"If YouTube won’t remove the algorithm, it must, at the very least, make significant changes, and have greater human involvement in the recommendation process.", man does this person know how many videos and how many users YouTube has? They cannot use anything except an algorithm to recommend videos. They cannot use anything except an algorithm to detect videos inappropriate for children. It seems YouTube is working on this, and this opinion seems like a ill thought out fluff piece to enrage readers and sell this persons book.
> They cannot use anything except an algorithm to recommend videos.
I agree that with the current business model it is not possible for YouTube to sort it manually.
When I was a kid, a long long time ago, it would have been impossible to conceive that a TV channel showed that kind of content regularly and continue open. If their answer would have been that they cannot fix it because it costs money there would have been an outraged response.
If YouTube cannot keep things legal, cannot respect people rights, cannot be a good responsible part of society because it is not cost effective for me the way to go is clear. And that is true for YouTube, Facebook or any other business digital or not.
Youtube is not a TV channel, it's a video crowdsourced sharing site.
If we want to have a "free" (as in no subscription and no money required to be payed for the service) video sharing/uploading site, what model would that make it work and still have human reviewing? I consider the fact that there may be undesirable videos as the cost of having such a site, similarly how to the "cost" of having a free Internet is that there's going to be lots of hate online and free access to tutorials to make bombs and what not. It's part of the deal and I'm happy with that, YMMV. If you worry about what kids might access then don't let them access Youtube but please don't create laws that would make free video sharing sites illegal/impossible to run.
This is true for pretty much any free Internet service that allows for user content. If all of Internet content production will go back to just "official" creators (because they are the only ones where the cost/benefit math would make sense) I think that would be a huge loss/regression over what we have gained since the age of the Internet.
When I was a kid in the 80s, cartoons were basically 30 minute toy commercials. My toddler loves watching videos on YouTube of Russian kids playing with toys, so I guess things haven’t changed much.
2018:
“I’ll pick a topic and just give my opinion about it try to be entertaining, try to be funny, try to be unique and say something other people haven’t said before,” youtuber said.
In response, the principal of the high school sent a note to students and parents Thursday night regarding the "hate-based video and text posts attributed to one of our students":
I would think having humans more involved in training the algorithm could scale much better.
Also, detecting videos that are inappropriate for children is a lot harder than determining certain content creators that are trustworthy to post videos that are appropriate (and to tag them correctly). That can be learned from the user's history, how many times their stuff has been flagged, getting upvotes from users that are themselves deemed credible, and so on. The more layers of indirection, the better, a la PageRank.
So even without analyzing the video itself, it would have a much smaller set of videos it can recommend from, but still potentially millions of videos. You still need some level of staff to train the algorithm, but you don't have to have paid staff look at every single video to have a good set of videos it can recommend. The staff might spend most of their time looking at videos that are anomalous, such as they were posted by a user the algorithm trusted but then flagged by a user that the algorithm considered credible. Then they would tag that video with some rich information that will help the algorithm in the future, beyond just removing that video or reducing the trust of the poster or the credibility of the flagger.
The algorithm works really damn well for 99.999% of the cases. It manages to show me great recommendations from very niche things I'm interested in. But it's the very same behavior that can, in some cases, lead to issues.
are you sure that it's not you who knows very well how to curate their own content and who to subscribe to rather than the recommendation system?
I'm not sure heavy automation is needed here, people jump from content creator to content creator by word of mouth. In contrast most algorithmic suggestions to me seem highly biased towards what is popular in general. I click on one wrong video in a news article and for the next two days my recommendations are pop music, Jimmy Kimmel, Ben Shapiro and animal videos
Not for me, for example I've been watching a few PyCon and I/O talks, and it's been showing me other interesting PyCon talks that are highly ranked. It's also giving me good AutoChess and OneHourOneLife Let'sPlays, both of which I've been very interested in lately.
All three things I just mentioned are fairly niche, comparatively, yet it knows that I've been watching a lot of them lately and is giving me more of it.
I'm reminded of how Google images had an issue where dark skinned people sometimes turned up in a search for gorilla. 99.9% of the time, the image recognition algorithm did really well, but here was a case where an error was really offensive. What was (probably) needed was for there to be a human that comes in and, not tag every gorilla image, but simply to give it some extra training around dark skinned humans and gorillas, or otherwise tweak some things specific to that sort of case, so the chance of it happening was reduced to nearly nothing.
There are probably a ton of situations like that in YouTube, where certain kinds of mistakes are hardly noticed (it shows you a video you weren't remotely interested in), but others can be really bad and need special training to avoid (such as where it shows violent or sexual content to someone who likes nursery rhymes and Peppa Pig).
I mean, that's a pretty easy conversation to have, no? "Hey team, when I search for 'gorilla', black people come up instead. Here, look. That's a problem, right? So I'm going to file this JIRA..."
Except what would really happen is people insisting that there's no actual racism involved, because software cannot be racist, rather the purely technical and politically neutral fact that black people do (chromatically speaking) resemble gorillas more than white people, meaning the algorithm is correct to make the association.
And once it was changed, people would complain that it's just another example of Google being run by extremist far-left ideologues who are ruining the meritocratic purity of tech with their social justice agenda.
I'm kind of wondering if a "Ned Flanders" user-detector is possible.
Search for users who stop videos at "offensive" moments, then evaluate their habits. It wouldn't be foolproof, but the "Flanders rating" of a video might be a starting metric.
Before putting something on YouTube for kids, run it by Flanders users first. If Flanders users en masse watch it the whole way through, it's probably safe. If they stop it at random points, it may be safe (this is where manual filtering might be desirable, even if it is just to evaluate Flanders Users rather than the video). But if they stop videos at about the same time, that should be treated as a red flag.
Of course, people have contextual viewing habits that aren't captured (I hope). Most relevantly, they probably watch different things depending on who is in the room. This is likely the highest vector for false positives.
The big negative is showing people content they obviously don't want for the sake of collecting imperfect data.
Last year we have a very big mobilization here in Argentina because there was a vote in congress to legalize abortion. It was very big and the discussion split all the political parties.
The big square in front of the congress was split at the half, the pro-choice "green" group was on one side and the pro-life "sky-blue" group was in the other side. Each group had a strong opinion, but the mobilization was quite civilized, I don't remember that anyone get hurt. Anyway, there were small kids on both sides with the handkerchief of the respective color.
Also, what is your definition of kid: 6? 12? 17?
Just imagine that the Church release a video on youtube where Santa visit a lot of children to give them presents, and in particular to a unborn children during the 8 month of pregnancy, and add to Santa a "sky-blue" handkerchief in case someone didn't notice the hidden message. Do you think it should be censored for kids?
Kid: I'd say the lower bound is around 5, and the upper bound is variable depending on the individual...
In this case, I'd suggest the upper bound doesn't matter, as the criteria for filtering should be "a semi-unattended 5 year old could view it without concern."
All your examples are of topics where it's probably best for parents to initiate their child's education on the topic rather than Youtube randomly putting it in some kid's feed.
The question I have is how can they tell "Flanders" viewers from "bored" ones or "out of time" ones short of them flagging it without a lot of manual review and guess work?
Reviewing viewers on that level sounds even more intensive than filtering every channel and video.
In the system I've proposed, if there are enough test-Flanders thrown at the content the times closed should be different enough to trigger an unclear Flanders rating. This would indicate some other metric should be used.
I don't see this test working in isolation. Given it's nature, it's value is in obscure rejection statements rather than acceptance (or "okilly-dokillies" in this case).
To echo what others on this thread have said, there's a lot of content on Youtube. This means that even if they are cautious about which content passes through the filter for kids, there's still a lot available.
The problem is that just a few examples of the algorithm getting it wrong is enough to cause an adpocalypse. If millions of videos are uploaded every month then you can imagine how low the error rate has to be.
If Google takes the impractical route and hires a sufficient number of multilingual Ned Flanders, then they're still probably going to have a non-zero false positive rate (humans make mistakes too).
Whatever they do is going to have to be evaluated in terms of best effort / sincerity.
Semi-related: The fun of Youtube is when the recommendation algo gets it right and shows you something great you wouldn't have searched for. The value is that it can detect elements that would be near impossible for a human to specify. But that means it has to take risks.
But how would that solve the problem that the article opened with? There is nothing wrong with the videos of children playing, the wrong part was recommending them to pedophiles
Feels like the article was about more than that one issue. It also discussed creators slicing in frames of mickey mouse and other methods of gaming the alg. Most of the responses here seem to be buying into Google's hype around number of hours or videos uploaded per second. I think that is a distraction that lets them off the hook for not managing the community they built.
> They cannot use anything except an algorithm to recommend videos
That’s assuming recommendations need to be personalized. They could recommend at a higher level to groups of people using attributes like age range or region.
I’m not a fan of their personalized recommendations. It’s algorithm overfits my views to recommend videos extremely similar to videos I’ve recently watched, which isn’t really aligned with my interests.
