me to mute it, but fuck them I'm not giving them any more metrics. If I clear the fingerprints and block the acquiring of these metrics the front page gets filled with new, interesting content. Who the hell understands this? I have also observed that if you have an adblocker enabled it gives you trash all the time.
When the absolutely disgusting, braindead, bottomfeeding "depp vs amber" nightmare was ongoing I had to "mute" the same channels multiple times and then 55 others, because it just slams it into my face. Watch it, watch it, you must see this muck.
The topic of my fav channels represent... I get nothing relevant from them. :DDD
The shorts... was the pinnacle of YTs innovation. :DDDD
Goog is all about control now. Look innovation for somewhere else... well... if you can find any, lemme know........
You can't do shit with godzilla and now he does whatever he wants.
The best part of YouTube recommendations - side bar recommendations - have been broken for at least 7-9 years. I remember going on deep YouTube rabbit holes in another era, because their recommendations always pointed to new, highly related content. Then, at some point in time, YouTube switched their recommendations algorithm to direct me to a mixture of 1) videos (mostly on unrelated topics) that I've already viewed, 2) videos about topics that I've recently searched for or watched that are unrelated to the current video, 3) videos trending across all of YouTube, and etc.
There are other things that drive me nuts about YouTube's recommendations, like the fact that they will never recommend me the next part of a n-part video. If I'm watching part 2/3 of something, please show 3/3 in the side bar, YouTube!
YouTube's iterative degeneration into its current state points to the folly of A/B-maximalism. In the pursuit of getting more base hits, it seems like YouTube forgot that the goal of baseball is to win games and keep fans entertained.
YouTube has been bad for a while. I suppose that some part of that is good – YT effectively killed the addictive loops that made their website irresistible. However, there is a lot that sucks about it. The utility of YouTube has gone down. Furthermore, I think YT blew open a hole in the video space for services like TikTok to emerge. TikTok may be crack, but YouTube used to be cocaine.
It's pretty clear to me that YouTube wants to steer you towards content they want you to watch and not content that you want to watch. Watching intellectual long-form content does not equal ad revenue, user "engagement", and whatever else bullshit addictive metrics they only care about.
None of these systems are for the people. It's either about YouTube's bottom dollar or some influencer's ego. It is really amazing to me when I come across old YouTube videos that are just people filming or discussing something interesting without fanfare. You can find newer people doing this these days as well, but it's hard. These types of videos are so refreshing because it's what YouTube should be about: people being creative in honest ways, people talking about or showing something they're interested in, etc.
>I remember going on deep YouTube rabbit holes in another era, because their recommendations always pointed to new, highly related content. Then, at some point in time, YouTube switched their recommendations algorithm to direct me to a mixture of 1) videos (mostly on unrelated topics) that I've already viewed, 2) videos about topics that I've recently searched for or watched that are unrelated to the current video, 3) videos trending across all of YouTube, and etc.
I've been working on a small team to tackle this problem. We have a working prototype if anyone is interested in checking it out. Look up a channel to get a list of channels in the same niche or related niches. It is specifically designed to surface smaller creators.
Here is our list for 3Blue1Brown, which seems to be popular around here:
The icons are crawlable links, so you can click the channels in a given list to go to the list for that channel.
We also have mapped the channels to provide a new way to explore. The map clusters similar channels so you can get a spatial sense of where your interests are and what interests and niches are very far away, ones you may not consider or even be aware exist. For the curious, here is a short blog post explaining the map and how to use it:
I hope this isn't too self-promotional. I think there is a need for this kind of thing and it is hard to resist the many, many cries of frustration about user exploration on YouTube and the narrowness of their recommendations that I frequently see around here.
> There are other things that drive me nuts about YouTube's recommendations, like the fact that they will never recommend me the next part of a n-part video. If I'm watching part 2/3 of something, please show 3/3 in the side bar, YouTube!
It used to do that, though! They should at least allow it up to a limit or something rather than making it just that stupid.
My other biggest complaint really is the recommendation system in general. It's so bad that I can guarantee you that I can fall asleep to something innocuous like Spongebob Squarepants and in the morning I'll wake up and it's playing Jordan Peterson. EVERY. STINKING. TIME. It was like that before with Lex Fridman, and I totally had to unsubscribe and unlike a lot of Lex content before it would stop autoplaying it. I can't keep playing that game, but at least I can tolerate Peterson's voice more than Lex's.
