Youtube's weird Algorithm and Machine Learning

M

muser

Well-known member
I find it all a bit sinister. This happened the other day 2CZ9Wr.gif Not reflective of my listening habits... was I somehow identified as white and then given these suggestions, was it purely algorithmic? Whatever it is its very weird. Heard a lot of people complain about getting this track constantly recommended to them



..often in automatically generated playlists which have no connection or similarity to the song. Is it just some feedback loop or is there some secret manipulation going on to give people a leg-up. I'm sure people like Jordan Peterson owe a huge amount of his success not only to youtube but the nature of its algorithm. You watch one video and instantly your front page is filled with JP videos and videos about his videos.

Then there's this.. .
 

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M

muser

Well-known member
We are all slowly being hacked in increasingly effective ways, and seemingly the potential for malicious manipulation is very real.

 
M

muser

Well-known member
Oh yes nice thanks luka, kind of separate issue but still its very strange and disturbing. I can recognize one of the channels linked in the article as being made where I live in Vietnam and its mind boggling why anyone would want to do this. Its common for people to leave their kids in front of youtube unsupervised here also.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
I doubt there's any secret desire on the part of google to give any particular content a leg-up, but the algorithms their recommendation systems are using are based on correlation and little else.
 
M

muser

Well-known member
I think your probably right and certain videos just get caught in a feedback loop. It is odd how that example I gave crops up in so many totally unrelated algorithmically generated playlists where everything else is in the list are quite closely related in time, genre etc. This is another I've noticed on mine and others YT playlists/ recommended sidebars



I dont really think there's any big conspiracy here but seeing the algorithm whitewashing grime is interesting though. why?
 
N

Numbers

Well-known member
I got fed this by YT some months ago:



At first I thought it was an algorithmic glitch or outlier. Then I discovered it has been re-issued recently. Not sure what causality is involved here (re-issue caused by algorithmic popularity or vice versa), but it quite something. Thing is: I quite like the song. That's the worst of it all.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
in the future, culture will be dominated by statistical AI that generate content "aucausally", by aggregating and examining correlations in their users' behaviour. media will consist of averages of your interests and history - minimising a loss function in a Facebook NN somewhere but producing an uncanny valley effect such in that it kinda looks interesting from a list of possible choices and almost could be, but on deeper inspection is totally and nightmarishly meaningless.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
vimothy said:
I doubt there's any secret desire on the part of google to give any particular content a leg-up, but the algorithms their recommendation systems are using are based on correlation and little else.
Click to expand...


dont be a mug
 
M

muser

Well-known member
This is the weirdest one ive seen come up in a while. 260k views.. looking at the comments seems like virtually no-one there knows who this Loveday bloke is, the other guys 4 uploads have 69 views , 86 views and 2.6k views none of them are University Challenge related.





It seems like either this is some weird accidental feedback loop glitch out in the algorithm or theirs some youtube techs messing around, either way I find it a bit unsettling
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
you guys are gonna wanna look at treelethargy/carol's neural network news thread and maybe help us generate some.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
The other day chocolate rain was recommended to me and I thought I might as well listen again, it's a song I like. I scrolled through the comments and it was everyone saying "why are all the comments from today" so clearly something kicked in to push it on people again for whatever weird reason

 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
luka said:
The other day chocolate rain was recommended to me and I thought I might as well listen again, it's a song I like. I scrolled through the comments and it was everyone saying "why are all the comments from today" so clearly something kicked in to push it on people again for whatever weird reason

Click to expand...


it might get a spurt of renewed popularity if he was currently in the news for something else, or if a media outlet or social media influencer reposted it to make it go viral again.

or...

tay has a pinned comment from 6 days ago that says "Watch MORE singing by ME! ---> https://goo.gl/vScJcG; Watch me TALK! ---> https://bit.ly/2YKUFze". so guessing he decided to juice the video with some ad spending as a way to get attention for his newer music/talks.

it's not serendipity.
 
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