If they took a completely different approach (not personalized) it could really impact the UX in a positive way.
No thanks. You try logging out and see the generic recommendations. It's the lowest common denominator, just like anything else targeted at large masses of people.
You are 100% not thinking big enough. These algorithms identify clusters. These clusters can be examined through random sampling. It doesn’t take a genius to spot that a cluster that involves children and pornography might have some problems.
Of course, the system doesn’t expose these kinds of outputs, because no-one has any interest in designing such a system and taking responsibility for the content.
> man does this person know how many videos and how many users YouTube has
While that might be true, 99% of the views are a very small subset of the videos posted. It's completely doable, or at the very least the problem can be greatly mitigated by putting more humans into the process and not letting the algos recommend videos that haven't been viewed by someone in Youtube's equivalent of "standards and practices". All that being said, I fear the primary reason this is not done is because such actions would reduce the number of hours of viewed videos and ad revenues. In fact, I've read articles supporting this theory.
Google under Pichai is basically like Exxon under Lee Raymond--solely focused on revenue growth and completely blind to any number that doesn't show up on the current and next quarter's income statement.
pichai doesn't come off as enthusiastic. I am a heavy Google product user. Watch all the hardware, I/O events etc, I have seen him use the same sentences multiple times over the past 2 years across events. I get that he won't exude the same charm, excitement as a founder-CEO, nevertheless a lot is left to be desired. A lot of his public statements feel like carefully crafted PR responses. Nothing wrong with crafted responses. When you are a 800 Billion$ company, you gotta be careful, but at least try to give off the perception of being authentic. Google is really bad at the perception game. Apple's really good at that. But I have a strong dislike for stupid moves, even more so than bad moves and Google has made lots of those stupid ones.
Probably Neal Mohan on Recode right? The current public number is 500 hours per minute. But that number has been floating around for a while. It's probably higher now.
The stat I heard while at Google (~5 years ago) was that 8 hours of video is uploaded every second. Cross-checking that against the 500 videos/sec figure, it implies that the average video is about 1 minute. I suspect the 8 hours figure is pretty out-of-date now, and it's more like 20 hours/sec.
BTW, you could do some simple math to figure out how many employees it'd take to have a human watch every video that comes in. 3600 secs/hour * 20 hours of video/sec = 72000 secs/video/sec, * 3 to assume 8 hour shifts = 216,000 employees, * $30K/year = $6.4B/year. It's theoretically doable, but you wouldn't get the product for free anymore.
$30K/year is minimum wage in Sunnyvale and Mountain View, where Google headquarters is.
YouTube could probably outsource it internationally, but that'd just spark a new round of outrage: "Why are global community standards set by an American technology company outsourced to poor workers in the Philippines? Are these the people we want deciding our values?"
This is probably not the thought process this issue would travel down. Costs are typically the first consideration in a semi-skilled position if native english sounding isn't a requirement.
They don't care, they want to push them into approved content rather than recommended content. Aka "these are the topics that you are allowed to speak of".
See current Pinterest scandal and banning from Youtube of any video mentioning this.
All true. But all of this is making me wonder - what are the people thinking who say they can't wait for our society to be run by AI? The apex of AI capability can't even recommend videos properly right now, and we want it to run all the aspects of our society?! No, thanks.
What those people actually mean is "I can't wait for AI to be so good that it'll be obvious that it should run all the aspects of our society". The current state is irrelevant, nobody wants to put those in charge.
What are the people thinking who say they can't wait for our society to be run by humans? The most common state of human government capability can't even put human suffering before numbers in a virtual bank account, can't prioritise truth over falsehood, can't restrain themselves from bribery, can't reliably turn up to hearings or ballots, can't organise projects and complete them, can't compromise when millions of people depend on it. We want to dismiss alternatives which haven't even been developed yet for not being good enough?
The argument is that a hypothetical benevolent ASI can't be corrupted like literally all humans can. Those people are likely referring to AI's as they appear in Ian Banks The Culture series.
Ah, the classic “think of the children!” argument. It is no one’s responsibility other than the parent to ensure their child isn’t watching inappropriate content (which will be different for every family and individual).
This article suggests that machine learning and collaborative filtering are incapable of producing healthy recommendations. I beg to differ, the New York Times may not like the result but they work for the vast majority of users on any service with too much content to manually curate.
I don't think that's the point. It is false advertising for YouTube to create YouTube Kids for kids, and then not have content that is appropriate for kids on it.
> This article suggests that machine learning and collaborative filtering are incapable of producing healthy recommendations. I beg to differ,
The article cites actual instances and recurring problems showing that "machine learning and collaborative filtering are incapable of producing healthy recommendations.": Even when YouTube tried to produce child friendly content, they failed. You can't just say "it's fine" after the article shows it not being fine.
Setting aside the personal responsibility angle for the moment (which I agree with you on!) don't you think that negative externalities should generally be managed?
YouTube is a paperclip maximizer (where paperclips correspond to eyeball-hours spent watching YouTube) and at some point optimizing paperclips becomes orthogonal to human existence, and then anticorrelated with it.
I think it's a perfectly fair thing to say that maybe the negatives outweigh the positives at the present.
(This argument doesn't apply solely to YouTube, of course)
I generally agree with you, but I think YouTube being safe for kids became their problem when they launched a version specifically for kids and marketed it as safe.
What law is there to prevent a kid from going on the internet and going to “inappropriate” sites? Watching video on cable? Finding their Dad’s Playboy magazine back in the day?
On cable there are ways to lock out channels, setting ratings on the TV and all that. If dad doesn't hide his Playboy well enough, it's obviously on him to fix it.
On the internet it is much more difficult, of course, and we can't realistically expect some shady offshore site from implementing age checks, let alone recommendation algorithms. But Google is a public, respected company from a first world country that claims to be promoting social good (which, of course, is marketing BS, and even if it weren't I would not want their idea of social good, but still). You'd think that they would invest some effort into not showing inappropriate content to kids at least. But no, they throw up their hands and go on ideological witch hunts instead.
I’ve got an idea - don’t let your kids get on YouTube and only allow them to get on curated sites. You can easily lock down a mobile device to only allow certain apps/curated websites.
I don't let mine anywhere near a TV or computer. Of course that might be a bit more difficult once tghey get old enough to actually reach the keyboard...
But then I try to not let my mom on YouTube either. Or myself, for that matter.
lol, do you even children. They will always find a way. You can restrict apps and services all you want. How about their friends at school? Are you going to restrict their phones as well? The only thing that works is actually talking to the kids about things they've seen/experienced. Not saying that is easy of course.
No we don't - not in the US. Short of literal pornography that could fall afoul of corruption of a minor the state isn't involved. That is just from ratings cartels and pressure groups.
If nobody gives a fuck enough to affect business you can give the complete SAW series to 3 year olds and all the offended can do is yelp indignantly.
Nope. This only applies to pornography if I recall correctly. There's not laws against showing R rates movies to kids, it's just the theaters that refuse to admit them. In 2011 the courts struck down a California law prohibiting selling I'd M rates games to minors, too.
Spotify's recommendation system is dealing mostly with artists that have recording contracts and professional production- their problem shouldn't be compared to YouTube's which has to deal with a mix of professional, semi-pro, and amateur created content. Also there's more of a "freshness" aspect to a lot of YT videos that isn't quite the same as what Spotify has to deal with (pop songs are usually good for a few months, but many vlogs can be stale after a week). Not only that, but many channels have a mix of content, some that goes stale quickly and some that is still relevant after many months- how does a recommendation engine figure that out?
It's better to compare Spotify's recommendations to Netflix's recommendations, which also deals with mostly professional content. Those two systems have comparable performance in my opinion.
Why the content exists is also important. People create video specifically for Youtube. Very few people create music just to host it on Spotify. This results in the the recommendation algorithm and all its quirks have a much bigger impact on the content of Youtube than Spotify. Also having that many people actively trying to game the recommendation algorithm can pervert that algorithm. That simply isn't a problem for sites like Spotify or Netflix.
>YouTube is a _disastrously_ unhealthy recommender system,
Can you explain with more details?
I use Youtube as a crowdsourced "MOOC"[0] and the algorithms usually recommended excellent followup videos for most topics.
(On the other hand, their attempt at matching "relevant" advertising to the video is often terrible. (E.g. Sephora makeup videos for women shown to male-dominated audience of audiophile gear.) Leaving aside the weird ads, the algorithm works very well for educational vids that interests me.)
Yes. Elsagate is an example - the creepy computer-generated violent and disturbing videos that eventually follow children's content - or the fact that just about every gaming-related video has a recommendation for an far-right rant against feminism or a Ben Shapiro screaming segment. There's also the Amazon problem - where everything related to the thing you watched once out of curiosity follows you everywhere around the site.
