
Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations - fraqed
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-crowdsourcing-research-youtube-recommendations/
======
FiReaNG3L
What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All
it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos
over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in
the past 6 months it would adjust).

Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see
that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you will be
fed on your recommendation page for months.

~~~
klmadfejno
I use YouTube infrequently. Usually for binging random content like comedy
sketches or speedrunning. No matter what I'm on, there's always a few videos
in my recommendations that make no sense and look like trash. Not generically,
but specific videos that ALWAYS appear. One of them is "I PAID FIVE BASSISTS
ON FIVR TO PLAY AN IMPOSSIBLE BASSLINE"

...

Why is this so bad? What are your hundreds of data scientists doing?

~~~
jack_pp
They stop appearing if you specifically mark them as not interested

~~~
klmadfejno
I do this, and it does work, but it doesn't seem to learn that I don't want to
see generic youtube garbage.

I'd love for it to learn that anything with a shocked face thumbnail and CrAzY
question for video name is not desired.

~~~
gothroach
Shocked face or a big red arrow pointing to something in the thumbnail make
the video an instant pass for me. It would be amazing if YouTube's algorithm
could recognize that.

------
rayuela
Couldn't care less about this. Just put out a paid version of Firefox that
dedicates this revenue stream exclusively to continued Firefox development and
I will happily pay fist fulls of money for it. Seriously, Firefox adds so much
value to my life and I'd happily pay for it.

~~~
satya71
[https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/)

~~~
thatguy0900
I think the "exclusively for Firefox development" is pretty important. Mozilla
is doing a lot of random things these days

~~~
Funes-
>Mozilla is doing a lot of random things these days

Yeah, like paying three million to its CEO annually. That's _not_ going into
Firefox development alright.

~~~
boomboomsubban
The one who no longer works there? And how do you think they would build and
manage a development team without executives?

~~~
Funes-
>The one who no longer works there?

As far as I know, Mitchell Baker is still Mozilla's CEO. And even if she
resigned, maintaining her salary would have been at odds with keeping many
employees from being fired.

>>I criticize _unreasonably high salaries_ on a nonprofit organization that
just laid off almost three hundred people

>"you are saying that they can build and manage a development team _without
executives_ "

If you want to engage in a discussion or a debate, at least be honest about
it.

~~~
boomboomsubban
Mitchell Baker began as CEO in December, after the resignation of Chris Beard.
Was permanently appointed CEO in April. Her salary for the position has not
been released

Mozilla is a nonprofit, not a charity. Their executives already receive less
than market rate for similar companies, by some accounts far less. They can't
offer nothing.

------
dexen
Semi related: there's a browser plugin[1] available to "de-mainstream"
Youtube. It removes from recommendations the well known channels of the big
name media brands[2]. You can add more to the list.

\--

[1] [https://demainstream.com/](https://demainstream.com/)

[2] [https://github.com/miscavage/De-Mainstream-YouTube-
Extension...](https://github.com/miscavage/De-Mainstream-YouTube-
Extension/blob/master/lib/js/background/channels.js)

~~~
zobzu
This works pretty well (I use it) because it removes recommendations and
search results (which are really recommendations) that are artificially
inserted/ranked at the top every single time.

That said I don't think it's what Mozilla and many commenters here are looking
for, they're looking for banning content they disagree with (i.e. censorship).

~~~
untog
> they're looking for banning content they disagree with (i.e. censorship).

That's an extremely unfair read of the situation. The extension doesn't even
ban anything. It is a research project attempting to understand why the
YouTube algorithm recommends the videos it does. Whether or not you think
Plandemic (a nonsense conspiracy theory video) should be banned or not you can
still see research into the YouTube algorithm as a worthwhile endeavour.

~~~
im3w1l
Literally the first sentence of the article is about dangerous
recommendations. And the second is about harmful content.

This is not just an open-ended inquiry of what youtube is recommending. It's
about finding the bad and getting rid of it.

EDIT: I also want to remind people about how Mozilla used its push
notifications to call for a Facebook boycott over objectionable content.

~~~
untog
> YouTube recommendations can be delightful, but they can also be dangerous.
> The platform has a history of recommending harmful content — from pandemic
> conspiracies to political disinformation — to its users, even if they’ve
> previously viewed harmless content.

What part of this is untrue?

