Disclaimer: this is an *hypothesis* I made, all this might be wrong:
* A social graph is built from various sources <-- this is where I wonder what the sources are, what is extracted?
* If I'm connected to Bob, I will see content related to his interests : It appears that the system tries to pick video channels related to me, but the video selection is skewed towards Bob's topics. It seems that Bob's topic embeddings are mapped to the text embeddings of video thumbnails (same for the video titles but with less weight). Since the context is small, sometimes it's off.
* If you refresh the page, it may return to your original recommendations, unless new data from external sources is fed into the algorithm. What's scare me: I wonder if the feed is in near real time. If this is the case, that's explain why my recommendation are as usual and sometimes completely off track for me but related to some people I know.
* It might buffer some topics : if you connect again with Bob but there are no new topics, it gives back the old topic related to Bob.
Once again, this is a pill of a lot of gueses.
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I really wish to go back to the previous algorithm which one of the reason I subscribed to YT premium, now it's just a minefield.
Same experience here. It used to give me spot-on recommendations based on my watch history-often out of nowhere, but still accurate. That was one of the reasons I subscribed to YouTube Premium.
Now, I strongly feel it's based on a wrongly inferred social graph. It recommends videos according to what's happen in the group. It's really unsettling.
I wish there were a setting to disable this "feature." and to stick on my history.
This partly explains why the recommendations I receive don't feel like mine.
Multiple times, it's been obvious that the suggestions were pulled from other profiles and I could even tell whose.
My hypothesis
* The algorithms have linked my account to some others.
* They then serve me the embeddings extracted from those profiles. The near-real-time nature of this has crossed my mind more than once.
It's really unsettling, and afterwards I feel uneasy about any recommendations (all Google services, Netflix seems problematic too, not Amazon).
YouTube seems to have some hidden knobs for tuning this behaviour: after multiple negative feedbacks, the problematic content disappeared from my front page. However, the recommendations on the right-hand side of individual videos remain problematic, and the automatic playlists of YouTube Music are still strangely disturbing (even after multiple negative feedbacks).
I used to love YouTube's algorithm: suggestions outside of my subscriptions but exactly on the spot. I used to took time to curate.
However since few months, all recommendations became off track. Then I started to realize these recommendations were related to the life of people I know. At least most of them, some subjects are private and personal, so this is really unsettling and I can't say if the algorithm is halucinating or not (I want to know if people tells me, not like this...). I have the impression that this is a Plato's cave illuminate with the private lives of those around me.
Technically, my understand is this:
* YT suggests channels closed to my interrests
* YT picks videos with thumbnails very closed to this "life of others" feed = the thumbnail leaks more than the video title.
I ended up to send a feedback to YT, no response, but most of these recommendations disapeared, and then it went back here and there, so I don't use the recommendation page anymore. YT music has more or less the same issue with automatic playlist.
The analytical part of me wonders why YT subscribes me to these "feeds", how these "feeds" are fed (maybe it goes beyond Alphabet / Google), but that's strange and disturbing enough.
Note: perhaps the fact I use ublock, blokadda, Firefox, etc... most probably makes my profile focussed on technical stuff, which makes other recommendations more visible.
It mentions uv at the end and rye at first (which use uv internally).