Yes, I was aware of Elsagate.[0] I don't play games so didn't realize every gaming video ends up with unwanted far-right and Ben Shapiro videos.
I guess I should have clarified my question. I thought gp's "unhealthy" meant Youtube's algorithm was bad for somebody like me that views mainstream non-controversial videos. (Analogy might be gp (rspeer) warning me that abestos and lead paint is actually cancerous but public doesn't know it.)
It's not 100%, but I'd consider "video games" => "Ben Shapiro" to be a pretty awful recommendation system, regardless of the reasoning behind it. As far as I know, the group "video gamers" doesn't have a political lean in either direction.
I've definitely seen this with comics. I watched a few videos criticizing Avengers: Infinity War, and now I see mostly Ben Shapiro recs. It makes no sense. I never have (and never plan to) seek out political content on YouTube.
I watch a number of gaming videos and have never had a far-right video recommended. Don't know who Ben Shapiro is.
It could be the type of games involved, since I usually watch strategy, 4x, city-building, and military sims. I usually get history-channel documentaries or "here's how urban planning works in the real world" videos recommended, which suits me fine. Somebody whose gaming preferences involve killing Nazis in a WW2-era FPS might be more likely to get videos that have neo-Nazis suggesting we kill people.
But that child comment didn't link Nazis to normal "video games". I assumed he just meant some folks (e.g. "1.8%" of web surfers) with the predilection for far-right videos would get more Nazi recommendations. Well yes, I would have expected the algorithm to feed more of what they seemed to like.
I do not see any Nazi far-right videos in 1.8% of my recommendations ever.
Isn't that an inevitable side effect of collaborative filtering? If companies could do content based-recommendation, wouldn't they? Until purely content based recommendations are possible, wisdom of the crowds via collaborative filtering will lump together videos that are about different things but watched by similar viewers.
I don't know what the comment you are replying to meant, I interpreted it to mean the algo takes you down a rabbit hole to darker content, however for me I miss the days when it actually recommended relevant videos, similar to the one I was watching.
My entire sidebar is now just a random assortment of irrelevant interests. For instance I wanted to learn to play a denser piano chord, I learned it ages ago but I still get like 20 videos that explain how to add extensions to a 7 chord, even if I'm watching a video on the F-35 fighter pilot.
I completely disagree, my children have a wonderful time following the recommended videos that youtube provides. I'm interested to hear your reasoning on why it is "disastrous".
I'm pretty sure all content on Spotify gets manually curated first, so abusive tagging doesn't happen, and some of the worst content simply doesn't get uploaded at all. Spotify also doesn't try to be a news site, so they can afford to have a couple week's lag between uploading a song and having it show up in people's recommendation feed.
I disagree in some sense. I personally have found the recommending system on YouTube pretty good for the main page of the site. The thing that bugs me is the recommended bar right (or bottom right) of the videos, which can be really annoying and infested with clickbait etc.
>It is no one’s responsibility other than the parent
Yes, but you _must_ understand that most (no, ALL) of the millennial generation grew up with public content over the airwaves that was curated and had to pass certain guidelines. So many parents think that the YouTube Kids app is the same thing. it's not!
If YouTube want to be the next Television, they're going to have to assume the responsibilities and expectations surrounding the appliances they intend to replace. Pulling a Pontius Pilate and tossing the issue to another algorithm to fail at figuring out is not going to fix the problem.
Thankfully, there's much more out there than YouTube when it comes to children's entertainment, actually curated by human beings with eyeballs and brains, and not algorithms. The problem is that parents don't know these apps even exist, because YouTube has that much of a foothold as "place to see things that shut my kid up, so I can see straight."
I don't think this is incentivizing bad behavior. It's merely showing the viewer more of what they are already watching with a gradual introduction to broader material. The example of a youtube serving content to "pedophiles" is borderline asinine. The neural network is just making suggestions on viewing, it's not telling people to watch. In regards to the complaint that "adult" content is being served to adolescents, there is an option to filter out sensitive content all together.
Also, as a parent to 4 children myself, the idea of letting my kids loose on the internet completely devoid of any supervision is ridiculous. When did it become youtube's responsibility to parent the children in its audience? Should we also ban HBO, Amazon, and Netflix from providing recommendations because it might be a child in front of the screen?
This is just another pointed attempt to censor free speech via the abuse of technology companies. The idea being that the platform will be restrictive if they are constantly badgered about it.
I would argue that your point is semantics, but even so you still have a choice of whether or not to watch the recommended more "engaging" material. It doesn't change the overall point of my statement.
I'd say it's quite a different point. My own experience has been that the recommended "engaging" material is something in the same genre as whatever I just saw, but with a clickbaitier title, flashier thumbnail, and overall poorer informational quality. It's the different between saying "I see you enjoy sandwiches, maybe you would also enjoy salads or a plate of sushi" and "I see you enjoy sandwiches--here's a candy bar, an off-brand soda made with high-fructose corn syrup, and a carton of cheap grocery store ice cream."
The semantics argument I was pointing out was in regards to "broader" vs "engaging". That's not what my statement was about, it was that no matter what the algorithm recommends to you, you still have the choice whether or not to watch it. The point you are making is purely anecdotal as I assure you the neural network is not simply showing you
>same genre as whatever I just saw, but with a clickbaitier title, flashier thumbnail, and overall poorer informational quality
You can keep telling yourself that you have a "choice", but in the end we all are just humans, with quite predictable behavior. Bias selection of content is since forever one of the more effective ways of shaping opinion. Politics is fighting hard on that front for a reason. For the first time ever are some very few algorithms selecting content for millions of people, with apparently little human oversight. Yes, this should worry us. Simply assuming the results of those will benefit mankind, especially in the long term, would be foolish. It's not quite exactly like the usual ai safety paperclip scenario, but by now it should be very obvious that optimizing watch-time, even with current "ai", comes with significant unintended side effects / drawbacks.
> just making suggestions on viewing, it’s not telling people to watch
I’m not sure I get the difference between suggesting content and telling people what content to watch. Were you trying to drive a different point ?
That aside, it seems your argument is that youtube being neutral in recommending videos shelters them from blame, while the article is basically about why being neutral is harmful.
I personaly think anything dealing with human content can’t be left neutral, as we need a bias towards positivity. Just as we don’t allow generic tools to kill and save people in the same proportion, we want a clear net positive.
I walk up to you on the street and suggest you give me a dollar.
vs
I walk up to you on the street and take a dollar from you by force.
Youtube is a platform, in order remain a platform it MUST remain neutral. You cannot have an open forum with bias. There are certain mutually agreed upon rules, (no nudity, extreme violence, etc.), those limitations are more than enough to handle the vast majority of "negative" content.
I whole heartedly disagree that we need a bias towards positivity. Who determines what that definition is? Something you see as negative, I might happen to enjoy. If Youtube begins to censor itself in that way it is no longer a platform and is now responsible for ALL of its content.
Thanks for the clarification on the first point. Won’t youtube effectively shove the next recommended video to a user as long as auto-play is activated ?
Also they are the default view, I’d argue suggestions are a lot more than just “suggestions”. It would be akin to a restaurant “suggesting” their menu, and you’d need to interrogate the waiter to explore what else you could be served. For most people the menu is effectively the representation of the food of the restaurant.
For the neutrality, if you recognize there are agreed upon rules, as you point out, the next question becomes who agreed on these rules, and who made them ?
Who agreed nudity should be banned ? Which country ? What nudity ? and art ? and educational content ? and documentaries ? at which point does it become nudity ? The more we dig into it, the more it becomes fuzzy, everyone’s boundary is different, and all the rules are like that.
Any rule in place is positive to a group and negative to another, for a rule to stay in place it needs to have more supporters than detractors, or put it another way have more positive impact than negative ones.
The current set of rules are the ones that were deemed worthwile, I think it’s healthy to chalenge them or to push for other rules that could garner enough agreement to stay in place.
> Won’t youtube effectively shove the next recommended video to a user as long as auto-play is activated ?
You can very easily turn auto-play off. There is plenty of opportunity to switch videos. It would be different if youtube forced you to watch the next video in order to use the site.
>For the neutrality, if you recognize there are agreed upon rules, as you point out, the next question becomes who agreed on these rules, and who made them ?
Youtube made them. Those are pre-conditions for uploading videos. They don't have to have any reason why they made them, those are conditions that must be met in order to upload a video. So by uploading a video you are agreeing to them.
>Any rule in place is positive to a group and negative to another
I don't agree with this generality. However, this discussion is not about the legitamacy of the rules to use youtube, it is whether or not youtube should censor videos, (that meets basic rules of use). My opinion is no, your's as you stated above was:
>I personaly think anything dealing with human content can’t be left neutral, as we need a bias towards positivity.
I agree with you that Youtube should routinely challenge their own rule sets. That is not the same as censoring their content, or in this case modifying their recommendation algorithm.