Funny thing is I was never crazy about either one. They clearly profiled me as being the kind of person who watches that stuff. No, surely the fact I watch a lot of videos about theme park rides can't mean I want to see similar content. Obviously, I want to watch Jordan Peterson!!! :D /s
Without the market dominance, YouTube would be marginally better than its competitors.
YouTube disabled my entire feed a few weeks ago (https://i.imgur.com/Q78FqLQ.png) and is bullying with a big prompt to turn on tracking to restore it. What's funny is that recommendations have worked perfectly well for the last few years with history turned off (Just show me the stuff I subscribed to) but now I have to click on each subscription one-by-one to see content. Good riddance since I've pretty much stopped using Youtube at this point.
I actually think the sidebar recommendations for a given video (at least for music) are still quite good. It's only when it starts taking into account your watch history does it start to get muddied up very fast. I wonder if there's an addon/userscript plugin that can wipe cookies upon every page refresh for a "pure" YouTube experience every time.
I don't have notifications on and when I visit YouTube I'll check to see what videos I want to watch since I last visited. I usually check the up next to see if anything similar/interesting is recommended and very rarely go to the home page to get recommendations.
Because I want new and fresh content from the topics I frequently watch. I want to be entertained, stimulated in various, unexpected ways. YT is sitting atop a goldmine and they offer only morsels.
I'm not subscribed to a lot of channels, and mostly relied on recommendations, which served me reasonably well for a time, but over time I noticed that some of my interests completely vanished, while others keep repeating old stuff I've already seen. And even channels I'm subscribed to, the recommendations are often old stuff and not the most recent.
But click one recommendation outside my interests just to check it out, and that's going to dominate for the next couple of weeks even if I decide I don't like it. Maybe I should downvote that more aggressively.
If you're not looking for recommendations and just your subscriptions, then you should be checking the subscriptions tab, not the home page. You'll always have all uploads from subscribed channels listed there
Shouldn't they be able to detect your preferred behaviour and put that on the homepage? They seem to be focused so much on creating magical AI that they're missing some fundamental easy stuff.
That's not what the recommendations are for. There's a separate page that list all posts by your subscriptions in chronological order, you can find it in the sidebar, IMO it's the only way to use YouTube.
Which is also nonfunctional, useless, not for human consumption. You can't filter those in any way. It looks like a relic from the 90s :DDD. Anything else you want to add?
I suspect YouTube is weighting incorrectly. I miss Human Curation of content.
I am looking for other sources.
It's annoying, more often than joyful, to use YouTube for me. It feels like a half-baked project. I miss Human Curation.
My story: paying long-term YT user (no ads), watched many multi-hour "calm stream / quiet cafe" videos, Recommended list became 75% polluted w/these and un-cleanable regardless of many "Don't Like" actions by me, nuked history, still seeing some.
I'm not sure what he means by 'clearing' his fingerprint, but if you visit EFF[0], you can check if your fingerprint is at least random. I've only been able to achieve a random fingerprint on Brave browser. Even clearing all cookies/cache on your browser will not reset the fingerprint.
To prevent metric collection, you can't be logged in and you need your browser settings set to block cookies for YouTube.
[0] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
I find value, but at what cost? When you are info hungry you don't like your precious time being wasted bc of inefficient systems hindering your work. Do I have to write API helper scripts and scrapers in 2022 for a top10 visited internet site?
BUT, BUT, BUT THE PINNACLE OF INNOVATION IS YOUTUBE/GOOGLE, RIGHT?
And they host these nice and trendy videos about how advanced they are, and how you should do your coding, how you should organize your work, your life, your team, whatever. And the terrible libraries... gimme a fn break. Too bad for the end consumer, it's all about pain.
I mean even porn sites have finer grained control on content filtering than YT :DDD. I'm wondering why they are not opening their code base and let the coding done by individuals, OF COURSE, FOR FREE! ha ha ha
Maybe near-zero but not zero. They said that they watch content from 10 (out of the 100) creators they are subscribed to.
I'm in a similar position. I'm subscribed to 78 channels but typically will only watch content from a fraction of these due to preferences on quality and time (some creators have good content but end up putting up an hour video, which I am less likely to view).
What's worse, the "not interested" button is broken. I get a couple of music albums recommended fairly often and I click on "not interested" every time I see them, only to have them pop up again a few days later.
Do you also get an endless stream of shuffle dance shorts being shoved down your throat? I think I made the mistake of clicking on one months and months ago and now YT won't stop trying to force feed me those shorts. They are 100% not like anything I watch on a regular basis. So Bad.
