YouTube Is Messing With the Order of Videos In Some User Feeds (gizmodo.com) 92
YouTube is testing non-chronological subscription feeds to try and serve you content that it thinks you'll want to see at the top. The problem with this is that the subscription feed exists because users subscribed to content that they want to see. If they don't, they will unsubscribe, thereby removing unwanted content from the feed. Gizmodo reports: YouTube confirmed the test on Twitter after some users noticed the change and inquired as to why the heck their subscription feed was no longer in chronological order. YouTube must have missed the memo about how users react when platforms mess with the order of the sacred feed.
Here's YouTube's how-to and troubleshooting Twitter account explained the test: "Just to clarify. We are currently experimenting with how to show content in the subs feed. We find that some viewers are able to more easily find the videos they want to watch when we order the subs feed in a personalized order vs always showing most recent video first." Weird, considering YouTube already offers recommended videos based on your viewing habits and subscribed channels in its sidebar.
Here's YouTube's how-to and troubleshooting Twitter account explained the test: "Just to clarify. We are currently experimenting with how to show content in the subs feed. We find that some viewers are able to more easily find the videos they want to watch when we order the subs feed in a personalized order vs always showing most recent video first." Weird, considering YouTube already offers recommended videos based on your viewing habits and subscribed channels in its sidebar.
Stopit (Score:5, Informative)
I really REALLY wish youtube would just make subscribe a real subscribe and not fart with it. If I subscribe to a channel there is a reason I subscribed to it, and I want to see all it's content show in my subscription feed.. Also show them all in chronological order. If a channel isn't of my interest I will unsubscribe! This whole "we will decide what you actually want to see BS is just more work on your part that I DO NOT WANT YOU TO DO!!"
Re:Stopit (Score:5, Insightful)
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YouTube "AI" algorithms, paired with Google's Total Information Awareness, know more about what you want to watch than you do. Just lay down and let the computer do your thinking for you, it's better that way. Humans are obsolete, all hail the technocracy!
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Then why is it they've yet to be able to recommend a channel I want to watch?
They throw gaming crap at me because I watch videos with tips on how to get specific achievements. They throw music videos at me because my wife showed me a couple videos but I have zero interest in music (and none of the genres are even close to what we've watched), etc.
They seem to ignore most of the channels I have shown interest in, which are generally smaller & not mainstream interests. The bulk of the videos I watch are
Strava started doing this too (Score:3)
I do a lot of cycling and use Strava, but last year they decided to do a similar thing and instead of a chronological feed of rides that other users that I have chosen to follow in my feed, I get a jumbled mess of others users rides in a random order. I used to use it to see who had ridden today, maybe call them up for a ride, now I can't know if I've seen everybody's rides as scrolling until I see an activity I've already seen, or one from yesterday, no longer means anything.
Their support is taking the sta
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I used to use it to see who had ridden today, maybe call them up for a ride, now I [have to spend more time on youtube] to see who had ridden today
Mission accomplished, for the advertising that recently finished removing "don't be evil" from their code of conduct.
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Youtubes message to you, fuck you and fuck your subscriptions we want to charge billions to influence your decisions by feeding you propaganda that you can not escape. Sicko psycho control freaks, why are they fucking with subscriptions because they want to control people by forcing the content the fundamentalist corporatists wants onto you whether you want it or not.
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Oh, and because our complaints mailbox does not work.
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It's not a bug, it's a feature? (Score:2)
Huh? I noticed glitches in the temporal order in Youtube's subscription feed over a year ago.
So, are they saying that it was supposed to be glitchy all along or that it is going to be even worse?
If the second, isn't the lack of randomness in the recommendations bad enough? Please don't add yet another glitchy algorithm where it isn't needed! Fix it the damn thing!
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Ugh. The "recommendations" just being variations on the last 3 videos I've watched is just making YouTube worthless as a quick stop entertainment medium. Recommendations are to help find new things, not what I already know about (although a single category of related would be fine).
