from Hacker News

Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

by fraqed on 9/17/20, 9:55 AM with 173 comments

  • by FiReaNG3L on 9/17/20, 12:17 PM

    What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust).

    Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you will be fed on your recommendation page for months.

  • by rayuela on 9/17/20, 3:58 PM

    Couldn't care less about this. Just put out a paid version of Firefox that dedicates this revenue stream exclusively to continued Firefox development and I will happily pay fist fulls of money for it. Seriously, Firefox adds so much value to my life and I'd happily pay for it.

  • by dexen on 9/17/20, 12:51 PM

    Semi related: there's a browser plugin[1] available to "de-mainstream" Youtube. It removes from recommendations the well known channels of the big name media brands[2]. You can add more to the list.

    --

    [1] https://demainstream.com/

    [2] https://github.com/miscavage/De-Mainstream-YouTube-Extension...

  • by srean on 9/17/20, 2:11 PM

    A few months ago YouTube was flighting a feature I liked a lot. The homepage would group my interest into named categories "Cute dog videos", "Strangeloop", "Debussy", "PyData", "Algebraic Topology" and so on. I really liked that because I could choose which deep end to sink into. Not just that it would also serve as a reminder on what I had been interested in, but have become too distracted to remember.

    They seem to have stopped this and now the recommendations featured on my homepage are all over the place.

  • by anjc on 9/17/20, 4:03 PM

    I'm always mind-blown reading comment threads like this regarding recommendation, with people annoyed that explicit feedback helps recommenders, or exasperated that they're recommended one item that they haven't approved while also wanting novel recommendations.

    1000s of hours of videos are uploaded every minute. 5+ billion videos are watched daily. Are you not rather quite pleased that YouTube can deliver highly relevant top-20 recommendations within milliseconds from such a large and changing corpus, while keeping track of your past preferences, your interactions, your social circle's preferences, popularity and trends, content features, etc?

    It's pretty amazing to me. I think people expect recommender systems to read minds.

  • by worldmerge on 9/17/20, 3:16 PM

    YouTube recommendations, for me, are the greatest music discovery resource. I've found more new artists through YouTube's algorithm than Spotify, Pandora or Amazon Prime Music.

  • by thrusong on 9/17/20, 6:17 PM

    YouTube recommendations suck so hard.

    I'm subscribed to all this stuff but it never seems to give me similar content, it recommends all the videos I've already watched.

    If I happen to watch something new, like a People's Court segment, then all I see is People's Court stuff.

    There never seems to be balance.

    Then there's the problem where a new video (like Gourmet Makes from BA) gets posted on a channel I like. I'll watch it with my partner on his machine, but then YouTube just chokes up, wondering why I never click on it, and then shoves it in my face ad nauseum.

    Like, their search engine doesn't even seem to scratch the surface of content they're holding. It seems to be really stupid machine learning or AI.

    Why can't it show me balanced recommendations from everything I watch or subscribe to, toss in some new things which are similar/popular, and maybe differentiate between content likely to be consumed multiple times (music videos) vs stuff people don't often watch a rerun of?

    They seem to have so much data they could work with. They have amazing engineers and Google's expertise in algorithms.

    Facebook even had problems with news feed being overrun with low quality content early on but seems to have figured it our fairly well- at least in my experience on the site (I know there are big echo chamber problems over there as well, don't get me wrong).

    Even a lot of my non-techie friends seem to complain often about how terrible YouTube's recommendations are.

  • by cblconfederate on 9/17/20, 3:24 PM

    > recommendations can be delightful

    They are really not. I struggle pages after pages to find something interesting. And then days later i stumble on a link that has interesting stuff randomly. Even search is bad. And there's always the knowledge that google is censoring stuff and manipulating people.

    There's definitely space for better youtube/video recommendation site.

  • by pluc on 9/17/20, 1:08 PM

    This is what you're gonna do with the money saved from the firings?

  • by m0llusk on 9/17/20, 2:10 PM

    This claims that YouTube recommendations are opaque, but often YouTube cites that viewers of a specific video like another. YouTube also tags content which might be extended to note related or contrasting content or to map how videos that share a tag relate.

  • by enturn on 9/17/20, 10:09 PM

    I previously used my partner's Google account to watch on YouTube and it had built up recommendations based on what I previously watched since I didn't use the subscriptions, but one day it all just disappeared and only showed recommendations from my partner's subscriptions. I'd prefer if they implemented a user driven exploration system rather than attempting to guess what I want but it must be useful to be able to change how it works without modifying the user interface. I eventually gave up and used my own account with now 32 subscriptions and it's better than it was although it shows a lot of videos I've already watched. It throws in a few videos from other channels but it's mostly from the subscriptions.

  • by awinter-py on 9/17/20, 3:31 PM

    facebook got muy upset when propublica used a similar approach (browser plugin) to surveil their ads ecosystem

    https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...

  • by logicalmonster on 9/17/20, 8:25 PM

    Am I incorrect in assuming that Mozilla’s goal was at one time to expand access of information to the world?

    I don’t see any other likely outcome of this “research” other than a fresh new media hue and cry detailing chains of “wrong-think” that will lead to activists who masquerade as journalists calling for more content they deem unfit for the plebs consumption.

  • by thesuitonym on 9/17/20, 7:58 PM

    I guess I just don't understand why Mozilla would spend money on this? Google is under no obligation to care about their findings. Why not spend money in areas that will actually benefit people? What do they hope to gain by this?

  • by satya71 on 9/17/20, 7:28 PM

    Fundamental flaw with this approach. Since I don't click on or watch conspiracy theories, none of my YouTube recommendations are those. But I have seen people watch incendiary and conspiracy theory videos exclusively on autoplay.

  • by cxcorp on 9/17/20, 6:40 PM

    Was trying to find the source for the extension, looks like the link was in the privacy notice. Github link here for those who are also looking for it: https://github.com/mozilla-extensions/regrets-reporter

  • by srtjstjsj on 9/17/20, 1:19 PM

    Seems silly Why not just build a better (user-configurable) recommendations engine?

  • by zkid18 on 9/18/20, 2:22 PM

  • by hal9000-tng on 9/17/20, 7:54 PM

    This must be part of Mozilla's new focus on profit.

  • by mitchtbaum on 9/17/20, 11:18 PM

  • by pgcj_poster on 9/17/20, 4:17 PM

    I use a ublock filter to block YouTube recommendations. I think they're unhealthy.

  • by zobzu on 9/17/20, 5:13 PM

    Crowdsourcing censorship!

  • by WealthVsSurvive on 9/17/20, 2:58 PM

    I'm sorry, but the crowd has run out of money. Try the people that print and take it.