People here talking about how they don't want YouTube to make a profile of their preferences, and here I am, wishing YouTube had a better profile of my preferences.
Lately, there is almost no new videos in my recommendation feed. It's mostly either the things I've already watched or new videos from the channels I'm already subscribed to. It really feels like I've exhausted the internet at some point. This can't possibly be true now, can it? :')
I think you might not be understanding the context of the argument.
Google has tons of information on you - way more than it needs, and yet it still doesn’t get recommendations as good as we expect (as you rightly point out).
So the issue is that it has tons of extra data than they need because it * doesn’t make their recommendation any better.*
Gathering data for the sake of gathering data in todays world of information privacy and hackers, leaks, etc. And that is what they are doing.
In my opinion (sample size of 1), YouTube is incredibly simplistic in its recommendations. I find it very hard to believe that they couldn’t achieve the same quality with much less info on me.
For instance, my IP changes when I travel, but I’m an American who speaks English, and yet YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries, despite having my home address (verified with my credit card no less!!!) That’s just laughable.
> For instance, my IP changes when I travel, but I’m an American who speaks English, and yet YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries, despite having my home address (verified with my credit card no less!!!) That’s just laughable.
I bet those advertisers that are wasting money on ads that you don't understand aren't laughing
For years YouTubes top hero banner purposely loaded quite a bit later than the rest of the page.
I never noticed it, until I moved to Spain for a while. Our place had slow internet, and I watched my roommates hit the ad multiple times a day on accident because it loaded right into where the search box was exactly as you’d naturally click there.
I have seen that kind of thing a few different places and I just plain decline to believe that it isn't done with knowledge.
Active items that are already clickable that change location as a page loads drive me nuts, but these particularly convenient examples add another dimension to that.
It might not be done with malice aforethought, so much as wilful ignorance; blind pursuit of metrics combined with a lack of any incentive to challenge the assumption that all clicks are intentional.
>For instance, my IP changes when I travel, but I’m an American who speaks English, and yet YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries, despite having my home address (verified with my credit card no less!!!) That’s just laughable.
Funny, my experience with YouTube is the opposite. I'm Italian, but I've emigrated a decade ago. I've tried to purge my Google account of all traces of Italian, changed my languages in my Google profile, settings, and all the places I could find. Google also has my credit card through Google Pay.
And yet they keep switching my YouTube interface to Italian at least once a week. I set it back to English every time but within days it's back.
The Italian interface is perfectly fine, mind you, but they insist on auto-translating the titles of English videos, which a) often results in barely coherent titles and b) the videos are still in English!
Mine is Firefox default "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5" yet google maps and search turned into French when I was in Luxembourg just for couple of days. Luckily they don't turn to ruscish any more when I'm in baltics.
My youtube ads are the same 2-3 casino/sports betting things over and over again. Tho I never have nor never will partake in any of those nor have I ever clicked on one, so it is just unbelievably stupid.
I’ve heard en-US is often considered as a default value and thus to be ignored when deciding user language. Set it to any other en-* value and chances are that it will override local indicators such as country IP.
That's really weird then. I'm often in Thailand and Google's never tried to change my interface language, though it does keep suggesting videos in Thai.
I think the mistake here is that google is making recommendations for the users. Google is making recommendations for google, to drive the users' attention to what benefits it most.
Bingo. I am a full-time YouTuber. I hate this reality.
Most people don’t understand the degree to which advertiser preferences dictate what they see on YouTube.
Creators are incentivized to only publish content that meets YouTube’s “advertiser-friendly guidelines.” When we publish content that is not suitable for all advertisers, YouTube doesn’t promote it, which is a death sentence for the video. YouTube claims that a video’s monetization status has no impact on discovery, but according to YouTube, all of the factors that influence whether a video is monetized directly impact video discovery. It’s smoke and mirrors.
An overwhelming majority of views on YouTube come from recommendations and suggested videos, and YouTube has little incentive to suggest or recommend content that is ‘unsuitable’ for advertisers. Because it doesn’t make them money.
To put some numbers on that, ~95% of my views come from YouTube’s suggestions and recommendations. I have millions of subscribers, but subscriber count is all-but meaningless. For any given video, subscriber notifications typically account for a negligible number of views, usually less than 5,000.
Remember when YouTube introduced the bell you have to ‘ring’ in order to receive notifications from the channels you subscribe to? That is one of many actions YouTube has taken to remove your ability to choose what you see. YouTube does this because people don’t decide what to watch based on whether or not it’s advertiser-friendly. They would rather decide for you.