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Re: It's not a bug, it's a feature? (Score:1)
Thank you for proving the point.
Someone isn't a Nazi for not liking a YouTube subscription sorting change, but your immediate response is to go full dehumanized hate on anyone who gets called one, and legitimize anything evil that happens to them.
I'd point out the irony of your behavior, but you're too fucking stupid to comprehend it.
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It's fascinating how ALL the responses to my post are by anonymous cowards. I think you maggots have proved my point- self-proclaimed Nazis are worthless shitbags who deserve a bullet in the head and nothing more.
If you are not Casey Neistat or BuzzFeed forget it (Score:1)
YouTube pushes what they want to push. Secureteam10's channel with over 1.5M subs, is no longer being recommended to those who watch it, and those subbed with alerts on are not getting notified of new posts. They are however recommending thirdphaseofmoon's channel to those who do not watch it (thirdphaseofmoon is christian right-wing disinfo).
Neistat, BuzzFeed and Top ten lists of any kind, that is what youtube's political controllers want you to watch. They are so stupid and transparent.
Memo from Alphabet to YouTube (Score:5, Funny)
Memo:
From: Alphabet HQ
To: YouTube
Hey you guys at YouTube... everything's still working just fine, isn't it time you fixed that (again)??
Remember, we struck out "Don't be evil" so make those users squeal!
Youtube is evil (Score:1)
1) Start play a video on youtube.com on my phone, it plays perfectly, and a popup appears..... "Video cannot be played, enable Google Play Services".... erm except the video is playing behind the popup, and "Google Play Services" is their major source of spyware that I do not want. So no, I won't.
2) I search on DuckDuckGo on my Samsung 8, selected a video for playing in DDG.... Youtube says it cannot be played. Go to youtube.com, plays perfectly, try again on DDG, still not working. Claims the browser doesn
Make it optional (Score:1)
Listen up, and listen good, Google. These sorts of changes accumulate to make using your products a very stressful experience at times. At least make this kind of stuff optional.
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Thatâ(TM)s annoying... (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)d know when I got to the first video Iâ(TM)d already seen, Iâ(TM)ve seen all the new ones. How the fuck am I supposed to know now?
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I'dâ(TM)answerâ(TM)yourâ(TM)commentâ(TM)butâ(TM)can't%20fucking(ahh shitâ(TM))readâ(TM)t.
Another site that thinks it knows better... (Score:5, Insightful)
.
Don't your programmers have anything better to work on?
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> "chronological order,"
I started uploading videos to YouTube just over twelve years ago, and I can't even see my own videos sorted by date. At least Google is consistent in not allowing both content creators and consumers to sort by date.
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Yeah these “algorithmic feeds” are annoying as fuck. I don’t need the service guessing what i want to see.
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>>Yeah these "algorithmic feeds" are annoying as fuck. I don't need the service removing what it doesn't want me to see.
Fixed.
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How else could they charge extra for the top spot in people’s feed?
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How else could they charge extra for the top spot in people’s feed while making it less obvious to the average viewer that that's what they're doing. (FTFY)
Modern Google in a Nutshell (Score:2)
Granted they've always been a bit weird with how they show content in search results and the like but lately it's become much more extreme, to the point that result sets being given to me through their search rarely matches up with what I want. They use previous search data to coach the next result despite being in another subject area altogether and it drives me bonkers.
I've almost completely moved over to DuckDuckGo now, it's not the greatest but at least searches seem to come back with what I want and no
Netflix (Score:3)
Netflix keeps doing the same thing to my watch list and it's fucking annoying.
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Worse, Netflix buries the watch list - and on Roku, the position is constantly changing.
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Might as well just put them last, I can scroll up to the bottom faster at this point.
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I don't think you understand. I'm using an Apple TV and the menus are always in the correct order.
They're randomizing my list of things I've added to watch later, so sometimes something I added three months ago shows up before something I added five minutes ago. And when viewing the list and viewing more details about a movie/show, sometimes when I simply go back to the list it's randomized again!
