[HN Gopher] YouTube algorithm recommends videos that violate its...
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YouTube algorithm recommends videos that violate its own policies:
study
Author : Liriel
Score : 152 points
Date : 2021-07-07 08:59 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (foundation.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (foundation.mozilla.org)
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I agree it sucks, but so does Netflix, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook,
| etc. Its almost like social media is just a marketing tool and
| your promotions aren't even recommendations at all, but paid
| placements.
| herbst wrote:
| You can't compare netflix tho. With the small amount of content
| they have its enough to browse the new section maybe once a
| week to not miss anything. Facebook and Twitter are not there
| to recommend content but to follow content you already cared
| about.
|
| We have 'illegal' streaming sites with better discovery than
| YouTube has.
| rvz wrote:
| They all do it, from influences, big advertisers, and cable
| news networks on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter,
| YouTube, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, etc all game the
| recommendation algorithms of each of these platforms.
|
| As long as the advertisers are happy paying them, they won't
| change. Not only these algorithms govern what is seen and
| unseen on those platforms, it is also a privacy issue and they
| operate by requiring to track the user's usage information.
|
| The small users and 'content creators' lose either way. They
| work for the recommendation algorithm and it can change at
| anytime and they end up earning less. Or they get removed from
| the platform / programme because of their low number of views
| and that's that, whilst the big players game the system.
| boyka wrote:
| I stream music from YouTube because of its superior
| recommendation algorithm (in comparison to, e.g., Spotify). The
| recommendations that I didn't know prior to them being suggested
| to me are spot-on.
|
| This must be entirely based on my views and non-specific data
| from my Google account, as I do not engage (like, dislike,
| comment).
| Tenoke wrote:
| I literally never get such content and I use YouTube constantly.
| I'm not sure how much I'd blame youtube for showing similar
| content to whatever people are already watching.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| As far as I can tell, simply watching news is enough to get
| entangled with the loonies.
| krapp wrote:
| On the contrary, the loonies are the ones who refuse to watch
| the news because they believe it's controlled by evil Marxist
| puppetmasters, while believing anything Youtube, Twitter or
| Facebook tell them.
|
| As bad as the news gets, it isn't going to tell you Bill
| Gates is putting mind-control chips into COVID vaccines, or
| that the Presidential election was stolen by a conspiracy of
| Chinese communists and Democratic party pedophile cultists,
| or that Jewish space lasers are responsible for forest fires.
| It may _report_ on those beliefs and their effects elsewhere,
| but unlike the internet, won 't assert them as fact, or let
| you form a comfortable bubble of alternate reality around
| yourself where those beliefs are only ever reinforced, but
| never questioned.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| They are also the ones brigading the comment section on
| news segments.
| swiley wrote:
| I prefer to use YouTube in private mode so the ML doesn't
| pigeonhole you. It only takes a few videos for it to "decide
| what you like" and so you can pretty easily convince it to feed
| you weird stuff like this if you want.
| codemusings wrote:
| I think the trick is also to watch pontential extreme videos
| linked from some place else in private mode so that your feed
| doesn't get messed up.
|
| But yeah I'd second that. My feed is mostly video games, music
| & crafting which fits my interests pretty well. I don't get any
| political or violent content suggested at all.
|
| I also wonder how much this gets influenced by tracking data
| gathered outside of YouTube.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >I also wonder how much this gets influenced by tracking data
| gathered outside of YouTube.
|
| I think not at all given what I see in incognito/secondary
| google account and that I dont see any of my interests which
| I havent watched much about on youtube recommended - e.g. no
| programming stuff and I'm sure there's a ton of tracking data
| outside of youtube suggesting I'm interested in that.
| [deleted]
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Annecdotal: music recommandations have regressed for me.
| rickstanley wrote:
| My case: my brother commited suicide early this year, I got
| recommended Reckful's last minutes of streaming [1], I didn't
| know what was going on; only after reading the description and
| comments that I understood the whole thing, and guess what, I got
| invested and searched some more, and I found out that his brother
| had also commited suicide. Imagine that going through my
| thoughts.
|
| I didn't take the "recommendation" very well, couldn't sleep
| properly after.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiER4tMnbJA
| pjc50 wrote:
| That's horrendous, sorry for your loss.
| iNane9000 wrote:
| "Art Garfunkel music video, and was then recommended a highly-
| sensationalised political video titled "Trump Debate Moderator
| EXPOSED as having Deep Democrat Ties, Media Bias Reaches BREAKING
| Point."
|
| It was much harder to figure out the connection on that one. But
| seriously, most of this is just demographics. It's not like
| there's a conspiracy to control information or anything crazy
| like that. I remember the panic about the creepy kids cartoons.
| It's just algorithms doing their thing. Get used to it.
| enumjorge wrote:
| > It's just algorithms doing their thing. Get used to it.
|
| Given how much influence some of these platforms have on
| people, how about the companies running them fix their stuff?
| We could also introduce legislation to make them fix it. Not
| sure why we have to get used to it.
| SllX wrote:
| Honestly I wonder how much of it is just peoples own
| personalized recommendations and how much of it is general
| recommendations.
|
| I have a hard rule not to use YouTube for any sort of news or
| politics, and the algorithm accommodates that very well. I'm
| sure if I created a new account, it would start off
| recommending me whatever BS is popular across YouTube at the
| time of creation, but if I used it exactly like I use my
| current account, I think the algorithm would accommodate that.
