[anjc]

I'm always mind-blown reading comment threads like this regarding recommendation, with people annoyed that explicit feedback helps recommenders, or exasperated that they're recommended one item that they haven't approved while also wanting novel recommendations.

1000s of hours of videos are uploaded every minute. 5+ billion videos are watched daily. Are you not rather quite pleased that YouTube can deliver highly relevant top-20 recommendations within milliseconds from such a large and changing corpus, while keeping track of your past preferences, your interactions, your social circle's preferences, popularity and trends, content features, etc?

It's pretty amazing to me. I think people expect recommender systems to read minds.

[thesuitonym]

Consider that a lot of the complains are that YouTube constantly recommends already watched videos, instead of new and relevant ones. Then, if a user watches a single video on a topic outside of their usual interest scope, YouTube replaces any semi-relevant recommendations with with that new category, regardless of if the user is actually interested in the topic.

[anjc]

> Then, if a user watches a single video on a topic outside of their usual interest scope, YouTube replaces any semi-relevant recommendations with with that new category, regardless of if the user is actually interested in the topic.

That's the way it used to work, now it adds that new category to the list of categories it thinks you like (top of the home page), and you can filter or include that category.

[throwaway316943]

The complaints are due to a significant decline in the quality of recommendations. It’s like that scene from 2001 where HAL is slowly lobotomized by Dave.

[anjc]

Since when, do you think? I personally think that they're better than ever. On the other hand, I think they moved to more deep learning approaches over the last 3-5 years (based on their research output at least) so perhaps recommendations are perceivably different since then

[throwaway316943]

I’d say more within the last 3. Definitely in the last 2. It’s much worse for me, just repeats the same channels and categories.