I was not expecting the truth to be SO much worse than the algorithmically provided view.<p>I'm sold on algorithmic timelines now. That Youtube is awful. People are awful. Fortnite Battle Royale is awful. I don't want to see any of those.
I worked on content recommendation for a bit while I was at Microsoft. People click on low quality articles, spend a lot of time reading said articles, then seek out similar or lower quality articles containing the same named entities. If you recommended a variety of content to those people, they'd most frequently pick articles of equal or lesser quality about named entities they just read.<p>This is really kind of saddening, but your best bet really is just personalizing on as many user metrics as you can collect to best serve the people who like clickbait as well as the people who are looking for higher quality articles.<p>Not really relevant, but funny enough, if you prioritize article quality, popular named entities, how relevant those entities are to the article, engagement, and article age, you end up with earnings reports.
From their about page:<p>"A simple way to understand this formula is that a video loses a point every 12 hours and gains a point every time it grows by 10x. In other words, a video's score will not change if its view count grows by 10x in 12 hours. These constants were tuned to keep popular videos around for about a day."<p>It seems like pretty flawed idea, they base their ranking on video views and age, but the video views are a result of the non-"Objectively-Ranked" videos on YouTube itself.<p>I think the page itself shows those results pretty clearly, it's chock full of videos with thumbnails designed to draw peoples eyes as well as text and titles designed to raise questions and imply drama in order to entice people to click.<p>That might be the wanted result, but I don't see how that is much different from the official Youtube trending page, except this one isn't localised/customised for your specific country.
Everyone here is clearly having the same experience. However much we dislike algorithmic sorting, it's clear that the most popular videos on Youtube are absolutely horrible.
I don't care about the popular crap on YouTube. I do care about the tiny subset of YouTube which is relevant to my interests. YouTube should accurately recommend related content, but does a terrible job, and is apparently getting worse. This is noticed by the obscure content creators, here's one:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA&t=1s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA&t=1s</a>
This is a great idea. I also wanted to create a platform like this one however allow people to sync their list of subscribed channels from YouTube.<p>As you know, the subscriptions feed is now optimized on YouTube and not all new content from your subscribed channels find their way into your feed anymore.<p>This platform that I was thinking would basically bring that back, however under a different domain with a better UI.<p>Anyone interested? Let's build it together. Or just bring that feature into this site. I just want a feed that's chronological and non-optimized.
It seems like they're doing something similar to how Reddit's "hot" algorithm reportedly works. As of 2015, that was supposedly like:<p>log(upVotes - downVotes) - (hoursOld / 12.5),<p>according to <a href="https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-work-ef111e33d0d9" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo...</a>.<p>Fair Trending basically differs just in the log() part, substituting (fractionUpVotes * views) for (upVotes - downVotes). This could change the ranking if a lot of people view without voting either way.