I think YouTube has just exposed the kind of content people were already interested in, and possibly consuming outside of the public eye. We find it frightening that people readily click on abhorrent content. When they probably were doing it over other platforms earlier. The internet had gore videos for the longest time. I remember a shotgun suicide video that kids in my school used to shock each other with. If Google as a private company chooses to ban content, than that is their right, but an apriori expectation that an entertainment platform should control peoples social behavior and enforce morality is harmful in a free society IMHO.
People were fueling industries of creatively bankrupt content well before the Internet came around, just look at the long term existence of tabloids.
Youtube is optimizing for the underlying psychological mechanisms that put people in that mood because it makes them suggestive and because none of this stuff has substance or meaning they can graze on it like how junk food producers want to promote.
I think the analogy to junk food is instructive. Both fast food and YouTube maximise revenue while minimising costs by exploiting human flaws and foibles, and do so much more effectively than was possible 100 years ago. It is creating an environment that is radically different than the one we evolved in.
Watching hours of YouTube - obesity of the mind. Kind of.
>Youtube is optimizing for the underlying psychological mechanisms that put people in that mood because it makes them suggestive and because none of this stuff has substance or meaning they can graze on it like how junk food producers want to promote.
Well, YouTube (or any advertising platform) also wants people clicking on ads and actually buying things, not just graze. AFAIK they already demonetize content that is not advertiser friendly, and thus de-prioritize it. Busy professionals with limited free time are your best bet for people with a lot of disposable income. If anything YouTube optimizes for content that is safe-for-work, and will quickly lead to you opening your wallet. But yes, I think this is a large scale multi-variate problem, and individual simple metrics don't cut it.
I doubt this person does not care about the subject they wrote about.
And if the algorithm is producing negative side effects, then, of course, it should be looked at and changed.
I'm no expert myself, but to my understanding: any algorithm is limited by its data set.
Based on its data set, an algorithm comes to conclusions. But one can then, of course, ask: what's the basis for these conclusions?
I recall reading that a certain AI had been fooled into thinking a picture of a banana was showing a toaster or a helicopter, after a few part of the image were changed to contain tiny bits of those items.
It turned out that the AI used the apparent texture on places in the image to determine what was on the image, rather than doing a shape comparison.
Which sounds like a time-saving measure. Though it may very well have been the method that most consistently produced correct results, for the given dataset.
Frankly, the attitude of "we don't know how it works and we don't care" cannot possibly end well.
Neither the attitude "oh well make a better dataset then".
I get that we're all excited about the amazing abilities we're seeing here, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't look where we're going.
I recall a story of an AI researcher who didn't want to define anything because he was afraid of introducing bias. Upon hearing this, his colleague covered up his eyes. When asked why he did this, he replied: "The world no longer exists". And the other understood.
Because of course the world still exists. And just the same way: it's impossible get rid of bias.
Some human intervention is needed. Just like constant checks and comparison against human results.
The problem of the dataset is not just that AI will pick shortcuts and naive heuristics, because humans will too.
The problem of the dataset is that you're not in control of who populates the dataset and what their intentions are. There's no understanding of an adversarial model and threat handling.
The NYTimes uses a very human "algorithm" to determine what to report on and if you look at the comparison of causes of death to what's reported it's wildly off:
This isn't a knock against the NYTimes so much as it is of humanity, we're all fascinated by the lurid and sensational (note that the Google searches are similarly off) and this permeates all levels of life.
I feel like things were mostly fine until the 2016 election, after which journalists became _very_ concerned. If I had a nickel for each, “The algorithms are coming! The algorithms are coming!”, I’d be rich. I mean, I didn’t like the outcome either, but these types of articles seem to motivated by a) finding a scapegoat and b) wanting to use “algorithm” in a sentence.
What a pleasant way of stating that humans are basically good. We just keep passing the buck. "We'd be fine if it weren't for this algorithm!"
We believe that man is essentially good.
It’s only his behavior that lets him down.
This is the fault of society.
Society is the fault of conditions.
Conditions are the fault of society.
If you ask me, "YouTube's algorithm" is simply exposing the way humanity is. And trying to get an algorithm to "shepherd" humanity to be better is simply Orwellian.
> If YouTube won’t remove the algorithm, it must, at the very least, make significant changes
It must? No, it doesn't have to do a damn thing. It's a product from a publicly traded company, therefore it "must" return value for stockholders. That means more behavior that increases ad revenue. The author is out of touch with reality. Stop feeding your kids youtube if you don't want them exposed to youtube. It's a private service(youtube), not a public park.
> It must? No, it doesn't have to do a damn thing.
Subject to the laws of the jurisdiction in which it operates, of course. We could - if we so wanted - pass laws to regulate this behavior. That is perhaps the best option, in my own opinion.
> It's a product from a publicly traded company, therefore it "must" return value for stockholders.
The dogma that it "must" return value for shareholders is not an absolute rule[1]; rather it's a set of market expectations and some decisions from Delaware (which have an outsize impact on business law) that encourage it. But it's not required. In fact, many states allow a type of corporation that specifically and directly allows directors to pursue non-shareholder-value goals - the benefit corporation[2].
> The author is out of touch with reality.
Please re-read the HN guidelines[3].
> Stop feeding your kids youtube if you don't want them exposed to youtube. It's a private service(youtube), not a public park.
This is the doctrine of "caveat emptor," essentially - that a consumer is ultimately responsible for all behavior. However, a wealth of regulation exists because that's unworkable in practice. The FDA and the EPA come to mind, but we also regulate concepts like "false advertising." Your stance here ignores the realities of life in service of ideological purism.
No we cannot pass laws that do that no matter how indignant we may be. The whole bloody point of the constitution is that no matter how pissed off the majority (or "the majority" which is just a noisy minority as it may be) is that you cannot simply legislate away rights.
The vague "do something!" regulation push has all of the marks of a moral panic and all participants should slap themselves hard enough to leave a mark and repeat "It is never too import to be rational."
Please explain what rights would be legislated away in this case. It's definitely not the 1st amendment - you can still say what you want, just not on necessarily on the platform of your choice. This was equally true in the broadcast TV days. So what other right(s) would be legislated away by regulating Youtube's content?
Broadcasters had the special pleading with some scintilla of a point in that there were actual shared commons to prioritize. In practice it was a fig-leaf as you never saw arguements in broadcast censorship over 'values' to wrestle over airwave ownership but instead bullshit doctrines like 'community standards'. The fact that the US has a long history of laying out rights for all, seeing the revolutionary implications and then saying 'No wait that can't be right it is too different.' and going back to the bullshit control they had before for a few centuries is a whole other sad topic.
One thing that did make it through that was the ruling that mediums which lack said limitation like cable and internet don't have the rationale for that restriction and thus the censorship that weak minds had become accustomed to vanished in a puff of logic. This has been the case since cable porn channels were a thing.
By regulating YouTube you effectively regulate what /all/ platforms may push. It isn't simply that YouTube decides that "You know what we don't want to post that." - an exercise of their collective Freedom of Association but "The government doesn't want us to post that so we can't." You can't just deputize tasks to third parties and expect the limits on exercises of power to vanish. Otherwise we'd see hordes of private detectives as a work around to Fourth Amendment rights.
Said regulations on youtube would be a major infringement upon freedom of the press and speech. Not to mention it is logically equivalent to censoring your own press is whenever it fits whatever criteria they dislike.
No. As you yourself recognise (presumably, as you put the "must" in scare quotes and italics), that companies "must" maximise shareholder value is a goal contingent on our decisions and policies, not some natural law.
Of course, it is incumbent on us individually to behave responsibly. But there is space for public policy and regulation, even of YouTube.
Incentivizing value for stockholders above all else is a good way to ensure incredibly anti-consumer practices grow in popularity. Something you might only begin to notice when your kids start getting recommended games from their friends that require you to gamble with IAP to get a new dance or something.
This seems like it takes some notes from Veritasium's theory on YouTube's recommendation algorithm which he posted after his initial reservoir shade balls video went viral. (edited for clarity)
YouTube's incentives are the best among such platforms IMO. They allow a simple profit sharing model where a part of the ad-revenue goes to the content creator. This is unlike instagram, for example, where the content creators have to peddle products in their ads to make money. Take a fitness channel for example - on YouTube, the content creator can just be honest, and the views alone will guarantee income. On the other hand, on instagram, they have to resort to selling snake oil. I love YouTube for this, and I am constantly amazed by how YouTube has become a livelihood earner for so many.
I'm sure Google and Facebook understand this, hopefully they won't cower any further. Big Media wants its "fair share" and they will keep attacking until they do.
I don't know if YouTube's problems are so bad that the argument applies in this case, but in general, "We can't comply with this regulation, it would be too difficult at our scale" is not considered a valid defense. Just as banks shouldn't be allowed to get so large that they can't fail without wreaking havoc on the economy, if algorithmic recommendation and moderation can't work, then maybe social networks shouldn't be allowed to get so large that human moderation is not possible.
