
Fair Trending: Objectively-Ranked Trending YouTube Videos - lowe
https://fairtrending.com
======
KirinDave
I was not expecting the truth to be SO much worse than the algorithmically
provided view.

I'm sold on algorithmic timelines now. That Youtube is awful. People are
awful. Fortnite Battle Royale is awful. I don't want to see any of those.

~~~
prolikewh0a
Shows how low quality society is now.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Is it time for someone to wheel out that quote again... Aristotle, was it?

~~~
KirinDave
I may steal this. This insult is so sizzlingly hot and sharp it carbonized my
phone and then cut it in half, and I love it.

------
mooman219
I worked on content recommendation for a bit while I was at Microsoft. People
click on low quality articles, spend a lot of time reading said articles, then
seek out similar or lower quality articles containing the same named entities.
If you recommended a variety of content to those people, they'd most
frequently pick articles of equal or lesser quality about named entities they
just read.

This is really kind of saddening, but your best bet really is just
personalizing on as many user metrics as you can collect to best serve the
people who like clickbait as well as the people who are looking for higher
quality articles.

Not really relevant, but funny enough, if you prioritize article quality,
popular named entities, how relevant those entities are to the article,
engagement, and article age, you end up with earnings reports.

------
simongr3dal
From their about page:

"A simple way to understand this formula is that a video loses a point every
12 hours and gains a point every time it grows by 10x. In other words, a
video's score will not change if its view count grows by 10x in 12 hours.
These constants were tuned to keep popular videos around for about a day."

It seems like pretty flawed idea, they base their ranking on video views and
age, but the video views are a result of the non-"Objectively-Ranked" videos
on YouTube itself.

I think the page itself shows those results pretty clearly, it's chock full of
videos with thumbnails designed to draw peoples eyes as well as text and
titles designed to raise questions and imply drama in order to entice people
to click.

That might be the wanted result, but I don't see how that is much different
from the official Youtube trending page, except this one isn't
localised/customised for your specific country.

~~~
yorwba
> except this one isn't localised/customised for your specific country.

It is. I get results in German. (And yes, they're all clickbait I'd never
watch.)

~~~
simongr3dal
I see, there's a language filter up top must've missed it the first time
around.

------
clux
Not sure if it helps much. It still looks like the same clickbaity garbage
that's in my regular trending tab.

~~~
comesee
Though it seems to be a different list of clickbaity garbage from
[https://m.youtube.com/feed/trending](https://m.youtube.com/feed/trending)
which is sort of interesting.

~~~
rsynnott
I’m reasonably sure the YouTube one shows old stuff if it’s currently popular.
Which I’d assume is what you’d want.

There’s nothing is even consider watching on the “Fair trending” one; I can
see myself watching one or two things off the YouTube one if I was very bored.

~~~
comesee
I used the filter on the site and I watched a view of these videos
[https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msc...](https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msce=0)

------
everdrive
Everyone here is clearly having the same experience. However much we dislike
algorithmic sorting, it's clear that the most popular videos on Youtube are
absolutely horrible.

~~~
threatofrain
Not everything has to be shared, but if people say that YouTube ought be broad
enough for everyone, then one is in a sense sharing a space with 12 year old
kids. Fortnite is probably the #1 streamed game at the moment.

------
jhallenworld
I don't care about the popular crap on YouTube. I do care about the tiny
subset of YouTube which is relevant to my interests. YouTube should accurately
recommend related content, but does a terrible job, and is apparently getting
worse. This is noticed by the obscure content creators, here's one:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA&t=1s)

------
therein
This is a great idea. I also wanted to create a platform like this one however
allow people to sync their list of subscribed channels from YouTube.

As you know, the subscriptions feed is now optimized on YouTube and not all
new content from your subscribed channels find their way into your feed
anymore.

This platform that I was thinking would basically bring that back, however
under a different domain with a better UI.

