Algorithms are breaking how we think - Technology Connections
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.
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!
I’m so glad this was algorithmically recommended. Thanks lemmings!
I mean, algorithms are not bad at all if they are transparent. The "scaled" sorting in Lemmy is an algorithm and it does work great. You can take a look at the source code and see how it works. The problem here is not "algorithms" and we really shouldn't call it "algorithms" - it's tech companies force feeding you content they want you to see and preventing you from seeing the sites/posts/users you are actively following from reaching your feed. What Musk is doing on X is propaganda and we should call it that
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.
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.
Considering that my biggest issue with YouTube is the fact that subscribing to a channel means fucking nothing now, it doesn't surprise me at all.
Being subscribed to a channel used to actually inform you when that channel uploaded something new, every time without fail. Now, that system is a separate thing (the bell) and it doesn't even fucking work 100% of the time. I subscribe to and have notifications enabled for about 13 channels that upload every single day; I only get notified like once a month about a random video whenever YouTube decides it wants to actually do the thing I have told it to do.
Like, I am subscribed to Technology Connections and have notifications enabled but this post is how I have come to know this video was uploaded.
i have never understood this complaining about subscriptions, it has always worked absolutely fine for me
i subscribe to a channel and their videos show up on the subscriptions page, that's it, it works?
Apparently my way of consuming YT is very different from most people. I do rely on subscriptions feed, but I have never used notifications. The feed still works perfectly - for me at least.
Just out of curiosity. Why do you need notifications? Do you try to watch the videos as soon they are posted?
I subscribe to and have notifications enabled for about 13 channels that upload every single day; I only get notified like once a month about a random video whenever YouTube decides it wants to actually do the thing I have told it to do.
This has not been my experience. I subscribe with bell for almost every channel I follow. If anything I almost get too many notifications, but at least I get to decide whether each notification/video is worth watching or dismissing. The new video notifications aren't always immediate, but I almost never see a video on my subscription feed that I haven't already been notified about.
There’s absolutely no incentive to log in to YouTube now that subscriptions and bells do nothing to control your feed. End stage enshittification.
I use Newpipe since I'm not going to login. No ads
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 use https://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 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.
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.
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.
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.
On an unrelated note do you feel youtube videos feel more corperate/professional nowadays?
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.
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.