
TheirTube – How do the recommended videos look on their Youtube home page? - reimertz
http://www.their.tube
======
mongol
This is very insightful. I have considered another, somewhat related idea: to
sample a news / media site, over the course of time. The idea would be to
illustrate how news bubble up and down in priority. It would for example be
interesting to follow how a somewhat big but also controversial piece of news
would be bumped down in priority as other news are added on top. As I
understand, the news home pages changes very frequently to attract people to
come back soon to see "what is new". This can have the effect that you miss
out on something significant because it is already bumped down.

In the old days, when news was printed on paper, you would have one front page
per day. I have no idea how many front pages there are per day now but
probably dozens if not hundreds of variants, where only after some hours the
biggest news is no longer the biggest.

~~~
the_duke
With all our media resources and technology, it's crazy that there is no easy
way to answer questions like "what happened politically in France in the last
month?", "what were the economic developments in Africa in the last quarter?"
or "what were the biggest battery technology advances in the last year?".

With the barrage of news it is very easy to miss a lot, especially if you want
to keep up with multiple domains and geographical regions.

I would love some hierarchical listing that shows the most important news
items for different time periods (week, month, quarter, year), and filterable
by domain (eg business, economy, politics, science, technology, ...).

One should be able to continuously drill down. Eg start with all news world
wide. Then show only Europe, then only eg Sweden, then the economy of Sweden.
Same thing with topics. With each entry linking multiple articles from quality
sources, across the political spectrum.

I would happily pay 25+/month for such an aggregator with the appropriate
quality. Which probably would mean hand-curated lists (opening up all sorts of
of bias problems, but still).

Edit: I wonder if this could be crowd-sourced via a dedicated platform.

~~~
mongol
The Economist paper edition has a spread with summarized news for the past
week. I have been thinking of isolating myself from the news cycle and keeping
myself up-to-date with a one week latency, using the Economist's summaries.
The problem is, I have not found a suitable replacement for national (in my
case Swedish) and also local news. Would also pay for a similar aggregator.

~~~
mnsc
If you can stomach Hakelius then Fokus was some good quality journalism when I
was a subscriber.

~~~
mongol
Good suggestion. I can stomach Hakelius, certainly. He is one of the best
writers in the editorial space in Sweden today.

------
BitwiseFool
I got tired of all the clickbait and recommendation spam on my YouTube
homepage so I made some filters in uBlock Origin.

My filters also block out recommended videos on the righthand side of the
video you are watching.

Here's what it looks like:
[https://imgur.com/a/uxpQE1J](https://imgur.com/a/uxpQE1J)

If you'd like the same, enter this into your uBlock Filters.
[https://pastebin.com/PK1hdeEn](https://pastebin.com/PK1hdeEn)

(Feedback and additions Welcome! This is something I hope to share with others
to make YouTube a little less insufferable)

~~~
johnsoft
You might be interested in Invidious. It's a lightweight youtube frontend that
runs in the browser.

[https://invidio.us/](https://invidio.us/)

[https://github.com/iv-org/invidious](https://github.com/iv-org/invidious)

You can host it yourself or use one of the many public installations:
[https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/wiki/Invidious-
Instances](https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/wiki/Invidious-Instances)

~~~
edgarvaldes
I use a FF addon[0] that redirects YT links to Invidious

[0][https://github.com/metiis/invidious-
redirect](https://github.com/metiis/invidious-redirect)

------
ideals
Flat Earther is not one of the options available from what I can tell. I
suppose it falls under conspiracist although that is a pretty broad category.

Fruitarian, Prepper, Liberal, Conservative, Conspiracist, Climate Denier

The web design is really good! And it's funded by Mozilla which is cool

~~~
creaghpatr
What's a fruitarian?

~~~
sydd
A stricter form of veganism, where you only eat raw fruit. Steve Jobs and
Gandhi was fruitarian too; usually such people practice indian spiritualism in
some form too (e.g. yoga)

~~~
grardb
Not quite. Veganism is a belief system, whereas fruitarianism is a diet. The
latter is compatible with veganism since the diet contains no animal products,
but you can be a fruitarian who exploits animals in a non-dietary fashion
(e.g. wearing leather, buying products tested on animals, etc.).

Also, my understanding is that at least some fruitarians allow for some amount
of nuts/seeds and leafy greens, but I don't know if that's universally
accepted.

