[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.