All "customized for you"/"things youll like" algorithms are more about trapping you in a frozen past than expanding your horizons. Everyone together trains the algo what "more of the same looks like" and thats what it regurgitates. Every time I read a marketing copy about AI, that's what I think of first, is that someone literally designed a new mouse trap.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...

"But taken together the cumulative effect is that of a giant refrigerator that freezes us, and those who govern us, into a state of immobility, perpetually repeating the past and terrified of change and the future."

That article makes the same argument about index funds and hedge funds, the Blackrocks and Vanguards of the world. Minimizing risk means trapping the world in a way that it never has a chance to gamble on changing.

"It has within its memory a vast history of the past 50 years - not just financial - but all kinds of events. What it does is constantly take things that happen in the present day and compares them to events in the past. Out of the millions and millions of correlations - Aladdin then spots possible disasters - possible futures - and moves the investments to avoid that future happening.

I can't over-emphasise how powerful Blackrock's system is in shaping the world - it's more powerful in some respects than traditional politics.

And it raises really important questions. Because its aim is to not change the world - but to keep it stable. Preventing any development thats too risky. And when you are moving $11 trillion around to do that -it is a really important new force."

Personalized tailored experiences prevent the future by making us relive the past.

It's not though. For example I used to be in hobby X, so I watched a lot of X based videos. As I fell out of the hobby I stopped watching X videos, so Youtube stopped recommending them to me unless it thinks there is a REALLY good X based video it thinks I would like.

YouTube also lets you easily add to your interests by directly searching for and watching videos about them. There is also the slow way where you have interest X and YouTube recommends you a video about Y since it noticed that it preformed well for other people interested in X.

I would never consider YouTube as trapping me as a frozen past as what kinds of videos it recommends are constantly changing as my interests in real life change.

To thaw the freeze you almost have to be constantly fighting the suggestions true nature, constantly scolding it for getting stuck into too tight of loops. It only really works if you feed it lots of negative feedback.

That said, I don’t personally use auto play often. I don’t let YouTube just pick random things for me over and over, unless it’s music in a background. Even on a tv I browse suggestions and pick one vs letting it choose.

For me YouTube is almost always able to recommend me a video I want to watch. I don't even use the negative feedback. I don't ever feel like it's frozen because it's matching my interests. If my interests stay the same it makes sense for YouTube to recommend videos about things I like and from creators I like.

I've noticed that its basically impossible for Youtube to recommend me anything outside the bubble it has assigned me. I end up using guest accounts to find new content but even that doesn't work too well (the guest account also ends up in its own bubble) and generally only recommends the most popular videos in a region so I even switch regions sometimes.

And lord help you if you accidentally click on some drivel that's suggested. It'll take years of ignoring it before it and similar videos are no longer suggested.

I liberally use the "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" options in the menu. Works okay for me.

These options are literally the only way for me to even get new recommendations. YouTube "helpfully" fills my recommendations with videos I've already watched, videos from channels I'm already subscribed to and watched, its own "mix" playlists of songs I listen to, and totally random "topics" it thinks I'm interested in. I have to "Don't recommend" every channel I subscribe to and "Not interested" every video I click on but don't watch fully, or they completely fill several pages of recommendations.

I don't know what happened or when, but it's impossible to discover new content there anymore.

There's also the option of going into your Youtube history and deleting things from it. More than once I've clicked on something out of curiosity and regretted it, only to have youtube recommend more of the same, but removing the original videos that caused it from my history seemed to do the trick. My theory is that some video categories have a highly addictive nature to certain groups of people. Youtube's algorithm picks up on this, and notes that people who watch x are likely to want to watch y and z etc. It could be conspiracy videos, pickup artist things, young women, or something feeding off of an insecurity. The algorithm doesn't care, but it can pick up on these patterns of viewership and entices you with more.

This started a couple of years ago. I remember quite distinctly when suddenly the suggestions were injected with things I already watched instead of actual on-topic suggestions. Tried disabling the watch history with mild success.

This was also around the time I just turned off the entire thing via DF YouTube :)

I now view YT like a dumb video hosting service; can't be bothered to fight with its stupid UI or inexplicable ML background fuckery.