I publish news. And there are highly-newsworthy stories that I haven’t covered because of the above. I hate it.
> So the issue is that it has tons of extra data than they need because it * doesn’t make their recommendation any better. ...YouTube is incredibly simplistic in its recommendations. I find it very hard to believe that they couldn’t achieve the same quality with much less info on me.
An example of YouTube insanity is their video quality settings. There is no clear manual setting (which should be labeled as such), to keep them at only a specific video resolution at all times (until adjusted by the user). Instead, users have to constantly battle with YouTube auto and resizing, to include when going to and from full screen, or make their own custom workaround.
> For instance, my IP changes when I travel... YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries...
The point is not the convenience of the user, but rather maximum data extraction from users and selling that data to 3rd parties (including governments). This is why users should not blink in finding workarounds for what Google is doing. Users should have no more concern or loyalty to Google, as they have for them, which is zero outside of how much money they can make.
The possibilities of having a truly open-source YouTube client is that users can configure their settings to exactly as they wish, without tracking and massive privacy violations.
> For instance, my IP changes when I travel, but I’m an American who speaks English, and yet YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries
I have no direct access to confirm this, but I have a theory as to why it happens. It’s a combination of greed and various ad buying semi-broken options.
1. Google shows ads which earn them the most money. “Relevance” only plays out in the mapping phase of finding advertisers who are willing to show their ad to your target group. The reducing phase is essentially just sorting by bid and selecting the top ones.
2. For many English speaking ad buys, I’ll bet there is an option that was checked to restrict which countries it’s shown too for the highest bids (maybe they have a separate campaign for RoW with a low bid, but doubtful). Advertisers have learned about ad fraud at least to some degree, so checking this box seems good to them.
3. Local advertisers in X foreign country aren’t given an option for “exclude English speakers here on holiday” and even if they did, some won’t click it and so there will still be some low bidding ad to fill the slot.
If it was about real relevancy to you and not “who will pay the most given this bucket of basic attributes”, folks like me would probably hate advertising less. The problem is it’s not and in a capitalist world I’m not sure it’ll ever change.
The same holds true for product recommendations, it’s my personal belief that on say Amazon, if a product is recommended for me, it’s because either the seller paid for the recommendation or it’s the highest margin item that fits my vagueish buying patterns. It’s not about real relevance there either, it’s “you brushed into this weird vẹn diagram overlap” and “now we can make money showing it to you.”
I think you nailed it - especially your 4th point: "If it was about real relevancy to you and not “who will pay the most given this bucket of basic attributes”, folks like me would probably hate advertising less."
>I’m an American who speaks English, and yet YouTube insists in showing me local ads
The number of travelers in foreign countries are so low compared to local population that I don't think it even makes sense for Google to optimize ads for people like that
Do you have any good sources about this? what do we know for sure Google know and track about us? I work for Google now, but speak for myself here. In my time here (not much, less than a year still) I've seen a huge focus on privacy and not storing user data. Then again, I don't work on ads. However, even before working at Google I was surprised that given my liberal sharing of information on the internet, ad targeting did not seem particularly more informed for me than "middle aged male living in Canada" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> what do we know for sure Google know and track about us?
For start, your entire search history. After you search, Google tracks how much time you spend on those sites with AdSense. Google reads our emails to scan for flights and to add appointments to calendar. It knows the places we go because Google Maps and the videos we watch online.
Google has plenty data to make an accurate profile of you, and you can see it’s inferences on your relationship status, income, employer and so on in your Google account[1]. (IIRC it was more complete some years ago, now it’s showing less categories or there’s another link I can’t find.)
> NSA databank, with its years of collected communications, allows analysts to search that database and listen "to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."
That they are not able to target you and others with ads worries me. I'm asking myself what are they doing with all this data they gather on people?
Regarding your point working at google, I don't think the entirety of google is evil. There have to be good people somewhere.
But some parts are just evil.
> Do you have any good sources about this? what do we know for sure Google know and track about us?
The list of Google handing tons of user data to governments or 3rd parties goes on and on. Clearly there is a lot for them to be handing over. Don't understand the surprise or confusion over what Google does.
Consider the possibility that the data isn’t the issue, and that YouTube is designed that way on purpose because that is what generates the most traffic.
Of course the argument can be made that they have the data and aren’t using it properly, but that’s not the simplest possible explanation.
The simplest is that they have the data, it’s working perfectly, and showing what people are familiar with is what generates the highest engagement, at the expense of new material.
