zlacker

There are healthy recommender systems, like Spotify.

YouTube is a _disastrously_ unhealthy recommender system, and they've let it go completely out of control.

>>rspeer+(OP)
Spotify has 40M tracks total. On YouTube, more than 5B videos are watched by users every day. Different scales of problem demand different solutions.

>>rspeer+(OP)
How is Spotify's different from Youtube?

>>rspeer+(OP)
Spotify simply does not have the content over which an algorithm could loose control.

>>rspeer+(OP)
I disagree in some sense. I personally have found the recommending system on YouTube pretty good for the main page of the site. The thing that bugs me is the recommended bar right (or bottom right) of the videos, which can be really annoying and infested with clickbait etc.

>>ariwil+w
I don't know what the comment you are replying to meant, I interpreted it to mean the algo takes you down a rabbit hole to darker content, however for me I miss the days when it actually recommended relevant videos, similar to the one I was watching.

My entire sidebar is now just a random assortment of irrelevant interests. For instance I wanted to learn to play a denser piano chord, I learned it ages ago but I still get like 20 videos that explain how to add extensions to a 7 chord, even if I'm watching a video on the F-35 fighter pilot.

>>rspeer+(OP)
Spotify's recommendation system is dealing mostly with artists that have recording contracts and professional production- their problem shouldn't be compared to YouTube's which has to deal with a mix of professional, semi-pro, and amateur created content. Also there's more of a "freshness" aspect to a lot of YT videos that isn't quite the same as what Spotify has to deal with (pop songs are usually good for a few months, but many vlogs can be stale after a week). Not only that, but many channels have a mix of content, some that goes stale quickly and some that is still relevant after many months- how does a recommendation engine figure that out?

It's better to compare Spotify's recommendations to Netflix's recommendations, which also deals with mostly professional content. Those two systems have comparable performance in my opinion.

>>rspeer+(OP)
I completely disagree, my children have a wonderful time following the recommended videos that youtube provides. I'm interested to hear your reasoning on why it is "disastrous".

>>rspeer+(OP)
>YouTube is a _disastrously_ unhealthy recommender system,

Can you explain with more details?

I use Youtube as a crowdsourced "MOOC"[0] and the algorithms usually recommended excellent followup videos for most topics.

(On the other hand, their attempt at matching "relevant" advertising to the video is often terrible. (E.g. Sephora makeup videos for women shown to male-dominated audience of audiophile gear.) Leaving aside the weird ads, the algorithm works very well for educational vids that interests me.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

>>jasode+x2
Yes. Elsagate is an example - the creepy computer-generated violent and disturbing videos that eventually follow children's content - or the fact that just about every gaming-related video has a recommendation for an far-right rant against feminism or a Ben Shapiro screaming segment. There's also the Amazon problem - where everything related to the thing you watched once out of curiosity follows you everywhere around the site.

>>ilikeh+P3
>Elsagate is an example,

Yes, I was aware of Elsagate.[0] I don't play games so didn't realize every gaming video ends up with unwanted far-right and Ben Shapiro videos.

I guess I should have clarified my question. I thought gp's "unhealthy" meant Youtube's algorithm was bad for somebody like me that views mainstream non-controversial videos. (Analogy might be gp (rspeer) warning me that abestos and lead paint is actually cancerous but public doesn't know it.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20090157

>>ilikeh+P3
Isn't that an inevitable side effect of collaborative filtering? If companies could do content based-recommendation, wouldn't they? Until purely content based recommendations are possible, wisdom of the crowds via collaborative filtering will lump together videos that are about different things but watched by similar viewers.

>>ihuman+A
More selective recommendation, all-subscriber environment.

>>throw2+G1
Why the content exists is also important. People create video specifically for Youtube. Very few people create music just to host it on Spotify. This results in the the recommendation algorithm and all its quirks have a much bigger impact on the content of Youtube than Spotify. Also having that many people actively trying to game the recommendation algorithm can pervert that algorithm. That simply isn't a problem for sites like Spotify or Netflix.

>>jasode+C4
Some of the child comments of your thread mention the nazi problem.

>>ilikeh+c5
But that child comment didn't link Nazis to normal "video games". I assumed he just meant some folks (e.g. "1.8%" of web surfers) with the predilection for far-right videos would get more Nazi recommendations. Well yes, I would have expected the algorithm to feed more of what they seemed to like.

I do not see any Nazi far-right videos in 1.8% of my recommendations ever.

>>jasode+C4
> I don't play games so didn't realize every gaming video ends up with unwanted far-right and Ben Shapiro videos.

They don't. That's confirmation bias at work.

>>Reedx+86
It's not 100%, but I'd consider "video games" => "Ben Shapiro" to be a pretty awful recommendation system, regardless of the reasoning behind it. As far as I know, the group "video gamers" doesn't have a political lean in either direction.

I've definitely seen this with comics. I watched a few videos criticizing Avengers: Infinity War, and now I see mostly Ben Shapiro recs. It makes no sense. I never have (and never plan to) seek out political content on YouTube.

>>jasode+C4
I watch a number of gaming videos and have never had a far-right video recommended. Don't know who Ben Shapiro is.

It could be the type of games involved, since I usually watch strategy, 4x, city-building, and military sims. I usually get history-channel documentaries or "here's how urban planning works in the real world" videos recommended, which suits me fine. Somebody whose gaming preferences involve killing Nazis in a WW2-era FPS might be more likely to get videos that have neo-Nazis suggesting we kill people.

>>ihuman+A
I'm pretty sure all content on Spotify gets manually curated first, so abusive tagging doesn't happen, and some of the worst content simply doesn't get uploaded at all. Spotify also doesn't try to be a news site, so they can afford to have a couple week's lag between uploading a song and having it show up in people's recommendation feed.