[smoe]

Really cool project, going to play around with it, since I wanted to experiment with alternative algorithms for these kind of platforms for a while, but didn't found time to get started.

My biggest gripe with YouTube recommendations, or any service of that kind (Spotify, Amazon, etc.), is that they don't understand what aspects of the content I value. So it is a huge hit and miss. Sometimes it works, because I guess I just happen to value the same things that the majority of people do, other times, I might watch an hour long very in-depth video about a topic, then YouTube for a week or so tries to get me to watch 5 minute, rather shallow introduction videos that are way more popular. There is nothing wrong with those videos per se, they are often really well made, but it is not what I'm looking for.

Other times it picks stuff up from the long tail that seemingly gets into a feedback loop, suddenly reaching millions of view, with practically zero relevance to me.

Then there are some personal tastes of mine, e.g. that I can't stand the, I guess I'd call it the "Youtube Voice" where creators go completely over the top instead of talking like a normal person.

I wonder what metric could be used as a proxy to get better recommendations? Or if a better approach would be, to just build a better custom search so I can tweak it to what I'm looking for at this moment in time.

[PopeDotNinja]

I wish I could explicitly tell YouTube “don’t ever recommend videos I’ve seen.”

[rollingchunder]

Awhile back I started using a video's 'like' button simply as a mechanism by which I could tell if I had watched something before since I did get repeat recommendations. Then, if I clicked a recommended video again later, I'd know I had already seen it. Over time, as far as I could tell, YT stopped recommending videos I'd seen before as there were fewer and fewer videos I would check out that I had already seen.

May also be attributed to something else, or I'm getting old, but it seems to have been a fortunate outcome.

[rasz]

inject those two styles into YT website:

    a #video-title { color: red !important;}
    a:visited #video-title { color: black !important;}

[gibolt]

They have two options under the triple dot menu (at least on Android feed) that you are not interested in this video or this channel.

May help curate once you start getting those recommendations.

[TobTobXX]

I once watched a few videos about US politics. After that YouTube just kept spanning half my recommendations with vids about USpol. While they were addicting, they didn't really interest me. I then took the effort to flag tem as 'not interesting' (about 3x, refreshing the browser) and it works, I have gotten very few recommendations about that since then.

[ianbooker]

Then you cut out videos you were interested in the first place.

[Alphaeus]

When it asks you why you're not interested, one of the options is "I've already watched this video".

[PopeDotNinja]

I used to do that, but it was a lot of work & I didn't notice an improvement to the search results.

[etripe]

I experienced exactly the same. I suspect that since they're optimising for engagement, already having watched a video is some indication that you'll engage with it again.

[brylie]

Also, if a video thumbnail/title displays on my screen and I don't click it, it is a sign of disinterest. Stop suggesting videos I have repeatedly scrolled past. Use the lack of engagement as a feature.

[namrog84]

Once I tried disliking or dismissing a video as enforced dislike. Then it said "ok disengaging the entire category" and I was like wtf no. That's not at all what I wanted. And there was no way to undo. So its frustrating trying to teach those algorithms things I don't like.

It was on google somewhere. It was like I wanted to dislike a particular author or that particular programming language they were talking about, but took it as me not wanting to hear about anything technological ever again. It was frustrating as heck.

[JSavageOne]

This option would single-handedly fix their completely broken music recommendation algorithm that only seems to auto-play the same 5 or so songs that I recently listened to and thumbs-upped.

[bryanrasmussen]

I get the same behavior, only I've never thumbs-upped anything.

[ChrisLovejoy]

amen! I wish you could crank up exploration cf. exploitation in your settings or something

[ma2rten]

It would be cool in general if recommendation algorithms or search algorithms were more customizable. I would imagine you could put some code into your settings that controls which recommendations you see. The platform, like YouTube in this case, could compute features that enable different kind of recommendation algorithms. There could be communities of people who tinker with this and share their recommendation algorithms.

[sincerely]

Steam added this feature recently (https://store.steampowered.com/recommender/ lets you add weights for "niche/popular" and "older/newer") and I've never had so much fun browsing a store. I hope other platforms take note

[amelius]

* Except for music.

[powerapple]

Don't ever recommend videos from 9 years ago please.