I find 2022 YouTube profoundly boring for the same reasons you do and their recent excess of advertising is atrocious. Instead of producing something valuable enough to subscribe to in the form of product innovation, the genius MBAs at Google have decided that annoying people to death with insane cable-television-style advertising is the value driver to bank the future brand of the company on. Seems like maybe the team that was responsible for the smash hits like Google Wave and the destruction of Reader have found new positions in the company, except this time they’re joined by a 30 year television advertising veteran who really gets the internet. But I digress…
But it also seems to me that both behaviors aren’t based on bad decisions, but more likely on the viewing habits of the majority and that’s what the algo has learned. It’s an interesting concept, even if a little dark and sad.
I do hope I’m wrong and they’re just bad at dealing with data to make recommendations, but it seems the less likely scenario since Google has had virtually unlimited resources and these are the specialized type data problems they are most adept at.
I basically never rewatch videos I watched, unless I search for a specific one, yet Youtube consistently shows me tons of videos I watched, with full red bar and everything. First I thought just not paying attention to them would slowly teach the algorithm that I'm just not interested, then I thought marking each such video as "not interested" would help. I gave up and installed "YouTube: Hide Watched Videos - by Ev Haus" script into Tampermonkey to finally get rid of those, and now about 50% of my Youtube home screen is empty space.
The goal of the YouTube algorithm is not to give you great videos but keep you mildly entertained for long periods of time.
In my experience the 'suggested videos' next to the video you're watching is more than good enough to get recs.
I use newpipe and put all the videos I like in a playlist. So everytime I want new videos I just scroll through the list, click on a video and just try something from suggested videos.
Being shown great videos that are relevant to you is correlated with increased time on the platform and satisfaction which are some of the metrics YouTube cares about.
>the 'suggested videos' next to the video you're watching is more than good enough to get recs.
Which is also an algorithmic feed which optimizes for the same metrics as the home page.
Let’s say you’ve got a tire you can’t seat on a wheel. Which of these is the YouTube algorithm going to optimize for:
1) a 60 second video showing how to use wd-40 and a lighter to set the bead, or
2) a 7 minute showing how beads can be broken, things you might try, an ad, some bad ideas, a funny guy yelling, another ad, and then how to set a bead with flame
Increased time on the platform is a proxy for more ads shown. YouTube optimizes for maximizing ads, not minimizing time on the platform with short, clear, informative content.
Let's do an informal experiment. In incognito I searched "how to seat a tire on a wheel"
The first result is 2:43 then 3:14 then a shorts drawer which are sub minute videos then 5:43 then 3:29.
It turns out that YouTube is not optimizing for showing 7 minute videos.
>YouTube optimizes for maximizing ads
While they do monitor for regressions of metrics like ad revenue improvements to the algorithm aim to improve the user experience as opposed to improving revenue.
That's funny. When I do exactly the same search on Youtube (incognito, but Chrome incognito so they still know my profile), I get videos of times 2:43, 10:20, 7:49, 7:37, and 7:42.
It's funny. Roll back the time to about 2-3 years ago, YouTube's recommendation algorithm was terribly good. It's the only reason I still kept my YouTube account but every time I visit YT I feel less of a need to keep the account now.
As a mass YouTube users probably spend more time on the site if they can't find what they want; I get the impression this sort of thing happens a lot online now, string users along so you can feed them ads from your customers.
I assume that's why they made Google search results so bad, rather than send you straight where you want to go they drive you around the block to run the meter up.
I think Google's search results have declined as Google has deployed more and more ML systems to support it. Perhaps something similar has happened with YouTube.
It seems to me that Google is expecting more from ML/AI than the tech is actually able to deliver. That is, of course, hardly a problem limited to Google.
Its backfiring for them in my case. Usually if I can’t find something easy within a few seconds, I decide its not worth the trouble to go on this research assignment of a search query and just close the tab. The little bit of trivia I wanted an answer for usually isn’t that important anyhow.
Netflix is managing to do this for me on AppleTV … it’s the one thing more annoying than the stupid YouTube app requiring an entire two extra button presses to switch accounts. Every god damn time I go to switch accounts I push the “select” button on the username in the username list, then remember “oh that’s right, fuck this stupid app” and click to the side and click the button again.
Every damn time… for years… every time. It’s that counterintuitive to my brain.