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Just like Facebook (Score:4, Insightful)
They're almost certainly doing this to promote channels and content that they deem to be acceptable. Facebook does the same thing: posts that they believe will drive more engagement will appear more frequently. Posts that they don't think will drive cash or are simply things that they disagree with will appear less frequently, if at all.
A lot of content creators lately, like Mark Dice, have been announcing that their subscribers aren't seeing their new videos at all in their subscription feeds. This is probably an early implementation of this "feature"
Easy fix for those of us here (Score:5, Informative)
YouTube already serves up RSS feeds for every channel (e.g. Postmodern Jukebox's feed [youtube.com]). You can find the link in the page source for any channel. They also have feeds for playlists and likely some other pages as well, though I haven't seen them in a casual glance through the source. Thankfully, I can drop a link to any random channel or playlist on my RSS client of choice [feedbin.com] and it'll parse the link to that channel or playlist from the page, allowing me to manage my subscriptions on a more granular level than what YouTube itself offers. For instance, BuzzFeed puts out a ton of videos that I have zero interest in (nearly all of their videos and content, in fact!), but their weekly Worth It [youtube.com] series of videos are something that my wife and I find entertaining to watch together, and that feed lets me subscribe to just those videos, without having to mess with any sort of filtering or other stuff.
In the end, I find that managing my subscriptions via RSS is easier (one place to manage all subscriptions), more configurable (Feedbin has some powerful filtering actions that can be applied if there isn't a playlist/channel with the specific content I want), and it's also better at protecting my privacy to boot, thanks to the fact that my subscriptions to that feed is now aggregated with everyone else using the RSS service, meaning that YouTube/Google has way less visibility into my interests and preferences.
Re:Easy fix for those of us here (Score:5, Funny)
Ohhh wish you hadn't divulged the use of RSS to avoid YT's stupid antics.. Now they'll probably remove the RSS feed and then we'll be stuck with YT's stupid antics... Thanks a lot.... :-
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I'm sure that's exactly what Youtube's exec wanted; people spending less time on their platform while still getting the content.
People this is all about adverting (Score:2)
""Disclaimer""PS i never sign into YouTube and don't have a list lol"
Its all about the ad dollars and the advertisers i mean shit, now everyone going to demand for a setting to leave their setting choices alone.....
Choise 1 googles prime advertisers on top.
Choice 2. you don't get one
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>Its all about the ad dollars and the advertisers
Well, the thing is, why don't the advertisers just advertise on whatever the users are watching? What's the problem with that?
The problem is just that the advertisers want to control what you're watching, nothing controversial or out of the mainstream, just lukewarm pabulum.
But the advertisers should not think that they are "sponsoring" Youtube videos. Rather, they are simply accessing Youtube users (regardless of what the users happen to be watching).
standard-issue social media helplessness (Score:3)
This morning, on my YouTube account, in the YouTube comment box, cut and copy were working, but paste (keyboard and mouse) were not. However, drag and drop paste was working normally, so I just had to use a two-step workaround (paste somewhere else, then drag and drop).
My configuration is pretty weird, so I don't draw conclusions right away. Most of these anomalies go away within a few days.
That said, it was standard-issue social media helplessness nevertheless. Nothing about my user interaction is fully documented or defined, and YouTube reserves the right to fuck over any damn thing they want at any damn time.
I don't approve of this business model and I govern myself accordingly. If I care at all about my words, I keep my own copies of everything I contribute to a social media platform. I never click "subscribe" on any feed whatsoever. And I'm always prepared to M*A*S*H my way to the next social media Hamburger Hill user interface at the code drop of a random A/B whim.
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The one time I really lost it was when Google changed the format of my search results to some god-awful multiplicity of carousels, rather than just the simple links. I spent two hours crafting some user CSS to dis-abominate the worst of it, and it was still bad.
