Most of the YouTube channels I follow have no external means to notify me about new videos. If I were to stop using YouTube, they were banned, or YouTube subscriptions stopped working the same, they would have no way to actually contact me about new content, and they’d lose me.
Effectively YouTube owns the relationship between the creators and I. This can be changed, CGPGrey has been building a mailing list for this reason, but it takes a lot of painstaking deliberate action to achieve. Migrating to a new platform alone is insufficient.
It's really no different than anything else in life. People hire contractors to do larger home repairs, and the contractors contact and subcontract other specialty workers as needed (drywall, woodworking, plumbing, electrical) for things they can't cover themselves. As the homeowner, unless you make an effort to know who these people are, you won't know who they are and may not know what their company is. The benefit is that you don't need to know any of it and can just let the contractor coordinate it all for you.
Youtube is just like that contractor, except instead of a local guy that cares about your business it's a giant multinational which is hard to get to care if they screw something up for you because you're one of many millions of other customers.
The parallels of you can handle all this coordination youtube offers with more control are obvious. Either hire someone to do it all for you or handle it yourself if you want control, because no matter what platform you go to that handles it for you, chances are it will exhibit some or all of the problems that Youtube has, or even new ones.
It would know what I read and watch. It would find new stuff for me, dedupe it, listen to my feedback,and learn from its mistakes. It would work with all kinds of media, not just youtube or HN.
And it would all be private. I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.
As a non-program, you can always depend on the means that humans have used for content discovery since time immemorial: word of mouth.
I use both YouTube and Netflix pretty extensively. These companies are both held up as ML success stories. But, at least in my personal experience, they suck! My front-page feeds consist of (1) content that the platform knows I have already seen because IT IS IN MY WATCH HISTORY, (2) content that is trivially related, like by having the the same channel/director/actors, and (3) random junk I have no interest in watching and always regret clicking on.
It's not that the content isn't out there -- I'm able to find stuff I like through "big spreadsheet of all the Netflix movies" websites, online recommendations from humans, and YouTube channel crossovers/cameos. But I've never had that magical "the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself" experience that every ML engineer I've ever spoken to seems to be convinced their systems achieve.
Are all ML engineers mindless drones with exactly average movie preferences, or am I some kind of incomprehensible weirdo?
I also still don't understand why yt recommendations are as poor as they are. I've tried taking the time to try removing certain things from the "recommendation history" (or whatever they call it), flag recommendations I'm not interested in etc and it does improve things a bit but still it recommends things I would never watch in a million years (eg right now I have 4 Joe Rogan recommendations on my homepage even though I've literally never watched any of his things and have zero interest in ever doing so, and click on every one and say not interested etc, for a while it was obsessed with trying to get me to watch MMA content even though I can't bear watching other people hurt each other).
And the whole issue of recommending videos where it knows I've watched the whole thing, I just don't even know where to start.
This is a different strategy to Google web search, where the monetisation occurs on the search results page (via ads there) rather than on click-throughs, so there isn't an incentive to try and get you to click several tangentially related links.
if you regret clicking on it, that means you did click on it and the recommendation did it's job; remember that the job of the recommendation engine is not (directly) to suggest content you'll like, it's to suggest content that will get you to click. Ideally those goals would be aligned, but not necessarily. YouTube is simply incentivised (via ad revenue) to get you to click on as many videos as possible.
So while it may not be overly successful on you (i.e. you only click occasionally), if it works on a significant portion of people it could still be a successful strategy overall.
Personally, I would gladly donate my (anonymous etc) data for this noble goal.
How do you figure out which data has been faked to drive views to particular content?
Data quality and relevance matter far more.
A recommendation engine that works solely based on your own watch history would require a totally different approach using algorithms that are years/decades/forever away from existing.
It does make sense that the job is simpler with everyone's history and inputs, if you can keep PII out of it. Are there any good references on recommendation aggregation algorithms?
Here's a simple proposal that keeps everyone's stuff anonymous and allows a rec service to pay bills.
Distribute the pool of everyone's watch histories/prefs/etc using IPFS, which is a DHT with static names and some storage. User clients put the share data into IPFS and register into a public pool. The client remembers their own hash. Rec services (there can be multiple) pull everyone's sets periodically and aggregate/indexe them. Users can then retrieve a batch of new recs by sending a small fee to the service of their choice along with their hash and the server will place some new recs into their bucket. If the recs are not suitable, they can try another service.