But as sand in the lettuce as that is. The Netflix app completely stubbornly refusing to give me a “mark as watched” and blatantly refusing to use the AppleTV SDK features to integrate with the “up next” and TV app… I’m getting pretty close to just cancelling the subscription, because I’m sick of having to go and specifically check Netflix… they are not that special I want to go out if my way, I’m sick of them being slow to load my list I’m sick of them not fitting into my relaxation time in a smooth seamless way and most of all I’m sick of having to waste time specifically opening their app, waiting for my list to load, being reminded which stuff from my big watch list is leaving soon, seeing there’s nothing I want to watch right now from my current partially completed tv show list and then leaving the app. Im just really annoyed by paying someone to waste my time… If they didn’t have just barely enough interesting stuff I’d have dumped them, but it’s just teetering in the balance.
Why the Netflix rant? Easy answer. I can see an exit potentially in the future. YouTube is shit and pisses me off but it’s basically a monopoly on hosting video content which means everyone else who makes interesting stuff uses it and unless I want to ignore the wonderful array of diverse and interesting and intelligent cont I have managed to find on there… I have no exit in sight for all the dumb shit google cancels I don’t see them cancelling YouTube.
Which is why I force myself to be more zen about its failings… This bread sure sucks but it sure beats starvation!
Maybe I'm old school but if I want to spend time watching videos and have no suggestions (nearly always the case because I block everything) I ask myself what I want to watch and search for it. YouTube has a search box. No idea about Netflix / Prime.
To give an example. I want to watch scifi. Lately I've been spending some time browsing the last years of the Dust channel on YouTube. It turns out that the general mood of those videos is depressing so I quit after a couple of days. I searched Google and asked friends. I'm watching Missions now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missions_(TV_series)
This is a conversation that needs to be had. Or rather, it's a conversation that should have been had before YouTube/FB/etc. gained control over the world wide web.
Podcasts are, and have long been the freeiest medium. The protocol itself worked well. Hosting was cheap & simple enough (compared to video) that "free hosting" didn't give the likes of Google an angle to centralise it under their control. It was also marginal and unprofitable enough that they didn't try hard.
That said, podcast discovery always sucked. It still sucks. Blogrolls, BITD, worked well for me. Recommendation engines better or worse, are at least something. Monopoly's understand instinctively that recommendation/discovuery is the key to the kingdom. Open systems tend to see the pursuit as dirty.
In any case, discovery is like hosting. It's a ford. Control it and you control the stream. Neglect it, and be defeated.
The puritanical rejection of tracking, profiling, recommendation & discovery has and is placing a low ceiling on open media initiatives. It's ceding ground to monopolies.
We need open, consensual ways of having profiling... advertising even, perhaps.
YouTube doesn’t do recommendations very well. Instead, it’s more like a shallow decision tree. To do a soft reset, clear your watch and search history. If you want to end up in the same place as before, choose 1-3 videos from the same creators and then YouTube will fill your feed with the rest of the creators from your previous history automatically.
If you accidentally clear your history while on a remote WiFi network, and want to restore your old decisions, then connect to your usual WiFi network and videos will be heavily weighted towards your original recommendations.
YouTube recommendations are not very deep and appear to use IP address as a significant feature regardless of whether you’ve cleared your history.
I found that disabling autoplay helped with this. I regularly watch youtube while getting to sleep. It would end up autoplaying previously seen videos all night, which I guess trained it to think I loved rewatching the same videos over and over.
I go to YouTube, see a whole lot of nothing, and then I promptly leave. It's an interest desert.
I always read and hear of YouTube being lauded for its recommendations, but to me it has always been the weakest video content site and social network. It doesn't do either job particularly well, at least not in a way that engages me for long.
I like science and geopolitical content, but the typical YouTuber treatment tends to pale in comparison to stuff you'd read.
From my perspective, HBO and TikTok win long and short form video respectively, whereas Twitter, HN, and Reddit win 1:n and n:m social.
what geopolitical and science do you read/follow? I can find pretty alright science (either very high level or just papers at some point, some industry niche websites strike a better balance), but not that many geopolitical sites I feel good about
Sadly, broken fallacy. More tracking wouldn’t lead to better recommendations. I already wrote a reply to a child comment, but wanted to say same applies here. YouTube isn’t about “showing you videos endlessly”, it’s about “endlessly monetizing you watching videos”. The recommendations are geared around them primarily making more money, not around your enjoyment (which is a distant priority, just enough to keep you as a willing product to be sold).
Building on your logic… if they want to make more money, wouldn’t they then be incentivized to get you to stay with YouTube by giving you something better to watch than the competition? Or better and better videos so you prolong your current session?
