I have discovered so many interesting types of music and documentaries and subculture/subgenres on it. It manages to hit my interests so well, that I rarely go to netflix nor spotify anymore for discovery. I 'll either directly go watch something that I 've chosen on amazon prime, or let the youtube algorithm handle recommendations. (I know this reads like a fake review - but I swear I have no affiliation for youtube btw. Just amazed how well their recommendation engine works)
YouTube seems to do terrible at the recommendations. It cannot even recognize that when I’m behind the computer, I’m not interested in watching documentaries and when I’m behind my Apple TV, I’m not interested in listening to music videos. It’s such basic stuff, let alone the actual recommendations; it just keeps rehashing the same channels. “Oh you watched a video about the US elections, let’s bombard you with US election videos for the next 3 weeks”.
If I compare the music recommendations of YouTube versus Spotify, the latter is miles ahead. YouTube always seems to either descend into obscurity, or you’ll end up with the same old stuff, where Spotify seems to balance things out fairly nicely.
In all honesty, for all the AI expertise and “intellectual excellence” Google possesses in this area, I am surprised how bad they are doing here.
I attribute this to careful curation of my logged-in viewing habits.
> you watched a video about the US elections
That's the problem. As a rule, I never view political, celebrity, or clickbait videos when logged in. There is such a vast amount of dreck in these categories, you're sure to be disappointed sooner or later.
If I see a political/clickbait video that catches my eye, I open it in an Incognito tab.
Their "don't suggest this video" or channel doesn't work for shit either.
The OP is absolutely right in wanting to regain some control over what's presented to his eyeballs. Right now the only way you can do that is to right-click on an offending video and select "don't recommend this channel" or "not interested". That only partially works.
I wish there were some way to specify actual words in a "black list" such that videos whose titles or descriptions contain a black list word would NEVER be presented as a recommendation. This is sort of like Twitter's muted words list. It really is the only way to block content that you really don't want to enter your headspace. Not perfect, of course, but better than being left to the whims of pavlovian algorithms coordinated by ever-improving AI.
I once made the mistake of viewing a Jordan Peterson video. It was mildly interesting, I found him somewhat provocative but a bit paternalistic, not my cup of tea, no big deal. But then... I got a ridiculous number of men's right's or "red-pill" videos recommended to me which were totally disgusting. It's easy to see how people can get radicalized or worse all because somebody is paying Google money for clicks and Google is, in spite of whatever they say, disinterested in our well-being.
In one language, the suggestions are pretty good. I've found plenty of new stuff that I otherwise wouldn't have.
In the other, it basically recommends a mix that is 80% videos from my subscriptions that I've already watched 10+ times and 20% new stuff that I just don't have any interest in. I wonder if there is some sort of failure mode I'm hitting.
5 to 10 years ago I would frequently get lost in Youtube's music recommendations, just going down one rabbit hole after the other with dozens of tabs of untrodden paths. Nowadays everything seems to loop you back to the same tightly knitted clusters of popular music. I suspect that if you were to graph the video recommendations, the resulting graph would be of a devastatingly low complexity.
If you could drop some examples it might be easier to understand why it’s working for you.
But youtube manages to recommend to me things that aren't in my alley, but I somehow end up loving.
(just a random sample from music) "Heilung - Lifa" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1BsKIP4uYM
"The caretaker at the end of time" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJWksPWDKOc&t=10573s
"Babe Rainbow - Secret Enchanted Broccoli Forest" - https://youtu.be/lh2qHxUDt6o?t=26
A whole new genre called DungeonSynth - https://youtu.be/E9R-vzIe8x0
And one called Witchhouse - https://youtu.be/6XIlNP-c4Ds
And Sovietwave goth - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZZSyO28RUg
Uhh, drum n bass n sax?? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G55GspnNkBo
And the latest weird recommendation a San Jose band called Sunami.
Oh And This! - https://youtu.be/cIMKJ43TFLs?t=76 ---- I wouldn't be searching for any of that on my own. But I love all of it (ended buying merch from quite a few "youtube recommended" artists). To me that is as successful a recommendation system as it can be. It shows me things I didn't even know I 'd love! From Jazz, to Funk, to Ambient, to SovietWave goth, to psychedelic rock, the list is always expanding.... I was never that open minded, but now I am. Maybe this is more on me and how my personality evolved through the years than on youtube's recommendations...
---
But you can see that many people had the same happen to them by how popular comments like this are -> "You didnt find this video. It found you." Or "I would love to know what I did to make this come up in my suggested videos. Holy shit this is awesome!"
Curious, ain't it?
Especially considering the fact that you did not even attempt outlining what the reason might be why so many others have the opposite experience.
