
YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users - elorant
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/youtube-should-stop-recommending-garbage-videos-to-users/
======
danShumway
We don't need human-curated Youtube, we need to give more control to users.

The annoying thing about Youtube is that many of the problems I have with
their algorithm could very, very easily be solved if the designers gave up
their relentless mantra of "never ask the user anything directly."

I watch playlists and LetsPlays, and occasionally my homepage will just turn
into a massive wall of recommendations from the same playlist, rather than
_one_ recommendation for the next video in the list. That's hard to solve
algorithmically, but very easy if you give me a button to press that says,
"when recommending a playlist, only recommend one video."

It's very hard to algorithmically figure out whether or not a user wants
repeated recommendations because repeated recommendations tend to steer users
towards repeated views even if they would prefer other behavior. But Youtube
has view history for users. It would be very easy to have a button to press
that says, "don't recommend videos I've already watched."

But at some point, everyone working on AI/algorithms decided that the best
user experience would be for users to try and on-the-fly intuit the quirks of
every algorithm and then to do reinforcement training based on their partial
understanding of how things work. The last thing I want as a user is to have
to treat my computer like a cat.

~~~
ses1984
Playlists can be semantically different things. They can be "top 50 songs of
2018" or they can be "history of WW2 parts 1-50". It might make sense to
recommend more than one video fron the first kind of playlist, but not the
second.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
How does that invalidate the argument for giving control over this
functionality to the user?

~~~
ses1984
It doesn't. Being able to deal with different kinds of playlist would be good
either way, whether YouTube controlled everything for you or some
customization was possible by end users.

------
donatj
The majority of my YouTube recommendations are videos I’ve _already watched_ ,
despite there being innumerable videos in the back catalogues of my
subscriptions I have not seen. My wife has the exact same problem.

Surely I haven’t seen all of YouTube. I would love if it recommended me things
I would be remotely interested in watching, even if they were “garbage” over
this. At this point I would almost prefer sketchy conspiracy theory video
recommendations.

~~~
danso
I have a tendency to rewatch videos over and over, or rather, replay them
because they make for good not-too-distracting background noise (I do the same
with “The Big Lebowski”). Nearly my entire recommendations feed is videos I’ve
seen a dozen times or more, and because I often visit YouTube to just quickly
find something for background noise, I’ll just click whatever’s near the top.
And next time I visit YouTube...those videos are at the top again.

That’s kind of annoying to me but I figured that it’s a problem of my own
making. But it sounds like the algorithm behaves this way for other users who
aren’t as weirdly repetitive as me?

~~~
dajon
I suspect this is fundamentally the same as Amazon recommending things you've
already bought. Even if the likelihood of rewatching/repurchasing is small,
that probability must compare favourably to the chance that their algorithm
will select a 'correct' unseen item to display.

Recommendations are hard.

~~~
danso
One of my cynical hypotheses is that, for videos that I'm rewatching for the
nth time, the amount of energy/desire to interact is diminished (i.e. "vegging
out"). Which is inversely proportional to the frequency that I'll click the
"Skip Ad" buttons.

------
naiveai
This article has a catchy title, but is absolutely terrible. Curated human
recommendations and/or "YouTube staffers should think like journalists" are
both two of the worst ideas for the internet I've heard in quite a long time.
They don't reduce bias by any significant amount consistently (and I suspect
the authors know this), and thinking of a platform where millions of seperate
people upload ungodly amounts of content per second as a platform to be
curated just like a news site is just fundamentally misunderstanding the scale
and nature of Cyberspace.

~~~
humanrebar
Curate it like a radio station or network then.

The curated playlists on Google Music are pretty nice. I wouldn't mind seeing
something like that for video, especially targeted at kids with various age
ranges, activities, moods, and interests.

~~~
kalleboo
> _Curate it like a radio station_

Radio is even more full of garbage than YouTube!

The curated playlists on Apple Music are decent but they're too short and
there are too few of them. There's also nothing stopping a third party
curating YouTube and sharing recommended playlists - it's just too hard to
find a mass audience with generic recommendations.

------
thosakwe
I don’t even buy the reasoning that the recommendations are somehow
“personalized,” because they don’t seem to be... At all. I have _never_
watched a political video on YouTube, or really anything unrelated to music or
computer science, yet my “recommended videos” are always full of Ben Shapiro
and his ilk. It’s easier to find relevant videos by doing a regular Google
search, which is a little ironic.

