What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust).
Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you will be fed on your recommendation page for months.
Youtube's recommendation algorithm is just dumb, in my opinion.
At least half of the time on Youtube, I watch classical music, and you would think Youtube would recommend me some classical performances that I haven't yet seen.
Nope. It keeps feeding me exactly the same videos I've already watched, despite being basically the largest catalogue of classical music videos.
What's the point of a recommendation system if it doesn't even recommend new video of the same category I like? Might as well just shuffle my watching history.
> Because YouTube doesn't care what you want--YouTube cares what it can monetize.
> You are the product, not the customer.
> Once you internalize that, stuff that Google does makes sense.
They published their algorithm. They rank items according to predicted watch-time. The other poster is probably correct, in that many people use these long classical music videos as background music over and over (i.e. high watch time) and so they're highly ranked.
Covington, Paul, Jay Adams, and Emre Sargin. "Deep neural networks for youtube recommendations." Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on recommender systems. 2016.
Nvidia furthermore implemented/released it for TensorFlow, and for their new Recsys engine:
I think it has a grasp of revisits, I forget the exact terminology but if you rewatch stuff I tries to predict will you like to watch it again. Some stuff is not worthing multiple times though, once is enough. But music videos can indeed be watched multiple times.
I think I heard somewhere that a lot of kid videos rank in the top stratosphere of view counts on YouTube because kids just play stuff on repeat. There's probably a lot of repeat plays going on across YouTube.
They should be able to distinguish between users who always play the same video in a loop vs. users who never watch anything twice (or anything intermediate between the two extremes) and adjust the recommendations based on that.
But maybe their recommendation engine is hyper-focused on the matrix-completion framework and doesn't use any information other than which users watched which videos.
The recommendation system is not "dumb" in the opinion of its designers. Perhaps it is performing exactly as intended.
In the same way that online advertising needs to display millions of ads to reach only hundreds of people, the recommendation system may not be intended to work at 100% efficiency.
YouTube "recommendations" work as far as I can tell. If you take two people searching for some subject area on YouTube, and only one of them knows how to search past the initial "popular" recommendations, each person will produce very different results.
If neither person is a skilled searcher (most people are not), they both end up with the same results. Those videos receive thus more and more views. Videos with millions of views help Google sell online ad services. If views were distributed more evenly across all videos, would that make advertisers more interested or less interested.
What's the point of a recommendation system that does not recommend a new video in the same category. To promote certain videos to attract large audiences and thus draw more interest from potential advertisers. More advertisers bidding on fewer popular videos would seem to favour higher prices paid to Google.
Some of the best videos I have seen on YouTube have less than 500 views, some even in the single digits. I found them through automated searches, not "recommendations".
Google makes information accessible with the belief that relevance is directly proportional to popularity. The company was founded on this idea.
This isn’t how digital ad inventory works. Advertisers don’t bid to win a slot that all viewers of a particular video will see. They bid to win a view. A million views on one video, or the same million impressions split across a thousand videos doesn’t change the supply/demand equation like you suggest. Buying an ad on the most popular video isn’t like buying an ad on the Super Bowl, because not all viewers are seeing the same ads.
A video with only a few hundred views is not going to produce much YouTube ad revenue. In order to sell the idea of making money from YouTube ads, one needs to convince ad buyers and video uploaders that videos can receive millions of views.
Same problem with music, I thought I somehow broke their engine because it keeps feeding me some random hit songs I liked 5 years ago and does it for the past 5 years. You would think they want to show me something new for their engagement metrics but I guess not.
For me it has been the opposite as in it has so little hysteresis. Just one day I watch something I do not usually watch, say cat videos, and for weeks I will get only cat videos as recommendations. I think their algorithm needs to be cognizant of and adapt to temporal shifts in a viewers interest. Some users may like change in focus at slightest of deviations, others may prefer more hysteresis.
It's both for me. It locks on to a few categories or channels and occasionally, almost randomly decides to start showing some other category or channel based entirely upon a single view.
This is not the same algorithm that they've always used. It began changing somewhere around 3 or 4 years ago and it's completely different now. Honestly, I think they've intentionally broken it. I used to derive a lot of enjoyment from going on an algorithm enhanced "wikiwalk" of YouTube content, discovering many interesting and bizarre videos. It's impossible to do that now, you just wind up stuck on a channel or going around in circles.