And again, you're saying "getting rid of it" without evidence. It's a study.
It does not mention banning anything, anywhere. If the argument is that they
should not study this because it might lead to bans in the future then you're
being pro-censorship in order to promote anti-censorship which doesn't make a
whole lot of sense.

~~~
heartbeats
> What part of this is untrue?

The characterization of pandemic conspiracies and political disinformation as
harmful.

It's like kids and allergies. You never hear about kids who grew up on farms
being allergic to animals - it's always those whose parents didn't have any
when they were growing up.

If people aren't subject to misinformation, they'll never develop the sense of
who's lying and who isn't.

It used to be that we gave common-sense advice - "don't believe everything you
read on the Internet". Now, it's the other way around - "we must cleanse the
Internet of harmful content".

Being exposed to misinformation is good for you, and it's good for democracy.

~~~
SiempreViernes
"I never heard of it happening, so it is universally true that it _never_
happens."

Meanwhile, the actual state of affairs is[0] that there's one allergic farmer
child per three allergic non-farmer children. Don't believe everything you
read online.

[0]:
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11048766/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11048766/)

------
srean
A few months ago YouTube was flighting a feature I liked a lot. The homepage
would group my interest into named categories "Cute dog videos",
"Strangeloop", "Debussy", "PyData", "Algebraic Topology" and so on. I really
liked that because I could choose which deep end to sink into. Not just that
it would also serve as a reminder on what I had been interested in, but have
become too distracted to remember.

They seem to have stopped this and now the recommendations featured on my
homepage are all over the place.

~~~
duskwuff
I'm pretty sure they're still testing that feature. I see it show up
occasionally.

Interestingly, I think there are a couple of variants for the number of videos
to display on the home page, too.

~~~
srean
How can I get myself on the better side of their A/B test ?

~~~
duskwuff
Unfortunately, I don't think there's any (public?) way to force it. I've seen
the feature disappear or reappear on a reload -- it's not consistent across a
session, let alone on a user-by-user basis.

Try refreshing the home page until it shows up, maybe?

~~~
gundmc
At youtube.com/new, they say you can opt-in to experiments if you have
premium, but I don't have premium and am not sure if that is one of the
options.

------
anjc
I'm always mind-blown reading comment threads like this regarding
recommendation, with people annoyed that explicit feedback helps recommenders,
or exasperated that they're recommended one item that they haven't approved
while also wanting novel recommendations.

1000s of hours of videos are uploaded every minute. 5+ billion videos are
watched daily. Are you not rather quite pleased that YouTube can deliver
highly relevant top-20 recommendations within milliseconds from such a large
and changing corpus, while keeping track of your past preferences, your
interactions, your social circle's preferences, popularity and trends, content
features, etc?

It's pretty amazing to me. I think people expect recommender systems to read
minds.

~~~
thesuitonym
Consider that a lot of the complains are that YouTube constantly recommends
already watched videos, instead of new and relevant ones. Then, if a user
watches a single video on a topic outside of their usual interest scope,
YouTube replaces any semi-relevant recommendations with with that new
category, regardless of if the user is actually interested in the topic.

~~~
anjc
> Then, if a user watches a single video on a topic outside of their usual
> interest scope, YouTube replaces any semi-relevant recommendations with with
> that new category, regardless of if the user is actually interested in the
> topic.

That's the way it used to work, now it adds that new category to the list of
categories it thinks you like (top of the home page), and you can filter or
include that category.

------
worldmerge
YouTube recommendations, for me, are the greatest music discovery resource.
I've found more new artists through YouTube's algorithm than Spotify, Pandora
or Amazon Prime Music.

------
thrusong
YouTube recommendations suck so hard.

I'm subscribed to all this stuff but it never seems to give me similar
content, it recommends all the videos I've already watched.

If I happen to watch something new, like a People's Court segment, then all I
see is People's Court stuff.

There never seems to be balance.

Then there's the problem where a new video (like Gourmet Makes from BA) gets
posted on a channel I like. I'll watch it with my partner on his machine, but
then YouTube just chokes up, wondering why I never click on it, and then
shoves it in my face ad nauseum.

Like, their search engine doesn't even seem to scratch the surface of content
they're holding. It seems to be really stupid machine learning or AI.

Why can't it show me balanced recommendations from everything I watch or
subscribe to, toss in some new things which are similar/popular, and maybe
differentiate between content likely to be consumed multiple times (music
videos) vs stuff people don't often watch a rerun of?

They seem to have so much data they could work with. They have amazing
engineers and Google's expertise in algorithms.