Even without this, I could just check videos you shared on Twitter, follow the same process, and have a decent chance of identifying you.
Anonymization is very very hard. Maybe federated learning is more promising here, keeping all your data privately stored on your own devices.
I think you're the one underestimating modern recommender systems, especially the ones built by advanced teams in big tech companies.
They absolutely use content features. Among other advantages, this counters the cold start problem (how will you learn about a new video if it doesn't get recommended to anyone).
YouTube has hours of video uploaded every minute. A non-centralized, context-less recommendation system would mean that you are offered those crap videos together with ones that are the standard for ‘good’ now. Just get into the long tail on any search results and see if you want those.
A non-monopolized video discovery would be splendid, only who knows how to achieve that. Perhaps it would be more realistic to do the recommendations based on the numbers of ‘retweets’ in federated networks—in a more ‘social’ style instead of views (dunno if PeerTube already offers that). Also, an open system will be incessantly gamed.
You might agree: "thought and discussion termination isn’t cool," right? I hope you aim to live up to your own principles. Maybe you meant to say something else to the human being on the other end of the line.
>I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.
This is another thing that bothers me. Being guilt-tripped for not watching an ad, or being a Patreon subscriber, or YouTube Red subscriber. Even if I don't watch ads or pay a fee I am, me, this individual is valuable just for who I am. My data, my habits are valuable to Google just as much as it is for me to pay a fee or to watch ads.
Some portions of a personalized, cross-service recommendation engine are a lot more viable if centralized (e.g. any scraping/indexing, and plausibly the personalization itself). Supposing such a service had no intention of you ever personally being the product, what would they have to do in order for you to still be comfortable handing that data over to them?
No affiliation, but it seems to be trying to do what you want
In the event that you have to change platform for whatever reason, you still have a line of communication.
By November 2010, they had iTunes Ping, Twitter, an iPhone app, Facebook, Myspace, the bassist's twitter feed all being pushed in huge tiles.
At the time this was extraordinary, since many artists did not have a handle on social at all and definitely were not pushing people "away" from direct connection like this.
I believe the idea was to allow many platforms to get between you and your fans/followers, but to allow the fans to choose which platform that would be.
As the OP suggests, this can be a lot of work.
[1] Coran Capshaw, the band's manager created an early dial-up ISP company in Charlottesville that went on to become MusicToday. was responsible for major tech advances in live entertainment
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090219153059/http://www.davema...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20101105102023/http://www.davema...
Judged.
However, on a more serious note, I new people who were -very- attached to bands/musicians based on interactions they had on MySpace and LiveJournal.
One problem with any online exposure in the modern web is that the bar from 'unknown' to 'trolls flooding your inbox' is pretty low. I do wonder however whether small time performers wind up trapped by this: When they are first growing they probably can't pick the ideal "Social Media" person, which may limit certain exposure and opportunities.
You don’t know the half of it. I ran a DMB blog and large online community. It was where I did a lot of my first web programming. :|
Whatever you think of their music, DMB and their fans pioneered a bunch of areas.
One of the most forward decisions by the band was to allow online distribution of their live recordings.
Being mainstream at that point meant it pushed torrenting of the live shows into the workflows of many people who wouldn’t have otherwise have been exposed to the tech.
It also drew the hackers of sorts to their scene who would illicitly capture and record IEM streams, mix them with mic recordings then combine them with stealth monopod videos to release bootleg copies of entire shows.
Only the Radiohead fans came close to the amount of enthusiasm in the DMB scene back then.
That said—if I could go back I’d pick Radiohead to follow.
Generally I would advise new content creators to be present on every possible platform.
I do, but the memory is well-faded, and growing dimmer...
I think it's hard to make a fully independent platform so I think topical ones are a better option - but YouTube is really in a position of power due to the network effect. As long as they don't shoot themselves in the foot with controversy and banning then they should be able to easily hold onto their position - everything challenging them has an uphill battle.
Arguably, entire political movements; the far right and conspiracy vlogosphere relies on constantly being advertised for free to new suckers through youtube recommendations.
Can we at least get youtube to put up a banner saying "no it's impossible to defy the laws of physics and build a unlimited energy machine with a few magnets a microwave and a multimeter?"
