zlacker

>>furcyd+(OP)
"If YouTube won’t remove the algorithm, it must, at the very least, make significant changes, and have greater human involvement in the recommendation process.", man does this person know how many videos and how many users YouTube has? They cannot use anything except an algorithm to recommend videos. They cannot use anything except an algorithm to detect videos inappropriate for children. It seems YouTube is working on this, and this opinion seems like a ill thought out fluff piece to enrage readers and sell this persons book.

>>strike+jh
Maybe they can't make editorial recommendations for the long tail but they absokutely could do so for the top few thousand videos each week.

Would that yield an improvement? I don't know, but it would have an impact.

>>andrew+mi
I'm kind of wondering if a "Ned Flanders" user-detector is possible.

Search for users who stop videos at "offensive" moments, then evaluate their habits. It wouldn't be foolproof, but the "Flanders rating" of a video might be a starting metric.

Before putting something on YouTube for kids, run it by Flanders users first. If Flanders users en masse watch it the whole way through, it's probably safe. If they stop it at random points, it may be safe (this is where manual filtering might be desirable, even if it is just to evaluate Flanders Users rather than the video). But if they stop videos at about the same time, that should be treated as a red flag.

Of course, people have contextual viewing habits that aren't captured (I hope). Most relevantly, they probably watch different things depending on who is in the room. This is likely the highest vector for false positives.

The big negative is showing people content they obviously don't want for the sake of collecting imperfect data.

>>scj+9o
The problem is that just a few examples of the algorithm getting it wrong is enough to cause an adpocalypse. If millions of videos are uploaded every month then you can imagine how low the error rate has to be.

>>Mirior+3t
If Google takes the impractical route and hires a sufficient number of multilingual Ned Flanders, then they're still probably going to have a non-zero false positive rate (humans make mistakes too).

Whatever they do is going to have to be evaluated in terms of best effort / sincerity.

Semi-related: The fun of Youtube is when the recommendation algo gets it right and shows you something great you wouldn't have searched for. The value is that it can detect elements that would be near impossible for a human to specify. But that means it has to take risks.