
How YouTube perfected the feed - danijelb
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-google-brain-algorithm-video-recommendation-personalized-feed
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CM30
Perfected the feed? As a YouTube user, 'perfected' is probably the last word
I'd use for it.

Instead, it seems to either:

1\. Hide stuff I actually wanted to see from channels I'm subscribed to 2\.
Show me videos I've already seen before. 3\. Show completely irrelevant videos
4\. Mix up subscriptions and recommendations by recommending videos I'd
already have seen if they showed me the bloody subscriptions in the first
place.

And watch later... oh boy, their idea of videos to show there seems to be
stuff I've either seen years ago and didn't like enough to finish, or that
I've seen multiple times and didn't finish once or twice because I saw
something new to watch.

~~~
ballenf
Wholeheartedly agree.

Feels like a generational difference. I'm from the generation that prided
itself on its ability to selectively craft one's own "feed" (RSS originally)
by spending time finding the highest quality, most relevant sources of trusted
content.

The author of this piece doesn't take that approach. And YouTube caters to
such. [edited to be less judgmental]

I'm constantly annoyed that the YouTube homepage requires several clicks for
me to find new videos posted by channels I _subscribe_ to. The organization on
the home page is different every single day. My only options are to delete
suggested channels (to see them reappear a week later!!). But in small print
on the side, YouTube taunts me that it actually does remember all the channels
I've subscribed to. It just thinks that it knows better what I want to be
watching.

And you know what? I probably do spend more time on the site because of this
shitty design. But what their algorithms don't tell them is the slowly
simmering resentment I have toward the site and my feeling of being in an
increasingly adversarial role with Google as a whole. Maybe that feeling will
never have any monetary impact on anyone, but it seems dangerous to ignore.

~~~
intoverflow2
> I probably do spend more time on the site because of this shitty design

Same can be said about the insufferable video suggestions that now cover half
the embedded player right where you have got used to click to pause/unpause it
over the years.

YouTube UX designers implement this dark pattern, then look cheerfully at
their metrics as if people are really into it because they use it so much.
When I know for a fact I've mis-clicked it almost every time it's popped up.

Drowning design decisions in metrics needs to die, it's just a breeding ground
for dark patterns.

------
bicubic
Perfected the feed? Uh.

My biggest complaint with youtube is that the feed is _awful_. It doesn't help
me discover new stuff I like, it doesn't even help me discover obvious stuff
like new uploads from posters I like. I don't know what the hell they're
doing, but I've caught myself resorting to google searches to find Youtube
content that I like on more than one occasion. Maybe I'm a minority, but the
entire front page of youtube is a huge miss for me.

The feed seems to be incredibly biased towards recently watched videos, to the
point where clicking a single weird link on reddit is enough to fuck up my top
suggested videos for a while.

------
intoverflow2
Watch one video about graphics cards and then have YouTube recommend you Linus
Tech Tips every day, till the end of time completely ignoring how many times
you click "Not Interested" completely ignoring you have blocked his account.

Noticed several other scenarios like this where you watch a part of one video
on a topic and YT's algorithm will try and force a certain YouTuber on you for
the rest of the time you use that account.

This isn't perfecting this is force feeding. Respect my blocks.

~~~
hkmurakami
"Not interested" sadly send like a point block rather than having any kind of
semantic intelligence behind it.

------
gallerdude
Yeah, I don’t know when, but sometime in the past few months I’ve basically
been exclusively using YouTube’s recommendation engine. While before it was
kind of blunt (“you like video games, so here’s some more video game videos”),
now it’s very sharp (“you’ve been interested in half life recently, and you
like the video essay format, so we’ll give you half life video essays”). It’s
honestly amazing how easy it makes it to reach good content.

A giant feed of neurally recommended videos, created by average people with
passion in topics _really_ feels like the future.

~~~
DiThi
That has been my experience except that at some point it forgets what videos
you have watched last year, becoming super annoying and useless.

------
wjoe
The example at the top of the article is actually an example of what makes me
_dislike_ the YouTube feed. I watch one video review of a game, and now I'm
getting 20 videos suggested about the same game which I only had a passing
interest in.

Sure, show me a few related videos, but often it can be a large percentage of
the home page taken up by a section like this.

The same over-personalisation is an issue in a lot of Google platforms. On the
Google news feed in Android, when I enabled personalisation it became
dominated by unimportant articles about games, films, or TV shows I'd looked
up recently, and hardly any general news. Not to mention the filter bubble of
Google searches in general. I find this trend of over personalisation
inconvenient, and not to mention a bit creepy.

