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Comment by jjeaff | Hacker News Reader

Even companies like Google seem incapable of using all the information they gather in a very helpful way.

There are some small ml cases that seem to work ok, like suggestions for message responses.

But YouTube video suggestions for example seem so facile. If I click a few videos about today's news, then every video suggestion quickly becomes similar content. Even though I am subscribed to a dozen niche channels and may have watched a bunch of science and engineering videos, I don't get any suggestions related to that unless I directly seek them out. After which, all my suggestions turn to engineering videos.

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A few weeks ago I started getting youtube video suggestions for religious Thai videos, which I have never shown any interest in. I ignored it. And it kept happening! I spend most of my time watching educational/tech review content, so I was worried my account got compromised. Changed passwords, and still the Thai videos kept getting recommended.

After a while I finally realized what happened: I would keep an ISS live-feed running in the background while I did housework. It was nice to just see where it was. Turns out that video was being hosted by a channel connected to several of these other Thai channels, and youtube assumed I would enjoy the content.

They still come up occasionally, but I've clicked "Not Interested" enough times that I think they got the idea.

I wonder if those Thai religious videos were spending a lot of money trying to get your specific demographic, so youtube showed it to you even though it was evident you had zero interest.

This,

there's some kind of mob rule going on suggestion wise that's pretty annoying. What are some gem sci/engr channels you've discovered if you don't mind sharing.

Isn't this what they are optimizing for though? I don't work at Google so I don't know and I block ads so I am not engaging with their revenue generation (at least in the most direct sense) but the idea seems to be if you are watching X content you then want to see more of X and it drives total engagement time. I think it sucks and is part of general trend of not being able to find diverse and cool content on the web..but hey Google

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