If you seriously believe that the Earth is flat or that lizard people control the world, then frankly a Youtube disclaimer won't really change anything.
But take this random video I found earlier on PeerTube: https://peer.tube/videos/watch/7b5faff9-1752-4eba-be37-beeb0...
It's in French but basically it's one of these videos against the banking system that simplify and caricature the situation to the point of meaninglessness. Coming up with a proper fact-check for something like that would be incredibly difficult, and I'm sure extremely controversial.
It would also take a lot of time and money to get economists and physicists to weigh in on these videos. That's how these conspiracy theories manage to remain relevant in the first place: overwhelm the opposition with thousands upon thousands of hours of content, and claim that they take things out of context or that they don't get it if they don't bother to sink months of their lives watching all that garbage.
Edit: And I've noticed the downvotes, yet what I have said is still accurate. It is true that Gab moved to mastodon, for example, and there is evidence of their mindset spreading to other properties in the Fediverse.
Some of the early adopters are definitely unsavory, yet that content is what new users are going to see. Peertube/etc are still too small to protect against it, I fear.
Early online worlds were (often, not always), academics and techies. Even that was often hard going to generate larger appeal. Facebook was Literally Harvard.
Random malcontents have an even higher social hill to climb.
An elite founding cohort tends to regress to the mean. An unsavory cohort ... tends to further radicalise or collapse entirely.
Fandom/hobby groups are more sustainable and often avoid pathological evolution, but rarely seem to develop mass appeal.
And all this before adding financial or business pressures.
I'm very cynical about any attempts to curb this. I suspect these services will go for stuff that they know, through A/B testing and whatnot, won't affect their bottom line.
Let's say they show particularly harmful and scientifically 'banana-shit' videos, but with a disclaimer in a sidebar that the content in question is 'disputed'.
I imagine viewers are much more drawn to the content and will filter out the sidebar because 1) they don't notice, 2) they don't care because it's just a sidebar, or at worst 3) the libs are trying to make us be okay with homos/feminist/etc.
A provider of said content could defend their 'wokeness', a consumer could just ignore the sidebar or use it to point out how 'the libs' control things.
Meanwhile the rest of us, if we get past the partisanship, are left wondering how such few actors got to decide on so many societally-relevant topics. Surely we've progressed beyond having to deal with feudal lords?
I always though these were prank/scam videos?
LOL, as a boat owner that hasn't been out on my boat in quite a few hears, I wholeheartedly agree. On a side note, the payment's due again...
All you need is some vague sense that all the "experts" are either dumber than you, or part of some big conspiracy.
Then because of that you don't even try to understand the work of those that came before you and hey presto! You're on your way to slowly rediscovering the laws of thermodynamics on your own - and until you do (if you ever do) you'll believe all sorts of wacky shit might be possible.
I'm sure it's just my bias, but I can't think of any right now.
Not everything is politically motivated. Some people are just ignorant or crazy.
That at least I think it a little explainable. I'm often checking different news sources about a story from Google news, and if the comment section at the bottom of foxnews.com is anything to go by, it's extremely hard to tell what see from what you would expect a Russion bot to do to stir discontent apart from trolling and/or blind ignorance of what the article was about.
In some ways believing in bots is a bit of an uplifting story. That's a person that doesn't believe their fellow citizens could actually be as disdainful and hurtful to each other as appears readily apparent. It's real tempting to buy into that sometimes.
hmmm I feel the same way I happen upon an opinion piece from the NYTimes, or a clip from MSDNC, or any of the other "the sky is falling and the fascists are at the door to destroy democracy" stories running in any mainstream news of today...
The more you believe the other side is comprised of evil racist fascists, or evil pedophile fascists, the harder it is to give any of they opinions due consideration. It's probably not random that fascist shows up as an accusation by both sides.
The only thing that I think has worked to give me a somewhat fair accounting of an event over the last 6-12 months is to use Google news, and specifically seek out how both sides of the spectrum represent an event (that means seeking out the foxnews.com article most the time, but sometimes foxnews is the main one and I seek out how it's represented elsewhere). Often it's like reading high-school essays about that are about the same book but focused on entirely different themes of the plot. I generally have to synthesize my own accounting from them while weighting accordingly based on the news and the source.
