If my kid watches an hour of unboxing toy videos, I shouldn't have to try and disable 3,000 channels of toy unboxings in an effort for that topic to never surface again.
Diversity of thought and topic is much more critical when they are kids.
But from my kids' viewing habits, I don't see it. The algorithm is seems super narrowly focused.
https://x.com/hitsman/status/1845168160691061121
Andrej Karpathy commented on the narrowness of the algorithm just the other day.
Anyone who works on this stuff should be ashamed of yourselves. You’re modern day cigarette companies.
How would you go about writing the recommendation algorithm?
De-jargoned, that means clicking the like button means I want to see more things like that, and the dislike button means I don't want to see things like that. If I watched something all the way through, but clicked the dislike button, that means I don't want to see things that produced a similar response from people who tend to react the way I do.
This kind of algorithm is not going to increase watch time over the short term, and might not over the long term either, which makes it unlikely to be adopted by any for-profit service.
"The algorithm" was different in the early 2000's and all of our lives were richer for it. Before Facebook publicly embedded psychologists into the development teams and before the goal was more and more attention. The internet used to be great.
I probably wouldn’t. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook were all invented before recommendation algorithms existed, and they worked great. Reddit still doesn’t use a recommendation algorithm.
Would they make less money without this stuff? Yeah, probably. But I think that’s a good deal for humanity.
I was really struck in The Social Dilemma how at the end they asked devs if they’d let their children use the platforms they’ve made. People interviewed overwhelmingly said no. If that’s the case, you know it’s bad. Just stop.
Would love your input.
iOS and Android.
On the other hand, it's so soul-crushingly depressing to contemplate how most youtube content targeted at kids is such brain-addling garbage fucking up their psyche in all sorts of ways, all for the sake of ad impressions... If there's a place for the expression "late capitalism" this has to be it
Fortunately this is one of the killer apps of LLMs IMO - I have built multiple small tools to help educate our daughter, like this guy: https://x.com/random_walker/status/1848388462782673340
I also never subscribe to any channels, watching a few videos pretty much guarantees they will pop up on the homepage every once in a while.
It allows us to control the algorithm. It’s all LLM translating to YouTube search queries under the hood.
Visually it looks the same.
The suggested videos come from predefined buckets on topics they love.
E.g. 33% fun math, 33% DIY engineering, 33% creative activities.
Video recommendations that have a banned word in the title/desc don't get displayed e.g. MrBeast, anything with Minecraft in it, never gets surfaced.
For anyone interested in using it, send me an email.
[email protected]