| I actually _like_ YouTube, which seems to be an unpopular
| opinion in some places.
|
| The only thing I can't seem to get rid of, permanently, are the
| stupid banners of videos that YouTube adds in about COVID, or
| at the time of the election, that crap, and some other
| nonsense. I mean if I keep clicking the X to get that out of my
| face, isn't that a strong signal I never want to see that crap
| or any of those topics again?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Why wouldn't it? Until YT has a perfect algo to detect violating
| videos, this will obviously happen.
|
| I keep seeing pieces like this and I feel like I'm taking crazy
| pills. I'm no expert at tech or social media. But this is a
| really obvious fact isn't it? So obvious that doing a "study" to
| "discover" it seems actively dishonest.
|
| What am I missing here?
| Black101 wrote:
| They will never make the algo perfect... like that they always
| have an excuse to remove whatever they don't like.
| tpmx wrote:
| _Mozilla conducted this research using RegretsReporter, an open-
| source browser extension that converted thousands of YouTube
| users into YouTube watchdogs._
|
| _Research volunteers encountered a range of regrettable videos,
| reporting everything from COVID fear-mongering to political
| misinformation_
|
| Like videos discussing the lab leak theory?
| kube-system wrote:
| > Like videos discussing the lab leak theory?
|
| _Which_ lab leak theory?
|
| There are widely varying claims on this topic, ranging from
| narrow and nuanced scientific discussions to all-out
| nonsensical conjecture. Labelling all of these claims with a
| broad brush and equating them is simply a straw man.
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| And yet, the "study" itself appears to imply that a video is
| extremist just because it has a title asserting that there is
| a left-leaning bias in some of the media.
|
| Seems false equivalencies, lack of nuances, and straw man
| arguments only matter some of the time.
| kube-system wrote:
| I wasn't defending the study. I doubt crowdsourced
| measurements of "regret" are good at measuring the accuracy
| of a video's content.
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| Fair enough, and your point is perfectly valid taken on
| its own.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I keep telling YouTube that I'm "Not interested" in COVID-19
| videos, but every other day they shove it in my face anyway.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| The lab leak may have been in there (you can probably check in
| the appendix to the report).
|
| But to be honest, it's pretty irrelevant. Content analysis is
| usually performed using the current state of knowledge. It is
| to be expected that known facts and what is perceived as truth
| changes after the fact. This does not invalidate the analysis
| itself.
|
| Here's the explanation from the report, which I find pretty
| reasonable:
|
| > Over the course of three months, the working group developed
| a conceptual framework for classifying some of the videos,
| based on YouTube's Community Guidelines. The working group
| decided to use YouTube's Community Guidelines to guide the
| qualitative analysis because it provides a useful taxonomy of
| problematic video content and also represents a commitment from
| YouTube as to what sort of content should be included on their
| platform.
| cromwellian wrote:
| Isn't there a problem with the sampling here? What if people
| who likely install RegretsReporter are also people who are more
| likely to view tangentially related problematic content in the
| first place, and then are shown more of it. Also, the dividing
| line on what's consider problematic is difficult, as we saw
| recently with Right Wing Watch.
|
| And the proposed regulation seems even more problematic. If the
| AI model were public, then it would be far easier for people to
| create adversarial content to game it. This is a problem with
| any models built on public data, including OpenAI's GPT stuff,
| or GitHub's Copilot. Detailed knowledge of how it works allows
| more efficient adversarial attacks, and the more these services
| become important public infrastructure, the more value such
| attacks will be.
|
| Imagine a co-pilot attack that inserts hard-to-discover
| Heartbleed-esque bugs into code for example.
|
| It seems way way too early to be discussing regulation of
| algorithms of a field so young and changing so rapidly. 5 years
| from now, the network architectures may be unrecognizably
| different in both form and function.
|
| It might be better to have some industry-wide group like the
| W3C or IETF which sets these standards, and have tech published
| reports and audits for compliance, but done in a way to prevent
| attacks.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| > Isn't there a problem with the sampling here? What if
| people who likely install RegretsReporter are also people who
| are more likely to view tangentially related problematic
| content in the first place, and then are shown more of it.
| Also, the dividing line on what's consider problematic is
| difficult, as we saw recently with Right Wing Watch.
|
| As I commented above, sampling is a problem, but the sample
| was only used to gather candidate videos which were _then_
| manually analyzed following Youtube 's own content
| guidelines.
|
| So the takeaway is: According to the study's authors, Youtube
| recommends videos despite them violating their own
| guidelines.
| cromwellian wrote:
| Does Right Wing Watch violate the guidelines? It's
| difficult enough to make AI that could enforce these
| guidelines, but even with a staff of tens of thousands of
| human evaluators I doubt you could avoid even 10% false
| positives given how much people argue over classification
| already.
|
| This kind of filtering, some say censoring, is super
| problematic both to pull off And to please all
| stakeholders, which is why a one size fits all regulation
| is likely to fail and create a new class of problems.
| secretsatan wrote:
| I found my YT sticks to mostly what I like, but if I accidentally
| select a video about some old vintage weird gun from some guy
| that occasionally appears in my feed, I guess through some other
| inference, then my channel is suddenly all guns, nothing but
| guns, guns, guns.
