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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

What a lot of people are missing is that when watching YouTube, they're the product, not the consumer.

I know this has been said many times before, but ignoring this reality is like trying to understand life without considering evolution, or understanding chemistry while ignoring the periodic table.

Google's incentives are to tailor customers to advertisers, not customers to content!

They don't care if you see what you want to see, they care if you see what they want you to see.

In that light, it all makes sense.

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How does that at all relate to YouTube videos though?

YouTube wants you to see ads. Ads are put in front of YouTube videos. Therefore youtube wants you to watch videos. YouTube, logically, should want you to watch more videos, for longer. If they serve you bad videos, you stop.

Therefore, Googles incentives are to tailor good recommendations of content for customers.

QED.

I think all this “you’re not the customer you’re the product” signaling - which is true to an extent- needs an additional corollary of “products aren’t free to acquire or produce” or “businesses can’t exhaust their supply of products to sell”.

Because if YouTube truly doesn’t care about serving you relevant videos -as you conjecture-, why not recommend the same 100 videos to everyone? It’s make caching way cheaper.

>If they serve you bad videos, you stop.

Actually this is false. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, I know, but it has long been known in the field of psychology that a variable reward system works significantly better than consistent rewards or consistent punishment. The reality is that a mixture of bad, mediocre, and occasionally good recommendations is the most likely to keep you on the site for the longest.

See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27353633/ (or Google “variable reward schedules” and take your pick of a publication you trust)

They are sort of recommending 100 videos to everyone. In my circle, a lot of people I know have very different interests than me. Yet, whenever I recommend a video to a friend, they often say it was already in their recommendations.

They might be pushing videos or topics that advertisers are more willing to pay for.

> a lot of people I know have very different interests than me. Yet, whenever I recommend a video to a friend, they often say it was already in their recommendations.

Is it possible that Youtube knows your friend's video interests just like you do?

> They might be pushing videos or topics that advertisers are more willing to pay for.

This, however, does seem very possible.

Annoying a sufficient fraction (or influential cohort) of the product off the platform will eventually have negative impacts.

Google crossed that Rubicon 10--15 years ago. They're driving with increased speed into the other side.

How does this fit if I pay for YouTube Premium? I don’t see the ads, and I guess they still get the data. Why are they trying to drive me to particular content if they can’t show me the ads they want to?

Premium users are not the majority. Their algorithms are tuned for the non-Premium users.

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