Anyone interested? Let's build it together. Or just bring that feature into
this site. I just want a feed that's chronological and non-optimized.

~~~
halflings
> As you know, the subscriptions feed is now optimized on YouTube and not all
> new content from your subscribed channels find their way into your feed
> anymore.

Source? Wasn't that just an experiment?

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Indeed, there's a separate feed for subscriptions and it works exactly as
expected. I don't see the issue here.

------
jamesfmilne
The initial page it showed me was a trainwreck of absolute garbage.

I think they need to go and work on their sums a bit more.

~~~
nadont8
Because people watch absolute garbage. There's no algorithmic solution to
that.

~~~
notatoad
there is an alogorithmic solution - it's the one youtube uses for their
trending page, which is subjectively far superior to this "objective" and
"fair" listing.

~~~
hoseja
Do you think the Youtube trending page isn't hand-polished?

------
mujoco
It seems like they're doing something similar to how Reddit's "hot" algorithm
reportedly works. As of 2015, that was supposedly like:

log(upVotes - downVotes) - (hoursOld / 12.5),

according to [https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-
algo...](https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-
work-ef111e33d0d9).

Fair Trending basically differs just in the log() part, substituting
(fractionUpVotes * views) for (upVotes - downVotes). This could change the
ranking if a lot of people view without voting either way.

------
tehwebguy
FYI YouTube will disable their API access as soon as the right team notices
this.

Go on, ask me how I know.

~~~
miduil
How do you know?

------
sbuttgereit
OK... opinion post here... hell with that... rant here.

I have to say the whole notion of "trending" I find ridiculous, and even a bit
offensive. That somehow because a zillion people find something interesting,
that I should, too, makes clear that the best we've done in filtering is
assume people are sheep and need to be "fed" as such. Even with the targeted
suggestions they do when they look at my viewing history (and other history
I'm sure), it's so incredibly ham-fisted I just want to shout, "hey maybe you
should spend less time getting your AI to beat Go champions and more time
getting it actually make useful and relevant recommendations that just maybe
you can dispose of that 'trending' shit you're always foisting on everyone."
(Of course, if Google actually got newer versions of the Youtube app to just
work correctly with their Chromecast, I'd take that as progress).

Yeah, yeah, I know that they aren't trying to get the best matched content to
me in the first place... just that which I might swallow and they can get the
biggest bang for their investment... but the value proposition gets too
diminished and I'm gone.... emphasis on stupidity such as "trending" pushes me
to look at alternatives with some frequency. I've already left Twitter and
Facebook due to this pushing trends stuff, Google is on the edge.

Of course, maybe I'm the outlier and I should just invest in Google, Twitter,
Facebook, oh yeah and their traditional equivalents of "Us", "People", and the
"National Enquirer" since that's where the masses apparently are.

The only trending I'd be interested in at all would be "trending" amongst a
group of people whom I could actively curate in a list based on my tastes and
interests and... importantly... theirs. It's clear to me that I can't
outsource that curation just yet.

Finally... the front page of Hacker News is obviously just a big "trending"
list. I have a higher affinity with the audience here, but still find about
60% - 70% of the front page content to be of zero interest and the comments
hit much less; The 30% - 40% I come back for clearly has a high value to me,
nonetheless. Between a tagging filter and having the ability to select a list
of certain HN users to allow undue influence the results that I see when I
come to the site would make it much, much better experience. (And I probably
wouldn't be baited to post crap like this). In truth, I don't actually use the
Hacker News homepage directly and instead start my journey at
[http://hn.elijames.org/](http://hn.elijames.org/)

~~~
ramblerouser
I totally agree that popular stuff is beneath us techno wizards, but thats not
the point of fairtrending.