That is an apples to oranges comparison, Youtube is a platform not an institution. It is open to all videos, provided they meet certain agreed upon guidelines, and should not be responsible for censoring content based on individual opinions.
I don't think that the recommendation is broken at all, in fact it works astonishingly well for the vast majority of people. The fact that there are a few bad actors is also present in the banking industry, (Wells Fargo for instance), to use your own bad comparison.
YouTube is asserting editorial and publishing rights when it promotes certain videos, if it were a pure video hosting site (providing a link to uploaded videos for people to do with as they please) then I'd agree they were just a platform, but a newspaper isn't a platform and neither is YouTube.
Youtube is asserting on behalf of people who own the publishing rights and not on behalf of themselves. This is an important distinction. Youtube is not the same as a Newspaper in any way shape or form, I don't really understand your comparison.
The queue for getting your video posted on YouTube would grow infinitely. (Or, more realistically, people would give up and not bother once it takes years.)
But I guess they could charge money to get to the head of the line?
The queue for having your video uploaded and public does not at all have to be the same queue for getting your video included in others' recommendations.
I can just see the outrage now: "YouTube running a pay-to-play scheme for exposure. Anyone can upload their video, but only the rich can get an audience!"
Come to think of it, this is basically the complaint against AdWords and the gradual takeover of the search result page by paid results.
This is exactly what happens. Prager U and Ben Shapiro advertise heavily on content adjacent to them (gaming) and their views go up, up they go in the algorithm.
That's not true you can upload a video and not allow it to be recommended until some human review was done. Most youtube channels don't need the recommendation engine.
That just isn't feasible. Videos would literally take years to get into the recommended status - another comment pointed out there are 500 new videos uploaded per SECOND.
If there was one dude, sure. But apparently YouTube is in the business of supporting the upload of 500 videos/second so they need to deal with the consequences of it. It's not like there's any regulation forcing them to be the place everyone uploads videos to and there are some valid competitors (though they're far less into the publishing/editorializing facet - vimeo is much more often direct linked for instance)
To be clear, I am not speaking for anybody in this thread but myself.
But I will unapologetically and forthrightedly say that, yes, if we're going to assert that YouTube has certain responsibilities for the nature of the videos that it hosts, and that it turns out that the nature of those responsibilities is such that YouTube can't possible meet them, then, yes, YouTube as we know it should be essentially shut down, at least going forward.
I am NOT going to say we should deliberately craft the responsibilities in such a way that YouTube is deliberately shut down. However, if it turns out that they are incapable of applying even the bare minimum effort that we as a society deem it necessary for them to apply, then, yes, it is absolutely a consequence that YouTube as we know it today may have to be so radically altered as to be a different site entirely.
In the general case, when the law requires certain obligations of you as a business, and you as a business can not meet them, that does not mean that suddenly those obligations are not applied to you. It means that your business is not legally viable, and needs to change until it is. It may be the case that there is no solution to being legally viable and being profitable, in which case, your business will cease to exist. Just as there is, for instance, no solution to being a business built around selling torrent files containing unlicensed commercial content to people. You can't defend yourself by saying you can't afford to get the licenses; your suitable legal remedy was to never have started this business in the first place. There's some concerns around grandfathering here to deal with, certainly, but they can still be affected going forward.
There is no guarantee that there is a solution where a company exerting whatever minimal control they are obligated to assert by society is capable of growing to the size of YouTube. If that is the case, so be it. The solution is not to just let them go because they happened to grow fast first.
(My solution to freedom of expression is an explosion of video sites, where each of them has ways of holding the videos to the societally-mandated minimum standard, and no one site can do it all because they simply can't muster the resources to be The One Site, because as they grow larger they encounter anti-scaling effects. Given how increasingly censorious Silicon Valley is becoming, as we are now into censoring the discussions about censoring discussions like the recent removal of Project Veritas from Twitter for its discussion of Pinterest censoring pro-life films, I expect this to increase the range of expression, not diminish it.)
Not speaking on behalf of what I want, but on behalf of what is true:
> It may be the case that there is no solution to being legally viable and being profitable, in which case, your business will cease to exist.
Or your business will exist illegally.
There's this interesting interplay between law and economics, where law is generally taken as a prerequisite for frictionless commerce, and yet at the same time if activities that large groups of people wish to partake in are made illegal, the market just routes around them and black markets spring up to provide them. Prohibition. The War on Drugs. Filesharing. Gambling. Employing illegal immigrants. Usury. Short-term rentals. Taxi medallions. Large swaths of the economy under communism.
There are a couple other interesting phenomena related to this: the very illegality of the activity tends to create large profits around it (because it creates barriers to entry, such that the market often ends up monopolized by a small cartel), and the existence of widespread black markets erodes respect for rule of law itself. When people see people around them getting very rich or otherwise deriving benefit from flouting the law, why should they follow it?
Switching to editorializing mode, I think that this gradual erosion of respect for law to be quite troubling, and I also think that the solution to it needs to be two-fold: stop trying to outlaw behaviors that are offensive to some but beloved by others, and start enforcing laws that if neglected really will result in the destruction of the system.
In the context of this particular case, I was assuming that nothing the current size of YouTube could exist illegally, as that would imply that whatever authority was declaring them "illegal", but not capable of doing anything about it despite it nominally living in its jurisdiction, must be anemic and impotent to the point of being nearly non-existent.
There's already an underground proliferation of video sites, spreading copyrighted content out of the bounds of what the rightsholders want, so it's pretty much assured we'd end up with illegal alternatives. :)
>A service just hosting videos (without recommending some of them) would be just fine.
It might be "just fine" in an abstract principle kind of way. However, reality would not support such a site because of human preferences.
The problem is that viewers want recommendations (both in search results and followup related videos) and content creators want to be promoted (to get views and ad revenue or sponsorships).
This means a video site with recommendations will outcompete a "dumb storage" video site where surfers must know the url for each video they want to play.
Perhaps it means that editorializing as a service is necessarily a business that needs to be kept separate from the hosting of videos - sort of like the older style of curated link lists that directed users to particularly interesting content existing beside the DNS service that stored an unbiased record of all content.
Some of that can be alleviated by trusted publishers, ie fox,cbs,abc... Won't need a review. Introduction of a paid queue. Just because they don't want to do it today doesn't mean it's an impossible solution just a hard one.
> Most youtube channels don't need the recommendation engine.
This is just not true. A massive part of the views originate from recommended/up next. Ask pretty much any creator. Only the core audience of a channel will have the notification bell on for a specific channel. Many users don't check the Subscription section and either link in from an external source, know beforehand what they want to search for or just watch what pops up in recommended.
> but in general, "We can't comply with this regulation, it would be too difficult at our scale" is not considered a valid defense
This is a great point that I was going to phrase slightly differently: if YouTube is too large to be able to prevent harm, YouTube needs to be regulated. YouTube get the benefit of being so large, so they should also get the cost.
Disclaimer: I work for YouTube, my personal view on the situation is this:
Bear in mind that YouTube does not operate only in the US with unhinged free speech laws. Many countries have stricter laws and YouTube definitely needs to comply with them.
Other than that, adpocalypse happened because of bad videos being surfaced by the algorithm so another responsibility is to the creators. (And shareholders)
There is nothing to be gained by having crap in your backyard.
YouTube needs no defense in this case because video recommendations are protected free speech. In the US at least it would be impossible to outlaw video recommendations in a way that would pass Constitutional review.
In addition to this, seeing content creators being slaves to the algorithm is an eye-opening experience. Especially when it comes to the children's videos. It's all computer generated garbage powered by responses to changes in algorithms. If kids suddenly watch more content with alligators, prepare for that being the only thing created, recommended or playing. It's wild.
Still looking for recommendations that are influenced by people's best-self intentions of who they want to be, rather than influenced by their worst-self behaviors.
We know we have to keep kids sheltered from people which may have unscrupulous neural networks at play looking for a way to further their own goals at the expense of a child's well being and overall health.
Engagement on the internet is also being driven by neural networks that are learning to adapt to the users brain chemistry to statistically modify behavior for maximum engagement/profit. Perhaps it is time to realize that these services are going to be analogous to a random stranger offering your kid candy for their own twisted goals that are unlikely compatible with a child's well being. If you consider a service like YouTube as an untrusted source of interaction perhaps you'll be as likely to block or monitor it the same as random chat rooms.
YouTube can be a source of astonishingly great education and entertainment that will help grow society, as well as astonishingly horrid corruptions of nearly anything that will corrode society at it's roots.
Most of these discussion posts seem to miss the point that 'engagement' or 'upvotes' does NOT equal value.
Also missing is the concept that a company with a massive platform has any social responsibility to at least not poison the well of society.
And claiming "it's the parent's responsibility" may have some truth value, but it does not and should not be an excuse to absolve the platform owner of responsibility.