| troelsSteegin wrote:
| How do you then un-gun your feed? Select a recommendation from
| a different topic? Or, how long does it take for the gun recs
| to go away if you don't pick any? It's interesting that there'd
| be a burst of recommendations around a new topic.
| secretsatan wrote:
| I think last time I just avoided all the gun ones and they
| eventually went away. I since clicked on another style of
| annoying video topic and a faster way to get rid of an
| annoying category is to actively go and dislike the videos
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| If you go into your history and remove the video that caused
| it fixes it for me usually.
| walshemj wrote:
| I don't get that and I subscribe to forgotten weapons nd a fair
| number of millatery themed channels Tank museum etc
| temac wrote:
| > Another person watched a video about software rights, and was
| then recommended a video about gun rights.
|
| Do all videos about gun rights violate Youtube policy? Maybe the
| content was actually problematic, but presented like this, I'm
| wondering what was the problem on this one.
| kebman wrote:
| Whatever happened to "let people be their own judge?" Or are we
| really that elitist, and do we really have so little faith in
| individual's ability to think for themselves? Why is Mozilla, of
| all entities, seemingly seeking to influence YouTube, and to what
| end? Should we just abolish the idea of a free market of ideas?
| Is it bad to be radical? Are you automatically _wrong_ if you
| are? And are YouTube 's own policies flawless? Just some
| questions that come to mind.
| swiley wrote:
| The feedback loop the recommendation algorithm generates is
| really powerful. I personally have to treat youtube cautiously
| the way I treat any addictive drug otherwise I end up watching
| it long after I would have liked to.
| batch12 wrote:
| Some others- Should Youtube develop and use algorithms which
| lead people down the path of radacalism for the purpose of
| engagement? Why are people so radically and violently opposed
| to conflicting thoughts?
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| Youtube is like Reddit or Twitter: a dumpster fire unless you
| carefully curate what you do on it. I remove everything from my
| youtube history unless i specifically want it to be used for
| recommendations.
|
| I mostly watch video's about bass playing and use youtube to
| listen music, and even with curating my history i still get the
| occasional insane political rant recommmended out of nowhere.
| fareesh wrote:
| It's not harmful to watch Alex Jones videos, lizard people
| videos, deep state conspiracy videos. This premise should be
| rejected outright. It is _more_ harmful to be watching videos
| about religion, astrology, etc. In some cases, these are
| mainstream belief systems that have caused countless death,
| destruction, financial ruin for thousands of years. This sudden
| interest in harm reduction is disingenuous and conveniently
| selective.
|
| If you are not treating these videos as harmful, do not waste my
| time with blatant politics disguised as sanctimonious harm
| reduction.
|
| As a new YouTube user why am I recommended 100% of comedians and
| channels who have identical politics? What are the odds?
|
| All extreme ideology and ideologues - left, right, up down, are
| poisonous and divisive. They should be treated equally, not
| selectively.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| The Alex Jones crowd recently tried to stage a coup. Thousands
| of Asians were assaulted in the last 16 months or so, often by
| people indoctrinated by middle-aged men talking rather loudly
| directly into a camera, in their car with ugly sunglasses.
| wyoh wrote:
| A riot is not a "coup", especially by people with no weapons.
| The people attacking asians are mostly not from the right
| wing crowd.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Heavy projection there. Racism falls within the purview of
| the right.
| prezjordan wrote:
| It is not more harmful to watch videos about Astrology than
| videos about how the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was
| a false flag operation.
| fareesh wrote:
| I have used financial ruin as one of the criteria for harm.
| There are far more examples of people who have been reduced
| to financial ruin because of astrology, so I am correct with
| regards to the quantitative comparison.
| prezjordan wrote:
| You are not correct under any lens in any context
| specialist wrote:
| You argue that belief systems are both equal and not equal.
|
| Pick a side.
| fareesh wrote:
| No that is not accurate, I am arguing that if the goal is to
| tweak an algorithm to reduce "harmful" information then the
| criteria for what is considered harmful should not be
| narrowed down on the basis of one's personal politics.
|
| Any sincere effort to minimize harmful information would
| start with astrology, superstition, religion, homeopathy and
| other such content - not some local USA "problems".
| specialist wrote:
| Then make that argument.
|
| That our tools should empower us. That all existing
| recommenders disempower, or worse. That people should be in
| control of their own eyeballs.
|
| In our attention economy, _the choice_ of what to show and
| not show are equally important. It 's trivial to crowd out
| opposing opinions, no censorship needed.
|
| Who controls that algorithm? Certainly not us.
|
| Most of the pearl clutching over censorship, "cancel
| culture", blah blah blah would be resolved today by
| restoring the fairness doctrine (equal time).
|
| (This obvious and correct remediation will not happen so
| long as the outrage machine is fed by advertising.)
|
| ((Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, many others, all made all
| these points, much more eloquently, repeatedly, much better
| than I ever could.))
|
| > _...minimize harmful information would start with
| astrology..._
|
| Encourage you to omit your own opinions of any particular
| belief system. No one cares. It's a distraction (food
| fight).
| JasonFruit wrote:
| It's not harmful to watch videos, if you don't do so
| uncritically. If you watch uncritically, almost _any_ media is
| harmful, down to Teletubbies. People need to take
| responsibility for their minds: Boogaloo bois and Antifa didn
| 't radicalize you, you radicalized yourself by believing what
| they said, either rationally or by default -- but own your
| decision-making.
| [deleted]
| uniqueuid wrote:
| > It's not harmful to watch Alex Jones videos, lizard people
| videos, deep state conspiracy videos. This premise should be
| rejected outright.
|
| That's an open question - whether conspiracy videos have a
| _negative effect_. Given the current state of research in
| psychology, political science and communication research, it
| seems plausible that they do have a negative effect, albeit a
| small one.
|
| The defining feature of conspiracy theories is mistrust in
| state institutions and elites. Such attitudes - while legally
| protected - can lead to people rejecting sensible and helpful
| behavior, including vaccinations [1].
|
| So given the current state of research, I do not think the
| premise should be rejected outright.
|
| [1]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/19485506209346...