Maybe some day they'll equip users with the tools that are appropriate to browse the biggest video platform of all time. They could take a hint from Steam on how to do that (or just use common sense)

Where is don't recommend channel? I saw a video about this when searching how to block specific channels but it doesn't appear in the UI of my YT android app...

In the browser it's in the "..." menu to the right of the recommended video's title. I don't know about the app.

I keep using them on this one set of day trading ads and they keep showing the exact same ad to me.

Don't resist it, they are right. You need it.

So true... I don’t do as you do with guest accounts etc i have premium because the only thing i hate more than my bubble is the adverts!

I tend to unsubscribe, or tell youtube to stop showing me this.

Is this YouTube specific? I often feel stuck in a bubble

It's uncanny how bad the major players are at this.

You can click here [1] to see your supposed 'interests'.

It's uncannily bad.

'Combat Sports' , 'Boating', 'Construction and Power Tools' and 'Cricket' (!) apparently among interests they think I haven though they are subjects which don't cross my mind.

I don't think I've even thought about 'Cricket' other than for them to tell me it's 'an interest'.

[1] https://adssettings.google.com/u/0/authenticated

Hah. For a job I had for a while I had to routinely search for movie names to make sure I got the spelling correct. Now google thinks I enjoy all the genres known.

I recently looked up car tires because mine were old and leaking air. It was a single day, but now it says I'm interested in "cars" and "car tires". No wonder why Seat started insistingly showing ads on my phone.

It also deduced correctly that I'm married with no kids, while my work account is married with teenage kids, probably from watching videos linked here in HN.

I have :

  Parental Status : Not A Parent

And then :

  Parenting
  Nursery & Playroom
  Babies & Toddlers
  Baby & Toddler Toys
  Baby Care & Hygiene
  Baby Strollers & Transport 
  Child Care
  Children's Clothing

An interesting algorithm you have there :D

Jeez how many do people usually have? There are just shy of 200 'interests' in my list. I'm not particularly interested in helping them out by editing it though. From what I saw the list is accurate in that it doesn't really contain anything I hate, but it's inaccurate since it's only a broken impression of all the things I like with many gaps.

Pet food and pet care supplies. I don't, and never will own a pet.

Maybe too many cat videos?

Kids should only be able to view content vetted by a human. Full stop.

Too bad it's never going to happen.

Historically, that human was called a parent. Parents today have no chance at the on-slaught of content and the delivery mechanisms for it. When I was a kid, there were 3 networks with a handful of UHF channels. Cartoons only ran on Saturday morning, most channels went off the air at midnight, and the TV censors were much more strict with would could be on the air. My parents had it easy. When I became a parent, the internet was still small, and YT wouldn't be a thing for another 10 years. I feel for my kid becoming a parent though, or others dealing with it now.

> Historically, that human was called a parent

Yes and no. From your own example, the censors and rules made it clear to parents what and when their kids could watch without the parents having to expend too much time and effort to double check everything. In theory, something branded 'YouTube Kids' would fit the same purpose and many parents probably assume it is fine based on their experience with offline media. The problem is there is no strictness or quality control like you mention.

There was also a network level curator like PBS, Nickelodeon or Disney. Are there people/teams making vetted youtube playlists of content that surpasses a certain level of quality?

That would be an interesting Kids mode. "Only allow videos from playlists that have been added/sunk to this account." Kind of a middle ground between making Google the content arbitrator and being able to watch every video before your kids do.

>There was also a network level curator like PBS, Nickelodeon or Disney.

That's kind of the point of YT though is to completely bypass the network curation. Nobody has what you want on or won't put your stuff on? Screw 'em! We bring you YouTube. The You was the big deal that bucked the network concept.

So no, there's never going to be a human curator for all of YT. If channels want to curate themselves, then they may or may not be rewarded for that with a larger subscriber base.

>That's kind of the point of YT though is to completely bypass the network curation.

Instead we have algoautoplay.

I'm describing opt in playlist producers. Why couldn't there be a level of "playlist curators" who exist not as channels. "Bob puts together really good playlists, whitelist all Bob approved videos." I subscribe to 10 curators and bobs my uncle. I want to follow bob for the videos he suggests not the ones he makes.

The idea of a channel curating itself is the anthesis of someone picking the best from many channels. Pop radio run by Taylor Swift would turn into her playing her album on repeat? How is that more useful than the album itself.