The key to longer term success of the platforms is to abandon the low-hanging-fruit of "engagement" as a measure value and develop more substantitive metrics that actually relate to value delivered, both to the individual watcher and society as a whole.
As one audience member, I find their recommendations to be basically crap, nearly never leading me to something more valuable than what I just watched (sure, they'll occasionally put up a recommendation that has enough entertainment value to watch, but much of the time I want my 5min back). To find any real value, I need to search again. That already tells us that their "engagement"-based algos are insufficient to serve the needs.
I think there is an inherent in optimizing for retention time. Ideally, the recommendation should help find stuff which improve people's health, make them happier, or more informed about the world. However, it doesn't seem like YouTube has metrics on those things. Furthermore, things like that probably can't be determined very quickly on new content.
I mostly watch movie reviews on YouTube and I'm constantly being recommended either weird Joe Rogan, alt-right content, or makeup videos. I don't get it. I've never clicked or watched anything remotely associated with it. I suspect a lot of the popular YouTube channel's are gaming the algorithms or SEO their videos to get more recommendations.
The neural network takes into account videos that other people who watched the same one you did watched. It's quite possible that the movie trailer you watched was popular among demographics that also watched those recommendations. If you don't have a lot of data for yourself, you will see a heavier bias towards other people's videos.
The "wrong behavior" that Youtube incentives is promoting and encouraging clickbait garbage content (just look at the default homepage). The holy metric now is "watch time", the result being that creators stretch out their content to 10 minutes because then Youtube is more likely to promote it (and midroll add = twice the revenue). Yesterday Youtube recommended me a 10 minute video of some guy explaining how he made this simple drone shot that could've been condensed down to a single sentence - "Turn sensors off". What a waste of time.
But hey they're a corporation and thus have no accountability to the public good.
Does the algorithm incentivize bad behavior or simply reflect the desires of the viewers?
Someone watching lots of DIY home repair videos will start seeing more. In that case it seems like it's incentivizing good behavior. Likewise, someone watching lots of soft porn on YouTube will be recommended more soft porn.
The algorithm isn't responsible for helping you make good life choices. The algorithm is responsible for recommending videos that you would like, and it seems like it does a good job of that, generally.
Unfortunately, some people like bad things and that's an age old problem that is hard to fix.
That said, it would be nice if users could CTOA (choose their own algorithm) instead of letting Google be the sole gatekeeper.
In my experience, some ~20 % of recommendations almost always go towards noticably more clickbaity/low-quality content (with rest often fitting quite well, or at least being of a similar level, just on topics that happen to not interest me right now), and as soon as you make the mistake to click one of them it shoots up dramatically. I've taken to open videos I'm not sure about in a private tab to avoid 2 weeks of crap recommendations.
I guess you could compare it to criminals using the telephone. Invention of the telephone helped a lot of people, but unfortunately it also helps criminals.
Likewise the YouTube algorithm helps many people, but criminals or unwanted people (like pedophiles) can also use it.
It's ok to think about ways to prevent it, but I don't think it should be the first concern. Imagine outlawing telephony, because criminals could benefit from its use.
Telephony is an interesting example because for many many years it had very tight restrictions.
Telephone service providers were monopolies, sometimes government monopolies. There was only one type of telephone you could use, and that was supplied by that same monopoly. It was illegal to attach anything else to the line either directly or indirectly. There were even (outside the US) laws on what you could say when talking on the phone.
It is not the case that someone watching a certain topic will see videos exclusively tailored to their taste. More over it is rarely the case that someone watches something specifically definable to the exclusion of anything less specific, because that desire will ideally be quickly saturated. And if it isn't then the recommendations are still rubbish.
Two ideas come to mind. First, make the engine recommend a few videos that it thinks you probably won't watch. That could help break up the echo chamber effect.
Second, allow users to blacklist, or whitelist, different kinds of content. If someone is struggling with sexual attraction to minors, let them blacklist content with minors in it. If I don't want to see the latest anti(or pro)-<insert political figure here> videos, I should be able to filter them out. I have no interest in Minecraft, so why should I have to keep scrolling past Minecraft videos just because I watch a lot of game related videos?
That said, all the calls for regulation or censorship concern me. I haven't seen the video, but Steven Crowder saying mean things isn't exactly something that should be censored. Any more than all the videos calling President Trump names. What I'm seeing signs of is a society that silences any speech that doesn't fit in a specific, politically correct, box. And that box is being defined by advertising companies who don't want to be associated with topics that their potential customers find uncomfortable. That's not a direction any of us should support...
There seem to be some extreme cases where the algorithm fails. That doesn't imply in general it doesn't work well.
Sounds again like hyperbole from the NYT.
I find it more interesting to consider what would actually be a good outcome for the viewers. I suppose originally all those recommender algorithms simply optimized for viewer engagement. Obviously that may not be the best outcome for consumers. Perhaps enraging content makes people stick on a platform longer, for example. But it would be "better" for a viewer to see more educational content and even to disconnect after a certain while.
But how would you even quantify that, for the algorithm to be able to train for it?
The son of a friend of mine taught himself programming from YouTube videos, which YouTube had recommended to him. I wouldn't complain about a result like that.
They need to stop showing people the upvote and view COUNTS. Behind the scenes they can still use it to make recommendations.
Those numbers are pseudo signals of quality to people who encounter content they have never encountered before.
Even when they have doubts that are watching something unhealthy the mind goes "well if the rest of the world thinks this dumbass is important I better pay attention..."
If a dumbass hurting people on video gets 10 million views other dumbasses worldwide automatically get triggered looking at the count. "hey I can do this maybe I should run for President..."
Remove the counts and you remove the pseudo signal of quality.
I want to see the counts. I feel it is far more transparent to see the counts than for things to just be surfaced or not opaquely. Youtube is not a discussion site and it does not work as one. How popular things are is a part of the context of pop culture, and most youtube content is pop culture.
Every single day, I watch the channel of a guy who has put out < 15 minute videos going back to nearly the founding of YouTube.
He gets an average of 10-15 views per day.
The value this guy adds to my day is literally measurable in $$$.
If I could find more people like him, that would be great, but instead these are my recommendations:
- 5 ways to do X
- Bill Gates breaks down blah blah blah
- Something about Tesla
- One video by a guy I discovered outside of YouTube who is similar to the guy I watch every day. I don't watch this one that much though.
YouTube's algorithm is not designed for discovery. It's designed for engagement. So I keep separate accounts:
1. Account for actually useful stuff where YT's recommendations are useless
2. Account where YT's recommendations are OK: white noise like things. Howard Stern interviews, etc
I wish you could configure the algorithm for discovery somehow.
Absolutely. There are gems on YouTube that are not only hard but almost impossible to find due to the flood of crap they repeatedly recommend me. As far as I am concerned the algorithm is broken and almost killed my YouTube experience(I have to admit that I'm still on YouTube but a lot less these days).
I figure that they probably don't give a damn about users like me, the algorithm is designed to steer traffic to a pyramid of monetized content and I don't seem to have any options to fight the trend but to disengage.
There are some channels/users that I started following a long time ago but after I watch one of their videos I land back on the crapflood.
I completely agree, and for a good example of "better", I think spotify's discovery algorithms are "pretty alright". It's less likely to get stuck in a rut. Youtube is happy to try to bring you down a rabbit hole.
And content-creators play a part in this: next time you hear about some pop-drama do a youtube search and admire how many videos are a single person just reblabbing the same story in front of a mic, cam, or videogames. You'll find hundreds. And so many things on youtube are like this...
I'm pretty sure that YouTube used to be better at recommending obscure long-tail videos but cracked down on it a while ago precisely because of articles like this one - now only videos from relatively big channels which have undergone a certain amount of minimal manual scrutiny gets recommended.
Of course it is a matter of metrics - it has no way of knowing what is useful. The closest way to algorithmically discover (outcomes over time) would be prone to spurious correlations and be so intrusive it would make Cambridge Analytica look like LavaBit.
I'm thinking "make things more discoverable" than "find more useful things" if that makes sense. I'm willing to wade through it myself if you present me with options.
>How popular things are is a part of the context of pop culture, and most youtube content is pop culture.
Only with respect to people you know talking about it. Not just arbitrary metrics. Rating systems are part of the context of putting valuations on ads, not part of culture. Whatever impact they do have is based on advertisers trying to reel you in by applying the bandwagon fallacy and stoking your sense of FOMO. It's not something edifying.
> How popular things are is a part of the context of pop culture, and most youtube content is pop culture.
I can't think of any traditional medium that tells you the popularity of something before you consume it. Movie theaters, TV stations, radio stations, etc. have no concept of "view counts" telling you whether or not to consume something.
Well, information IS available, beforehand in nielson ratings and films' grossing numbers, but you're essentially right.
That's the problem: opaqueness leaves us vulnerable to being misled. Some PR company calls it "the hottest ticket of the season," and we have no way of corroborating this claim.