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| The only reason we have somewhat responsible state
| institutions and elites is due to a long history of well
| deserved mistrust of said powers.
| fareesh wrote:
| You are selectively highlighting part of the comment.
|
| The full context is that it should be rejected outright IF
| other forms of harmful information are allowed to remain.
|
| Any selective enforcement of this nature is insincere because
| it blatantly ignores more harmful examples.
|
| If there is a comprehensive enforcement that treats all
| harmful content equally, it can be considered sincere, else
| it is simply politics. These are not minor examples, they are
| far more dangerous than the examples being cited in this
| study.
| meowface wrote:
| I agree with you, but I think I and most people wouldn't
| view astrology videos anywhere near as harmful as any of
| the other videos mentioned. Could you link one or two
| videos that you consider to be presenting information as
| harmful as the other things you listed?
|
| For things like homeopathy and other medical pseudoscience,
| I think a lot of those things do get banned, depending on
| the claims they're presenting.
|
| And for something like a video recommending you invest in
| the video creator's company because [astrology gibberish],
| I think in that case it's just a matter of magnitude. Of
| course such a video causes harm, but YouTube can't be
| expected to be able to prevent all levels of harm. Your
| argument is sound when you're comparing against things that
| many would agree are at least as harmful as the other
| examples you give, rather than just meeting the criteria of
| any level of harmfulness.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| You are using the term "homeopathy", which includes
| osteopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic treatments, and
| other "holistic" areas of treatment.
|
| Homeopathy is a very broad area, and some of it isn't
| just pseudoscience, although we may not yet know the
| mechanism of operation for some of the 'treatments' (and
| some are almost certainly actively harmful).
|
| It's probably a weak analogy, but homeopathy is to
| medicine as supplements are to FDA-approved
| pharmaceuticals. There's always going to be some crazies,
| but there will also be some good things there, too, and
| by banning it, we will miss out on some really good
| innovation and ideas.
| temac wrote:
| I've never heard it referring to all pseudo-medicines.
| Wikipedia seems to agree on a narrow definition about
| just heavily diluted shits.
| meowface wrote:
| I think a better analogy would be Flat Earth, moon landing
| hoax, aliens on the dark side of the moon vs. astrology and
| mysticism and religion.
|
| I doubt astrology causes much financial distress for the vast
| majority of believers, even if it results in some people making
| poor financial decisions. Same for any other kind of distress.
|
| The problem with lizard people, Deep State, and much of Alex
| Jones' stuff is that the claims are about specific people and
| groups of people and their intentions and actions. They cause
| many people to genuinely, truly believe that certain people are
| the most abominable evil imaginable. That's inevitably going to
| increase the risk of direct and indirect harm a lot more than
| woo-woo fortune-scrying.
|
| One could say religion has done the same, and that's not
| necessarily wrong, but it's misleading. You'd have to compare
| specific things like religious extremist videos rather than
| merely religious/spiritual videos. Lizard people / Deep State
| YouTube content is very often extreme, while astrology and
| religion YouTube content is very rarely extreme. Pizzagate and
| QAnon adherents are earnestly trying to bring about the arrest
| and/or execution of people they believe to be child rapists and
| murderers.
|
| Even stuff like 9/11 conspiracy theory videos, if believed,
| lead you to the unavoidable conclusion that some, much, most,
| or all of the US government and/or Israel and/or Jews are
| diabolical mass murderers. You're not going to come away with a
| conclusion like that after watching a crystal healing or reiki
| video.
|
| >As a new YouTube user why am I recommended 100% of comedians
| and channels who have identical politics? What are the odds?
|
| Probably because something in your Chrome or Google search
| history, or the history or video activity of other people
| sharing your IP address or device, led YouTube to believe that
| may be something you like. Or, as this article points out,
| maybe you clicked one or two things that were tangentially
| related in some way and their data set indicated a lot of
| people who watched those also watched those other things. So,
| the odds are probably very high.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > It's not harmful to watch Alex Jones videos, lizard people
| videos, deep state conspiracy videos. This premise should be
| rejected outright. It is more harmful to ...
|
| Sure we can go down the whataboutism-road to find examples of
| things that are _more_ harmful, but you do realize there are
| people who believe in deep state and other insane conspiracy
| theories?
| fareesh wrote:
| There are concepts like equal enforcement and equal justice
| which by definition require what you are terming as
| "whataboutism" to highlight.
|
| If there is going to be selective enforcement of content,
| then call it what it is - politics.
|
| No sincere effort to minimize harm would ignore the harm
| caused by religion, astrology, homeopathy and other ideas
| like this.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I fully agree!
| intended wrote:
| Big Tech went from the shiny new thing, to the Mc Donalds of
| content.