To put it plainly, I think YouTube has decided to bury all of the fringe and weird one off content in favour of mainstream channels because they can't monetize the former. Good job Google, you killed another golden goose.
I set my browser to block all cookies. Has the same effect as private window mode. That way I can still browse youtube without having to open a new window. Yea, it sucks that I can no longer sign in, but at least the recommendations are better.
This criticism shouldn't apply anymore. They predict categories you like and you can select a category. The 'All' page should be a mix of all categories, not just cat videos. Amazon on the other hand...
I'm sorry I don't know how to turn it on. When I go to youtube.com, at the top it has about 15 categories that it has gleaned from my use (e.g. Guitar, Flight Simulators), some of which I'm surprised it learned, as well as All, Mix, Trending. I use Edge and I'm logged in to YouTube.
I use YouTube infrequently. Usually for binging random content like comedy sketches or speedrunning. No matter what I'm on, there's always a few videos in my recommendations that make no sense and look like trash. Not generically, but specific videos that ALWAYS appear. One of them is "I PAID FIVE BASSISTS ON FIVR TO PLAY AN IMPOSSIBLE BASSLINE"
...
Why is this so bad? What are your hundreds of data scientists doing?
I think these are exploitation/exploration trade-offs.
YouTube only knows your interests by the videos you watch. It knows you like speedruns, so it will show you speedruns, easy. But you certainly have other unrelated interests: cooking, woodworking, old cars, whatever. So, from time to time, Google takes a chance and shows you a random topic just to gauge your interest.
It works on a global scale too. They want some variety, they don't want to depend only on a few topics and previously successful YouTubers. So sometimes, they may pick a random video and so it to everyone, and if it succeeds, they have something new.
It is actually rather clear when you look at your recommendations to determine which are which. Typically you are going to find a mix of videos related to the video you just watched, videos relative to your global interests, trending videos, and random stuff.
If some generally effective machine learning algorithm acts really stupid from time to time, chances are that it is exploring, that is: it is asking you a question instead of giving you an answer.
Edit: someone mentionned the multi-armed bandit, yes, this is such an algorithm
I don't think it's bad actually. I mean the recommendations could be far better, but this specific case isn't bad.
Say you go on reddit/r/iloveredcars - all you will see upvoted (ie ... RECOMMENDED by users) will be red cars. You'll never see blue cars. You'll never know they even exist. All you've ever seen are red cars. Not only this but you'll notice that over time it's always the same red car pictures being reposted over and over again.
By inserting "wrong" results a small percentage of the time this ensures that users will be exposed a tiny bit to different content, that may be they end up liking, opening an entiere new tree of recommendation opportunities.
Now I'm sure some people don't want this and they do want to see the same red car pictures over and over, but personally, I appreciate that they do this.
The function of an adtech recommendation system is not to find content that you want to see but rather to show you content that's the most profitable for the adtech firm that's serving it.
The videos that YT recommends over and over again are probably videos that have a high ratio of advertising revenue (meaning good demographics) to playback cost (meaning low overall byte size) and a high likelihood of going viral by being shared off-platform (meaning broad appeal, non-controversial, short, safe for religious conservatives, safe for work, and easy to summarize within 280 characters).
The videos you want to watch don't meet these criteria, so Youtube won't find them for you.
Recommending you a video you don't want to watch is a wasted opportunity. If you don't want to watch it, you won't, so YouTube's earnings are zero. If something you do want to watch is recommended instead, you will, and YouTube's earnings are nonzero.
I'm right now on a browser without my account and on which I don't usually watch YT, basically only when someone pastes a link while gaming. About half of the front page are things I might have clicked on when bored. A third are long. Two are definitely controversial. I don't buy your hypothesis.
Disclosure: I work in Google, but my closest contact with YouTube was drinking whisky with a YouTube SRE some four years ago.
I'd say there's definitely a lot of "LOOK AT MY YOUTUBE SEO TITLE" but in actuality that bassist guy is really good and generally plays some great riffs.
They could probably infer that if I'm watching comedy,and the last 5 videos were comedy by the same artist, I don't want to watch some guy's channel about bassists that they've tried to get me to watch 100 times prior.
If they were only recommending comedy from the same artist you may then have the same issue as another comment, which is that recommendations aren't novel enough.