~~~
hombre_fatal
The wiki page of veganism disambiguates between dietary vegans and ethical
vegans.

~~~
grardb
It does, but that page was likely written by non-vegans, who in general have a
hard time seeing past the dietary aspect of veganism, since it's the biggest
obstacle to becoming a vegan for most people.

As I point out in another comment[1], the origins of veganism are very much
rooted in animal rights. I grew up vegetarian, but I would never refer to
myself as a "dietary Hindu." There's a lot more to it than just the diet!

Typically, a vegan would refer to someone following a vegan diet as a "plant-
based dieter" in order to distinguish between the groups.

FWIW, I became a vegetarian at age seven (22 years ago) and became vegan a
little over three years ago, and never in my life have I heard or seen the
terms "dietary vegan" or "moral vegetarian" which are both mentioned in the
Wikipedia article.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23992110)

------
guscost
I would be described as a "climate denier" by many people here, but my YouTube
recommendations have _zero_ overlap with the fictional recommendations. This
is because I do not feel any need to prop up my opinions with endless wacky
video propaganda.

Look, I'm sure there are plenty of people who get sucked into bubbles of
YouTube nonsense, and sadly these recommendations may accurately represent the
recommendations for typical users. But just deciding that someone is a
"liberal" or a "conspiracy theorist" does not in fact mean that you can assume
_anything_ about what they are seeing on YouTube, which is what the title
seems to claim. Please keep that in mind.

~~~
sbuttgereit
I actually find the exercise on this TheirTube thing to be utterly useless. It
has a real world validity on par with lie detectors and homeopathy.

A person, or group of people, set up this site and built YouTube profiles on
what they think people in these categories are like. Then they use those
profiles to show "what these people see". The problem is few actual, real
individuals match these caricatures. The people that built this site aren't
"them", except within a limited one of the presented profiles or two. My only
hope is that nobody tries to build an argument around the outcomes of this
exercise.

I think if anything is to be learned, it's the biases and preconceptions of
the people that built the site moreso than anything about how YouTube builds
recommendations... re-enforcing or otherwise (and I'm no fan of YouTube
recommendations, either).

Esse quam videri

~~~
mikael-gramont
That's not what they did though.

"Each of these TheirTube personas is informed by interviews with real YouTube
users who experienced similar recommendation bubbles"

"These accounts subscribe to the channels that the interviewees followed, and
watches videos from these channels to reproduce a similar viewing history and
a recommendation bubble"

------
skim_milk
Cool idea, I've always wanted to do this but instead of using political lines,
I've always wanted to know what the recommendations of the peoples of Indian
reservations, the black belt, other ethnic enclaves in and outside of America
etc. This app seems to exist more for social media activism than for building
insight into the lives of different peoples (which is absolutely okay and
needs to be said, but still). Are there other websites like this out there?

~~~
082349872349872
Try to push your youtube bubble around. It takes days to weeks.

Unfortunately you'll need to already know a number of entry searches to "seed"
the movement. After that you can try to just move around by surfing from the
seeds.

I think it's easier if your target bubble uses a different script, or at least
a different language.

~~~
skim_milk
I was thinking of building a website that simply asks people permission to
share a snapshot of their YouTube or other social media recommendations to
keep the feed authentic. It would seem to be easy enough to collect and
categorize different people's feeds, if I could somehow convince the right
people to open up that part of their lives.

------
ZinniaZirconium
This is why I browse incognito, clear my cookies, use a VPN, and don't
participate in the phenomenon of recommended content. I don't want some
algorithm telling me what I should want.

~~~
spuz
You realise that the Hacker News front page is an algorithm that predicts what
you should want?

~~~
mongol
Does it? Is it personal?

~~~
IAmEveryone
Yes, by self-selection of visitors.

------
IronWolve
I was watching some motorcycle videos overseas, and of course liked (button
click) them. This then had my entire channel filled with languages i dont
understand.

The fix is to remove all liked videos, problem, I had over 15,000 liked videos
over decades(s?) of use. I finally found a howto, a script to run in chrome to
remove all my likes.