- "There's no scientific basis for race"
These positions are so entrenched that disagreeing with them publicly is to risk your career. But they're also the product of ignorance. In the world of biology, the opposite positions of these are fairly uncontroversial views. (see [1] for an example of the first)
Using a throw-away account for obvious reasons.
[1] https://quillette.com/2019/05/03/selective-blank-slatism-and...
>>AntiVax - Flat Earth
To Attribute them only to far right tells me you do not really understand these groups. They are not left or right politically, especially anti-vax for which many have far-left economic and social positions
There is a movie on netflix about Epstein the island.
This is a news story about a series of events. It is not the same as a political ideology.
The US standards for defamation are explained very well here https://law.stackexchange.com/a/132/11158
Someone thinking girls were locked in the basement and deciding to storm the place is a sign of a mental health issue. But his actions doesn't make the known facts false.
I agree with all of your other points.
Folks with this "naive" political ideology are shooting at people and kicking peoples head on the streets. Many innocent have died in the riots, much more have lost their business to looting.
I don't see conservatives having a hard time condemning the pizza place shooter or any other similar act, but I see a lot of leftists rationalism and even denying altogether the bad actions of their bad people. They even cheer their bad actors on.
At this point I can only assume ill intent, since we are bombarded daily with rhetoric likening any action by the POTUS and his admin to something nazist.
If I were to go into work saying I supported Trump, I risk getting fired, because of rhetoric like this.
I don't know if they do this for ideological reasons, or if the outrage machine makes them a lot of money. My guess would be the latter.
But some random guy saying something silly and offensive in one (live?) interview is still not the same as a set of very specific completely baseless allegations in the right-wing conspiracies theories.
From a very quick search it seems that the police didn't take several cases serious, and were at the very least rather lax in their attitude. In other words, there's at least an actual crime and at least some smoke. It's not something invented from nothing.
And this is the real danger of this sort of politicized conspiracy bullshit: now this is automatically seen as "politically motivated" instead of actually looking at the matter at hand. People who spread pizzagate-esque conspiracy theories or enable them are very much harming the anti-paedophilia efforts.
> equality of outcome not equality of opportunity
Equality of opportunity is no greater thing to cherish. Opportunity comes from circumstance, and therefore this equates to wishing for equality in circumstances. Boiling this down to its fundamentals, this would mean important life decisions like whether to have children (and how many), what kind of hobbies and preferences people have, etc., would be left to the whims of balancing acts by the state.
He's either a troll, an idiot, or a saboteur. This isn't debatable in the slightest. Which of these explanations do you prefer?
I'm not sure why it has to be one of those. I mean maybe slightly an idiot because what he is saying is likely not good for him politically, but not entirely wrong. You make it sound like the USPS doesn't have any issues.
To the extent the USPS "has issues," as you put it, it is because Congress has consistently set them up to fail. Congress is free to shut down the USPS or kneecap it if they want, but the executive is not. Certainly not to serve their own corrupt purposes.
Just something else to add to the list of things Republicans would scream bloody murder about if a Democratic president were doing it.
You won't see them recommended on Youtube. I think there are a few "tankies" out there though who also annoy the mainstream left. Named after people who supported the Soviet tanks suppressing revolt in Hungary.
Israel/Palestine politics has a big risk of going from getting outraged about things that actually happened to things that didn't, plus conflating the faults of the government and military of Israel with blame on all Jewish people (which is antisemitic).
https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/129388933700478566...
> "Gender critical" is just Qanon for British women
For some examples: https://medium.com/@KatyMontgomerie/jameela-jamil-josie-long...
In the UK there's a lot of people who are far left who are pushing anti-vaccination, anti 5G, anti-mask "plandemic" KBF garbage.
The violent groups do tend be be far right though.
Edit: I’ll also add that the original commenter was deliberately vague (didn’t mention “Trump” or specific political groups, for example) to avoid controversy and you come in attempting to bulldoze that by mentioning BLM.
I've seen that go by on Twitter and am not impressed .. should I call for it to be cancelled?
(Mind you, a stock feminist answer might be that the Netflix series is just a representation of a whole rotten child beauty pageant culture which in turn derives from the sexist adult beauty pageant culture, and that nobody should be sexualised without their consent - which cannot appropriately be given by people who are underage.)