Facebook even had problems with news feed being overrun with low quality
content early on but seems to have figured it our fairly well- at least in my
experience on the site (I know there are big echo chamber problems over there
as well, don't get me wrong).

Even a lot of my non-techie friends seem to complain often about how terrible
YouTube's recommendations are.

~~~
robotnikman
I feels like YouTube's recommendations were better around 2010 to 2015. I
think back then they recommended videos based on the tags a video had, seemed
to work much better

~~~
izacus
I'm assuming there were less people adding fake tags to earn more views then
as well.

------
cblconfederate
> recommendations can be delightful

They are really not. I struggle pages after pages to find something
interesting. And then days later i stumble on a link that has interesting
stuff randomly. Even search is bad. And there's always the knowledge that
google is censoring stuff and manipulating people.

There's definitely space for better youtube/video recommendation site.

------
pluc
This is what you're gonna do with the money saved from the firings?

~~~
ChrisSD
No. This is the Mozilla Foundation not Mozilla Corp.

~~~
arkitaip
I don't know why people pretend like the distinction matters.

~~~
ChrisSD
In terms of where money goes, it does. Mozilla Corp both makes and spends vast
sums of money (browsers are fantastically expensive).

Mozilla Foundation, in contrast, makes and spends relatively little compared
to that. Seriously how much do you think this crowd-sourced project is costing
the Foundation?

------
m0llusk
This claims that YouTube recommendations are opaque, but often YouTube cites
that viewers of a specific video like another. YouTube also tags content which
might be extended to note related or contrasting content or to map how videos
that share a tag relate.

------
enturn
I previously used my partner's Google account to watch on YouTube and it had
built up recommendations based on what I previously watched since I didn't use
the subscriptions, but one day it all just disappeared and only showed
recommendations from my partner's subscriptions. I'd prefer if they
implemented a user driven exploration system rather than attempting to guess
what I want but it must be useful to be able to change how it works without
modifying the user interface. I eventually gave up and used my own account
with now 32 subscriptions and it's better than it was although it shows a lot
of videos I've already watched. It throws in a few videos from other channels
but it's mostly from the subscriptions.

------
awinter-py
facebook got muy upset when propublica used a similar approach (browser
plugin) to surveil their ads ecosystem

[https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-
transp...](https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-
tools)

------
logicalmonster
Am I incorrect in assuming that Mozilla’s goal was at one time to expand
access of information to the world?

I don’t see any other likely outcome of this “research” other than a fresh new
media hue and cry detailing chains of “wrong-think” that will lead to
activists who masquerade as journalists calling for more content they deem
unfit for the plebs consumption.

------
thesuitonym
I guess I just don't understand why Mozilla would spend money on this? Google
is under no obligation to care about their findings. Why not spend money in
areas that will actually benefit people? What do they hope to gain by this?

~~~
cma
It could build the case internally for them to build something like peertube
or support it.

------
satya71
Fundamental flaw with this approach. Since I don't click on or watch
conspiracy theories, none of my YouTube recommendations are those. But I have
seen people watch incendiary and conspiracy theory videos exclusively on
autoplay.

------
cxcorp
Was trying to find the source for the extension, looks like the link was in
the privacy notice. Github link here for those who are also looking for it:
[https://github.com/mozilla-extensions/regrets-
reporter](https://github.com/mozilla-extensions/regrets-reporter)

------
srtjstjsj
Seems silly Why not just build a better (user-configurable) recommendations
engine?

~~~
klmadfejno
Over a database of videos they don't own? That changes rapidly in ways they
can't control?

------
zkid18
[https://github.com/mozilla-extensions/regrets-
reporter](https://github.com/mozilla-extensions/regrets-reporter)

------
hal9000-tng
This must be part of Mozilla's new focus on profit.

------
mitchtbaum
[http://blog.kaleidoscopestoyou.com/tag/how-a-teleidoscope-
wo...](http://blog.kaleidoscopestoyou.com/tag/how-a-teleidoscope-works/)

------
pgcj_poster
I use a ublock filter to block YouTube recommendations. I think they're
unhealthy.

~~~
soylentcola
There are a few good "un-frak your youtube" extensions as well. I've got mine
set to disable autoplay, trending, chat, "related" at the end of video
playback, and recommendations. Helps quite a bit.

------
zobzu
Crowdsourcing censorship!

------
WealthVsSurvive
I'm sorry, but the crowd has run out of money. Try the people that print and
take it.