Edit: For clarity, I had no idea WTF a shuffle dance was and curiosity got the better of me. Super great way to make me NOT curious about my non-core interests.
Or it is working exactly as intended. We forget sometimes that we have misaligned incentives: We want the most interesting content and Google wants the most ad $$$.
Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed. They've changed it to start showing random shit you might want to watch instead of the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos. They seem to repeat videos they think you ought to watch quite often in search results as well.
Bad search that tries hard not to actually show you search results is another one of those dark trends I see everywhere.
Have you seen Twitter search lately? The search tab in the app doesn't even have a text field visible by default. It's all just unrelated popular garbage. You have to swipe down to reveal the text field where you can enter your search term. Then you get more unrelated garbage in the "top" result tab and you need to go to one of the other tabs to actually see what you were searching for.
Search on the iOS app store is awful too. You type in the exact name of the app you are looking for and have to scroll through 10-15 vaguely related results before you get to the one you actually want.
Yes. God help you if you're looking for a video not made by a popular youtuber. Saw an amazing fried chicken recipe ten years ago and think you can just scroll the results until you see it? Ha, fat chance. You've got about five results and then nothing but whatever horseshit is trendy today.
Recipes are particularly hopeless. There's a highly formulaic style of recipe video that caught on a year or two ago. Videos built on this formula usually have a title like "I have never eaten such delicious $X", usually with a thumbnail of a liquid being poured over some food, and frequently describe nonsensical or terrible recipes. These videos are useless for actual cooking advice, but somehow get a ton of engagement anyway -- I often get them as recommendations despite not even being interested in cooking videos.
Add it to a playlist (or bookmark it). I don't trust the videos to still be up when I might be interested in them so I've become a little bit of a data hoarder.
I've noticed this with Google, too. Particularly when searching for things in the past, it's like they adamantly don't want 3+ months ago to exist. I now have to archive news articles and the like because I know that I'm going to have an extremely hard time finding them later.
If search works too good you are gone too quickly. Amazon figured this out A LOOOONG time ago. If Google makes you rephrase your search 10 times that 10x ads they can show you. If they take those opportunities to also drive you to crap sites that waste time but are heavily monetized by Google ads then that's even more for them. It's no different than grocery stores putting the most commonly purchased items all the way in the back. Want to run in and get milk? Maybe, we have 6 gallons that expire in the next 5 minutes up front, but if you want more you gotta walk past chips, beer, frozen pizzas and a wall of cheese.
It's definitely an accelerating trend though, online search is getting so much worse and even fast food menus are insane now. You need to the app to see anything other than the most profitable combos in many cases.
Interesting since they are managed by the same company. But I'm not even sure Google is the best search engine for Youtube or video content in general.
Not an expert on this, but I get the feeling they're trying to dissuade people from discovering videos with lower view counts in search results, since these videos are less likely to be cached at the CDN nodes and are more expensive to serve, i.e. budget cuts, like everything else
> the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos.
Isn't that a good thing? If you searched for something and the first 10 results aren't a match, why not introduce you to other things (one can experiment with finding how closely related those additional recommendations are, or based on other things you recently enjoyed, etc.)?
Machine learning probably had something to do with it. It notices videos with thumbnails of people with their mouths and eyes wide open doing some kind of shocked expression with red arrows pointing to something perform better than average. Then it starts recommending videos with thumbnails like this preferentially. YouTubers take notice and start producing thumbnails like this for every video.
Go to the front page right now with clean cookies and you'll see most of the thumbnails have "reaction faces" in them for no apparent reason, usually pulling some kind of exaggerated expression.
Clickbait used to mean that you baited the viewer into clicking, now it means you baited the algorithm into recommending you.
There was a Linus Tech Tips video where he admits that it's stupid, but sadly it works really well. It's a bit like when Wikipedia kept using Jimmy Wales' face in banners requesting donations. People claim to not like it, yet it's was what got the highest conversion rates.
This is a clear example of penny-wise but pound-foolish. At no point in a product's lifetime does should machine learning obviate the need for good taste.
Patrick McKenzie (aka patio11 here) had a post/talk about how when he was working with FogBugz they realized that people LOVE to watch Joel Spolsky talk.
In fact, A/B testing showed that the longer the video they put on the home page, the higher the conversion rate.