|
| They serve crap in mass produced quantities because it sells.
|
| Remember that content moderation stops scaling after a point. No
| matter what good engineers think they will achieve in the Trust
| and Safety / Risk divisions.
|
| Reading this article it seems pretty clear that training
| parameters weigh engagement at a rate that makes junk content a
| guarantee.
|
| The troubling part is that this IS creating another
| educated/uneducated divide. The kind of conspiracy theories I see
| gaining traction around me differ entirely based on education
| (and therefore income).
|
| And if you are reading this far - almost all the data needed to
| have a society level discussion is under an NDA.
|
| It gets worse the moment you leave the English language. Want to
| find a sentiment Analyzer that works well on Code-Mixed
| subcontinental/Portuguese/Dominican hate speech? Good luck with
| that.
| cvwright wrote:
| > No matter what good engineers think they will achieve in the
| Trust and Safety / Risk divisions.
|
| You can have all the "Trust and Safety" effort you want, but
| when the core architecture of the system is built to reward the
| craziest stuff, you're still going to get a ton of crazy.
|
| It's like building a paintball park inside a nuclear reactor,
| in the middle of a WW2 minefield. No matter how many "Safety"
| staff you have running around in orange vests and hard hats,
| people are still going to get hurt.
| Quequau wrote:
| I enjoy watching metal machining content and trying to find it,
| in a language I can at least semi-follow along with it way harder
| than it has any right to be.
|
| On the other hand I really, really dislike most extremely popular
| YT shows that are focused on personalities and/or talking
| heads... yet YT has no problem relentless suggesting those to me.
| swiley wrote:
| If YT ever suggests something you don't like then you have to
| not ever watch it for a long time to make it go away.
|
| Unless it's television news, something seems to artificially
| inject that into the feed.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _metal machining content and trying to find it, in a language I
| can at least semi-follow along with_
|
| What language are you looking for, and what channels do you
| like so far? I'm curious how much overlap there is with what
| I've been watching in this area, and can recommend some English
| language channels.
| Quequau wrote:
| Most of what I see is in English but I also speak German and
| can understand some Russian (at least enough to be a danger
| to myself).
|
| Some of what I subscribe to: Tom Lipton, Adam Booth, Chris
| Maj, Cutting Edge Engineering, Dragonfly Engineering,
| Blondihacks, CNC4XR7, Edge Precision (a favourite),
| JamesPark_85 Machining TV, JohnSL, Keith Rucker, Mateusz
| Doniec, Max Grant, The Swan Valley Machine Shop,
| MrPragmaticLee, myfordboy, outsidescrewball,
| PracticalMachinist, Rustinox, Special Instrument Designs,
| shaper andi, Stef van Itterzon, Steve Summers, Topper
| Machine, AlwaysSunnyintheShop, An Engineer's Findings,
| AndysMachines, Assolo, Bart Harkema Metalworks, BAXEDM,
| clemwyo, CompEdgeX, Ca Lem, David Wilks, FactoryDragon87,
| Fireball Tool, H&W Machine Repair and Rebuilding,
| Halligan142, Henrik Andren, igorkawa, IronHead Machine, James
| T. Kilroy Jr., Jan Sverre Haugjord , Joerg Beigang,
| Mechanical Advantage, Piotr Fox Wysocki, Solid Rock Machine
| Shop Inc. (another favourite), Stefan Gotteswinter (really
| good), THE IRONWORKER, Vladimir Alekseenko, TheMetalRaymond
| (now I want a horizontal boring mill).
|
| I guess that's just over half. A lot of these channels have
| either stopped uploading videos or upload very irregularly,
| so YouTube's algorithm hides their content from me, even
| though I am subscribed to the channel.
| jcims wrote:
| I wonder how many of us there are out there. It seems like
| I bump into folks that are into the same thing all the
| time, but where are the numbers? Tom Lipton (for example)
| is one of the GOATs of course, but he has 140k subs? Peter
| at Edge Precision, consistently delivering excellent
| tutorials and great camera work on a huge machine...60k
| subs. Stef van Itterzon, building one of the most
| ridiculous DIY CNCs I've ever seen, less than 10k subs.
| It's odd.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I watch a fair bit of this sort of thing on YouTube, but
| I don't use the subscribe or like functions on anything.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| "This Old Tony" is english spoken with just the right humour
| for me. Anyone got any more channels of similar style, not
| neccesairly just about metal machining?
| nitrogen wrote:
| Breaking Taps has some interesting stuff including
| machining but without the humor, Rainfall Projects is
| metalworking rather than machining, Wintergatan is building
| a crazy machine, Ron Covell shows some crazy sheet metal
| bending techniques in a very dry style, Machine Thinking
| goes into some of the history of machining, and Clickspring
| makes clocks and an Antikythera mechanism out of brass.
|
| Not all of those upload regularly, and as someone who also
| uploads occasionally (though not machining related) I don't
| blame them, because good video is _hard_.
| arethuza wrote:
| Abom79 is one I watch regularly.
| throwanem wrote:
| AvE's worth a look if you like This Old Tony. The drunk
| uncle to Tony's sober one, if you like.
| herbst wrote:
| I get recommendations of people that literally make me angry.
| Like people I totally cant stand and because they make kinda
| similar content to people I watch they get recommended all the
| fucking time. I tried disliking (which is not fair to begin with,
| because I would not watch them if my TV would not simply start
| it) but it changed nothing.
