Comment by fuzztester
7 months ago
Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely.
They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.
7 months ago
Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely.
They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.
For what it's worth, I do not remember a time when YouTube's suggestions or search results were good. Absurdities like that happened 10 and 15 years ago as well.
These days my biggest gripe is that they put unrelated ragebait or clickbait videos in search results that I very clearly did not search for - often about American politics.
15 years ago, I used to keep many tabs of youtube videos open just because the "related" section was full of interesting videos. Then each of those videos had interesting relations. There was so much to explore before hitting a dead-end and starting somewhere else.
Now the "related" section is gone in favor of "recommended" samey clickbait garbage. The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. The old Markov-chain style works with the human, and lets them recognize what kind of space they've gotten themselves into, and make intelligent decisions, which ultimately benefit the system.
If you judge the system by the presence of negative outliers, rather than positive, then I can understand seeing no difference.
>The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand.
I would go further and say that it is impossible. Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes.
Imagine that all the videos on the internet would be on one big video website. You would watch car videos, movie trailers, listen to music, and watch porn in one place. Could the algorithm correctly predict when you're in the mood for porn and when you aren't? No, it couldn't.
The website might know what kind of cars, what kind of music, and what kind of porn you like, but it wouldn't be able to tell which of these categories you would currently be interested in.
I think current YouTube (and other recommendation-heavy services) have this problem. Sometimes I want to watch videos about programming, but sometimes I don't. But the algorithm doesn't know that. It can't know that without being able to track me outside of the website.
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They probably optimize your engagement NOW - with clickbaity videos. So their KPIs show big increases. But in long term you realize that what you watch is garbage and stop watching alltogether.
Someone probably changed the engine that shows videos for you - exactly as with search.
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I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display.
Or when they would show more than 3 results before spamming irrelevant videos.
Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video.
Or when they had a dislike button so you would know to avoid wasting time on low quality videos.
On desktop Chrome, a modern ad-blocking browser extension will block 100% of YouTube adverts. I haven't watched one, literally, in years. I don't watch YouTube from a mobile phone, but I think the situation is different. (Can anyone else comment about the mobile experience?)
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> I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display.
Wait what?! You "Consume Content" on a COMPUTER? What are you some kinda grandpa? Why aren't you consuming content from your phone like everyone else? Or casting it from your phone to your SMART TV! Great way to CONSUME CONTENT!
CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT
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YouTube seems to treat popular videos as their own interest category and it’s very aggressive about recommending them if you show any interest at all. If you watch even one or two popular videos (like in the millions of views), suddenly the quality of the recommendations drops off a cliff, since it is suggesting things that aren’t relevant to your interest categories, it’s just suggesting popular things.
If I entirely avoid watching any popular videos, the recommendations are quite good and don’t seem to include anything like what you are seeing. If I don’t entirely avoid them, then I do get what you are seeing (among other nonsense).
Long long time ago; youtube "staff" would manually put certain videos on the top of the front page when they started. Im sure there we're biases and prioritization of marketing dollars but at least there was human recommending it compared to poorly recorded early family guy clips. I dont know when they stopped manually adding "editors/staff" choice videos but I recall some of my favorite early youtubers like CGPGgrey claim that recommendation built the career.
See this >15-year-old video "How to get featured on YouTube" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uzXeP4g_qA, which I remember as being originally uploaded to the official Youtube channel but looks like it's been removed now, this reupload is from October 2008.
It all depends on your use case but a lot of people seem to be in agreement it fell off in the mid to late 10s and the suggestions became noticeably worse.
YT Shorts recommendations are a joke. I'm an atheist and very rarely watch anything related to religion, and even so Shorts put me in 3 or 4 live prayers/scams (not sure) the last few months.
Similarly, Google News. The "For You" section shows me articles about astrology because I'm interested in astronomy. I get suggestions for articles about I-80 because I search for I-80 traffic cams to get traffic cam info for Tahoe, but it shows me I-80 news all the way across the country, suggestions about MOuntain View because I worked there (for google!) over 3 years ago, commanders being fired from the Navy (because I read a couple articles once), it goes on and on. From what I can tell, there are no News Quality people actually paying attention to their recommendations (and "Show Fewer" doesn't actually work. I filed a bug and was told that while the desktop version of the site shows Show Fewer for Google News, it doesn't actually have an effect).
Part of the reason I switched from google to duckduckgo for searching was I didn't WANT "personalization" I want my search results to be deterministic. If I am in Seattle and search for "ducks" I want the exact fucking same search results as if I travel to Rio de Janeiro and search for "ducks".