I've long suspected many large production recommendation algorithms suffer from a positive feedback loop problem. In the example you point out, there probably is some real behavioral bias to focus attention on highly expressive faces. Then the algorithm picks up on this small bias and amplifies it, where the entire front page turns into young people with shocked faces.
When I was playing WoW, it was hard to find, for example, "guide to blackwing lair". It would be way down the page, below videos always titled "shocked reaction to Blackwing lair boss kill", "streamer reacts to BWL speedrun".
That shit is the fucking worst. 10 results down it gives you the "People also watched" and "For You" categories before it resumes listing what you fucking searched for. Can you imagine 20 years ago trying to build a search engine and explaining that you should insert search results that people didn't fucking search for?
I think that’s an issue with the monetisation. People who needs a specific guide would be relatively small in numbers. Unless your video is watched by tens/hundreds of thousands, it is not worth making (unless for hobby). Content creators are feeling like they need to make the title and image appealing to a wide audience rather than people looking for something specific.
The search engine should prioritise videos matching your specific search so you can find what you are looking for from hobbyist creators but I’m not sure if that’s happening.
Wow nail on the head. Just did this and out of the first 8 videos, 5 were reaction videos, 4 with the exact same "shocked" faces. Scrolling down the page it is much the same. How can google allow whatever algorithm to present such homogenous content on such a general platform?
Notably though, if I log in and visit my home page I have only one video of this nature on the front page in the first ~50, so it does appear possible to teach the algorithm you will not engage with such content even without conscious effort.
You asked about bots and spam but I want to talk about the content degradation.
YT has been heavily commercialised and lots of people are trying to make a living out of it. Most videos are about keeping viewers for as much time possible watching your content. As a result what would have been a 2-minute video becomes a 20-minute video with introductions, discussions about the weather and silly sales/crowd manipulation tricks. Content is key and I really don't have the time for such a time waster: I'm always skipping to the point or completely ignoring absurdly long videos.
I looked up how to pronounce a word the other day and found a 30-second YouTube video. I expected it to be a looping track of someone saying the word over and over, but what I got instead was 25 seconds of someone describing the word's origin (without saying the word itself), and explaining how many people want to know how to pronounce it. Only as the thumbnail overlay popped up at the end of the video did they actually say the word.
"Forvo is the largest pronunciation reference online. Our goal is to compile native speaker pronunciations for all the words that exist in the world, including names."
The sad thing is, this is the same problem TV has had for a long time that YouTube was solving. TV programming will take 10 minutes of content and stretch it into 40 minutes of filler with 20 minutes of commercials. YouTube used to have a much better content to filler ratio in general. "It was said that you would destroy the TV producers, not join them."
What you experience as short videos turning into long ones was to me the addition of ads inside videos everywhere.
SponsorBlock has saved my enjoyment of YouTube and allowed me to subscribe to channels I never would have watched because of their constant self-promotion.
With an adblocker stopping the ads outside the video, and SponsorBlock to stop the ads inside, I enjoy YouTube like never before.
YouTube requires videos to be eight minutes or longer to include mid-roll ads. So everybody making money from YouTube ads has an incentive to extend their video lengths to at least eight minutes.
>As a result what would have been a 2-minute video becomes a 20-minute video
Or shouldn't have been a video at all.
Lots of people come up with some schtick they don't give a damn about because they see (or think they see) all these other people getting rich on YouTube and TikTok.
And recommendation engines are awful in general. It's a problem that even those genuinely trying to solve it really haven't.
You are correct ... because if I'm only going to make a 2 minute video I would put it on TikTok or Instagram. Way easier to get likes (which is what I'm after if I'm not monetizing it), and way easier to make that content.
I think YouTube knows this which is why they are pushing shorts so hard.
YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.
Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding (niche|not palatable to SV) channels who’s subscribers don’t get notified despite the bell thing being on, new videos no longer in feeds, and even people getting unsubscribed for no apparent reason.
This is a problem, as I’d sooner give up peanut butter than only be served videos with open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails.
> YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed.
This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history.
I also started getting a lot of "recommendations" for things I've ... already seen. That started a bit earlier, maybe about half a year ago.
So now it's about a third forced stupid stuff, about a third things I've already seen, and maybe a third that's useful. I've been flagging things as "not interested" quite aggressively in the hopes it would improve, but I've seen no difference. I think they just changed the way recommendations work to always fairly aggressively mix in "popular content". If I wanted to watch random mindless nonsense then I would turn on my TV: I use YouTube to avoid all of that.
