The article mentions "Technology Connections titled 'Algorithms Are Breaking How We Think'"

I'm a huge fan of the channel, and that video is mostly great and insightful. But his being "puzzled" at the way people use the subscriptions "feed" is kinda surprising. The low percentaged from that feed should lead to asking questions to understand why, instead of assuming people are "doing it wrong". People use subscriptions as a sort of meta bookmarking system. It's also a way of honing their algorithm. People can have a wide variety of interests. Just because someone is subscribed to a channel on anime doesn't mean it's the thing they're looking for at the time they dip into that feed. And some channels just fill the feed up with posts that don't always necessitate the work of pruning it. So, that firehose ends up being a lot of noise. The ideal would be some sort of in-between. Where you can pare down the subscriptions feed based on a current interest. One doesn't need to see the very latest post by a creator of they aren't someone who is chronically online.

I think we will still see the emergence of "human algorithms" that personally curate content for you.

▲

LocalH 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't want any algorithms, AI or human, curating my default feed. I want my feed to be a chronologically-ordered listing of the content creators I choose to follow and like. If I want to explore the algorithm, that should still be possible, but it shouldn't be the default.

▲

whycome 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's what the subscriptions feed is. But in practice (when one subscribes to a lot of creators) it isn't always useful.

▲

ascagnel_ 2 days ago | parent [-]

I've found that creators and channels I've subscribed to don't always appear in the subscriptions feed. Thankfully, YouTube still posts an RSS feed for every channel, and following a bunch of them in my reader app reliably captures all the output. I'll dip in and out, only watching what I want, and it's harder to do that when a chunk of the feed is silently hidden from view.

	▲	pezezin 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There is an additional setting for notifications. Click on the little bell to the side of the channel name, and make sure to select to get all the notifications, otherwise they might get hidden.

▲

chongli 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You say that, but then you probably won’t like it when it happens. Some creators post way more than others. Low frequency posters tend to get swept away by the current.

Some of my favourite YouTube channels post very infrequently (one video every few months) whereas others post every single day. The YouTube algorithm seems to know this and pins the low frequency guys’ new videos right to the top when they come out.

▲

LocalH 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>You say that, but then you probably won’t like it when it happens. Some creators post way more than others.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a "discover" type of feed. I'm just saying it shouldn't be the forced default

	▲	chongli 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’m talking about creators I subscribe to. I don’t want the most prolific creators to dominate over the ones who post rarely among my subscriptions. I subscribe to creators to bookmark them and keep an eye on them, not to let them open their floodgates into my feed.

▲

zrobotics 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This, exactly. I find there's an inverse relationship between posting frequency and video quality. Channels like hyperspace pirate (DIY science/chemistry/physics) may post several times in a week if they are super into a project, then go 2 months without a new video. Those channels post videos that I will more reliably watch, since they don't post filler. Whereas one of the few video game channels I subscribe to (manyatruenerd) posts basically every day. Some of the videos are good, but there's a lot of filler. And that's unavoidable when trying to work to a schedule like that. I spent a few months trying to push a commit to my hobby project every day to see that green github history, and a lot of that stuff ended up being worse quality.

It's a tricky balance, since I don't necessarily want just a feed of my subscriptions, it really depends on what type of content I want to watch/engage with. There's a ton of time where I just want background noise while I work on something, that's where the previously mentioned video game channel and similar content are what I want. Whereas there's certain content (like hyperspace pirate or applied science) where if they post a video I don't watch until I can actually give it my full attention. I have my complaints with YouTube, but out of the main social media sites it seems to do the best job with being able to present an algorithmic feed that is actually useful. I tried TikTok for a few weeks, and as much as people were talking their algorithm up I just couldn't reliably signal what videos I actually wanted to watch. There's some very good content there, but for me at least I spent more time struggling against the algorithm since it kept trying to show videos I just don't care about.