The magic of social media is that corperate executives and media conglomerates
don't get to pick what goes to the top. The users do. That's why Facebook
'curating' the trending news feed was so messed up. The whole point of
trending is to see what actual real people are interested in, not just what a
dozen editors in a backroom want you to see.

~~~
sbuttgereit
Sure, that's the idea, but it has no more chance of success than does Facebook
purposefully curating to the masses... indeed: no curation suffers the same
problem that someone's assumption about what I should be interested in,
without first understanding me does: my wants, dreams, desires, fears,
interests, curiosity, etc. are all out of the picture: be it the corporate
curator or the unthinking algorithm, they all look the same. So, in the end
"Fair Trending" is utterly useless to me; in fact, the posted site looks worse
than Facebook curating the trending news... Facebook at least looked
intelligently tone-deaf. The linked site... just looks mindless.

At the end of the day nobody should second hand their interests and be so
passive as to care at all what "trends". In fact, a pure random pick out of
all the possible options would likely be more interesting and engaging than
this "Fair Trending" can do or corporate engagement efforts... while a random
pick certainly wouldn't be perfect, it at least it surface interesting and
original ideas/content that don't necessarily click the "group-think" and
"lowest-common-denominator" boxes.

------
ikeboy
There's no music videos, which usually account for many trending videos.

If you want objective ranking, look at kworb lists. E.g.
[https://kworb.net/youtube/](https://kworb.net/youtube/)

------
ramblerouser
Pewdiepie has the #1 spot on fairtrending and is no where on Youtube's
trending.

Ellen Degeneres and Jimmy Falon are you Youtube trending but nowhere on
fairtrending.

"Elitist corperate control over mass media is great because I don't like what
normal people do." -people in this hackernews thread

~~~
anonytrary
> "Elitist corperate control over mass media is great because I don't like
> what normal people do." -people in this hackernews thread

This seems blown out of proportion. "I don't like what normal people do, so I
will probably not look at trending to find content" is what most people are
saying.

~~~
ramblerouser
Fairtrending isn't about recommending stuff you personally are interested in.
It's designed to acurately report what is actually popular and not just being
promoted by Youtube. I think that went over the head of the people complaining
that their personalized recommendations are more interesting to them.

~~~
anonytrary
I think everyone gets that trending isn't personalized. It's possible that a
lot of people have no interest in what is objectively trending, and defer to
personalized subscriptions and other feeds. I'd imagine that _most_ people
_are_ interested in what is trending (otherwise, it wouldn't really be
trending), but HN is hardly a realistic sample of most people, so you can
expect people here to be surprised that X, Y and Z are trending over the
world.

------
mung
Suppressing the urge to Photoshop all of those thumbnails to Fito's video
screen in idiocracy as a reply.

------
foxfired
"Number of views in the video" was an actual problem for youtube because
people gamed the algorithm by inflating views. Now "time spent watching the
video" is added to confirm the view.

I understand this data is not easily accessible to a third party but it would
certainly improve this algorithm.

Edit 1: If I open YouTube and the Fair trending videos were presented to me, I
would probably never use YouTube again.

Edit 2: I realize that I never click on the trending tab on youtube. I take
back Edit 1, I'll just never click on the trending tab again.

~~~
ramblerouser
Have you looked at the front page of youtube after clearing your cookies? Its
not more high brow than fairtrending. The point is that media corperations are
paying Youtube for placement and Youtube is hiding non-advertiser friendly
content.

------
miduil
If you haven't noticed, YouTube's ranking mechanisms became more "fraudulent"
at least in the recent months. So besides having a service that provides un-
editorialized blackbox algorithm rankings, this service might also provide a
view to purposefully/bugged excluded content.

An example of how bad it is, they've started (on purpose or not) removing
videos of uploaders that aren't taking part of the YouTube monetarization +
have a Patreon link in their description. [0][1]

I'd expect/hope that such practice would be suit in EU courts for unfair
competition.

I wonder how "Fair Trending" implemented their technology, if they are using
official YouTube APIs and if Alphabet is going to kill this service once it
gains traction?

Their about [2] page doesn't answer the "how do we get to the data?".

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005682)

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA)

[2]:
[https://www.fairtrending.com/about?lang=en](https://www.fairtrending.com/about?lang=en)

------
tropo
You really have to pick a category. For example, "News & Politics" is decent.

Of course, an alternate ranking does nothing to fix the problem of videos that
have simply been banned by YouTube. Lots of good stuff is just missing now.
Freedom of speech: tearing out a man's tongue doesn't prove him wrong, but it
does prove that you fear his message and it strongly suggests that his message
might be correct.

~~~
toofy
> ...but it does prove that you fear his message and it strongly suggests that
> his message might be correct.