YouTube is slowly turning into a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; I think very soon it will start offering me a cup of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies. Teenagers are stupid. Always were, always will be. I know I was.
Hey, maybe in the future you'll inherit your parents' recommendations. If you're lucky and your parents and grandparents made good choices, you'll have a pleasant experience that makes it easy to make good choices, and if they didn't, your digital life will be terrible from the start. We'll talk about recommendation mobility as the easy of adapting to a user, regardless of their ancestors.
I can refresh the home page a hundred times in a row and the exact same videos in the exact same order get displayed. It never used to be like this. I have no idea what the hell is going on at YouTube head office.
I work in a different part of Google... But getting the same result when refreshing page sounds like getting served from a cache, which doesn't sound that weird. Isn't there a button to show something else?
Recommendations are made, and they are random in some sense.
But an interface needs a certain persistence to be user friendly. Too annoying to glance something, try to go back, and it's gone. Some persistence creates an environment that is a bit more spatial and nicer to my brain.
So, your mind wandered to giving up peanut butter? For me it'd be something like... Uh, Tomatoes. I had to really think about it, but yeah, I'd give up tomatoes to not live in that world, which is saying something because tomatoes in one form or another tend to help keep my morale up through many, many meatless days.
This is only the case if you subscribe to channels that churn out content on a daily or weekly basis and have no interest in finding tangential content by new creators. I've given up on using YouTube for discovery, I have to actively fight the search in order to find anything remotely useful and the main feed is just the same crap repeated over and over again no matter how many I mark as not interested. Whatever happened to it several years ago has completely lobotomized the recommendation engine, it's just trash now. I'm hopeful that content creators will continue to trend towards uploading to multiple video platforms so I can find new stuff.
YouTubers have become more professional and post a large number of videos optimized for monetization (trendy videos, videos around 10 minutes long with additional ads inserted in the video, etc.).
In addition, in order to maximize advertising revenue, YouTube tends to place more importance on new click-bait videos that have a rapid increase in views, rather than high quality videos that can be viewed over a long period of time.
That is the reason why many of those clickbait-like videos are the third one on the right side of the screen when a particular video is played.
Specifically, YouTube stops suggesting videos from your channel if you aren't posting weekly. They need to keep posting bad videos just to keep the revenue increasing on the good ones.
I'm personally regularly suggested videos from content creators with infrequent posting schedules. Heck, I fairly frequently get suggested a video from a creator who hasn't posted a video in more than a year.
> YouTubers have become more professional and post a large number of videos optimized for monetization (trendy videos, videos around 10 minutes long with additional ads inserted in the video, etc.).
That's how I feel about it, too. The quality of the content has gone down because of the incessant urge of popular YouTubers to produce a "clickable" stream of videos on a regular basis. In a way, it feels addictive like porn - you know what you are going to see, it's just that the reviewed product, or the shown environment is different in the new video.
Wrong incentives + lack of mechanisms to find, navigate to and promote interesting content.
Nowadays, people create content on Youtube essentially only for profit (be it actual profit from Youtube or promotion).
That's it. That's what you are selecting from.
There are of course exceptions, but these are rare enough to not dictate the general quality of content.
And if you are dissatisfied with general quality, that's it. There is no catalog where you can drill down and search for stuff that you don't know but you might be interested in. You can only search for things you already know -- and really interesting things tend to be a bit outside of what you already know.
This is almost boringly textbook late-stage "monopoly in practice" playing out. Start with an "edge". Get big because edge. Use "big" to sharpen edge further. Use big (and/or edge) to consolidate market. Once sufficiently consolidated and/or controlled, raise costs.
This is what costs getting raised looks like in a monopoly market. Who's gonna stop them.
Totally agree but I think it's only part of it, other problems probably take par in this:
- spammers are getting better and Google is less able and willing to moderate
- the use of AI without much design around it. It's speculation since who knows how their algorithm works, but from what I've read and the general mindset in ML these days, it's very possible that they just use a recommendation AI with a single target (I've heard watch time, but again, who knows) with little to not design around it. This just does not work, especially if the AI is good at his job. It's a similar problem to decision makers blindly following KPIs, knowing if you did well and choosing criterias can be as hard as taking the decision itself, and an AI can't do that, you can't avoid designing your product.
Ive been thinking for a while that Netflix could. They desperately need to seperate themselves from the competition and they already have the video distribution tech and captive audience to launch a real challenge to youtube.