Honestly, I'd prefer my voice assistant (siri mostly) to be like that as well. It was at first, and I think everyone hated that lol.
YT Shorts itself is kind of a mystery to me. It's an objective degradation of the interface; why on earth would I want to use it? It doesn't even allow adjustment of the playback speed or scrubbing!
So, there's a few ways to explain it. From a business strategy level, TikTok exists, and is a threat to YouTube, so we need to compete with it.
From a user perspective, Shorts highlights a specific format of YouTube that happened to have been around for a lot longer than people realize. TikTok isn't anything new, Vine was doing exactly the same thing TikTok was a decade prior. It was shut down for what I can only assume was really dumb reasons. A lot of Viners moved to YouTube, but they had to change their creative process to fit what the YouTube algorithm valued at the time: longer videos.
Pre-Shorts, there really wasn't a good place on YouTube for short videos. Animators were getting screwed by the algorithm because you really can't do daily uploads of animation[0] and whatever you upload is going to be a few minutes max. A video essayist can rack up hundreds of thousands of hours of watch time while you get maybe a thousand.
(Fun fact: YouTube Shorts status was applied retroactively to old short videos, so there's actually Shorts that are decades old. AFAIK, some of the Petscop creator's old videos are Shorts now.)
But that's why users or creators would want to use Shorts. A lot of the UX problems with Shorts boils down to YouTube building TikTok inside of YouTube out of sheer corporate envy. To be clear, they could have used the existing player and added short-video features on top (e.g. swipe-to-skip). In fact, any Short can be opened in the standard player by just changing the URL! There's literally no difference other than a worse UI because SOMEONE wanted "launched a new YouTube vertical" on their promo packet!
FWIW the Shorts player is gradually getting its missing features back but it's still got several pain points for me. One in particular that I think exemplifies Shorts: if I watch Shorts on a portrait 1080p monitor - i.e. the perfect thing to watch vertical video on - you can't see comments. When you open the comments drawer it doesn't move over enough and the comments get cut off. The desktop experience is also really bad; occasionally scrolling just stops working, or it skips two videos per mousewheel event, or one video will just never play no matter how much I scroll back and forth.
[0] Vtubers don't count
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You can scrub on the mobile player, that's what makes it so much frustrating because you can't do that on desktop
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I think there is a large demo of people now who actually prefer to watch videos in portrait.
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Solid point. Not to mention that Shorts content is mainly linkbait and/or garbage.
I imagine my blocked channels list is stress testing YouTube at this point from the amount of shit Shorts results it's fed me after 2 years. Lol
Besides the religious crap, ill randomly get shit in India in hindu, having had not watched anything Indian and not even remotely Indian.
I only get those when it's new content with <20 likes and they are testing it out. Doesn't bother me, I like to receive some untested content - even though 99% of it is pure crap (like some random non-sense film with a trendy music on top).
>in hindu
Hindi is the word for the language, bro.
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Just because you're an atheist doesn't mean you won't engage with religious content though. YT rewards all kinds of engagement not just positive ones. I.e. if you leave a snide remark or just a dislike on a religious short that still counts as engagement.
Yes I know, not the case, and before you ask, I also don't engage with atheist videos. But that's only one example: the recommendations are really bad in a lot of ways for me.
Prayers for the unbelievers makes some sense.
But I associate YouTube promotions with garbage any how. The few things I might buy like Tide laundry detergent are entirely despite occasional YouTube promotion.
Lmao. I'm very positive that the conversion rate for placing an atheist in a live mass out of the blue is very very very low. Because I never stayed for more than 3 seconds, I'm not sure if it's real religious content or a scam, though - and they don't even let me report live shorts :(
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That's a feature, not a bug.
I think it's probably pushing pattern it sees in other users.
There's videos I'll watch multiple times, music videos are the obvious kind, but for some others I'm just not watching/understanding it the first time and will go back and rewatch later.
But I guess youtube has no way to understand which one I'll rewatch and which other I don't want to see ever again, and if my behavior is used as training data for the other users like you, they're probably screwed.
A simple "rewatch?" line along the top would make this problem not so brain dead bad, imho. Without it you just think the algorithm is bad (although maybe it is? I don't know).
This is happening to me to, but from the kind of videos it's suggested for I suspect that people actually do tend to rewatch those particular videos, hence the recommendation.
Install "Unhook" chrome extension. That changed my life.