And TikTok is leagues better than Instagram or Facebook. There are a few communities that I have to engage with in those sites, since that's just where the people involved are posting. But goddamn are the algorithmic feeds on both just a dumpster fire. The only content I have engaged with on Facebook for 5+ years is RC vehicle related, mainly the local racing club and other groups. And yet my Facebook feed is all political or Ai rage bait, they dint even show posts from my high-school friends. I see it every time I log in, and haven't clicked on any of the suggested posts I years. It's frustrating, since I'm providing them with tons of signal on what content I actually want to see, and that content is on their site. Meta just does such a poor job of allowing you to curate your feed that I gave up on their sites years ago. I wouldn't mind being able to see my old friends posts (although most of them also don't post anymore due to these issues) or at least see content related to my interests. I might spend more time in the site if that were the cadlse, instead I log on for 10 minutes once a week to see when the next race is scheduled.

▲

al_borland 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some of it has to do with app defaults. When you load up YouTube it doesn’t go to the subscriptions, it goes to the Recommended page. It has enough of the new videos from subscribed channels people watch, plus enough of the new videos from channels they commonly watch without a subscription, that people have no reason to go to the Subscriptions page.

Launching from the Subscriptions is an intentional act by people who are actively trying to avoid the Recommendation page, or where the Recommendation page failed to surface what they wanted.

I would not be at all surprised if any using of the Subscriptions page triggered YouTube to adjust their algorithm for that user to see more of what they played on the Recommendation page. They probably see the use of the Subscriptions as a failure of the Recommendation engine.

For a short while my YouTube app on my AppleTV was showing Watch Later and Subscriptions when it launched. I loved it. I assume they were just A/B testing, because it stopped doing that after a while.

▲

xbmcuser 2 days ago | parent [-]

I have set my history to be deleted for YouTube after just 3 months. This does surface some videos I have already watched but most recommendations are usually more from my subscriptions

	▲	mh- 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I wouldn't sweat it. I've let it keep my watch history since they launched the feature, and it still puts reruns in my recommended feed all the time.

▲

gobdovan 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think avoiding algorithms completely is tricky. Even things like podcast guests or suggestions from friends feel as manipulable but in a human way.

What works for me is checking if people I respect in a domain also blog or link elsewhere. That is how I found Peter Norvig's blog... or maybe it was on hacker news.

▲

whycome 2 days ago | parent [-]

Veritasium is another popular creator that would overlap with the HN audience. It deliberately uses different thumbnails and titles when videos are new. It's a human (afaik) using the A/B suggestions in the back end. So it's like a second degree AI manipulation.

▲

JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-]

That crap—together with the nonsensical kinetic weapon video—genuinely turned me off his channel. It clowned him up in a way that felt gimmicky, almost aimed for children versus adults.

	▲	zrobotics 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I can't put my finger on what exactly I find distasteful about his channel, but his content is just off-putting to me. The closest I can describe it is that it annoys me in the same way that shows on discovery or the history channel did 15-20 years ago before I quit watching cable TV. It just seems like it's over produced and glossing over details, maybe it's trying to aim fore a more general audience and that is what hurts it.

▲

HeavenFox 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah I don't understand why all YouTubers seem to despise "the algorithm", and some of the creators I follow even created their own rival, Nebula, that does not have "the algorithm". Without "the algorithm" I wouldn't find out about your channel in the first place!

▲

dostick 2 days ago | parent [-]

What is the purpose of that algorithm. I think YouTube’s algorithm purpose is to keep people engaged. The ethical algorithm would only suggest content user is interested in or may be interested based on interests of other users with similar subscriptions.

	▲	the_af 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		YouTube mostly suggests videos related to other videos I've watched or to my subscriptions. So it already works like this for me. It almost never suggests random crap. I'd be hard pressed to come up with an example where I was puzzled or infuriated by one of YT's suggestions... (Facebook and Reddit, on the other hand, are way more random and infuriating).
	▲	2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]