[Lerc]

I recently found his videos also. It's one of those things that gets my mind bubbling with ideas for things I want to make, never enough time to do them all though (and this breadboard beside me is asking for attention)

It does make me wonder about the algorithm, Quite a lot of things I find on Youtube turn up on HN a week or two later. I'm not sure if this is an indicator of the effectiveness or failure of the algorithm. It is definitely succeeding in finding videos popular with some people and showing it to more who might share that interest. The question is, are the things I (and consequently many others of similar interests) see the best of all there is, or a subset of the excellent videos out there that happen to get noticed.

I sometimes find channels that are years old with a goldmine of good information. That suggests that there is more good stuff out there than what I see. Were they just unlucky that I didn't see them before? Am I lucky to be seeing them now? It also might be that it is not luck but the algorithm has arbitrarily decided that the video has some special factor that requires promotion or that I have passed some arbitrary threshold of perceived character development that makes me supposedly now interested in such things.

[imtringued]

I get absurdly niche videos with 33 views in my feed about robotics but most of them have views in the low thousands. The algorithm isn't holding you back.

[mrheosuper]

i noticed recently YT has been suggesting micro-small channel(<1000 subscriber) to me, not sure if this is good thing.

[throwaway2037]

The real question: Are the recent recommendations better than previously? Example: If the recommendation engine (presumably driven by some kind of AI/LLM at this point) better understands the content of videos, it can make better recommendations. If anything, it seems logical that smaller channels would begin to appear on your YouTube feed, as long as the content is highly quality and matches your interests.

[mrheosuper]

It's both good and bad: Sometime it suggest some small channels about some niche topics that i found very interesting.

But i don't like how aggressive it is with suggestion. If i search some random topic, my newsfeed will be flooded with all videos about that topic many days later. So sometime i have to use different profile just to not "contaminate" the algorithm.

[godelski]

  > It does make me wonder about the algorithm

IIRC he uses a pretty simple algorithm. I remember him discussing the gating mechanism and how he had it follow a cycloid. I think there's a lot of opportunities for others to optimize the algorithms and he is focused on the physical engineering side. I'd love to see him collaborating with someone who does more reinforcement leaning. I also think it's very impressive what he achieves with such simplified algorithms.

If I'm misremembering or missed something please correct me. I'm out now but I'll try to find the video of him talking about gating when I'm back if someone hasn't already linked it.

Also, I love how YouTube has all these "small" creators doing extremely impressive stuff. It's a real shame the algorithms make discovery challenging. The beauty of something like YouTube is not about just getting something to watch, it's by being able to get access to any content. Search is always a difficult problem to solve but I'm afraid it's currently over optimizing for views rather than intent. Which, to be fair, is much harder to measure. But I say over optimized because frequently I can search the title with 90% accuracy and fail to find the video. Something minor like missing an "s" or something effectively non meaningful. It's extremely frustrating...

[8note]

the algorithm in question is youtube's for how its getting to all the HN users at about the same time. i was also suggested this same video a few days back

[godelski]

My post discussed two algorithms: the gating algo for CARA[0] and the search algorithm for YouTube.

If I'm reading your comment accurately, you're mentioning the discovery algorithm, which is neither of these. I also got the video, but I was already subscribed (it was suggested to me when it was released). Yes, the discovery algorithm has some of these issues but I'm more understanding of that because it's a much harder problem.

Both have self inflicted problems and I think they can be more easily addressed:

Discovery over optimizes to recent views and can get stuck in certain genres[1]. There is also a strong preference to things average user enjoys which doesn't work well for those of us who are only slightly less schizophrenic than the algorithm itself. Too much exploitation, not enough exploration (I wish this was a setting I could adjust. My mood changes, how can I let the algorithm know?)

Search has two critical self inflicted problems.

1) after about 5 results it will suggest completely unrelated videos (looks like it hands off to the discovery feed). Sometimes I need page two... just fucking show me more...

2) the problem I mentioned previously, where it distrusts you prioritizing popular videos over a trivial spelling or grammatical error. Google search has this exact same problem.

[0] my dumbass didn't check which video was linked. It's this one where he discusses it. At 12:30 in the video

[1] this leads me to having tons of YouTube tabs open as I'm unsure if a video I'm interested in but don't have the current bandwidth for is never going to be shown to me again

[barbecue_sauce]

The quote in your intial reply ("It does make me wonder about the algorithm") was referring to the YouTube algorithm.

[godelski]

The comment you responded to clarified that there are two YouTube algorithms (in reality there are many, but was distinguishing the categories). I was talking about search while the response was talking about discovery (like what you see when you open YouTube. The automatic suggestions)