~~~
chapium
You can generally avoid political talk shows by clicking the not interested
button. They still bubble up, especially if you watch general interest videos
that have primarily male audiences.

~~~
jpl56
"Not interested" seems to work just for a little while. They will come back
eventually...

------
apacheCamel
I propose an idea, maybe: every video you watch, the original author of that
video can set up a list of recommended videos to watch after you are done with
the one you originally came for. This way, the original video author has a say
in where you head in your Youtube rabbit-hole experience.

This is just off the top of my head early in the morning so probably not the
best idea, but honestly it seems better than what they are doing now.
Personally, I subscribe to a certain set of people and rarely watch videos
outside of those content creators.

Edit: Just to add to my first point, I would be much more happy to follow the
recommendation of the content creator I follow than some algorithm designed to
get me to watch/click more.

~~~
striking
They can already add suggested videos in end screens and in the info card
drawer (although the info card drawer is not used nearly as often as it could
be, and YouTube doesn't necessarily do a good job of drawing attention to it).

~~~
apacheCamel
I guess I forgot about that (it probably helps that Youtube doesn't give it
much attention as they should). I think those were a step in the right
direction but having those possibly at the top of the "recommendation" area or
just replacing it completely would be more intuitive to me. Maybe even having
it autoplay to the next video set up by the content creator.

I am not a content creator so my opinion is solely from the viewer side. I
would love to hear from people who are making the videos I watch and enjoy as
well since many of them are using Youtube as their sole income. IMO, you have
to please both sides to a certain extent or this all won't work.

------
wastedhours
Am I the only person who gets actually relevant recommended videos when logged
in?

I'd say 80% of the recommended videos are directly related to the interests
I've shown with my viewing habits. I went through a period of watching at
least an hour a day so perhaps that's it and they have some serious data
behind me (and I never watch conspiracy, politics or prank videos for them to
appear anywhere near them).

Whenever I'm logged out though, then yeah, complete dumpster-fire.

~~~
fortran77
I just checked. The "up next" column seems pretty relevant. I probably
wouldn't watch the Area 51 video or the "what did we find when we searched
pennies" but they weren't awful ideas

[https://imgur.com/kG0uUDt](https://imgur.com/kG0uUDt)

(And that Navier-Stokes video was very good!)

------
safeplanet-fesa
I use my current YouTube account for two and a half years. In this time period
I clicked "Not interested" in the right sidebar with suggestions around 3000
times - very many times, and I keep clicking it. Due to this huge effort, when
I watch videos of my interest scope, I mostly receive good suggestions and I'm
satisfied with the suggestion system; however when I occasionally watch
something unusual to me, I do receive bad suggestions and I keep clicking "Not
interested". But already for a year I have not been suggested any "TOP 10
LIFEHACKS", reaction videos of obnoxious clowns, no previews with useless
arrows and circles, O-faces, social experiments and pop-music from YouTube's
Trending. Whenever I sometimes open YouTube from another computer, I fall into
such deep disgust that my face expression twists. Another thing not related to
this: I still use old YouTube's theme, it's faster and looks better than this
modern "polymer" for touchscreens.

~~~
rasz
"fun" fact: "Not interested" button on Twitch uses a rolling ~300 item filo
(First In, Last Out) list. Perfect placebo! You keep clicking and it keeps
pretending to work.

I wonder if Google is not doing the same, as they do for Likes with 5000 limit
[https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/6m7k63/i_just_reac...](https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/6m7k63/i_just_reached_5000_liked_videos_limit/)

------
Quequau
Everything about YouTube doesn't fit my interests or preferences... to such an
extent that I use YouTube-DL for almost all the things I watch off YouTube.

Recommendations are almost always garbage and I have no idea why. I also think
that the search function is bad, like so bad that's it's somehow dishonest. I
routinely run the same searches looking for the same thing but find stuff that
was made well before the last time I ran the search... so why didn't the
previous search uncover these results?

~~~
lizant
By design, the search function does not return an exhaustive list of content
matching your search terms. It returns content that YouTube wants you to
watch.

------
dgudkov
Well, click-driven advertisement and emotion-driven social media have
disrupted the old (and well functioned) system of information pre-filtering
and pre-selection by domain experts and journalists whose salary was dependent
more on reputation than "engagement".

Now we're mowing the consequences of such "disruption".

~~~
alexis_fr
Those “domain experts” were censoring men’s rights, for example. Only since
Youtube are we discovering that male victims of home violence are 28% cases;
If you listen to the “domain experts” they’ll pretend it is so small it’s not
measurable, or pretend it’s not a problem.

That’s just an example for the area I’m expert in, but the current western
political blowback is massively due to information flowing with fewer
censorship, hence discovering that “domain experts” have led us to believe
false or inaccurate things in the past.

“Domain experts” is also “TV-channel chosen domain experts” or “journalist-
chosen domain experts” which has proven to provide erroneous results.