In this case, I'd imagine this is a case where the people who have a bad experience with the YouTube suggestion algorithm have a reason to speak up but the people who are having a fine experience do not.
Here's an example of some stuff that just showed up recently.
[1] Some guy camping an exploring an island that used to be a federal prison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xnI1hZdltw
[2] A documentary about homeless people racing carts - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi-f_J6hV-g
[3] Fantastic funk music (and I don't even listen to funk!) - https://youtu.be/m1oLjnKeUiY?t=2
[4] Fantastic old school theatrical hard rock from Japan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbI79e5iZKs
[5] Sapolsky's must-see lecture on stress - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9H9qTdserM&t=112s (which I got recommended and was watching this morning in the background while I worked)
Just a random sample from stuff that popped up in the recent past. All the above captured my curiosity 100%. Maybe it's a personality thing, maybe I am eager to just discover novel stuff, that the quality level might not be the highest but the novel factor covers for it.
My biggest gripe with YouTube recommendations, or any service of that kind (Spotify, Amazon, etc.), is that they don't understand what aspects of the content I value. So it is a huge hit and miss. Sometimes it works, because I guess I just happen to value the same things that the majority of people do, other times, I might watch an hour long very in-depth video about a topic, then YouTube for a week or so tries to get me to watch 5 minute, rather shallow introduction videos that are way more popular. There is nothing wrong with those videos per se, they are often really well made, but it is not what I'm looking for.
Other times it picks stuff up from the long tail that seemingly gets into a feedback loop, suddenly reaching millions of view, with practically zero relevance to me.
Then there are some personal tastes of mine, e.g. that I can't stand the, I guess I'd call it the "Youtube Voice" where creators go completely over the top instead of talking like a normal person.
I wonder what metric could be used as a proxy to get better recommendations? Or if a better approach would be, to just build a better custom search so I can tweak it to what I'm looking for at this moment in time.
May also be attributed to something else, or I'm getting old, but it seems to have been a fortunate outcome.
a #video-title { color: red !important;}
a:visited #video-title { color: black !important;}May help curate once you start getting those recommendations.
This is the part I don't understand, how is Google doing so bad at this. You get slightly better experience if you use Chrome. It (on purposely?) keeps asking you to click 3 buttons to play a video Edge, and won't even show comments.
The worst part is when it gets stuck on particular video/topic and just keeps recommending the same thing for months.
The ML PhDs could be working just fine. You won’t know.
Am going to see if I can update the link above aswell.
> Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from.
Which makes it sounds like this is a paid article regardless. Incognito worked though thank you.
1. Open it with Incognito
2. Setup and forget: use https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome (also for firefox)
3. using a website like outline: https://outline.com/7eq6fKThe reason I found them useless is that the suggestions were too specialised. I usually do not want to watch a dozen videos on the same topic. I usually want to watch one high quality video about it, then move on. Same with channels. I do not want to follow ten channels about each of my hobbies. One channel or two high quality ones is enough.
So, even though the linked project is super cool from a technical perspective, I am not sure how the algorithm could be improved to attend to my taste.
[0]: https://hakon.gylterud.net/tutorials/youtube.html (YouTube self-defence)
Yeah, that's pretty much my exact gripe - that the algorithm just keeps wanting to show you more of the same. It's like a friend who gets obsessed about one thing after you said you liked it once :')
I'm not sure how best to solve this though
I just removed my Twitter treding topics, awesome.
On a side note, tiktok has to have the best recommendation algorithm possible - not good for us, but good as in addicting.
There's so much useful information inside user comments.
I have a theory that I'm truthfully too lazy to test out, but I'm presuming that lower quality videos are going to have an average comment text complixicity number lower than the higher quality videos, especially as your topic gets more specific/technical.
Take a look textstat(1) for some examples.
The carwow channel for example is definitely asking to answer stupid debates in the comments to improve its ranking. The vilebrequin channel does the same but as a joke and explain that it's to improve the ranking. The community then write a lot of long and stupid comments to improve the ranking.
Writing long complex comments that are still readable would be a lot harder to ask of your audience, you would have to inspire it. Therefore something like this is maybe better for the ranking https://medium.com/glose-team/how-to-evaluate-text-readabili...
on edit: changed wrong comments to ranking
Seems doable.
I was worried I'd accidentally nuke my gmail account, but turns out you can delete your YouTube account + history without affecting any of your other Google services (I did it last night).
You can always watch specific videos without being logged in.
what do you think would be good markers of a bad video? other than the obvious (clickbait terms, repetitive/generic titles), I'm not sure what could work. any suggestions?
I notice that when I consume these content I never end up feeling better than when I started regardless of whether I agree / disagree with them. Also a huge time sink.