Except that we expect parents to be stewards for our children and give consent on their behalf, except in cases where we've decided that parents cannot be trusted to do so and we outlaw that activity for children (sex, alcohol, etc), or that consent does not fully convey the situation (a parent forcing an unwilling child to get a haircut is not viewed the same as a child forcing an unwilling child to play a full contact sport which is also not viewed the same as a parent forcing a child to get into a fistfight on the street).
Where do parents sexualizing their children for television fall into this? I dunno. If they were doing it for an individual that came over and paid in person, we'd have some real probing questions, but it's okay when it's on TV for a national audience?
But in an attempt to bring things vaguely back on topic: I'm actually curious to know if left-wing movements have been aided by YouTube and to what extent. Its effect on the right is very well documented but on the left I've tended to see the outrage on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook more.
You do see a small effect through raw footage videos. Shaming people videos.
The left owns the mass media (fox not withstanding) so the right needs a video outlet. Radio takes care of audio.
Not to get too far down a rabbit hole here but the OP was referring to the "far left", which certainly doesn't own the mass media. If anything, centrists own the mass media.
Check Blender's Peertube [1] and compare to their Youtube Channel [2]. At the time of writing the latest video is a week old and has 27K views on YouTube while a measly 28 views on PeerTube.
Those figures alone show that it's not even worth to keep an instance up and running for this. I doubt it even counts as an insurance policy against Google shenanigans, you are likely to lose all viewership if your channel goes kaput anyway.
The only way this can possibly be successful for anyone is if they make huge investments in marketing and that carries a risk that even then it may never pay back. YouTube just provides immense value through discovery. You may not like it but there's no denying.
As we know, there is a growing history of unexpected changes or even phase-outs of services/features that were once considered fixtures provided by Google.
There is nothing I am aware of that says a user could/should not simultaneously 1. keeps backups of her work on physcial media in her possession (as well "in the cloud"), 2. host her work on YouTube or some similarly commercial service, and 3. self-host her work on PeerTube. The decision to diversify should not matter whether the videos have significant views or not.
If both services are free, do you have to "move" from service X to service Y, or can you can just "copy" (mirror).
Someone not having your level of prudence and understanding in their MO doesn't mean they're idiots. Did you learn everything you know by reading the docs and best practices recommendations and acting accordingly, or did it take a couple of stinging mistakes to bring you to where you are? Your attitude is the stuff that nightmare bosses/parents/teachers/mentors are made of. Mellow out.
Dustin, from Smarter Every Day, has millions of subscribes and keeps his backup copies on old hard drives loosely placed into plastic containers. He also causally tosses them around.
He's hardly and idiot but...
Here's the video where Linus sets him up a 160tb server to replace his old "backup solution". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcWSrIiR1tY
There are many videos by creators chronicling the solutions they've had to contrive to preserve their records and the cost/time tradeoffs they've made to continue creating while saving their archives.
Perhaps it's a matter of tone not coming across well through text, but you seem to be bizarrely angry at people on YouTube in general, even more so if they don't back up their video files.
You would be incorrect. The overwhelming majority of video uploaders on YouTube have never made a single cent.
My flow for watching youtube has been to subscribe and sign up for email alerts (the bell). When I had some time to watch, I'd scan my youtube alerts email folder for items of interest. It was efficient and would quickly leave me with a queue of videos.
That workflow went away for me this month: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/63269933?hl=en
I don't even know what the alert bell is for now. If I look at notifications its full of "recommendations". If I go to my subscriptions its random items from all my subscriptions regardless of "the bell".
Is it though?
I don’t make videos, but if I did it wouldn’t be as “my job”, it would be because I had information to share.
My favorite YouTube videos and channels aren’t “personalities” being “influencers”.
I guess I just don’t measure success in “popularity”. I don’t think my number one goal would be to get to people, it would be to contribute something useful to a couple people that could use that info.
I would value a good and reliable search feature over the highest possible user base, but this is all just me. I am aware there are people that need the attention / viewership more than I do.
Maybe relying on Google to share -or- arbitrarily decide not to share money that they get in from their massive advertising machine with you... isn’t a good business model?
Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.
From the article:
> “If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership, I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to self-host your content in the future.”
Sure, backups are good but anyone with significant viewership should make sure they promote their other web assets to diversify.
Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority. Getting them subscribed to your email list or to follow you on another platform should be your #2 priority.
There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube for pure video hosting (Vimeo, Wistia, self hosting). There are no alternatives to YouTube for discovery.