▲ 3 points

Ask HN: What's up with these YouTube recommendations?

Somewhat regularly I get YouTube recommendations that I enjoy and that feel peculiar at the same time. Today it was this[1] video by Macroblank called 痛みの永遠.

Almost always I have no prior knowledge or context of the content. Never heard of Macroblank, I don't listen to this kind of music etc.

Most of the top comments seem to agree. Their comments read like this one from YT: "I've never heard of this band/artist before, I don't have any clue what this album or any of its songs are called, and I don't think I've ever even listened to anything like this on YouTube before, but I am very glad this randomly came up in my recommendations."

Why do so many people at the same time get a recommendation for one specific item?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22VFPZVN3tQ

3 comments

> Why do so many people at the same time get a recommendation for one specific item?

Because of the large audience size for another item that is triggering the recommendation.

Also for “weird recommendations” it is good to know that social networks use a percentage of the recommendation budget for further exploration of your interests (~5%), rather than purely elongating short term engagement.

who knows? i watched one mike tyson video and it thinks i need to see something about mike tyson every day.

YouTube is definitely doing curation of "viral" videos to introduce novelty into their recommendations. They've gotten so conservative that the usual algorithm can't fully satisfy users' need for novelty, so they widely promote a curated selection of videos. I first realized it with this video "An Old Man's Advice" with an older balding guy in reading glasses with an enormous Santa beard in the thumbnail. English language users will probably recognize it from about 2 months ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhckVlgYZJE

Here is the guy's Social Blade page where you can still see the spike in views and subscribers from late June partially scrolling off the end of his historical graphs:

https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UC5hWk56PCwg1D11kDgt...

I think one they currently are promoting to English-language YouTube today is this Kurzgesagt video about loneliness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9hJ_Rux9y0

I haven't seen it in my own homepage today (although I haven't been looking at it much) but I saw it mentioned several times by Twitter users expressing mild bewilderment at the recommendation, like these two posting about ten minutes apart:

https://twitter.com/Grary_/status/1567265382750093312

https://twitter.com/bradplaysclari/status/156726305981873357...

Oh, apparently these were two more, the originals I saw were these:

https://twitter.com/masterlerle/status/1567262297424560128

https://twitter.com/microfennec/status/1567257618061692928

These are all within the last hour. The fact we have four people posting about this within the last hour on Twitter visible under a single search term suggests the video is going out to a massive audience, many of which are caught off guard by the recommendation. This doesn't seem to be normal algorithmic behavior, especially for a video that is only 7 hours old as of my writing.

There was another article (from The Atlantic) posted here about an old supposedly discontinued practice of "coolhunters" at YouTube, individuals responsible for curating and promoting videos (in the article they discuss Justin Bieber in particular as hand-picked for promotion), which supposedly were replaced with the homepage recommendation algorithm. I am pretty sure they were brought back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730285

To combat the lack of algorithmic novelty on YouTube I am working on a small team to develop alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel to get a list of similar channels. Here is Kurzgesagt's similar channels list:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q/

Navigate by clicking the icons or using the top search bar to look up a channel.