- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
A slightly unusual video from the fantastic Technology Connections channel. It articulates a lot of my own thoughts on social media, “algorithms” and AI.
What surprised me the most was the statistic that only 3% of author’s views come from the subscriptions feed. This is wild to me because subscriptions are pretty much the only way I have ever used YouTube.
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My main reaction when I saw this us “wait? Nobody uses subscriptions?” When nearly exclusively use my subscriptions to look at things and maybe one or twice a week go on the home tab because YouTube home tab is fucking garbage. I also do this on other platforms where I have my followed tab I watch.
Right?! It’s the same for me!
This is the video that led me to actually start taking a hard look at social media (I was already off of Instagram, but that was almost unconscious in that I just started loathing the app), and led me down the rabbit hole that eventually led me to Lemmy!
That’s awesome. Welcome on Lemmy!
It’s a really good video. He did a very good job putting words to my thoughts too, I’ve struggled to say why I don’t like AI beyond “it’s not very good at things”, but as he touches on in the video, that is only one small part.
I was also very surprised by the 3% statistic, I think I watch nearly everything from my subscriptions, the recommended is either completely useless from whatever the algorithm has decided I want or showing me videos I intentionally didn’t watch.
I went and followed him on Mastodon, and in that thread learned you can just add a channel to an RSS feed by using the link to their channel. I’m sure that’s old news to some, but as I already use an RSS app, I’m going to start switching over I think.
I’ve been using RSS to keep up with channels and it’s been great. I recently found out that you can use a different feed url to only get the main videos from the channel (to filter out shorts and livestreams)
So instead of the channel url (which gets converted to
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC...) you usehttps://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULF...(might stand for User Uploads Long Form)If you use an addon (like Feedbro) you can automatically get the first rss URL and manually convert it by clicking on Find Feeds In Current Tab when on the channel’s page, then right-click copy the “rss” hyperlink. Otherwise, you can look for the channel ID in the page source by searching for
=UC.That’s really cool, I miss more things being outwardly interoperable. Very useful feature, I can’t wait until they deem it too usable and remove it.
I was explaining RSS to a friend (I follow their Substack blog via RSS, yes, I read it in the ugly Feedbro interface) and they were a bit weirded out by the idea until I went into how this was kind of a default option a few years ago.
One day I’ll have a home server setup that will keep the Web 2.0 dream alive for me.
That’s super helpful, thank you for sharing! I appreciate it :)
Wow. That RSS feature surely is like >15 years old and by now it’s so irrelevant they just forgot to shut it down. Because no one uses RSS anymore these days, and subscribing like that does absolutely nothing for YouTube’s business model.
I’m still using RSS. YouTube lives off ads/subscriptions, they don’t care how you find the videos.
I’m so glad this was algorithmically recommended. Thanks lemmings!
Depending on how you browse, it was not algorithmically recommended. Even if you’re using “active” to filter, it’s barely an algorithm. Certainly not a personalized one, unless you’re just looking at the subscribed feed, in which case the personalization was done by you, not the formula.
That’s kind of the appeal of this kind of website, when there is automatic sorting it’s very straight forward and user mailable.
Person who invented sorting algorithms watching you sort by new “to avoid algorithms”:
(yes, I’m also guilty of milking the ancient computer science vs. venture capital vocabulary joke; if you wanna start a flamewar better do it about “sorting” vs “ordering”)
Perhaps there is a better term and I should be more clear, but people know, roughly speaking, what “new” does, even “active” is fairly straight forward. They are literally algorithms but not what people are talking about when they complain about “algorithms”.
When people complain about the “algorithm”, in the colloquial sense, they’re talking about some nebulous unknowable method of sorting that only the people at meta and alphabet are privy to the details of, not the literal definition of the word.
I should have chosen my words more carefully but I think the point stands, there is a marked difference between a system where it is clear to the user how things get sorted, and the home, discovery or “for you” systems of major social media sites.
Grayjay. Nuff said.
I think I read somewhere that the majority of views typically come from videos being recommended on users’ home pages. That is the reason why content creators focus so much on the youtube algorithm, since if their videos don’t get recommended, they don’t get as many views.
(I haven’t watched the linked video, so that may be exactly what they talk about)
Well the 3% is just interesting tidbit, but the video should be watched by everyone.
The main point is that we are being trained to not think independently and let the sites tell us what to think. Our current political situation is exactly because of this.
I can say that while I near exclusively use the subscriptions feed to start browsing, and will add interesting videos from it to the watch later list, once i’m nearing the end of a video I’ll often choose from the recommended videos on that video rather than going back to the subscriptions page.
I’ve felt this. YouTube tried to radicalise me to the left ( Yes, I do realise the irony of saying this on this particular server, but it’s my story, and merits telling regardless), and I felt myself spiralling. I realised it, and cut off all of the algorithms. Now I use Freetube on the desktop, so that I only have the content I choose, and the fediverse as other social media.
Serious question: radicalize in what way?
I generally skip ALL propaganda videos longer than 10 seconds, no matter the orientation or product advertised. It’s my BS detector from years of watching TV as a kid. (Only exception is when I want to see the latest trends in ad techniques, and analyze them).
I honestly wonder how does a radicalization process look like. 🤔
So, context: I’m still fairly young (right now in college), from Europe and fairly into politics (US and otherwise), this all happened when I was still in high school. On YouTube I watch primarily tech/educational content. And then the algorithm starts pushing TLDR news on me. That’s fine, those guys are generally ok and their sources are reliable. Besides, I already have plenty of European news sources and want to catch up to the US. Then slowly new channels were introduced. At first confirming my beliefs, how healthcare is terrible et. all(in the US). Then it started planting small lies, like how there are “only two federal holidays”(it took me a while, even after quitting to dismiss this as a lie and actually checking my sources), and it started escalating, trying to push me left and towards more radical solutions. I’m not yet sure exactly when or how, but at some point I smelled bull crap and realised I was being messed up with. At which point I quit and started curing my own feed.
Interesting. Sounds like it saw you watch “TLDR” content, and binned you with the “I want simple answers, here and now” cohort, a prime target for manipulation videos. Probably could have pushed you in any direction you seemed inclined to follow.
There is this interesting push and pull with algorithms, they need to show content users will engage with, but, their main value to the companies is that it allows them to easily manipulate what is seen.
They push people to hard they stop using the algorithm, but if they just let the algorithm act purely one what people engage with, then they can’t monetize it.
There is a third access of preventing people from going down self destructive rabbit holes, but they don’t care about that until people start talking about regulating them or start moving away.
That push and pull is exactly why they’ve been intentionally using them to rot people’s brains. The dumber and more apathetic you can make your users, the more you can monetize them, you first minimize the push so you can maximize the pull. This is not an accidental “quirk” of modern algorithms, it’s part of the design. Money must be maximized at all costs, including the mental health of the users and the stability of society. Money uber alles. The techbros will drive our society into the ground without a second thought if it makes them a few bucks richer. They’re not planning to stay here anyway. We are just a resource to them, and they will exploit us to the fullest to pursue their unachievable techno-utopia fantasies.
Great video, as always. I would suggest PocketTube for Firefox for controlling the chaos of YouTube subscriptions. I don’t see shorts at all, and if I’m not looking for, say, music or Star Trek content, I can just turn those categories off.