|
| So I am stuck with getting the same few shitty YouTubers pulled
| in my autoplay every single day.
|
| I tried making an new account from scratch. But nope,
| recommendations seem to be based on the channels you follow with
| no personal references pulled in
| ud_0 wrote:
| _> I tried disliking_
|
| Don't do that! The algorithm counts that as an engagement
| action.
|
| What you need to do is click on the three dots symbol next to
| the video title and select "don't recommend this channel". This
| absolutely fixes it. You may have to do this a lot. There is
| also a general "don't recommend this" option that, anecdotally,
| doesn't work as well.
|
| Also, disable autoplay. It doesn't seem like YT can distinguish
| between clicking on a video and it just playing on autoqueue.
|
| The YT algorithm is not fundamentally different from the other
| social media algorithms out there: it tries to serve you up
| with controversial content that "engages" you. You are most
| likely to be "engaged" by content you either directly disagree
| with, or by second-source channels that report on content you
| disagree with. As a fallback, the algorithm will also try to
| serve you content based on your cohorts, which can in of itself
| be pretty radical and disagreeable.
|
| Get a YT Premium account if you can, sending a very small
| message that you vote against ads and all the algorithmic
| baggage that comes with them.
| yissp wrote:
| > Get a YT Premium account if you can, sending a very small
| message that you vote against ads and all the algorithmic
| baggage that comes with them.
|
| YT premium users are still presented with the same
| recommendations as normal users, are they not? That's kinda
| my problem with the service. Sure you don't actually see the
| ads, but you're still using an advertising-based platform
| with all the user-hostile design that model encourages.
| ud_0 wrote:
| Oh absolutely, I'm recommending this because of the second
| part of my sentence above. I believe the ad model is bad
| for both consumers and companies, in ways that are not
| immediately obvious. Ad models tend to generate perverse
| incentives in my opinion. I also think it's important to
| signal a willingness to be a reasonable consumer, and to me
| it's also about ethics: I watch a lot of Youtube, I can
| afford to pay for YT Premium, and I run an adblocker.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Yes, a view is a view and a dislike is engagement. If you
| really don't want to see people or content, use the triple
| dot menu and click 'not recommended' or 'don't recommend this
| channel' (which actually straight filters it out).
| namibj wrote:
| The "don't recommend this" notably has two reasons on the
| "tell us more" dialog: "I've already seen this video", and "I
| don't like this video".
|
| I often use the former, after watching stuff via mpv
| (chromium has tearing, but more notably, high enough CPU
| usage to annoy me with a half-broken fan that's quite loud).
| weare138 wrote:
| I have the same problem. I watch alot of science and history
| channels but damn near every time I watch videos on World War
| II I start getting suggestions for crazy far-right channels.
| And I don't mean like mainstream 'conservative' channels like
| FoxNews, I mean crazy stuff like Nick Fuentes. Even if I tell
| it to not recommend a certain channel it will just pop back
| into the recommendations after a few weeks. It would be
| different if the rest of the recommendations were good but
| they're just crap too.
| Felk wrote:
| I am personally abusing the block feature for this. I haven't
| tested if it is actually true, but I began blocking channels
| that I am not interested in and haven't noticed anything being
| recommended yet from any channel I remember blocking.
| herbst wrote:
| That sounds like it could work. Pretty sure I never saw that
| function on my Android TV tho.
|
| Kudos, gonna try!
| sbarre wrote:
| I spend time blocking/curating videos in a desktop browser
| so that my Apple TV YouTube app sucks less from a
| recommendations perspective..
|
| It's lame that it has to be done that way, but it's the
| best way I've been able to do it.
| kevincox wrote:
| Is this abusing the function? Block is for things that you
| never want to see. It sounds fairly appropriate.
| mdoms wrote:
| Not sure what client you're using, but on the web and mobile
| you can click/tap the kebab menu and select "Don't recommend
| this channel". Youtube has a nasty habit of recommending rage-
| inducing channels because they generate engagement. If "Don't
| recommend this channel" was a button on my keyboard it would be
| worn down to a nub by now.
| herbst wrote:
| Google just really hates their Android TV users. I realized I
| simply can block them on my phone which actually works!
| wincy wrote:
| I did this to Cocomelon as my daughters watched it a few
| times and the algorithm thought I wanted to watch nursery
| rhymes all day long.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| turn off autoplay to protect your recommendations.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/
|
| Turn off recommendations, comments, autoplay etc. I only see
| exactly who I've subscribed to and nothing more.
| sureglymop wrote:
| A few years ago I completely scratched using a YouTube account
| and instead switched to the android app NewPipe (I was
| primarily watching on my Android phone).
|
| This has completely changed and improved the experience for me.
| NewPipe lets you create multiple feeds of groups of channels.
| So for example I can have a feed podcasts, music and tech news.
|
| This not only makes it easier to actually get to the content
| you want to consume at any given time without distracting
| yourself but also helps you get better recommendations in these
| grouped feeds (the recommendations still work).
|
| NewPipe is free and open source and can be downloaded on
| F-Droid.
| herbst wrote:
| Thanks for that. Going to look into it. (In the hope it works
| on TV and also blocks ads)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Seconding newpipe, it's great if you just want to watch
| specific videos or channels. Should work on Android tv,
| unfortunately not available for LG WebOS TVs.