Also I have an addon that lets me put channels into categories, addon called
PocketTube. It lets me see unfiltered access to my channel choices, and
youtube hates its direct access and if I open a video in a new tab, it prompts
me for a captcha. I've ended up watching youtube in a VM with a VPN so I can
change locations due to youtube's heavy handed behavior. I also will just copy
the URL and watch on my desktop.

Really, youtube content is vast and un-navigable, they filter results, show in
the wrong default order, wont remember settings of order, removed language
choice filter.

The 80/20 rule, or top 10%, Pareto principle, whatever you want to call the
cream on the top problem. The problem is small popular percentage of content.
Youtube is pushing popular videos, and you miss out on all the lower popular
videos, hiding 80% of the content, many new creators go unnoticed and
unviewed.

There is a demand for a front end portal, that runs unfiltered but allows
search controls, skip popular, view ascending order of all content, view by
category only, be able to exclude content, exact search phrase allow, no
shadow banned or hidden content rules, no white list rules (by default).

I cant be the only one tired of facebook/google/twitter showing me what they
think I want, i didnt ask them to be my parser of content, just because I use
their service, as its the only game in town, I still dont want spoon fed
content.

Same problem with podcasts, a search function vs a browse directory. There are
so many podcasts, and most places give you the top 10 podcasts per search.

I think a unfiltered directory of content providers (any platform), tired with
advertising, crowd funding, etc would re-open the internet of new content, and
take back the controlling behavior of mega corps.

------
gundmc
Previously discussed 13 days ago - 160 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859548](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859548)

------
ed25519FUUU
I checked out the prepper channel and I actually like the videos that were on
there. I know the gag here is that these are fringe topics, but this is a fun
way to explore other topics.

~~~
SamWhited
I always like the general DIY stuff, the problem ends up being that if I watch
one or two fun "how to can goods for the end of the world" videos or whatever
YouTube inevitably starts recommending people talking about how they're going
to start a race war and live in their bunker and kill all the immigrants and
black people or something horrible along those lines. I used to live in an
area with a lot of prepers and this was their prevailing thought. I'm not sure
if it's a minority of the community or not, but it's what YouTube likes to
recommend anyways.

~~~
jaywalk
I don't believe you Re: the extremist YouTube recommendations. They remove
videos and ban channels for far less.

~~~
SamWhited
Does that stop them being recommended in the mean time? I normally just report
this sort of thing, but I never go back to specifically see if it gets removed
(hopefully it does). It's what always seems to happen. Of course, it could be
from something else I'm watching too, is there a way to see why their
algorithm recommends particular things? I mean, it's not like it happens every
day, right now my feed is entirely full of mountain bike content, which seems
to generate much more friendly and welcoming recommendations.

------
lanius
Despite how drastically different the recommendations are for each persona,
there seem to be some videos which are inexplicably nearly universally
recommended. It's practically a meme - the top comment on many older videos is
something along the lines of "See you all again in 5 years when Youtube
decides to recommend this again" or "I didn't search for this. Neither did
you."

------
Svip
I notice the "liberal" link has "leftist" in the URL. Is YouTube so basic, it
cannot distinguish the two?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
We might as well stop using the term liberal, it means so many things to
different people now.

~~~
guerrilla
We might as well stop using the term logic, it means so many things to
different people now.

Liberal is well defined in virtually all models of classification used in
political science and political philosophy, which a project such as this
should probably defer to.

~~~
hombre_fatal
People absolutely do not agree on what "a liberal" would believe in. Hell, to
some people, it's nothing more than a slur.

Also, the reductive "then we should toss out the word 'logic' then!" kinda
comes off as a tantrum, to me. I don't really get the point. Why not focus and
possibly disagree with the suggestion that nobody agrees on what "a liberal"
means?

If you try to switch the argument to your analogy, then you're going to spend
more time defending and explaining your (nonsensical) analogy than you would
just explaining where you disagree. For example, you'd have to start
explaining why you think people disagree about the word "logic", something
I've never encountered.

Not a very effective strategy.

~~~
guerrilla
People absolutely do not agree on what "logic" is. Just ask people. Hell, to
some people, it's nothing more than "I'm right."

>I don't really get the point.

The point is that it doesn't matter if people in general don't know that the
word means, which is why I didn't refer to "people" but classification systems
designed by and for people trying to understand political ideologies and
orientations. The term "liberal" has definite specific meanings that
correspond relatively narrowly.