But fortunately either I dropped out of Satanic side of this particular A/B test pool, or Google's telemetry convinced them it was the worst idea since hydrogenated palm oil, and about a week later my Google search results were back to a bearable normality.
Personal policy: never click on a carousel link ever. Hate the damn things, may they all die in a fire.
And if the carousel moves on its own accord, exit stage left within 1500 ms (20% chance your back button is screwed over, so my mouse is always heading for the history drop-down, just in case).
You'll find me further down, clicking on the REST of the page.
If I really have to stick around and interact with a moving carousel, I usually font-change or resize and window drag my window until the carousel is entirely off screen.
Finding myself feeling compelled to linger on a carousel page usually triggers the five whys: why I am accessing this page? why am I accessing this site? why I am engaging this topic? why am I using this search tool? why I have taken on this project?
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Why am I such a die-hard crank about carousel evasion?
Because it works. The gradient of life is complex, with not many robust signals. There are few signals I've encountered with a better cognitive ROI than fleeing the carousel, gleefully heedless of any small, short-term pain.
So you can imagine my humid outward eardrum pucker the day that Google randomly larded up my Google results with cards and carousels, and carousels and cards.
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Google probably sees this as just another of 10,000 A/B interface trials. My amygdala and my insula saw it differently. And those little suckers forget never.
Antitrust investigation of Google? Well, the rational part of my brain thinks this is a bad thing, because Google is far from the worst offender. Meanwhile, a deep emotional center in my brain will dance a Black Swan gig.
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The arrogance of these social media empires: even when I'm at rage factor 11, there's still no button offered for me to punch out of an A/B trial gone hopelessly sideways, waaay down the Nung River, deep into permanent lizard-brain antipathy.
Hey, Big Brother, hurry up with that 24/7 face-camera sentiment analysis, because you don't know what you don't measure. At least, I guess that's your best excuse.
Fuck Google (Score:2)
You aren't making the world better, you are creating a generation of useless fucking robots that can't think for themselves that will ultimately cause great harm.
Just stop it (Score:2)
Just stop it, Youtube, stop fucking with our shit in the hopes of squeezing another nickel out of the users somehow.
Youtube has gone to shit with their rules about what you can play and when. It's 2018- we can send a man to the Moon and put metal in a microwave, but I can't play a fucking video with my tablet cover closed?
The old days were a blast (Score:1)
You used to be able to message friends, video answer, depend on getting notifications just by subbing. Fuck youtube experiments. just deliver updates in chronological fucking order because I can look through a back catalog to see more if I want, you don't need to worry your pretty head bout nuthin.
Video version (Score:1)
So, YouTube is trying to be the video version of Facebook. We've seen what 'thinking' does to Facebook pages.
Youtube doesn't know what people want to see (Score:1)
Ring that bell... (Score:2)
While we're on the topic of subscription stupidity, could somebody clarify why we need the bell feature in addition to the subscription feature? I'm already notified about new videos in my subscription feed, I don't need the bell to send me messages when new videos are posted.
Oh, I get it. If subscriptions aren't chronological anymore, the bell is effectively a replacement for chronological notifications. I knew they innovated for good reason, and not just to give content creators another way to beg for
You had ONE job! (Score:4, Insightful)
Evidently, it was to break the UI.
Well done!
Youtube, get the clue (Score:2)
The amount of ads I want to see is zero, and the kind is none. This is why I use an adblocker.
As long as you don't care what I really want to see and only pretend you do while trying to abuse me, I don't care what your ad revenue is and only pretend to watch your ads while trying to get to my videos. Deal? Deal.
FUCK OFF GOOGLE (Score:2)
Why do you dick around with your users? Because you get an erection? Are your dicks that small that you need to jerk others around?
It's time for FTC to step in and break up Google. Sorry you fucked people over for too long. You got big and sloppy and provide NO VALUE to the user.
You've turned into Microsoft. People use you NOT because they prefer you, but because they're too lazy to u
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