------
dredmorbius
The tool that's "perfected the feed" for me is mps-youtube.

This is a console-based audio- and video-playing tool which allows me to:

1\. Search for content.

2\. View detailed information.

3\. Search by _user_ or _YouTube playlist_.

4\. Selective add or remove items from a _current_ playlist.

5\. Save and manage multiple named playlists.

6\. Queue up large sets of content to be accessed. Including audio-only, in
background (my preferred mode).

7\. Works on Android via Termux.

8\. Keyboard playback controls to skip, jump, play, pause, speed, or slow
playback. (Similar to mplayer's if you're familiar with those.)

9\. No ads.

10\. No comments.

11\. No recommended "fail", "dash-cam", or "blackhead" crap. _That corner of
YouTube._

It's everything I've wished YouTube was, and that it isn't.

[https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube](https://github.com/mps-
youtube/mps-youtube)

------
derekp7
I really wish there was a way to exclude certain videos from their feed
recommendation engine. Or at least put them in a different category. If
someone sends me a particularly funny cat video, because it is their cat, I
really don't want to get a deluge of cat videos. Also, if you are playing
videos for your 2-year-old, those shouldn't influence the playlists that come
up when you are driving to work (the Gummy Bears videos keep popping up in my
80's playlists).

~~~
freetonik
You can click on three dots and select "Not interested". This works for
videos, playlists and topics in your feed.

~~~
derekp7
Except that I am interested, if I happen to be playing videos for the kid. I
could create another account, but I'm not sure how to tie additional youtube
accounts to the youtube red service. And I'd have to remember to switch
accounts before playing videos for him (they should introduce "listening
profiles", and have the ability to move certain instances of watching a video
to a specific profile).

------
TACIXAT
YouTube and Amazon both have an awful recommendation system. Both sites have a
wealth of data, a wealth of consumables, and yet if I go to them without
something specific in mind I'm pretty much only offered things I've previously
viewed.

------
aethertron
What are the qualities of a good feed?

1\. it shows me cool new stuff

2\. it keeps me on the site

1 is obvious. 2 is questionable. It could be a consequence of point 1. Or it
could be a matter of sneaky manipulative tactics. I am suspicious of
platforms' recommendation algorithms. They are working for the interests of
the platform, not necessarily mine. (But that isn't the way it needs to be.
Recommendation bots independent of platforms could resolve this conflict-of-
interest issue.)

------
PeachPlum
Just wait until Thursday 31st Aug, the day of the YouTube Purge

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-24/google-
ro...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-24/google-rolls-out-
its-biggest-crackdown-on-youtube-hate-speech)

------
gnicholas
Is there a way to turn off the watch-this-next feature? I sometimes show
educational videos to my toddler, and if she sees the tiles of other videos,
she always wants to watch them (and will often throw a fit if she's not
allowed). I would literally pay money to turn off this "feature".

~~~
dredmorbius
[http://fixyt.com](http://fixyt.com) is one interface that avoids that. Though
its search features seem broken currently.

The other option is to use a downloader (yt-download, mps-youtube -- seem my
comment elsewhere) to specify _only_ what you want to watch, without YouTube's
"helpful" drug-pusher suggestions.

------
jasonkostempski
The YouTube RSS feeds are pretty much perfect, aside from being hidden or,
sometimes, non-existent.

~~~
CrystalGamma
Yeah I use those, too. Turns out you can use some url hacking to get them,
even if they don't have a <link rel=alternate>. The URL is
[https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=](https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=)
followed by the channel ID (if your channel URL is
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/something](https://www.youtube.com/channel/something),
then you can just take that 'something', if it's
[https://www.youtube.com/user/something](https://www.youtube.com/user/something),
you may need to search for the ID a little). EDIT: Oops, that last one
actually exists :S

------
dekhn
The mention of sibyl, which is rarely discussed outside of Google
([https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~niejiazhong/slides/chandra.pdf](https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~niejiazhong/slides/chandra.pdf))
is interesting. Most people really do not understand how effective simple,
straightforward linear and logistic regression done on large scale data is.
The Brain stuff and deep learning is nice, but the meat and potatos is still
basic regression.

------
RandyRanderson
They need to change their objective fn from "increasing minutes played" to
"increasing overall service satisfaction".

------
AmIFirstToThink
Why do I have an image of "feed" as in cows being fed corn mush?

In light of recent transgressions against speech on their platform, I wouldn't
use the word "perfect" to describe YouTube feed.

------
EJTH
Perfected the feed? its worse than ever. And the new reskin of youtube is also
the most lazy hack job I ever saw from Alphabet, its quirky even in chrome.