This is the part I don't understand, how is Google doing so bad at this. You get slightly better experience if you use Chrome. It (on purposely?) keeps asking you to click 3 buttons to play a video Edge, and won't even show comments.

[dancek]

Our tastes are so different. I'd much rather watch a great video from 2005 than a good one from 2020. I'm irritated by the recommendation algorithms pushing new content. Why would I care whether the video was published last night or last year?

[powerapple]

Yes, recommendation should be personalized anyway, so you can get videos from 9 years ago and I don't.

[atoav]

If e.g. you want political thinking in current events than you'd probably value recent videos more.

If you wanna see a great video on some obscure implementation detail of some electronics gear from the soviet era it doesn't really matter if it was uploaded a year ago or 8 years ago.

[powerapple]

What I mean is it displays a button to click after I clicked play on video when I use Edge, which is my main drive nowadays. And the comments are not displaying. It cannot be only my experience I hope :S so I get downvoted because my taste not liking old videos :/

[bra-ket]

agreed, it's strange that with all their legions of machine learning PhDs Youtube recommendations still suck.

The worst part is when it gets stuck on particular video/topic and just keeps recommending the same thing for months.

[selestify]

I’m sure the YT algorithms are optimized just fine for whatever revenue metrics they’re maximizing. You and I might just be part of the edge cases that they haven’t bothered improving their models on just yet

[bigfoot675]

This is such an insightful comment. I find myself falling into the trap of complaining about things that are "broken" all the time too, but you're right: if you're on HN then you're not the customer that most companies are targeting.

[bryanrasmussen]

unless one can prove that there is something special about being on HN that makes a person intrinsically different than other consumers I don't think this is a reasonable conclusion. It may be that this can be proven but I would like to see the proof.

If someone posts on a crafting forum, complains about youtube being broken is the conclusion that they are not the customer that most companies are targeting?

or any number of other fora, I doubt the predictor of a single interest is enough to differentiate the person so significantly.

[kortilla]

Yes, just posting on a forum alone puts you in the tiny minority of consumers. There are huge swaths of people that barely like to read content, let alone write.

Look at how many youtube videos dominate search results with hundreds of thousands of views for “how to” X when X is trivially described in a few lines of text.

[bryanrasmussen]

>Yes, just posting on a forum alone puts you in the tiny minority of consumers. There are huge swaths of people that barely like to read content, let alone write.

My stepfather was an idiot, a drunkard, a gambling addict, a drug addict, easily conned by direct marketing and ponzi schemes, with not a large number of friends, and poorly educated.

He read, as far as I have been able to figure out, 1 book in his life and he read that book 75% of the way finished (It was some sort of crime book - pretty thick though so about the 600-800 pages length)

But when the internet came around he got himself an online identity and was out on forums of people who shared his interests all the time posting his views on things.

There are really not very many people out there less capable than my stepfather, percentage wise. I do not believe there are huge swathes of people that he beat.

>Look at how many youtube videos dominate search results with hundreds of thousands of views for “how to” X when X is trivially described in a few lines of text.

given that youtube is owned by the Google, not sure what to take from that other than they put results from one of their properties at the top for purposes of their own.

although I often take a how to X video over text because even though the X is trivially described there are a lot of extra things you can find out from the video really quick - for example if you search for how to do X in Y

and you read a tutorial, it can be that the tutorial is slightly off from your version of Y, and you spend time trying to figure out if it is the tutorial that is wrong, if you have misunderstood their trivial few lines of text because the text might not be clearly written and so on and so forth, but when you look at the video if it shows a menu entry being clicked on that just does not exist then you know they have something different than you do and if you can't immediately figure out what your system change has been try to go find some other solution.

It is the extra information that a video gives that can make the video useful. As to which to choose is dependent on a lot of things.

[robotresearcher]

Their recommendations are not designed to make you happy, but to optimize their business. They are driving you to ads, not joy.

The ML PhDs could be working just fine. You won’t know.

[xiphias2]

I pay for YouTube premium, so I don't have ads. Still, I'm seeing many of the problems other people are talking about, especially 10 minute videos where the content could be explained in 10 seconds.

[tripzilch]

Though that's a reason why many people don't pay for YouTube premium, not why you somehow deserve better treatment.

[shostack]

I want this for Spotify. Especially the ability to say "wipe your recommendation model you have on me for the weekly list and start from scratch."