> something I've never encountered.

Then you've never asked regular people what logic is or haven't noticed that
their answers differ widely and hardly correspond to what philosophers and
mathematicians mean. Nevertheless, the laity's ignorance does not dilute the
meaning of the term.

------
ravenstine
Seems like, relative to its own system, YouTube has a decent grasp of where I
lie on the political axis. (pretty close to the center)

------
michaelbuckbee
Something I genuinely do not understand is the relation between conspiracy
themed content and left/right politics.

Is there a correlation between YT's recommendation algorithm clearly seems to
think there is as there are videos that I would describe as more tangentially
political than topical on both the Climate Denier and Conspiracist pages.

------
thomasfromcdnjs
What does everyone think of Shellenbergers apology for climate alarmism?
(Apocalypse Never) It showed up in that category.

------
johnmaguire2013
This is a very cool idea. I'd love to see similar versions for sites like
Facebook and Twitter.

------
tlow
Although the generated personas are caricatures by design, this is a great
example of persona development and user segment branching.

Great website with excellent design that provides a thoughtful exploration of
the youtube's online "echo chambers".

------
GaryNumanVevo
I setup an RSS / ytdownloader script a year or two back for my subscriptions.
It just mirrors the latest videos to my private CDN overnight, and sends me an
email first thing in the morning with a digest. Much nicer way to watch
YouTube

------
rootsudo
It's really sad how youtube is becoming a selective news service where it's
always doom and gloom and impending fear and anxieties.

That's why I just use it for music.

~~~
techntoke
I like the idea of PipeWire where you can create your own feed without logging
in. If I like someone I will send them a donation directly. I don't want want
them to be telling me to like and subscribe every 5 seconds and then telling
me what products to by because they are secretly sponsored by them.

------
api
I wish there was a way to turn the recommendation algorithms to their inverse
setting. Watch a right wing video? Get recommended something from the left.
Watch a debunking video? Get recommendations on topics in the paranormal and
the fringe.

This strikes me more as actual "red pilling."

~~~
IAmEveryone
There really is no “other side” to many of these. You won’t find a community
of lunatics making 340min-videos about “round earth”, except maybe NASA. And
the opposite of a far-right racist isn’t a far-left anything, but a regular
person that just happens not to be racist.

~~~
bickeringyokel
Great point, I guess the opposite of a prepper video is just an hour long
video about someone showing you their regular pantry with average amounts of
food and explaining where they want to go on vacation for the next several
years.

------
mttjj
Yikes, the name of the website is right there. How did this post title get so
screwed up. @dang can you fix the "There" in the title?

~~~
jonny_eh
Seems to have been fixed.

------
stjo
Clicking on the back arrow lets you check out recommendations for previous
dates.

~~~
notwhereyouare
neat, I missed that when I saw the website earlier

------
RIMR
Neat website. Wish we didn't have this dishonest clickbait title though.

------
jeffbee
What is the YouTube homepage even for? Why does anyone ever see it?

~~~
hombre_fatal
Same reason you see Netflix's homepage.

When logged in, Youtube.com shows you a mix of new videos from creators you
watch and related/recommended videos in the effort to provide you something
you will probably want to watch. So I go there when I'm in the mood to watch
something, perhaps while eating dinner.

And it works. If you want to see how ineffective it would be just looking at a
list of popular videos, view the horror that is the trending tab.

[https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending](https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending)

~~~
jeffbee
I guess I just don't ever use YouTube that way. People embed videos in their
blogs or on Twitter, and that's where I see them.

------
sjg007
Great idea, someone should do this for FB too.

------
ma2rten
Their liberal persona is actually fairly mainstream, probably to the right of
the average Bernie Sanders supporter.

~~~
arexxbifs
The project has ties to the Mozilla Foundation, and the author also works on a
project funded by the European Commission. It's either bias blindness,
propaganda, a deliberate way to secure funding, or some combination thereof.

------
OzzyB
Not to be that guy but: s/there/their

The title is "ThereTube" \-- today I was that guy...

~~~
dang
Fixed now.

------
ThomPete
Great stuff, bad AI recommendations at least for the climate denier part.
(maybe you should change it to climate catastrophism skeptic which would be
more precise from the results I see) very few people denies there is a climate
I take it :)