I'd take your point if they only recommended bass videos, but presumably it's just one recommendation in a list of many, with the point being to explore your preferences while also satisfying your demands
The problem everyone is complaining about is that they used to recommend a good mix of content that was actually relevant. Like if you were watching a bunch of comedy videos by one comic it would recommend more of them but also another comic that you would probably enjoy. I don’t know how they did it, maybe it was just based on what other people with similar demographics and interests watched. If it was then they probably broke it when they decided to pop the filter bubbles. Turns out some of those bubbles were useful, they just decided to throw the baby out with the bath water.
> They could probably infer that if I'm watching comedy ... I don't want to watch some guy's channel about bassists that they've tried to get me to watch 100 times prior.
davie504 is basically a musically-themed comedy act, so this doesn't seem that unreasonable.
Urgh him. I watch a lot of music videos (as in videos about making music + music theory). I can not get this guy off my recommends. He has the personality of a sofa cushion. I cannot understand why he's popular.
Other than that, I'm pretty happy with my recommends. I think the Google spooks have built a good file on me.
I use this firefox addin, it put a cross next to user comments and videos and lets you hide videos and comments from those users/channels in the recommended videos, searches etc;
Shocked face or a big red arrow pointing to something in the thumbnail make the video an instant pass for me. It would be amazing if YouTube's algorithm could recognize that.
Every so often I do that. I spend five minutes selecting channels I'm not interested in, because I watched a gamedev video once and now I'm being suggested hundreds of gamedev videos, or whatever. Pretty soon, it's like the algorithm just... gives up and starts suggesting me generic videos about celebrities and other vapid things that I'd never click on in a million years.
I often AM interested in a topic, I just don't want every little piece of content drivel shoved down my throat. I still want the cream of the crop to occasionally pop up in my feed.
That's the problem with marking things as not-interesting. The algorithm will wildly overreact in the opposite direction.
I've marked dozens of videos on a single topic as "not interested", only for them to be replaced by different videos on the same topic soon after. Marked all those as "not interested" again, and the next day there were more.
The only thing that works for me is finding the video in my watch history that's causing the recommendations and removing it there. Often it's even something I didn't watch all the way through or even gave a thumbs-down; apparently thumbs-down also means I secretly want more of this content?
YouTube's recommendation algorithm is somehow worse than useless.
I've had the same experience. I use YT to listen to music pretty regularly and if I don't go and actively select a different song it will play the same 5-10 over and over. Even when I do select a song it will make its way back to those same 5-10 songs. There's a lot to discover on there so I still use it, but it's also pushing me back to my other services or libraries.
Not just that, but I get super annoyed that I exclusively listen to YouTube music on my desktop, and exclusively watch shows etc on my Apple TV. And for some reason YouTube cannot figure out that no, I don’t want to watch these music videos on my Apple TV, and no I don’t want to watch this documentary on my desktop.
And yeah even within music videos, the recommendations seem really basic. Compared to Spotify, Google is looking like real amateurs when it comes to recommendations.
> Compared to Spotify, Google is looking like real amateurs when it comes to recommendations.
I agree about Google bad recommendations, but for me Spotify it at that same bad place too. It used to be way better, but now 80% of my daily recommended playlists are stuff that I have in my own music library, just shuffle played. It's absolutely terrible.
It works well enough for me in some categories. Like if I'm listening to some guitar demo or pedal maker demo or shootout, I'll get similar videos coming through and I've stumbled onto some great ones that way (JHS pedals has a great channel).
But yeah, the music cycle is funny. And for some reason, no matter how many times I say "please don't show me this video", YouTube really wants me to listen to Mandolin Orange. I can't escape that recommendation even though I think I listened to them once and decided it wasn't to my taste and have always removed them from the queue. (Sorry, I'm sure they're nice but it's just not for me)
What freaks me out is how invasive YouTube/Google is. I have browser ad blockers, script blockers, privacy addons. Sure I am logged in though which pretty much defeats the purpose of all those.
My often used example is the time I went car shopping with my sister. She was buying a new car I went with her (age old women vs salesman bias). The dealership was over an hour from my town, my sister lives in a different town. I didn't do anything other than stand there, no info of mine given, no forms filled out.
Back home two hours later YouTube has showing on recommendations for me videos for new car shopping.
Yeah, it especially annoys me that it recommends videos I've already watched. Even if I say "don't recommend this" and give "I've already watched the video" as the reason, YT will still keep recommending videos I've watched.