There isn't really competition... there is enough monopoly here to disregard user experience to some extent. Rational firm will maximize profits so it can be assumed what they're doing here conforms to that
Lets assume for a second that I can, through the construction of some black magic 3rd party tool, recommend you the perfect videos to watch without any tracking of your profile what so ever (not really possible but lets just assume that it is for just a moment). Would you ever pay a 3rd party for that service? If your answer is: I wouldn't so it should be Youtube that provides it for free rather than a 3rd party, then you get what we have now. A standardized garbage product that works in the best interest of Youtube rather than its users. The product isnt dysfunctional due to lack of data, it is in fact perfectly functional for what Youtube is trying to make it do. They are optimizing for watch time and all their research indicate that this is the best way to maximize for that.
If you aren't willing to signal to the market that this is a problem that you would be willing to pay real $ to solve, then it will never get solved. If there was any actual demand for proper search and recommendation engines, plenty of us around here would have created 3rd party tools to solve for just that. But the reality is, in spite of how dogshit Youtube's recommendation engine is, people are just not willing to pay for a solution.
Haha. It does not work that way. You have no control over recommendations or the effectiveness of the advertising it is designed to optimise.
The problem with "tech" companies is not simply advertising. It is control. If the user cedes control of their computer to the "tech" company, then the company may use it for advertising. But the user has no control over how the company exercises its control. There are no legal limits. The use being made of the computer is ultimately for the benefit of the company, not the user.
The company decides what to show the user. Given the monpolistic nature of how these companies operate, e.g., "tech" proponents will argue YouTube has no viable alternatives, if the user is not satisfied, then it's tough apples.
The company might decide the user is a sub-optimal target for advertising. Then what. This could affect what the user is sent as "recommendations".
The issue is one of control. Under the "tech" company model of computer and internet use, the user gives away control. In return, she gets "convenience". She can be passive and consume what is chosen for her, but there is no guarantee of satisfaction. The system is designed to benefit the company.
There is a feature in youtube call profiles. You might want to try that out. For example i have work profile, kids, personal, learning profile etc. Now you make sure in each of these profiles you subscribe to those channels that are relevant enough. That way you recommendations are much better.
Is boob tube 2.0 really better than the original yet? It seemingly can't even stop showing bizarre things to children, recommending good content seems very far away. It's probably not even their business interest if you adblock.
@ivass would you kind msg me, I wanted to ask you something, but there is no connection info on your profile.
twitter.com/lucasmanual
or email on my profile.
YouTube has a hidden button labeled "New to you". I've recently discovered it, seems to do a better job of recommending new videos, compared to the home page recommendations.
As it is a new development (been seeing the same thing happen since a few months ago, and lot of people seem to have the complaint), I'd assume YouTube is exactly taking account all the data it has on its users, and are applying what they see as the best strategy for their bottom line.
I wouldn't expect more data or better profiling to bridge that gap.
I think the tracking itself is fine. The recommendation engine just has become really stale. It's hard to believe that out of all the hundreds of hours uploaded per minute (or whatever) there are only like 20 videos per week that I might be interested in. I feel like the recommendations used to be more dynamic.
I do not think there is a correlation between the amount of tracking and the quality of recommendations.
Your assumption is that it is in Google's interest to show you stuff that interests you. That is wrong. They just want to maximize the time you spend on their platform. These two are not necessarily the same.
Yeah I agree their recommendation algorithm needs some serious work. I have the same issues as you - especially that it keeps recommending videos again and again and I have clearly seen the thumbnail and not clicked it but it never gets the message unless you tediously manually hide the video.
There is a lot of effort that goes into gaming the algo. Either that or YouTube's devs are completely incompetent. Either would explain why watching Stewart Lee videos gets me Jordan Peterson recommendations, but I tend toward the former rather than the latter.
YouTube's recommendations aren't based on what you want to see the most, they're based on what will earn the most money through engagement.
You're going to see recommendations for monetized channels, channels that have long ads on them, and channels that you are likely to comment/like/subscribe.
It has very little to do with discerning your tastes and more to do with extracting value out of your time spent in the app.
Not really - if I hated a video or wanted to gouge out my eyeballs after seeing it, I am likely to "dislike" it or comment with an angry rant. That's also engagement and that's what social media wants, not stuff I enjoy, stuff I engage with.
Lately, there is almost no new videos in my recommendation feed. It's mostly either the things I've already watched or new videos from the channels I'm already subscribed to. It really feels like I've exhausted the internet at some point. This can't possibly be true now, can it? :')
Where do I opt-in for more tracking?