<story><title>Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations</title><url>https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-crowdsourcing-research-youtube-recommendations/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>klmadfejno</author><text>I use YouTube infrequently. Usually for binging random content like comedy sketches or speedrunning. No matter what I&amp;#x27;m on, there&amp;#x27;s always a few videos in my recommendations that make no sense and look like trash. Not generically, but specific videos that ALWAYS appear. One of them is &amp;quot;I PAID FIVE BASSISTS ON FIVR TO PLAY AN IMPOSSIBLE BASSLINE&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;p&gt;Why is this so bad? What are your hundreds of data scientists doing?</text></item><item><author>FiReaNG3L</author><text>What&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust).&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GuB-42</author><text>I think these are exploitation&amp;#x2F;exploration trade-offs.&lt;p&gt;YouTube only knows your interests by the videos you watch. It knows you like speedruns, so it will show you speedruns, easy. But you certainly have other unrelated interests: cooking, woodworking, old cars, whatever. So, from time to time, Google takes a chance and shows you a random topic just to gauge your interest.&lt;p&gt;It works on a global scale too. They want some variety, they don&amp;#x27;t want to depend only on a few topics and previously successful YouTubers. So sometimes, they may pick a random video and so it to everyone, and if it succeeds, they have something new.&lt;p&gt;It is actually rather clear when you look at your recommendations to determine which are which. Typically you are going to find a mix of videos related to the video you just watched, videos relative to your global interests, trending videos, and random stuff.&lt;p&gt;If some generally effective machine learning algorithm acts really stupid from time to time, chances are that it is exploring, that is: it is asking you a question instead of giving you an answer.&lt;p&gt;Edit: someone mentionned the multi-armed bandit, yes, this is such an algorithm</text></comment>
<story><title>Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations</title><url>https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-crowdsourcing-research-youtube-recommendations/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>klmadfejno</author><text>I use YouTube infrequently. Usually for binging random content like comedy sketches or speedrunning. No matter what I&amp;#x27;m on, there&amp;#x27;s always a few videos in my recommendations that make no sense and look like trash. Not generically, but specific videos that ALWAYS appear. One of them is &amp;quot;I PAID FIVE BASSISTS ON FIVR TO PLAY AN IMPOSSIBLE BASSLINE&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;p&gt;Why is this so bad? What are your hundreds of data scientists doing?</text></item><item><author>FiReaNG3L</author><text>What&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust).&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bleepblorp</author><text>The function of an adtech recommendation system is not to find content that you want to see but rather to show you content that&amp;#x27;s the most profitable for the adtech firm that&amp;#x27;s serving it.&lt;p&gt;The videos that YT recommends over and over again are probably videos that have a high ratio of advertising revenue (meaning good demographics) to playback cost (meaning low overall byte size) and a high likelihood of going viral by being shared off-platform (meaning broad appeal, non-controversial, short, safe for religious conservatives, safe for work, and easy to summarize within 280 characters).&lt;p&gt;The videos you want to watch don&amp;#x27;t meet these criteria, so Youtube won&amp;#x27;t find them for you.</text></comment>