I mean amazon prime is full of "kids cartoons" that started out as youtube fodder ten years ago. So yeah Netflix could maybe start a "yourflix" side bar - but they would have to work with people who were actual production companies for fear of, well everything.
Something tells me if they setup a package for everyone who had got 100k views on youtube, handed them a better microphone and a contract, they might stand a chnace of building a thousand new production companies.
Readit News
If I subscribe to a new channel it gets recommended like hell, then it forgets about it.
BUT! Totally irrelevant things that I never watch, is kept on my front page for weeks. Like it wants me to check it or wants me to mute it, but fuck them I'm not giving them any more metrics. If I clear the fingerprints and block the acquiring of these metrics the front page gets filled with new, interesting content. Who the hell understands this? I have also observed that if you have an adblocker enabled it gives you trash all the time.
When the absolutely disgusting, braindead, bottomfeeding "depp vs amber" nightmare was ongoing I had to "mute" the same channels multiple times and then 55 others, because it just slams it into my face. Watch it, watch it, you must see this muck.
The topic of my fav channels represent... I get nothing relevant from them. :DDD
The shorts... was the pinnacle of YTs innovation. :DDDD
Goog is all about control now. Look innovation for somewhere else... well... if you can find any, lemme know........
You can't do shit with godzilla and now he does whatever he wants.
There are other things that drive me nuts about YouTube's recommendations, like the fact that they will never recommend me the next part of a n-part video. If I'm watching part 2/3 of something, please show 3/3 in the side bar, YouTube!
YouTube's iterative degeneration into its current state points to the folly of A/B-maximalism. In the pursuit of getting more base hits, it seems like YouTube forgot that the goal of baseball is to win games and keep fans entertained.
YouTube has been bad for a while. I suppose that some part of that is good – YT effectively killed the addictive loops that made their website irresistible. However, there is a lot that sucks about it. The utility of YouTube has gone down. Furthermore, I think YT blew open a hole in the video space for services like TikTok to emerge. TikTok may be crack, but YouTube used to be cocaine.
None of these systems are for the people. It's either about YouTube's bottom dollar or some influencer's ego. It is really amazing to me when I come across old YouTube videos that are just people filming or discussing something interesting without fanfare. You can find newer people doing this these days as well, but it's hard. These types of videos are so refreshing because it's what YouTube should be about: people being creative in honest ways, people talking about or showing something they're interested in, etc.
I've been working on a small team to tackle this problem. We have a working prototype if anyone is interested in checking it out. Look up a channel to get a list of channels in the same niche or related niches. It is specifically designed to surface smaller creators.
Here is our list for 3Blue1Brown, which seems to be popular around here:
https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/
The icons are crawlable links, so you can click the channels in a given list to go to the list for that channel.
We also have mapped the channels to provide a new way to explore. The map clusters similar channels so you can get a spatial sense of where your interests are and what interests and niches are very far away, ones you may not consider or even be aware exist. For the curious, here is a short blog post explaining the map and how to use it:
https://channelgalaxy.com/blog/article0/
I hope this isn't too self-promotional. I think there is a need for this kind of thing and it is hard to resist the many, many cries of frustration about user exploration on YouTube and the narrowness of their recommendations that I frequently see around here.
Cheers!
It used to do that, though! They should at least allow it up to a limit or something rather than making it just that stupid.
My other biggest complaint really is the recommendation system in general. It's so bad that I can guarantee you that I can fall asleep to something innocuous like Spongebob Squarepants and in the morning I'll wake up and it's playing Jordan Peterson. EVERY. STINKING. TIME. It was like that before with Lex Fridman, and I totally had to unsubscribe and unlike a lot of Lex content before it would stop autoplaying it. I can't keep playing that game, but at least I can tolerate Peterson's voice more than Lex's.
Funny thing is I was never crazy about either one. They clearly profiled me as being the kind of person who watches that stuff. No, surely the fact I watch a lot of videos about theme park rides can't mean I want to see similar content. Obviously, I want to watch Jordan Peterson!!! :D /s
Without the market dominance, YouTube would be marginally better than its competitors.
YouTube disabled my entire feed a few weeks ago (https://i.imgur.com/Q78FqLQ.png) and is bullying with a big prompt to turn on tracking to restore it. What's funny is that recommendations have worked perfectly well for the last few years with history turned off (Just show me the stuff I subscribed to) but now I have to click on each subscription one-by-one to see content. Good riddance since I've pretty much stopped using Youtube at this point.
https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
I don't have notifications on and when I visit YouTube I'll check to see what videos I want to watch since I last visited. I usually check the up next to see if anything similar/interesting is recommended and very rarely go to the home page to get recommendations.