Uh, they don't have view counts, but they certainly tell you when things are popular. These are bad examples because all of these have very public "view counter"-alikes. First-weekend box office for ""popular"" movies is reported in news media. TV stations have ratings. Pop music has Billboard. In fact we have a local "Top 50" station which only plays ""popular"" music.
View counts ~= box office take ~= TV ratings ~= Billboard.
Every type of media you list has gatekeepers, kingmakers, and counters, and other things influencing your to or not to consume.
I have never met anyone who chooses their movies based on box office, nor have I met anyone who chooses TV shows based on their ratings. Those are all after-the-fact consumption stats, unlike YouTube view counts, which are shown to you upfront (without you looking for them).
Fully agree. Instagram is removing like counts (or at least looking into it). I think this a great path forward for the industry. Too often people see “popular” as “correct and not needing question”.
Edit: the Instagram motivation is admittedly a bit different, but a good path regardless
That only works for a specific usecase. I've been looking at videos on how to drywall. Views and upvotes helped me find the most useful instructionals and skip the bad ones.
I often find the upvote to downvote ratio to be a higher sign of quality than purely the number of upvotes. If they showed me the ratio, I still might get the same value from it.
While I agree there isn’t much signal in 1:1 and 4:1, it’s been my experience that if a video gets a downvote that quickly, it probably isn’t as good as a video only attracting upvotes for educational, howto or technical content.
People aren't children needing information withheld from them. Give them the information and let them make up their own minds. This kind of coddling is how we ended up here in the first place.
I would expect most of the time the counts actually are a pretty good indicator. There may be good content that is overlooked, but if something is successful, it probably has something going for it.
YouTube also leads you down radical rabbit holes as that keeps the algorithm happy. How many of the recent terror attacks (ISIS or New Zealand type incidents) were fostered by YouTube watching?
Saying you're not saying there's a conspiracy is a way of saying there's a conspiracy. There's a site guideline against this: the one that asks you not to post insinuations of astroturfing without evidence. Experience has shown that these are imaginary the overwhelming majority of the time, and meanwhile the "cure" poisons the community more than the alleged disease does. So please don't do that on HN
This site used to be called "startup news", it is run by a startup accelerator.
Many people here maybe have or hope to have their own company one day. It seems normal to me to defend the concept of companies.
Personally I think blaming big companies is just lazy thinking that prepares the path to socialism. Of course companies, or the economy in general, aren't perfect. People are still trying to figure out how to do things better. That's normal. There is no need to assume evil greed behind everything.
Hacker News has always been like this. The site is specifically targeted at people associated with venture-capital-funded startups.
A very large percentage of those people are former FAANG employees, employees of companies trying to get acquired by FAANG, or employees of companies doing exactly the same things that FAANG are getting criticized for. (Some are all three!)
I doubt any of them are getting paid to AstroTurf, but they know what side their bread is getting buttered on.
> The site is specifically targeted at people associated with venture-capital-funded startups.
Quite un-so! HN is targeted at one group only: the intellectually curious. So curiosity—keeping HN interesting—is the only thing we care about and optimize for.
As for VC-funded startups, since only about 10% of HN users are located in Silicon Valley, the number working for such startups is certainly far less than that. 50% of HN users are outside the US. This community is orders of magnitude more diverse than your image of it here.
People work for many different employers. Are their views impacted by their work experience? Of course they are—for every user here. There's nothing sinister about that. If someone posts a view that's wrong, others will correct it. As long as they do so thoughtfully, that's great. The cycle of life on HN.
Sorry Dang, but I have to cast immense doubt on your claim that 50% of users on HN are from outside of the US considering how frequently America-centric topics tend to rise to the top of the HN front page. Namely the frequent battles of free speech which seem to fall down American ideological lines.
Is it 50% of registered users or 50% of active commentators? And I think the image HN has been trying to cultivate is vastly different from the image of what HN actually is, at least from some of the other sites and circles I post on. The rather negative reaction to the Katie Bouman news as well as the summer programming for women incident show that somewhere down the line there is a serious breakdown in what culture HN is trying to create.
Doubt as you like, but I put a lot of work into measuring it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 was over a year ago, but I'd be surprised if it has changed much since then. I'll take another look soon.
I'm glad you have a sense of the culture HN is trying to cultivate. Even getting just that across is astonishingly hard. By far the likeliest default is that nobody has any sense of it.
Does it fall short? Sure. The question is how much is possible on the internet—specifically on a large, public, optionally-anonymous internet forum, the bucket HN falls in. We're happy to do our utmost, but only along the axis of the possible. We can't come close to delivering everything people imagine and demand. Your comment doesn't allow for the constraints we're up against, how few degrees of freedom we have, or how close we come to getting crushed between the gears.
HN is a large enough population sample (5M readers a month) that it is divided wherever society is divided. That means you're inevitably going to see posts which represent the worst of society relative to your own views. Societies, actually, because whether you doubt it or not, HN is a highly international site. People post here relative to their respective local norms, but mostly in mutual ignorance of that fact. This accentuates how bad the worst posts seem.
So yes you see awful posts, but it doesn't follow that they're representative either of the community or the culture. Jumping to that conclusion is an error nearly everyone makes, because painful impressions (such as nasty comments) are vastly more memorable than pleasurable ones (such as sensible comments). This has been studied and there's a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect. The phenomenon was established about news coverage (https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019...), but internet comments are no different.
What are these "other sites and circles" you mention that do so much better culturally than HN does? Are they public forums where anybody can create an account? Are they optionally anonymous? How large are they? In other words, do they face the same problems that we do? If so, and they're better than we are at solving them, please point us there so we can learn from them. Nothing would make me happier. Usually, though, when people make this claim, they're talking about much smaller communities and/or ones that are not fully open.
To be honest, I don't think those constraints are much of an excuse. HN is no different from any other large internet forum that has existed or will exist in the future. It exists in essentially the same space as Reddit etc all of which are not free from criticism despite having the same level of constraints you mentioned as HN here.
Specifically, I don't see how HN nowadays is cultivating that sort of intellectual curiosity when I've seen how horrible the culture here can be to certain groups of people. Not only that but the sort of posting culture encouraged here is weighed in such as a way as to be anti-intellectual: Specifically the idea that you're supposed to flag or downvote egregious posts rather than respond in kind. Now I understand that you're not supposed to feed the trolls, but what I believe this has resulted in a sort of 'tragedy of the commons' incident where nonsense is allowed to expand and grow without proper response. Some of the incredibly toxic things I've seen I've flagged and downvoted in kind, but the net result is that it goes unchallenged.
I see HN encountering the same problems as Reddit where HN is not prepared to deal with growth and bad actors. I see people being shadowbanned (and for good measure), but I don't think HN can remain a completely open platform without falling apart like many other platforms that have existed before.
And as for the other sites/circles, I mostly post on semi-private controlled forums because that's where I can find the highest quality of users and debates. My point was that I see the overall impression of HN from the people on those platforms to be more starkly negative. And it's getting harder for me personally to see any real cultural difference between HN and a more tech-oriented subreddit.
I'm not asking to be excused, I'm asking for something actionable. What can we do to make HN better that we're not already doing? Your answer appears to be: nothing, unless we made it less open and smaller.
The idea that large public internet forums inevitably degrade has been the default understanding of internet forums since before PG started HN—in fact he started HN as an experiment in escaping that fate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). So another way of putting this is that you think HN's experiment has failed. That's fine, but I cling to a different view for the time being; out of cognitive dissonance if nothing else, since I spend days and nights working on it.
The guideline about flagging egregious comments is there to prevent obviously awful comments from generating off-topic, repetitive flamewars. If a comment like that is flagged and downvoted, that is challenging it. It means the community has rejected it. Better still, it minimizes its influence by stopping it at the root. Responding by pouring fuel on the flames is what causes it to expand and grow. Since you refer to not feeding trolls, you obviously know this. Beyond that, I'd have to see specific examples.
Since I don't know what semi-private controlled forums you're referring to and can't look at the criticisms of HN people are making there, it's impossible for me to evaluate them. That's a pity, because we might be missing opportunities for improvement. But the fact that they're starkly negative doesn't say much by itself. Smaller communities always have a negative view of larger communities—that's how community identity gets created. And cohesive communities always have a negative view of non-cohesive communities, because divisive topics inevitably produce responses that fall outside their acceptable spectrum. Sharing an acceptable spectrum is part of what makes a community cohesive. We don't have that on HN, certainly as a function of size, and probably also for other reasons.
Okay, to make it clear: I think HN's main issue at large is that the mission statement ('to post things that gratify intellectual curiosity') is too broad. Forums and sites that are established with a broad mission statement means that as it grows, the site loses identity because it results in a sort of race to the bottom.
