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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34415 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Is YouTube's business model imploding in slow motion?

They've been pushing more inane bullshit in recommended with zero prompting, and the algorithm just seems totally broken from too many manual overrides at this point. I don't see video ads thanks to Vanced, but the image ads are getting increasingly schizo or just plain weird. Who is actually paying for them any more?

Their personalization obviously isn't working too well either, given all my ads for menopause meds and Israeli flag lapel pins. Do they think I'm a republican congressman with a Bulwark subscription or something?

As a youtube premium subscriber(on principle if a service offers a choice between ad and pay model I choose any reasonably priced paid model) I find the recommendation algorithm works fairly well. There are some "sticky" recommendations that happen when I watch some link I wish were easier to get the algo to forget about but it mostly works.

Here is a random f5 on my youtube homepage.

I can pretty much tell where each of these suggestions is coming from and

  1. I sometimes watch random documentaryies

  2. I watched on of the "blood on the clocktower" no holds barred videos on the behest of someone here

  3. Tech humor skit that combines my watching of skit comedy with my watching of tech videos

  4. Video essay about some video game nonsense that I use as background noise

  5. JRE clip because sometimes I'll watch recommended episodes with interesting people, although I rarely watch the clips

  6. Short look into something I might find interesting

  7. music playlist because I recently got that Sanatra song in my head and played it

  8. Old documentary short, a category I watch somewhat frequently

  9. Board game review from a board game reviewer I watch sometimes

  10. Video game challenge video, I don't watch many of these but it's adjacent to some things I watch, suggestions can't all be hits

  11. TV show debunking/confirming video I sometimes watch these.

  12. a stand-up set

If I didn't already know what I wanted to put on I think I'd happily click on about half of these recommendations.

I also find the algorithm is pretty responsive to changes in my watching habits. When a new Path of Exile season comes out and I start consuming more PoE videos I find that pretty much every refresh will include a video from one of the PoE content creators.

I think some of the problems of people here are self created. If you're not logging into an account and intentionally throwing wrenches into the gears then how can it be a surprise when the algorithm doesn't work for you?

Most likely that inane bullshit is the kind of thing 'normal people' love, and pushing it on their feed means they watch more of it. see: his videos getting millions of views. Ditto for schizo/weird ads, less confidently, probably relatively stupid people click on them. This is the same reason google sucks nowadays - normal people don't want, either revealed preference or intend, to see a RTFM link when they google an error message, they click on and read the shitty copywriting spam so that's what they get.

I am interested in following Rumble's growth. It is a free speech-oriented alternative. As they grow, so too will pressure on them to conform.

Sometimes the ads are links to other videos (actually, they may all be links to other vids on YT), see these two examples.

As to your opening question, there was some discussion a couple weeks ago about the potential for online advertising to implode and die right now, so maybe you're seeing a knock-on effect. But, it could just be YouTube being busted, and it's arguably been busted for at least a year now.

I would add to that one observation - last weekend I decided to go full memory lane on some of my experiences around 5-10 years ago. A long not visited friend of mine was on a call and we got deep into nostalgia about the stuff we did, played and watch. During that time I was looking into the old videos on youtube but what I ended up at is a massing fucking graveyard of deleted videos...... Some of them escaped the gruesome faith but locked behind 18+ for....some reason....even if the author was last seen like 3 years ago.

I just hate how I cannot just browse any site without an account apparently.

I've heard this a lot and it is bad. Kind of hope they video files still around, just behind a tombstone or something, but videos are large enough they may be deleted to save space

Bad user interface doesn't actually mean their business model is failing. More likely they're just trying to take advantage of their virtual monopoly.

Tangentially I find those youtube thumbnails ghoulishly inhuman. Creators have access to pretty complex A/B testing for what drives clicks with instant feedback, so over time they have slowly "gradient descended" into plastering those open-mouthed staring faces everywhere – not as a conscious decision by anybody, but simply because that's the local minima when you do large scale tests of the minds of children. It's almost Lovecraftian, like a human puppeted by a deeply alien mind that you have no goals in common with.

