  > It does make me wonder about the algorithm

IIRC he uses a pretty simple algorithm. I remember him discussing the gating mechanism and how he had it follow a cycloid. I think there's a lot of opportunities for others to optimize the algorithms and he is focused on the physical engineering side. I'd love to see him collaborating with someone who does more reinforcement leaning. I also think it's very impressive what he achieves with such simplified algorithms.

If I'm misremembering or missed something please correct me. I'm out now but I'll try to find the video of him talking about gating when I'm back if someone hasn't already linked it.

Also, I love how YouTube has all these "small" creators doing extremely impressive stuff. It's a real shame the algorithms make discovery challenging. The beauty of something like YouTube is not about just getting something to watch, it's by being able to get access to any content. Search is always a difficult problem to solve but I'm afraid it's currently over optimizing for views rather than intent. Which, to be fair, is much harder to measure. But I say over optimized because frequently I can search the title with 90% accuracy and fail to find the video. Something minor like missing an "s" or something effectively non meaningful. It's extremely frustrating...

▲ 8note 2 days ago | parent [-]

the algorithm in question is youtube's for how its getting to all the HN users at about the same time. i was also suggested this same video a few days back

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godelski 2 days ago | parent [-]

My post discussed two algorithms: the gating algo for CARA[0] and the search algorithm for YouTube.

If I'm reading your comment accurately, you're mentioning the discovery algorithm, which is neither of these. I also got the video, but I was already subscribed (it was suggested to me when it was released). Yes, the discovery algorithm has some of these issues but I'm more understanding of that because it's a much harder problem.

Both have self inflicted problems and I think they can be more easily addressed:

Discovery over optimizes to recent views and can get stuck in certain genres[1]. There is also a strong preference to things average user enjoys which doesn't work well for those of us who are only slightly less schizophrenic than the algorithm itself. Too much exploitation, not enough exploration (I wish this was a setting I could adjust. My mood changes, how can I let the algorithm know?)

Search has two critical self inflicted problems.

1) after about 5 results it will suggest completely unrelated videos (looks like it hands off to the discovery feed). Sometimes I need page two... just fucking show me more...

2) the problem I mentioned previously, where it distrusts you prioritizing popular videos over a trivial spelling or grammatical error. Google search has this exact same problem.

[0] my dumbass didn't check which video was linked. It's this one where he discusses it. At 12:30 in the video

[1] this leads me to having tons of YouTube tabs open as I'm unsure if a video I'm interested in but don't have the current bandwidth for is never going to be shown to me again

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barbecue_sauce 2 days ago | parent [-]

The quote in your intial reply ("It does make me wonder about the algorithm") was referring to the YouTube algorithm.

	▲	godelski 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The comment you responded to clarified that there are two YouTube algorithms (in reality there are many, but was distinguishing the categories). I was talking about search while the response was talking about discovery (like what you see when you open YouTube. The automatic suggestions)