The evolution of the MTV VJ. It could even have an audio reaction track layered over the top of the playlist that can be toggled on off. They could add intro/outro commentary.

I would expect the people that would be good at doing that would not actually be interested in it since they would not really be able to monetize the viewers. The original owners would get the ad sales. Now, if they added ads to view while viewing the channel, maybe they could earn from those ads, or some smaller portion of the ad sales go to the list curator while the main still goes to content creator?

This is actually a brilliant idea and Youtube almost supports it. Channels can have playlists that have any videos, not only their own. All that's missing is to be able to restrict an account to certain playlists.

The other part is how to incentivize the creation of the playlists.

And a way to rank, score, sort, browse playlists. Currently the only way to stumble upon a playlist is to get linked to it from elsewhere or from an authors page?

Might break a little once Bob is popular enough to be offered money (or some other reward) for featuring videos they wouldn't otherwise pick. I do think it's a good idea though.

> Historically, that human was called a parent. Parents today have no chance at the on-slaught of content and the delivery mechanisms for it.

Unless you're letting a tablet, or the television raise your children, it's not because of the onslaught of content. The onslaught of content is nothing new - for the past century, mass media was producing more content than you could ever consume.

The problem is that parents aren't putting in the time and energy to curate the content their children consume. (I'm explicitly not going to go into the social reasons why, it's an interesting topic, but not really pertinent to this thread. Some people in this thread are bringing up technical reasons why, which I feel is more pertinent.)

It was a slippery slope. I'd like to claim that if parents spent less time staring at a screen in front of their children, there would also be less children staring at mind-numbing content online. The fact is, however, that many simply dump their kids in front of Youtube just so that they can spend time on social media themselves.

In other words: If we want to break kids' screen addictions then we need to start with their parents.

As a parent now going through this the whole thing I can't help but think of the "worse is better" essay. The conclusion I've come to is that we dove headlong into the promises of "better" technology and that worked for a long time, but since the rise of social media and smartphones we've crossed this threshold where "better is worse".

I grew up with a handful of channels and I can't really say it was much of a hardship. When I compare to the endless doomscrolling of YouTube for yet another Minecraft video I see my boy doing I can't help but feel like the algorithms have got his mind in a vice already. The technology seems better in every way, but the negatives are also amplified.

Ehh, it's not quite that unidimensional. Kids also used to roam freely around the neighborhood, and find the stash of porn mags in the local hobo camp.

YouTube Kids has a setting for that, at least: https://www.techlicious.com/blog/curated-content-youtube-kid...

I’m unable to find that setting in the YouTube Kids app on my iPhone. Is it on yours?

There are those who would say that that human should be a parental unit.

Those who are a parent would say that those who do have no idea.

That would depend a lot on the parent. I know plenty of parents who would agree.

I watched the decline in phases between my oldest nephew’s birth in 2007, my sons in 2011 and my nieces more recently.

YouTube is measurably worse, especially for children’s content. There was amazing music and educational stuff in there, and it’s still there. But those creators are gone in the sense that there isn’t a lot of new content as the garbage you describe took over.

It’s reflective of the poor leadership of that part of the company. Based on conversations with fellow parents, YouTube is a no-go zone for them. The idiot who got a big bonus for “engagement” targeting kids will be long gone when the brand toxicity kills the growth.

Look at Netflix as a comparison of a company with similar product, but who has self-respect. Netflix has a ruthless focus on engagement, but you don’t see the type of vacuous content. Netflix never auto played by 3 year old to a creepy clown hiding in a kids video. If anything, they elevated television in many ways.

>really make it hard for quality content to succeed

It's the opposite. Quality content goes viral where bad content will stop getting recommended to people.

>Cheap and almost copied content gets rewarded the most

What gets rewarded the most is entertaining videos. YouTube doesn't care if that video took 10 minutes to make or 10 months. It just sees how good the video is at entertaining people.

You said it yourself, it isn’t quality content that gets rewarded, it’s entertaining content or, more specifically, content that gets you engaged. So it isn’t the opposite, it’s their point exactly.

The parent implied that quality content was at a disadvantage by the algorithm when that is just not the case. I believe that quality content is correlated with its entertainment value.