Thank you. I recently logged into Youtube from a work computer not tied to any of my existing accounts (looking for a how-to video) and was genuinely taken aback by the home page. Just a bombardment of hyper saturated colors and distorted faces.

I just don't understand how it still works despite what I assume is a substantial number of people who are sick of it. I have for years absolutely refused to ever click on any video with one of those fucking thumbnails. Same with clickbait titles. I will not do it. I can't be the only one.

I also don't watch advertisements, actively avoid products I see in ads, actively avoid believing any implicit claims in ads like 'wow thats a cool rugged truck', and am not interested in almost all advertised products anyway for various practical reasons. But ads still work for most people, who don't do any of that.

You aren't the only one, but you're a minority! Similar to tiktok - it's uniformly useless garbage, despite me exploring a lot of niches for a few hours out of morbid interest (there's a few ways to ignore the algorithm and just watch a roughly global-view-biased feed), but lots of even very smart and successful older people I know love watching the cat videos or humor videos or whatever.

Same here, but presumably there's not nearly enough of us to significantly affect anything. I think it mostly targets children; they don't run ad blockers to the same extent as other groups, they often spend a large amount of time on youtube, and are more perhaps more easily influenced by advertising itself.

For the same reason people may be "tired" of the Marvel formula, but those movies still make hundreds of millions, because there are millions of literal children/teenagers and also, millions of non-English speaking people globally who have basically teenage minds when it comes to Western entertainment, such as YT videos or blockbuster movies.

In the 70's and 80's, not only did those in charge of making entertainment were largely from the entertainment business, but since you didn't really know why a movie made a lot of money, you could make it a little smarter or whatever. Now, in a world where every script has been thrown into a computer to analyze for best performance, and the guy writing the checks used to run the theme park division of the same corporation six months ago, there's going to be nobody who cares about appealing to more than the median consumer, and the sad reality, is a lot of even successful movies from the 70's and 80's and 90's could've been even more successful if they were a little dumber - the rest of the audience were basically paying a tax to appease smarter viewers because those people were in charge.

Now, they're not.

But, to circle back to the topic of YouTube, new-media creators have the opportunity (modulo sufficient resources) to make things that put the traditional entertainent industry to shame, stuff that has more niche focus.

Honestly Elon Musks might have a chance at turning around twitter. Granted he way overpaid but it did get him a seat at the table. And he does have magic for being efficient and getting shit down. He has a lot of directions he can go with it. Payments seems first.

I wrote a response to this idea as a top-level post above: https://www.themotte.org/post/181/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/32443?context=8#context. To summarize, I disagree that he has a chance at turning around Twitter.

Trying to drive traffic I take it.

Which brings up a conundrum eventually would have commented when I read front page but stubborn on driving it.

The just made the utterly incomprehensible change such that when you go to an individual channel's 'video' section, you can ONLY sort by "recently uploaded" or "popular."

There is now no way to do an easy sort by upload date to find someone's oldest videos.

Assuming charitably there was a rational reason for this, I would guess youtube makes more money when a video being watched is new and hot, and/or it is easier on the server to fetch a video that has been watched millions of time or was recently uploaded than to dredge a 5-10 year old video that got relatively few views up from the archives.

But its just a consistent trend of degrading user experience and flexibility in favor of forcing algo-curated content down your throat. With the common problem of overfitting wherein watching 1-2 videos on a certain topic or by a certain creator causes the site to serve you up literal dozens more from said user or on said topic, even interjecting it into search results for other topics.

I thumbs down almost all videos I watch by habit now in order to avoid the algo getting any uppity ideas about what it feels like I should be watching.

I think you can still do the "date:[MM-DD-YYYY]" search. But still, it is frustrating seeing YouTube gimp the search function as the years go on.

I thumbs down almost all videos I watch by habit now in order to avoid the algo getting any uppity ideas about what it feels like I should be watching.

What's the benefit to viewing YouTube videos logged in? I don't use YouTube a lot, but when I do, I always use a clean browser session. Modern browsers make this easy with private/incognito mode.