OK... opinion post here... hell with that... rant here.<p>I have to say the whole notion of "trending" I find ridiculous, and even a bit offensive. That somehow because a zillion people find something interesting, that I should, too, makes clear that the best we've done in filtering is assume people are sheep and need to be "fed" as such. Even with the targeted suggestions they do when they look at my viewing history (and other history I'm sure), it's so incredibly ham-fisted I just want to shout, "hey maybe you should spend less time getting your AI to beat Go champions and more time getting it actually make useful and relevant recommendations that just maybe you can dispose of that 'trending' shit you're always foisting on everyone." (Of course, if Google actually got newer versions of the Youtube app to just work correctly with their Chromecast, I'd take that as progress).<p>Yeah, yeah, I know that they aren't trying to get the best matched content to me in the first place... just that which I might swallow and they can get the biggest bang for their investment... but the value proposition gets too diminished and I'm gone.... emphasis on stupidity such as "trending" pushes me to look at alternatives with some frequency. I've already left Twitter and Facebook due to this pushing trends stuff, Google is on the edge.<p>Of course, maybe I'm the outlier and I should just invest in Google, Twitter, Facebook, oh yeah and their traditional equivalents of "Us", "People", and the "National Enquirer" since that's where the masses apparently are.<p>The only trending I'd be interested in at all would be "trending" amongst a group of people whom I could actively curate in a list based on my tastes and interests and... importantly... theirs. It's clear to me that I can't outsource that curation just yet.<p>Finally... the front page of Hacker News is obviously just a big "trending" list. I have a higher affinity with the audience here, but still find about 60% - 70% of the front page content to be of zero interest and the comments hit much less; The 30% - 40% I come back for clearly has a high value to me, nonetheless. Between a tagging filter and having the ability to select a list of certain HN users to allow undue influence the results that I see when I come to the site would make it much, much better experience. (And I probably wouldn't be baited to post crap like this). In truth, I don't actually use the Hacker News homepage directly and instead start my journey at <a href="http://hn.elijames.org/" rel="nofollow">http://hn.elijames.org/</a>
There's no music videos, which usually account for many trending videos.<p>If you want objective ranking, look at kworb lists. E.g. <a href="https://kworb.net/youtube/" rel="nofollow">https://kworb.net/youtube/</a>
Pewdiepie has the #1 spot on fairtrending and is no where on Youtube's trending.<p>Ellen Degeneres and Jimmy Falon are you Youtube trending but nowhere on fairtrending.<p>"Elitist corperate control over mass media is great because I don't like what normal people do."
-people in this hackernews thread
"Number of views in the video" was an actual problem for youtube because people gamed the algorithm by inflating views. Now "time spent watching the video" is added to confirm the view.<p>I understand this data is not easily accessible to a third party but it would certainly improve this algorithm.<p>Edit 1: If I open YouTube and the Fair trending videos were presented to me, I would probably never use YouTube again.<p>Edit 2: I realize that I never click on the trending tab on youtube. I take back Edit 1, I'll just never click on the trending tab again.
If you haven't noticed, YouTube's ranking mechanisms became more "fraudulent" at least in the recent months. So besides having a service that provides un-editorialized blackbox algorithm rankings, this service might also provide a view to purposefully/bugged excluded content.<p>An example of how bad it is, they've started (on purpose or not) removing videos of uploaders that aren't taking part of the YouTube monetarization + have a Patreon link in their description. [0][1]<p>I'd expect/hope that such practice would be suit in EU courts for unfair competition.<p>I wonder how "Fair Trending" implemented their technology, if they are using official YouTube APIs and if Alphabet is going to kill this service once it gains traction?<p>Their about [2] page doesn't answer the "how do we get to the data?".<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005682" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005682</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRB8O08PjnA</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.fairtrending.com/about?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.fairtrending.com/about?lang=en</a>
You really have to pick a category. For example, "News & Politics" is decent.<p>Of course, an alternate ranking does nothing to fix the problem of videos that have simply been banned by YouTube. Lots of good stuff is just missing now. Freedom of speech: tearing out a man's tongue doesn't prove him wrong, but it does prove that you fear his message and it strongly suggests that his message might be correct.
The default feed is pretty clickbaity but I filtered to only show the technology category and it's not terrible <a href="https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msce=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.fairtrending.com/?lang=en&fc=cat&cat=28&tag=&msc...</a>
Seems to have issues when filtering by language. Pretty sure the top 5 shouldn't be 6 days old with < 100 views.<p>[0]: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/b1OuV51.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/b1OuV51.png</a>
im always wondering how to quantify the self reinforcing aspects of popular videos. also it seems like score decay based on time should be completely controlled by the user
I think it's funny during Christmas and Easter, thousands of sermons and positive Christian videos are posted to YouTube but do not warrant a special response from Google, despite Christians being a large user base. Google is of course free to do as they wish with their platform and promote whatever they want, it's their choice and they own it. What I dislike is they advertise it as sort of free speech platform but rankings are intrinsically geared towards special interests.