Reminder that you don't have to have an account to subscribe:
* https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=THE_CHAN...
* https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=YOURPLA...
(Though an 'official' subscription with-in the system may help the creator.)
But click one recommendation outside my interests just to check it out, and that's going to dominate for the next couple of weeks even if I decide I don't like it. Maybe I should downvote that more aggressively.
I am looking for other sources.
It's annoying, more often than joyful, to use YouTube for me. It feels like a half-baked project. I miss Human Curation.
My story: paying long-term YT user (no ads), watched many multi-hour "calm stream / quiet cafe" videos, Recommended list became 75% polluted w/these and un-cleanable regardless of many "Don't Like" actions by me, nuked history, still seeing some.
Honesty question here, but how do you do that?
BUT, BUT, BUT THE PINNACLE OF INNOVATION IS YOUTUBE/GOOGLE, RIGHT?
And they host these nice and trendy videos about how advanced they are, and how you should do your coding, how you should organize your work, your life, your team, whatever. And the terrible libraries... gimme a fn break. Too bad for the end consumer, it's all about pain.
I mean even porn sites have finer grained control on content filtering than YT :DDD. I'm wondering why they are not opening their code base and let the coding done by individuals, OF COURSE, FOR FREE! ha ha ha
I'm in a similar position. I'm subscribed to 78 channels but typically will only watch content from a fraction of these due to preferences on quality and time (some creators have good content but end up putting up an hour video, which I am less likely to view).
Edit: For clarity, I had no idea WTF a shuffle dance was and curiosity got the better of me. Super great way to make me NOT curious about my non-core interests.
dont, bookmark https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
Significant downgrade on what it used to be.
Have you seen Twitter search lately? The search tab in the app doesn't even have a text field visible by default. It's all just unrelated popular garbage. You have to swipe down to reveal the text field where you can enter your search term. Then you get more unrelated garbage in the "top" result tab and you need to go to one of the other tabs to actually see what you were searching for.
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
Of course, the actual history search box is confusingly smaller and off to the side of the much larger search box for all of YouTube.
And after I wrote that sentence I found the original video I was thinking about with a google search. Welp.
It's definitely an accelerating trend though, online search is getting so much worse and even fast food menus are insane now. You need to the app to see anything other than the most profitable combos in many cases.
I’ve started keeping a log of every interesting article I find since I know I won’t be able to find it earlier.
I’m also seeing a trend where they try and answer question and will pull from any source. The answer often being wildly wrong.
Saw one of “people also ask” where the source was some dudes fanfiction so the suggested question and answer were complete non sense.
YT search was never good (that I can recall).
When I want to find content on YT, I use Google search with a site restrict [1].
Infinitely better.
I invite you all to do the same and forget the YT search box.
[1] something like : life of Albert Einstein site:youtube.com
Isn't that a good thing? If you searched for something and the first 10 results aren't a match, why not introduce you to other things (one can experiment with finding how closely related those additional recommendations are, or based on other things you recently enjoyed, etc.)?
Because that's not what I told it to do.
Go to the front page right now with clean cookies and you'll see most of the thumbnails have "reaction faces" in them for no apparent reason, usually pulling some kind of exaggerated expression.
Clickbait used to mean that you baited the viewer into clicking, now it means you baited the algorithm into recommending you.
In fact, A/B testing showed that the longer the video they put on the home page, the higher the conversion rate.
The search engine should prioritise videos matching your specific search so you can find what you are looking for from hobbyist creators but I’m not sure if that’s happening.
https://www.canva.com/p/templates/EAFBCRpOy3g-yellow-black-e...
Notably though, if I log in and visit my home page I have only one video of this nature on the front page in the first ~50, so it does appear possible to teach the algorithm you will not engage with such content even without conscious effort.
"Forvo is the largest pronunciation reference online. Our goal is to compile native speaker pronunciations for all the words that exist in the world, including names."
https://forvo.com/faq/
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+pronounce+foxes
SponsorBlock has saved my enjoyment of YouTube and allowed me to subscribe to channels I never would have watched because of their constant self-promotion.
With an adblocker stopping the ads outside the video, and SponsorBlock to stop the ads inside, I enjoy YouTube like never before.