One big advantage is the thing most posts in the thread have been complaining about: The Algorithm (TM)

I'm going to go against the consensus here and say that I actually quite like the suggested videos page. The results are far from perfect but if a video appears on my homepage there's a better-than-even chance that it will be relevant to my interests, vs a roughly 0% chance for videos on the front page in incognito mode. And I don't think the results have got noticeably worse in recent months/years.

Logging in also gives you access to other features, including the subscriptions feed that shows you new videos from channels you've subscribed to, the ability to make comments (yes, youtube comments as a whole are trash, but there are still certain pockets that have value), and being able to give upvotes that at the margin will encourage creators to make more of the sort of content you enjoy.

Interesting. That makes sense.

the subscriptions feed that shows you new videos from channels you've subscribed to

BTW, YouTube does support RSS. The URL looks something like https://youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=... where the channel_id is a long string of letters and numbers.

Suggested videos still works, but it's somewhat worse than it was a decade/half a decade ago. Half of the suggested videos are just generic popular ones that are somewhat genre relevant - I'll try to explore some small niche and half the videos will be 5k of kinda-what-i-want and half will be 1M view videos in the nearest popular niche, but you can just ignore that.

Well, you don't have to pass the age-verification for some videos, and it saves your place (not perfectly, but it's kinda nice). That's kind of it?

Now that I think of it, bypassing the age verification is the only reason I bother logging in.

I also have a playlist of some hard-to-find songs saved that I add to occasionally.

The algorithm I think is bruised by something adjacent to partisanship. They continually seem to steer people away from organically popular pop culture critics and towards institutionally captured boring ones with horrible engagement ratios.

I feel like that doesn't happen to me, unless I get a little too close to the news.

Is YouTube's business model imploding in slow motion?

Bad user experience is not the same thing as business model failing. Google realizes they can make a lot of money by degrading the user experience while still not losing users. YouTube is full of so many ads, spam, and clickbait thumbnails an title bait. And also, too many shitty sponsors by creators. It's like the world's biggest infomercial and carnival mixed together. It's hard to target video ads as well as text.

Who is actually paying for them any more?

Usually politicians or big brands trying to build awareness. Quantifiable ROI is not that important.

True, but I feel like by the time only Cellular Renewal Potions Druid is buying your ads, something has gone horribly wrong on the business side of things.

Never underestimate the amount of money scams have for advertising.

I'll say their search system is impressively bad lately. Every search gives you maybe three results for what you're actually searching before recommending you things you've already seen that are completely unrelated. The only explanation I can think of comes from my experience in a completely different field. My boss will often have me make adjustments to our site or ad network that, without getting too into it, essentially trade a little bit of the system's health or user experience for a short-term bump in impressions/clicks.

With the search problem I described, it's possible that a PM had a bonus or other incentive to increase the clickthroughs on the "recommended" tab. Not being able to make this increase through genuine growth, they tell the engineers to cannibalize the search feature to also promote recommended videos to the user. The engineers ask "are you sure about this?" before just doing their job. And then another part of the user experience is shortsightedly consumed.

Any other ideas/explanations as to why this happens?

I dunno, but YouTube is convinced I am a huge Jordan Peterson and Fox News fan. I have yet to click on a Fox News link and only occasionally watch a Jordan Peterson video.

You really need to click the ... in the bottom right of the video thumbnail and select "not interested", or "dont' recommend channel", I find that this fixes the annoying increase in weird recommendations after I watch a single video outside what I usually watch.

I've been doing that, and all it seems to do now is cause all your recommendations to be generic kiddie phone-zombie shit like in the first pic.

It feels like there's a watershed threshold, where the system realizes that there's a big split between blue and red tribe videos/creates and their fans. The system defaults to blue but if you manage to convince it you swing the other way, it will push red stuff hard and stop showing you blue stuff. I'm sure there this is not the only axis though.

I had almost no political videos in my home page. I watched one redneck compilation video, and all of sudden I got tons of Fox News, Daily Wire, etc. videos.

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