| wilde wrote:
| I turned auto play off by default on YouTube. Recently I noticed
| that sometimes auto play was happening anyway. It seems that
| YouTube has introduced videos that override my choice called
| "Mixes". Whoever came up with that is an evil genius. Now I have
| to be really careful to click the actual video I want to watch
| rather than a version of it with the same thumbnail that ignores
| my settings.
|
| Fuck YouTube.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| By the way, regarding these algorithm studies:
|
| It's important to do them correctly to _prevent bad studies_ ,
| not (just) to get valid information.
|
| Or, as Andrew Gelman [1] said:
|
| > The utilitarian motivation for the social sciences is they can
| protect us from bad social-science reasoning.
|
| [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/03/12/the-
| social...
| janto wrote:
| I'd argue that the net utility of social "science" has been
| negative because it generates bad ideas under the guise of
| "good social-science reasoning" and is often explicitly
| antiscience.
| azangru wrote:
| > recommender AI
|
| So, am I correct to understand that the recommender AI is just
| learning from youtube users' actual behavior and shows what
| content people who have watched a given set of videos tend to
| find "engaging" (watch for a significant amount of time, leave
| comments, like, etc)? That, in effect, the AI is just holding a
| mirror to youtube users, and some journalists don't like what
| they see in it?
| intended wrote:
| Think more like junk food when it was first invented.
|
| A culture/society with no understanding of Mc Donalds will
| immediately see Mc Donalds proliferate.
|
| The food is cheap, fast and tasty. It hits all the buttons.
|
| Same thing here. Except, this is the phase before health and
| safety regulations and poisonous/radical content is distributed
| along click bait.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Not quite.
|
| a) we don't know how the recommender works, and it changes over
| time, and some problematic recommendations have been found even
| in absence of actively seeking out problematic content, and
|
| b) it's not journalists but researchers from mozilla and
| scientists from the University of Exeter.
| azangru wrote:
| > some problematic recommendations have been found even in
| absence of actively seeking out problematic content
|
| I don't know how to put it in proper terms, but isn't it
| possible that the user who has watched videos A and B ("non-
| problematic") is classified the same as a subset of users who
| have watched A, B and C (C being "problematic"), and thus is
| shown C?
|
| Asking because personally, I've never seen my "safe for work"
| youtube account ever recommend me anything "problematic". At
| the moment, it's just feeding me music videos of the same
| genre, which I am already bored by :-)
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Both happens.
|
| Some studies such as [1] measure recommendations without
| past browsing history, and they still find recommendations
| for harmful content.
|
| Other studies (such as this from Berkman Klein Center [2])
| simulate user behavior and subsequent recommendations and
| find additional harmful effects of personalized
| recommendations.
|
| [1] Faddoul, M., Chaslot, G., & Farid, H. (2020). A
| Longitudinal Analysis of YouTube's Promotion of Conspiracy
| Videos. ArXiv:2003.03318 [Cs].
| http://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03318
|
| [2] https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2019-06/youtubes-
| digital-pla...
| dtech wrote:
| There is a known problem with Youtube both excessive
| recommending in the same category and driving people to more
| extreme videos.
|
| If you watch a surfing video, even for a few seconds, expect a
| lot of surfing videos to pop up in your recommendations for a
| long time. This has gotten slightly better over time in my
| experience.
|
| The larger problem is extremism. Watch a video about a
| vegetarian dish, get recommended vegetarian dish and lifestyle
| videos, watch those, get recommended veganism videos, watch
| those, get recommended PETA and animal activism. It kinda works
| like a funnel.
|
| Might not seems that dangerous for your favourite topic, but
| now replace the topic with conspiracy theories, religious
| extermism, radical feminism, anti-government armed resistance,
| self-harm and suicide, anorexia etc. etc.
| bl5THJUSFXWy4ii wrote:
| > There is a known problem with Youtube both excessive
| recommending in the same category and driving people to more
| extreme videos.
|
| There is a belief that that problem exists with YouTube but
| whether that actually exists requires further investigation.
| For example [1] suggests the opposite.
|
| [1]
| https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10419
| azangru wrote:
| I believe it's been attributed to the fact that more
| "extremist" content gets more engagement from users in the
| form of comments or longer watch time.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| All of this reminds me of the early days of the TiVo. It had
| a recommendation system that it would use to fill your DVR
| with shows you would like. If you recorded a show in a new
| category (which gave the show an implicit positive rating),
| it would often go off the rails and find everything in that
| category. The first time I recorded "The Simpsons", it filled
| up my DVR with cartoons over the course of the next week
| before I noticed what it was doing.
|
| We seem to be basically no better than that sort of logic.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Here is a link to the original announcement by mozilla, which is
| a better source (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-
| investigation...) (@dang should this be updated?)
|
| Some insights from the report:
|
| * The study uses donated data from mozilla's browser plugin [1].
| This means it almost surely has self-selection bias and does not
| offer representative usage data. But that's a fair tradeoff to
| get realistic measurements of recommendations.
|
| * The focus is on harmful content, so we don't know how much this
| is out of the entire exposure people get. (But there are a couple
| of representative studies out there).
|
| * Out of all _reported_ videos, 12% were considered actually
| harmful. That 's not a terrible rate in my opinion.
|
| * 70% of harmful videos came from recommendations - that's why
| the authors demand changes to the YT recommender system.