~~~
whatshisface
The mainstream media is also cozy with their advertisers and were known for
helping to cover up environmental issues.

------
puranjay
Am I the only one who always felt that the garbage videos is what really made
YouTube so much more authentic and fun than TV?

If I wanted sanitized, censored, controlled entertainment, I'd just watch TV

~~~
wolco
I agree the uniqueness is a big draw. Never sure what might show up.

------
mxscho
Regardless how to define what's garbage and what's not, YouTube seems to
remove demonetized videos from recommendations. Since I don't think that good
content is always necessarily advertiser-friendly, a lot of good videos are
just not getting any attention because a few big companies decided that
they're not helpful to market their products. Example: Historical or
educational videos which are about controversial topics or just have the word
"war" in their title.

Basically, their recommendations algorithm favors profit from advertising over
personalized recommendations because it seems to be designed to maximize
click-through rate and watch time for videos with many ads. [1]

[1] [https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=838](https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=838)

------
sails
I use the cosmetic filtering feature of Ublock Origin [1] to block everything
except the video and related controls. I then only access youtube via the
"subscriptions" page [2]. This effectively blocks the recommendations,
autoplays, linked videos etc that make YouTube feel like such a cesspit.

[1] [https://www.maketecheasier.com/ultimate-ublock-origin-
superu...](https://www.maketecheasier.com/ultimate-ublock-origin-superusers-
guide/#removing-elements) [2]
[https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions](https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions)

------
washadjeffmad
It's like this hasn't improved since the late 2000s. If I forget to disable
autoplay and it eventually ends up on a LinusTechTips, it'll be another week
before I stop getting recommended nothing but those after every video.

If this behavior is based off aggregate watching patterns, can we at least get
the patterns applied to us of people who match our usage demographics and not
the tens of thousands of pre-teens being raised by YouTube?

------
kup0
Typically almost none of my recommended videos are relevant.

The worst part is that what they do recommend are often conspiracy videos, "X
destroys Y" debate videos, extremist 'alternative' news, and other similar
trash.

You would think they could tell from what I've watched already that none of
their recommendations are remotely relevant to me- and in fact, are often the
opposite of anything I would ever want to see.

------
kinkrtyavimoodh
To offer a counterpoint, I absolutely love YouTube recommendations.

Once you get into watching videos belonging to a new field, you get a lot of
recommendations for that, and it's great to use them to get a good nice
overview of the field.

Likewise, repeat recos for songs etc are also very very convenient.

I think this is again a case of the vocal minority making it feel like
everything sucks.

------
durnygbur
YouTube is toxic for humans, because it is not a platform serving humans. It
is a platform serving copyright holders and advertisers. Next video playing
means copyright levy going somewhere to someone, one more ad impression
(interesting glitch had been present in Germany unil recently where copyright
holders were too greedy for such arrangement to operate, only proving how low
priority, if any at all, a human user is). Trends and moods are being traced
globally only to accumulate the both. What audio and video will be presented
to a human is absolutely no concern for anyone - whichever will sustain the
inflow of the copyright levies and ad impressions.

------
ideonexus
"When a video finishes playing, YouTube should show the next video in the same
channel."

This is how it worked just a couple years ago. I would binge-watch a channel's
entire history of videos on history, board games, or other fascinating
subjects in the background while I did other things. At some point it changed,
and now every video I watch gets followed by some click-bait often highly-
political nonsense meant to get me outraged or shocked at something.

I've decided to turn it off and just stream documentaries on Curiosity Stream
now. When I do watch YouTube, I get nagging pop-ups asking me to upgrade my
service, but why would I do that when they've ruined what I enjoyed about the
site?

------
grawprog
Google's too busy optimizing ad delivery for youtube to care. I recently
updated the android app, only change I noticed was now ads extend over the
description and comments until you click a little x. That never existed before
the update.

~~~
LordHeini
Try NewPipe.

Googles Youtube App drives me insane with all the crappy ads.

~~~
grawprog
Yeah I do use newpipe to play music through an external player but I don't
sign in on there so finding videos for channels I'm subscribed to gets kind of
frustrating.

------
xboxnolifes
Recently, my disliked Youtube change that the "Related videos" on the side of
a video now first show 10 of my general "Recommended" videos instead of videos
that are similar to the one I am currently watching...

------
apricot13
I make a point to avoid watching recommended videos the exception being I tend
to use youtube for researching products and recommended videos are actually
helpful there.

My youtube process is to go straight to the subs page daily, add all the
videos to a 'watch later' playlist* so whenever I go to youtube I always have
a curated list of just for me content and I don't get sucked down the rabbit
hole.

*not the watch later option because you cant change the order of those ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I'd kill for a marker on the subs page that said 'last visited'!