Also, entertainment content about celebrities like the kardashians.
I want something that will allow me to add interesting videos to my "watch later" playlist. That way I can then watch the videos on the normal YouTube app on my apple tv
It allows you to hide the Feed, disable Autoplay, hide the Sidebar and related Videos etc., and thus completely filter out every recommendation, now you would just have to subscribe to all the Channels that interest you - tada personalized feed. Of course this has some short comings: Likewise you won´t discover new interesting channels and other novel videos etc., so to speak you´d have to subscribe to every channel that could contain a video of your interest
That´s my system for not wasting so much time on Youtube; thank you Chris for sharing the post, it inspired me to undertake the coding approach, if i have time in the near future, to build a good filter.
I have maybe 4 channels I check out from time to time, and all of them post new videos pretty irregularly, so there is not much point in managing subscriptions. That said, I recently started using NewPipe on mobile and have subscriptions there.
I mostly watch tech, games, dev, toys etc. including rocket jump, Siggraph, viva LA dirt league, corridor, Tom Scott, Vertassium, Steve mould, numberphile etc.
I almost always end up finding something interesting to watch. When it's not, I either mark it as 'not interested' or leave a dislike and it becomes good again
Much like the author I have no problems finding "decent" content from traditional wide audience channels like Tom Scott, Veritasium, Numberphile, Siggraph, etc it's trying to find that 1 video out of the full homepage of recommendations that's not mainstream but actually "very good" and in depth that ends up eating more time than watching the videos - followed by a refresh to apply all of the "not interested"s I added to try to steer away from certain content. Definitely going to try this repo when I get home.
so you’re fully in control? Just my two cents.
Tiktok had the best recommendations system so far. They are designed to keep you hooked. YT they are designed and give feel you are wasting your time on this so go back to your life.
Not sure if search engines can provide user defined algorithm plugins for searching or day use search algorithm 1 or 2.
Most of the time feel like I am restricting myself from watching new videos in youtube because it might think I like this starts to recommend that will be a problem. So I don't even anyone my mobile to watch youtube videos. They should have incognito button so that I can watch new stuff.
Recently I noticed I get better suggestions when I am logged out [0]. I am still convinced someone could implement a recommendation system that can suggest more interesting videos based on my history. And it would make me spend more time on the platform so it would be actually win-win if that could have been done by youtube but given their current priorities on monetization I don't know if there is hope. I will give that a try.
I think you're right re: monetisation and incentives tbh, I can't envisage it changing any time soon
I guess there is no way to have the same result without the need of the API key (I do my best to stay away from google)
Invidious is "an alternative front-end to YouTube" which can be self-hosted or you can use one of the popular hosted instances.
https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/ https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/wiki/API
I used stylebot chrome extension with this css:
#masthead-container, .videowall-endscreen, #secondary, .ytd-comments, #upload-info, ytd-video-owner-renderer, .super-title,.ytp-ce-element, #items {
display:none
}
const $ = jQuery;
function hideThem(){
if(jQuery('.ytd-compact-autoplay-renderer#toggle')[0].checked){
jQuery('.ytd-compact-autoplay-renderer').click();
}
}
hideThem();
$(document).ready(()=>{
hideThem();
});I would prefer saved searches. But YouTube doesn’t seem to index the auto generated subtitles.
I would absolutely love this as a browser add-on. My current approach to avoiding distraction on YouTube is an add-on called "Remove YouTube Recommended Videos, Comments" which does exactly what its title says it does, but leaves the actual YouTube page quite bare
Does the video teach you something worth knowing? Feel like this could be answered by taking the captions and ranking the difficulty of the language used, or making a word map. Then have AI deciding is this about math, science, politics, and so on. Even simple as rating the words on a grade reading level would help to filter out useless videos.
Particularly, the "sam build --use-container" command might be useful for simulating the Lambda environment
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/lat...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improve-youtube-op...
People must waste more time reading about how to not to waste time than anything. Just like all these people being unproductive while reading about how to be more productive.
Of course the solution to all this is self-discipline but that doesn't sell.
I wrote my masters around the YouTube algorithm and the implications on politics. Some of my findings: - The algorithm works differently in English or other languages; - The number of views is not a very important metric on the recommendations - The number of interactions is a much more important metric for the algorithm - The algorithm seems to be fairly simple: the more a video has the searched keyword, the better chance you have for it to rank higher - YouTube doesn't necessarily put you on a "bubble" as defended by some authors on other social media platforms. It suggests videos that are related but if no other videos are relevant, it has no issues with suggesting content that is contrary to the initial. An example would be: "Donald Trump speaks about the elections". If no other Donald Trump content is available, it will suggest content about the elections, and this might mean a video about an opponent