I find it strange that one would believe this A) means people are scared, and
B) means the message is more likely to be correct.

For example, if we were to watch two random idiots arguing or "debating" over
a complex and highly nuanced topic, if neither of these "debaters" has any
expertise or really any understanding of the wider issues which may need to be
considered, its incredibly unlikely either of these people will come to
anything close to the "correct" answers. While one of them may make more
convincing arguments, this means very little.

If my car mechanic makes a convincing argument,links me to a bunch of youtube
videos, and official looking webpages which all tell me I should use
homeopathic medicine and the guy I'm sitting next to me simply says "Nah,
doctors are totally way better, dude." Neither of those two people are trained
in medicine, but should I listen to the mechanic because his argument was more
convincing? No, of course not.

Having an innate ability to use Sophistry absolutely does not indicate whether
or not their position should be trusted. And refusing to engage with a Sophist
is in no way an indication of being fearful of their message.

It's so weird when people believe "debate me bro, a random idiot, or you're
wrong and I'm correct." is in any way a rational conclusion to make.

~~~
tropo
That is a different situation. Nobody is banning the advocate of homeopathic
medicine.

YouTube actually bans videos. They leave up plenty of incorrect things that
are nonthreatening, so correctness is clearly not the determining factor.

This is not a matter of refusing to debate. It is a matter of refusing to let
alternative opinions exist at all.

------
comesee
The default feed is pretty clickbaity but I filtered to only show the
technology category and it's not terrible
[https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msc...](https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msce=0)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
OT but I sometimes get the impression I'm the only person in the world who
can't stand "Linus Tech Tips". The guy just grates on me and I get the
distinct impression he genuinely doesn't know what he's talking about.

I guess the fact that he's in this list and therefore one of the most popular
channels on YouTube would explain why he keeps appearing in my feed despite my
unsubscription and continued lack of interest, however.

------
convery
Seems to have issues when filtering by language. Pretty sure the top 5
shouldn't be 6 days old with < 100 views.

[0]: [https://i.imgur.com/b1OuV51.png](https://i.imgur.com/b1OuV51.png)

------
bayesian_horse
Sometimes you better not try to find out why something is trending. For
example the "Toad" incident recently.

------
isuckatcoding
So much youtuber celebrity garbage

------
erik_landerholm
Happy to say I’ve never even seen videos of these type.

------
larl
This is actually terrifying.

------
the_cat_kittles
im always wondering how to quantify the self reinforcing aspects of popular
videos. also it seems like score decay based on time should be completely
controlled by the user

~~~
simongr3dal
As I understand it, the formula is designed to keep a trending video around on
their list for roughly a day. It would be interesting so see a list which
optimised for showing videos (of any age) with accelerating views, and had a
stronger decay over time, so you could see what is trending _right now_ , but
it might be heavily biased by the very recent uploads from popular creators.

------
exabrial
I think it's funny during Christmas and Easter, thousands of sermons and
positive Christian videos are posted to YouTube but do not warrant a special
response from Google, despite Christians being a large user base. Google is of
course free to do as they wish with their platform and promote whatever they
want, it's their choice and they own it. What I dislike is they advertise it
as sort of free speech platform but rankings are intrinsically geared towards
special interests.

~~~
duskwuff
Probably because those videos don't actually drive much engagement. Most
sermon videos -- for example -- tend to be relatively slow-paced, lightly
edited (if at all), and do not use any visuals beyond a fixed camera on the
speaker. All of these factors are poison to engagement, even for users who
might otherwise be interested in the content.

~~~
ramblerouser
Do you know how many views Easter sermons get, or are you just assuming it's
not much? I would be quite surprised if the youtube algorithm is looking at
video editing style.

~~~
duskwuff
> I would be quite surprised if the youtube algorithm is looking at video
> editing style.

I didn't mean to imply it does -- at least, not directly. But those factors
affect how users interact with the videos, which YouTube measures as
engagement. And a typical sermon is likely to look especially bad on certain
engagement metrics; in particular, their length means that users are less
likely to watch them to completion, and even less likely to watch multiple
videos in a single session.