~~~
frosted-flakes
In the Android app, the default Watch Later playlist can be re-ordered just
like any other playlist.

------
PaulHoule
I would point to this article:

[https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201](https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201)

My take is that "reccomendation" technology is disasterously bad in most cases
but Google has us hypnotized to believe they are "smarter" than the rest of
us, although when you look at their definition of "smart" it seems to be a
bludgeon to intimidate other people with.

Google doesn't have to be smarter than its competitors, it just has to be
smarter than the people who buy ads.

------
patresh
Relevant paper put up last week on Arxiv to be published at EMNLP 2019 :
Auditing Radicalization Pathways on Youtube (
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313](https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313) ).

Researchers of the University of Minas Gerais and EPFL audited Youtube's
recommendation algorithm in the context of alt-right content and found that
users consistently migrated from milder to more extreme content throughout
recommendations.

~~~
judge2020
Similar post from a year ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17938181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17938181)

YT's recommendation algorithm drives watch time and engagement, but based on
the behavior of other users; so when the YT algorithm sees that driving to
extremism pushes high engagement, while driving users to more mild content
reduces engagement, the algorithm knows the best course of action for future
users.

------
teilo
I _hate_ the recommend algorithms they use. If I get interested in a
particular topic for a few hours, or watch, in a whim, a video I would
normally have no interest in (a pop music video for instance), I don't want to
see and endless series of videos in the same category.

It's bad enough that I had to log my AppleTV's YouTube app out, because
children. My Recommend page would be overloaded with Fortnight, PubG, and RDR
videos. That I could understand at least.

------
rapnie
> YouTube's recommendation engine "isn't built to help you get what you want —
> it's built to get you addicted to YouTube," argued Guillaume Chaslot

Well.. for me the bad recommendations and search results are having the exact
opposite effect. If I have a direct link to a cool video then its fine, but
clicking around in the UI is an absolute time-waster.

But then again I'm not logged in and have FF + uBlock + PrivacyBadger and
maybe its made deliberately annoying then..

------
ekingr
I would argue that it is the same story for traditional media - albeit to a
less extreme extent. In France, even on public channels, reality shows and
dubious _scandal-sounding_ programs now represent a high share of the
broadcasts.

For sure it is less extreme than the topics mentioned there, but still the
programs are optimized to make you addicted and boost stats. Neutral fact-
based or educational content is disappearing quickly.

------
magashna
I've found that clicking "not interested" videos doesn't work, but reporting
them has cleaned up my feed. Now I almost only get things from my
subscriptions. It's a more brutish option that may have collateral damage but
seems to work for me

~~~
manigandham
Why report them? That can get videos demonetized or removed for the creator.

------
cookie_monsta
That's weird. YouTube always makes awesome recommendations for me.

Just kidding. YT's a dumpster fire, but it serves to point at when somebody
starts telling you that Skynet is just around the corner. We may have nailed
the A but but we're a looong way off the I.

------
sarcasmOrTears
I really like youtube recs. I have different accounts for different interests
and the recommendations are always on point. I don't understand why so many
people from the media complain. I think they just don't like that youtube
recommends non-mainstream channels too.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I agree, I've actually found some really interesting channels through
recommendations. Perhaps the targeting is so accurate due to the years of data
they have on my 2 accounts.

That said, I recently created a brand new account for my company and the
default recommendations seem to be _absolute mindless garbage_. But perhaps my
interests just don't align with what the vast majority of the YouTube-using
public are watching.

~~~
TheBranca18
I've found over the years as I get to be more and more of an irascible old
man, that my viewpoints don't align with much as far as popularity goes. And
that's okay. Frankly the power in YouTube for me was to look back at seminal
events that resonated and transformed my life. It is wonderful for that.
However, it's very poor at complex recommendations. If I watch a video about
the polar ice caps melting, that doesn't mean I want to watch a climate change
denier. I realize this is not an easy thing to solve and that's why it
shouldn't be solved solely with algorithms. The same way that copyright claims
should have a human touch and not just automatically remove revenue for people
on the platform.

------
oldgradstudent
So some people don't like some YouTube recommendations?

------
mcemilg
How to define garbage?