It's ironic to see a complaint that youtube recommendations are stale, in the comments of a complaint that they lead people to discover offensive things. Can't have it both ways. Either you let people discover new things (some of which might be offensive) or not.
This misses my point entirely. I'm not commenting on whether youtube recommendations are stale or not. I'm pointing out that it's contradictory to complain both that the recommendations are too stale and that people discover offensive things.
My point is that it's not. Mostly stale doesn't mean there is never something outside the norm. As such, I do not believe I am missing your point, but that you are willfully and incorrectly assuming that everything is always an absolute.
Some of this blandness may be by design, at least when it comes to political content. YouTube caught a lot of flak in 2018 for allegedly being a "radicalization pipeline", but research[0] shows that their "next video" recommendations consistently direct users away from fringe content and towards mainstream media outlets. One of the authors of that paper made a website to visualize their results[1], which is pretty neat.
The research in question was limited by not using logged-in accounts with a significant view history, but it's still the best attempt to quantify the YouTube algorithm's influence that I've seen so far. Mozilla's initiative sounds interesting, but the fact that they're asking users to only report negative interactions rather than getting a representative snapshot of all YouTube use makes me suspect that Mozilla is approaching this from the perspective of advocacy, not scientific inquiry.
Yup. I'm somehow bored by the greatest collection of human knowledge ever captures on video because it can't seem to find anything new for me to watch, even with hundreds and thousands of hours of content created every hour.
What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale.
I think part of it is them removing certain content from the recommendations. I would be happy with a chronological order of all videos from all my subscriptions. Perhaps with groups of subscriptions, so I can make a group of comedians, a group of nerds, a group of girls dancing, etc.
The real problem is that youtube is still so much better than everyone else at just playing videos. How has it been 10 years and there is still no real competition in the realm of usability. Even most paid services are not as good. I think a bunch of the streaming services should pool their resources and come up with a good open source player with libraries for all the major frontends and backends. Instead of all of them poorly reinventing the wheel over and over.
The fact Google makes the browser and the OS for most users certainly puts them at an advantage.
Video is much much more complex than a .mp4 file on a server - the effort required to get the first frame from the server to the users screen as quickly as possible, and then not drop any frames after that, is pretty high to begin with, but it's even higher if you don't have control of the exact way the browser allocates CPU/GPU time for example...
That's my experience as well. It will only recommend videos that I assume are popular globally, and old videos from channel I've watched in the past (including videos I've already watched), until I watch enough of something new and it suddenly switches to only recommending that. There's gotta be some middle ground...
I don't understand how the recommendation algorithm seems so brittle, given that advertising is their core business, and that I am manually doing so much of the work by subscribing to channels I enjoy. A simple feed of recent updates from channels I subscribe to would be an improvement; in fact I think I mostly find videos to watch from Twitter.
> What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale.
There isn't any more "depth" to recommendations anymore. Right now it's the same recommendations over and over again. Lots of celebrity, corporate media, etc.
When youtube wanted to grow, their recommendation was so good. You could go down that rabbit hole forever really and actually discover content/creators. Now that they have a monopoly position, it's about limiting options and guiding you to established content.
[semi-speculation presented as if I actually know]
Youtube recommendations are best effort. That effort has a computational budget and a time limit. The fastest and least computationally intensive recommendation is to pull the last set of recommendations out of the on-device local cache.
The next fastest thing is to recommend whatever is cached near the edge of your internet connection whether it fits your previous viewing or not. It generally does not do this. Instead it recommends edge-cached material with cosign similarity to your preferences. However, there might not be much of that if your preference is for outlying content.
The slowest and most computationally intensive recommendation would be to compute a new tensor of your preferences and run cosign similarity across the entire vector space of Youtube. It doesn't do this for obvious reasons even though that's what we all want.
Of course, this ignores the issue of Google revenue. Advertisers targeted you, target you based on the videos you've watched. So there's that too. Google recommends videos for which it has relevant advertisers.
With most sufficiently large companies it all boils down to making money (which usually is why they have been able to grow so large to begin with). It is a very fine line between making as much profit as possible from users and not exploiting them so much that they leave.
Google does not have that much interest in serving new, interesting videos over what earns the most clicks and therefore advertising. A lot of users might also be pretty fine with what is already served. Although I have seen more and more alternatives popping up, several with a monthly payment plan instead. While free content is nice, a paid plan incites different business practices than one where revenue is closely coupled with the number of clicks.