Or shouldn't have been a video at all.
Lots of people come up with some schtick they don't give a damn about because they see (or think they see) all these other people getting rich on YouTube and TikTok.
And recommendation engines are awful in general. It's a problem that even those genuinely trying to solve it really haven't.
Deleted Comment
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/technology/youtube-automa...
I think YouTube knows this which is why they are pushing shorts so hard.
Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding (niche|not palatable to SV) channels who’s subscribers don’t get notified despite the bell thing being on, new videos no longer in feeds, and even people getting unsubscribed for no apparent reason.
This is a problem, as I’d sooner give up peanut butter than only be served videos with open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails.
This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history.
I also started getting a lot of "recommendations" for things I've ... already seen. That started a bit earlier, maybe about half a year ago.
So now it's about a third forced stupid stuff, about a third things I've already seen, and maybe a third that's useful. I've been flagging things as "not interested" quite aggressively in the hopes it would improve, but I've seen no difference. I think they just changed the way recommendations work to always fairly aggressively mix in "popular content". If I wanted to watch random mindless nonsense then I would turn on my TV: I use YouTube to avoid all of that.
YouTube is slowly turning into a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser; I think very soon it will start offering me a cup of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Fuck these non-deterministic algorithms and the feeds they fill.
It makes me worry about the future of humanity, as the clean slate is what is popular in your location.
> open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails
Dont forget to add a large amount of money to the title my $$$$250,000 computer.
But it f'ing works - I am really not sure what is wrong with people. Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ...
I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies. Teenagers are stupid. Always were, always will be. I know I was.
And yet here we are. Alive and well.
Do yourself a favor and get an ad blocker. YouTube is barely usable without one at this point.
Recommendations are made, and they are random in some sense.
But an interface needs a certain persistence to be user friendly. Too annoying to glance something, try to go back, and it's gone. Some persistence creates an environment that is a bit more spatial and nicer to my brain.
I also just manage a curated list of channels and consume via RSS, with YT perpetually blocked, short of a few re-review days per year.
How does the algorithm not get that I have probably watched 10,000 ads for Tiktok, I am not installing that shit! Stop trying!
In addition, in order to maximize advertising revenue, YouTube tends to place more importance on new click-bait videos that have a rapid increase in views, rather than high quality videos that can be viewed over a long period of time.
That is the reason why many of those clickbait-like videos are the third one on the right side of the screen when a particular video is played.
That's how I feel about it, too. The quality of the content has gone down because of the incessant urge of popular YouTubers to produce a "clickable" stream of videos on a regular basis. In a way, it feels addictive like porn - you know what you are going to see, it's just that the reviewed product, or the shown environment is different in the new video.
This is why we need user-controlled recommendations. I want that shit blocked.
This sounds like TikTok, and likely trying to compete with them.
Wrong incentives + lack of mechanisms to find, navigate to and promote interesting content.
Nowadays, people create content on Youtube essentially only for profit (be it actual profit from Youtube or promotion).
That's it. That's what you are selecting from.
There are of course exceptions, but these are rare enough to not dictate the general quality of content.
And if you are dissatisfied with general quality, that's it. There is no catalog where you can drill down and search for stuff that you don't know but you might be interested in. You can only search for things you already know -- and really interesting things tend to be a bit outside of what you already know.
This is what costs getting raised looks like in a monopoly market. Who's gonna stop them.
- spammers are getting better and Google is less able and willing to moderate - the use of AI without much design around it. It's speculation since who knows how their algorithm works, but from what I've read and the general mindset in ML these days, it's very possible that they just use a recommendation AI with a single target (I've heard watch time, but again, who knows) with little to not design around it. This just does not work, especially if the AI is good at his job. It's a similar problem to decision makers blindly following KPIs, knowing if you did well and choosing criterias can be as hard as taking the decision itself, and an AI can't do that, you can't avoid designing your product.
Ive been thinking for a while that Netflix could. They desperately need to seperate themselves from the competition and they already have the video distribution tech and captive audience to launch a real challenge to youtube.
I mean amazon prime is full of "kids cartoons" that started out as youtube fodder ten years ago. So yeah Netflix could maybe start a "yourflix" side bar - but they would have to work with people who were actual production companies for fear of, well everything.
Something tells me if they setup a package for everyone who had got 100k views on youtube, handed them a better microphone and a contract, they might stand a chnace of building a thousand new production companies.