|
| * Data quality: Reports came from ~37k users of the browser
| extension, but only ~1600 submitted a report. Total N of reports
| is ~3300, so pretty low. The actual analysis was performed on a
| sample of ~1100 out of these (why?). Harmfulness was analyzed by
| student assistants which is ok.
|
| * Non-english languages seem to have higher prevalence of harmful
| videos (which is to be expected given the attention and resources
| spent).
|
| [1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/regrets-
| reporter...
| pseudo0 wrote:
| The problem is that the study's design makes it impossible to
| measure the magnitude of the issue. Any recommendation system
| operating on the scale of YouTube's is going to have a non-zero
| error rate, and this study effectively just confirmed this
| known fact. The relative uselessness of the design makes me
| think this is more about ammo for advocacy efforts than genuine
| interest in studying this issue.
|
| The question I'd be interested in is: how frequently does a
| typical YouTube viewer have actually harmful content
| recommended to them? Looks like it's pretty rare, if even the
| self-selected group that was interested in this effort and
| reported harmful content saw an average of (0.12 * 3300)/1600 =
| 0.2475 over the entire duration of the study. And that's a very
| generous upper bound, assuming that all of the people who
| didn't submit reports just forgot about the extension rather
| than failing to see any potentially harmful content.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Right, that's the issue here: We don't get any meaningful
| base rate.
|
| But the problem is: It's incredibly hard to get
| representative measurements of _personalized_
| recommendations. How do you want to collect those? You 'd
| need a representative sample in the upper four digits (costs
| five to six figures), and track their browsing including on
| mobile phones.
|
| This is expensive and technically difficult, because you need
| to essentially MITM the connection (SNI doesn't give you the
| videos, only the domain).
|
| Of course, Youtube knows the precise extent of the issue, but
| they can't/won't/don't give precise data to anyone
| (problematic but understandable, given that every
| totalitarian government in the world would immediately send a
| wishlist).
| gipp wrote:
| YT started reporting Violative View rate a few months ago:
| https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/building-greater-
| transpa...
| pseudo0 wrote:
| It would be more expensive, but I don't think it would be
| infeasible for an organization like Mozilla. Focus just on
| the desktop use to start with (extracting recommendations
| from the YouTube app would likely be challenging) and pay a
| representative set of users to install a browser extension
| that records the videos they are recommended. Then go
| through some subset of the videos and evaluate if they are
| harmful or not. It would definitely be more work, but at
| least that would give some useful new information on this
| issue, rather than confirming what was previously known.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Well, I've done some of these things in other contexts.
|
| Market rate compensation for participation in such
| studies is ~$1 per day. You'd need at least 10'000 users
| to have menaningful confidence intervals. Say you're
| tracking for one month, then you pay 300k for the sample
| alone.
|
| If you have a single multi-purpose researcher doing study
| design, programming, logistics, analysis, outreach and
| all, that's perhaps 50k-100k a year (highly dependent on
| country and institution).
|
| Next you hire a bunch of people to do the content
| analysis. Either mechanical turk with a 2-3 factor
| overprovisioning or actually trained people who are 2-3
| times as expensive. At roughly one minute per video,
| you'd need one hour for 20 videos, i.e. approximatelly 50
| cents to 1 dollar (ballpark) per video.
|
| Say you argue that the long tail is irrelevant, and you
| want to code the top 100k videos (danger, arbitrary
| cutoffs are bad), then that's another 100k.
|
| That's half a million for something that isn't mozilla's
| core mission and is already being done by publicly funded
| researchers. Would be nice if they did it, but it sounds
| like a bad investment to me!
| justshowpost wrote:
| > browser plugin
|
| Didn't Mozilla drop plugin support completely in Jan?
| vengefulduck wrote:
| They most likely meant a web extension (or "add on" as
| Firefox refers to it) not a NPAPI plugin which was what was
| removed in January.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| It certainly should, since
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/07/youtubes-recommender-ai-st...
| (the submitted URL) does nothing but copy the Mozilla report
| and sex it up with gaudy language. We've changed it now.
|
| Submitters: please read the site guidelines. Note this one: "
| _Please submit the original source. If a post reports on
| something found on another site, submit the latter._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| karmakaze wrote:
| That's a good summary. I was trying to get a handle on what
| 'harmful' could mean, and why this isn't higher than 70% from
| recommendations. What are the other sources, search results,
| word-of-mouth, etc? Anyway this part cleared up the context.
|
| > New research published today by Mozilla backs that notion up,
| suggesting YouTube's AI continues to puff up piles of 'bottom-
| feeding'/low grade/divisive/disinforming content -- stuff that
| tries to grab eyeballs by [...]
|
| It seems the best way to play this is to not interact with
| (downvote, comment on) content you don't want to see, and stop
| playing such content as soon as you know.
| pizza wrote:
| Well, not sure what to make of that 70% since 70% of all
| youtube video watches are due to recommendation in the first
| place
|
| https://qz.com/1178125/youtubes-recommendations-drive-70-of-...
| belorn wrote:
| Looking at the example of their harmful content, half is videos
| about pro-republic videos talking about the US 2020 election.
| If that is representative of their study then that seems very
| much self-selected in both nationality and politics.
|
| It should be noted that those that classified if content was
| harmful or not was a team of 41 research assistants employed by
| the University of Exeter.
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