>Of course, this ignores the issue of Google revenue. Advertisers targeted you, target you based on the videos you've watched. So there's that too. Google recommends videos for which it has relevant advertisers.
I think this is exactly the problem.
Contrast this with the recommendations I get from my paid spotify account where I don't get ads: It's absolutely Excellent. Seriously, whoever worked on Spotify's recommender system algo deserves a huge pat on the back. They have the best recommender I've encountered anywhere on the net, and I pay a lot of attention to recommenders. It's just light years ahead of everyone else.
> (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust).
This applies to YouTube music as well. I find this incredibly annoying.
Know what's even worse? Searching for something, then liking that song. On my end, that generates an incessant stream of titles from the same artist that no amount of downvotes can stop.
YM sees the pattern +--------------------- and yet continues to predict +.
Accidentally clicking on an ad from the President's re-election campaign made YouTube think that I'd be interested in watching videos of different people getting destroyed by facts and logic, or watching sweaty people get really angry at pop culture for some reason.
Systemic fixes are needed. In the meantime you can improve your own experience (and hopefully others a bit too). When you hover over a recommendation, there's a menu icon to the right side (three vertical dots, gray). Clicking it opens menu with option to indicate "Not interested" and "Report". The former is supposed to train your own instance of recommendation algo, the later does the usual reporting.
According to the current scuttlebutt lore, Youtube makes a concerted effort to steer users towards authoritative sources (typically the big media brands), especially on spicier subjects. This is in response to the recent slew of articles accusing Youtube of user radicalization.
Not interested doesn't work. One or two weeks later it 'forgets' your preferences and someone else uploads the same content as a clip so it gets suggested too.
Googling around shows there used to be a 'Don't recommend this channel' button which would be awesome to have back.
I find it very annoying listening to a two hour debate, understanding difficult topics and then disagreeing with the speaker and being unable to block content from said speaker.
There's a bunch of one-topic people pushing their opinions out to the youtube user base and it would be great not to have to see their face in 30 different suggestions after you find yourself deeply disagreeing with their opinions or you're just done with their conversations after hearing all of their views.
Those don't do shit. I tried getting it to stop recommending me fucking Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro videos for years, but I guess I just can't escape the angry 30-something category.
I think Youtube's recommendation algorithm is an abomination that has caused real harm to society.
Same here! God forbid I watch a video by someone who's ever been in front of a camera with those two guys, I'm immediately pushed into a rain of suggestions.
Try watching a comedian that's slightly edgy like bill Burr, you get immediately showered in videos of people "showing feminists what's what" or "shutting up liberals". I'm not even American, not right wing, but YouTube seems to try its hardest anyway.
I'm afraid this, too, is because it works. I don't have a specific example at hand but multiple times I've seen people say something like "youtube kept recommending me this so I finally watched it".
On mobile YT suggested me to watch an old video from a channel I'm subscribed to. It's a good video but since I have watched it already (with my account logged it) and remember it who cares about it. This one time the interface asked me if it's a good suggestion! So I clicked the bad suggestion link, and then the app asked me to categorise why is it a bad suggestion. All the options were about the video itself. The categories were "overly sexualised", "gory", "boring" etc. There was no option to say "I have seen it already you silly". Way to set up a feedback system to get no useful information out of it.
Same thing for my 'google news' app on my phone. If I ever (god forbid) google a persons name, I get stories about that person for months. I also get the same results (mixed into new results) for days and sometimes a week at a time. Are they really that bad at recommendation that they can't find another option that ranks higher in my "interest" score?
Comparing my TikTok "For You" page on an account that doesn't follow any other accounts with my YouTube Home on an account with tons of subscribed channels that are relevant to my interests I'm astonished at how fucking terrible the YouTube recommendations are. Absolute dogshit. Awful.
I found Youtube recommendations are much better than recommendations at other places. Eg. Netflix. When I say recommendation, I mean - "Helping me with discovery of new stuff". They also have a problem - they keep showing what I already have seen - I don't know - whether this is by design or a bug.
Try clicking novel suggestions from the home page. It will start altering your profile in a few days. Also don't do this from a browser session tied to a Google account. There will still be a profile attached to the cookie but it isn't permanently linked to you.
Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you will be fed on your recommendation page for months.