And to call back to my original examples: The Katie Bouman thread(s) [1] [2] and the Women: Learn To Program [3] threads should give you quite a lot of pause. The fact that such benign incidents resulted in large flamewars is specifically an issue because it indicates a greater rot growing inside HN's culture.
There's obviously more examples (such as anything politically related almost immediately devolving into flamewars or whataboutism) which indicates that the mission statement simply isn't working. And the greater problem of flagging only works if the community as a whole agrees in a positive direction; if suddenly tomorrow HN was filled with people who held highly negative beliefs, then the flagging system fails.
When I look at other forums such as SomethingAwful, Penny Arcade etc I see them as surviving because they have much stronger moderation while maintaining a sustainable community size. And right now I don't see HN outlasting either of those communities. Without some sort of cohesion guiding the community, the end result is that the site will eventually be pulled away from its original purpose.
To sum up what I think would be necessary:
1. Long time contributors would need to be emphasized more. Especially the high quality contributors, because they serve as a way of keeping a community united.
2. The mission statement of HN needs to be less vague and more to the point. Keep a focus solely on things that happen with the tech community and issuing harsher but smaller punishments to people that cause issues. You issued a warning to me a while ago because I was being an ass, and on other sites a warning like that would've resulted in a harsher punishment like a temporary probation.
3. Politics is inescapable as was found out during the 'political detox' week. But other forums can help moderate and control political debates and inflammation by keeping them solely inline with the site's mission statement (ie: a gaming site focuses on politics as it relates to games).
That said, implementing a lot of this might be almost impossible at this point because people would decry censorship almost immediately, resulting in a large reactionary wave. Which unfortunately I think also says a lot about the overall lassiez-faire moderation style HN employs for everything but the most egregious and repeat of offenses.
Intellectual curiosity is HN's essence. To change it to no longer be about that would be to kill it. If it's going to fail, let that be because we tried our best and fell short, not because we folded prematurely. People have been saying that HN is degenerating and and dying since shortly after it started; that's the sort of thing people say on the internet. Meanwhile HN is still here, and so are many of the users who posted those complaints. So there must be something curiosity-gratifying about it.
> The fact that such benign incidents resulted in large flamewars [...] indicates a greater rot growing inside HN's culture.
Such incidents result in flamewars because society is polarized on these topics and getting more so. Is there a single place on the open internet at HN's scale or greater that is any different, or indeed isn't worse? HN can't be immune from macro trends. (For example, there have lately been more nationalistic flamewars, especially about China. That's plainly related to shifts in geopolitics.) If HN is a ship, the sea is stormy. We can't control the waves, or how much vomiting the passengers do. If we focus on what we're actually able to affect, maybe we can prevent the ship from sinking.
I took another look at the threads you linked to and don't see what you see. The balance of the community there is clearly supportive. Most of the indignant comments are from people protesting against the negative reactions, which were clearly in the minority. Those don't represent the community, although (as always) the community is divided. So I come back to what I said in my first reply to you: if you're judging the community by the worst things that appear here, that's a fallacy. (Actually, I'm talking about your links #1 and #3. #2 was worse.)
Perhaps my standards are lower than yours? That's possible. On the other hand, sometimes when people post complaints like yours I have the impression that what they really want is for us to take their side on every issue and ban everyone on the opposite side. We can't do that. The community would not allow it, and trying to force it would destroy it—what good would that do? There's a deeper reason too: enforcing homogeneity would be incompatible with intellectual curiosity, and we're optimizing for the latter. The price of that is a certain turmoil on divisive topics—enough to convince ideologically committed users that the site is dominated by the other side (see "hostile media effect" above). If you don't think people on the opposite side of the issues have just as "starkly negative" a view of HN as people in your circles do, I have a long list of links I can share. In fact I almost unearthed them to post here, but decided to spare you.
Yours is the first comment I've seen that expressed surprise it's so high. The most widespread perception is that HN users are largely based in SV. That has led to a lot of misunderstandings.
It's not necessarily the case that people sympathise with companies because they're involved with running them. It might be that they involve themselves with running companies because they sympathise with them.
Google absolutely can do all of those things without an algorithm. What they can't do is accomplish that without impacting profit margins (or at the minimum, executive bonuses). "If it impacts business as usual, then it is impossible" is a naive/flawed/libertarian stance.
And these people would inevitably make some number of mistakes in categorization too, or miss something, or just be unable to quite hit some baseline universal standard that doesn't upset a group. Then YouTube still gets the bad press.
But 99.9% of all videos uploaded never gets more than a few handfuls of views so those are irrelevant. Of the remaining 0.1%, you don't need to watch every second of every frame - speeding it through at twice the speed should be doable. So by your own calculations, 72 000 * 0.001 * 0.5 = 36 people working full time.
You can set that 0.001 factor as big or as low as you like, but then we’d get the same nytimes hit piece saying this is intentionally being done by humans.
You made me curious so I did some back-of-the-envelope math. An average of 576K hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every day [1], which is 4.032M hours per week. If the reviewers watch all the video at 1x speed and work 40 hours per week, you'd need about 100K reviewers to do the job. (This is just to watch the video -- not including any additional work done to annotate the video with whatever information you want out of your reviewers.) If each one costs $30K a year (probably a lowball estimate including salary, insurance, etc.) it would cost a total of $3B per year. YouTube makes $4B in revenue per year and roughly zero profit AFAICT, so there's no way this is feasible.
I’m usually a proponent of the “wall garden” when it comes to applications and strict sandboxing for most users, since software can harm your computer.
But in the case of YouTube, there is absolutely no way that they can curate it and it still being as open as it is.
There is no need to curate every video, only the ones qualified enough to be recommended/showcased to the public who is not explicily looking for them.
Say I watch a video on a topic like "nes video game speed running". Right now I'd see other nes video game speed running videos, it's very useful. In a curated world, what would be recommended? It's probably too much of a niche topic to yield results that would be very useful.
> But in the case of YouTube, there is absolutely no way that they can curate it and it still being as open as it is.
So?
If YouTube exits the space and allows oxygen back into the video sharing market, we might actually get some different video sharing services that do different things (a la NicoNicoDouga).
YouTube does human curation already. They are refered to as "playlist" and every user has the ability to create and share them. So what you are asking for is Google to create their own playlist? Would this also entail removing that ability from other users?
Quite true, but let's not pretend that Twittr, Tumbler and Fakebook aren't also "incenting" all sorts of distorted behaviors of their own! These sites are "algorithms" all the same, even if the workings of these algorithms are in some ways more transparent. We need open and widespread federation via technologies like Mastodon, Matrix and ActivityPub, so that if you don't like one "algorithm" you can easily switch to another that's more appropriate to your use case.
> We need open and widespread federation via technologies like Mastodon, Matrix and ActivityPub, so that if you don't like one "algorithm" you can easily switch to another that's more appropriate to your use case.
This always sounds good, but decentralized is nearly impossible to commoditize or make appealing to the general public. Outside of evangelism and word-of-mouth, how are people going to escape the Youtube advertising budget and instead choose - en masse - the product that is better for their privacy?
If the ranking algorithm is open for all to see, won't that encourage even worse gaming of the system? I am trying to think of comparable situations in existing open systems, but none come to mind.
> We need open and widespread federation via technologies like Mastodon, Matrix and ActivityPub, so that if you don't like one "algorithm" you can easily switch to another
We already have them, yet FB, IG, Twitter, YT are the social media behemoths.
Are you making a plea for the average internet person to care about the values of the platforms they use over the platform content? You are likely preaching to the choir here on HN, but I would guess that the audience here is only 1% of 1% of the audience you need to message.
Corps make good use of psychological experiments to optimize their utility function. "Evil is efficient." The problem is that companies optimize for money without taking into account any other factor in any significant way.
> In 1970, Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman published an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” [1]
Arguably this quote incentivized the destruction of "good corporate citizenship" (although I admit it's possible that concept never existed in a broad sense).
I think the author's issue is not that her recommendations are bad, but that other people are getting recommendations for things she disagrees with (ie conspiracy theory videos, child-unsafe content, etc). So I don't think she would view decentralization as a win.
Wow, I'm conflicted. First, an obvious idiot statement, which helps us ground our analysis:
> Human intuition can recognize motives in people’s viewing decisions, and can step in to discourage that — which most likely would have happened if videos were being recommended by humans, and not a computer. But to YouTube’s nuance-blind algorithm — trained to think with simple logic — serving up more videos to sate a sadist’s appetite is a job well done.
So this person is advocating that a human (ie, another human besides oneself, an employee at youtube), have access to the click stream of individual users? This proposal, in 2019??? Of course this would have to be compulsory to be effective. Why would I want a megacorp to be making moral decisions for me? I'm ok with them making amoral algorithmic decisions.
The author is generalizing the problem of YT Kids, which should be human curated, to all of youtube.
OTOH, yeah feeding our worst impulses is kind of a problem. But, tweaking the algorithm isn't the solution. The machine itself is designed to thrive on attention.
