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How YouTube’s recommendation algorithm works if you’re not the average user (theatlantic.com)
17 points by tchalla on Nov 14, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments


>YouTube has posted a sign outside the bar that says it’s not for kids and points to the playground next door, but then they serve anyone who comes in

What exactly do you expect them to do though? The only thing a birthdate selector does is give the web dev a misleading idea that the majority of their users were born on the first of January, 1900.


I hate how this article started out as a genuinely interesting, scientific study of a recommendation system, but quickly boiled down to a meager political debate about kids using technology.


Uh, did it? I mean, it talked about kids and YouTube in the last couple of paragraphs, which is an aspect to consider, but the rest of the article focused on the study, its limitations and the possible implications.


Kinda, the closing remarks were sort of disappointing to me.


> Pew found that 64 percent of recommendations went to videos with more than a million views.

That drives me nuts. I wish Youtube had knobs I could tweak to exclude anything with more than 1000 or whatever views.

I really have no interest in a video that one million Normal People watched.


What's wrong with popular videos. There's lots of great content that's not clickbait with a lot of views


Most highly popular things are also average things.




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