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Grayjay Desktop App

(grayjay.app)
510 points pierrelf | 3 comments | 20 Dec 24 17:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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IronWolve ◴[20 Dec 24 18:01 UTC] No.42473248[source]▶
We always been missing good 3rd party search/trending for online videos.

I've been using a youtube frontend called pockettube, where I could make lists(channels) for content I like, without youtube forcing me what to watch.

Example. I have an Art and Food channels with my favorite content creators, I get to see the list in order of newest videos first, totally bypassing youtubes forced interface.

In fact, if people started creating front ends to youtube with real search/suggestion engines, you could find new content and help the less viewed but good content that gets bypassed.

Grayjay is great, since it uses multiple video providers, but you still have to "Know" who to follow. The search "Knowing" part is still word of mouth, random change of seeing a creators video, or the platforms showing it to you. Combine the 2, and it would be unstoppable.

I think if someone came up with a external database of content providers on multiple platforms that allows apps like grayjay/pockettube/etc to find new content, that is the missing piece.

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duxup ◴[20 Dec 24 18:33 UTC] No.42473528[source]▶
Finding content is so hard.

All YouTube wants me to watch are "OMG YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT THIS COP DID" content. I have no idea why they want me to watch those videos, I never do and I block the videos and the channels from recommendations but they keep coming ...

All I get are ads for weird suspect drugs and products, just going on these platforms is such a bad vibe.

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munificent ◴[20 Dec 24 18:52 UTC] No.42473723[source]▶
My experience is that YouTube recommendations are heavily weighted based on my watch history. If I watch a single video on, say, videogames, all of a sudden my recommendations are all gamer stuff.

Fortunately, you can easily edit your watch history. I just go through mine periodically and remove any kind of video that I don't want recommendations related to. Doing that has given me a very dialed in recommendation feed. If anything, it's too dialed in, and I rarely get serendipitous recommendations.

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Nextgrid ◴[20 Dec 24 21:00 UTC] No.42474962[source]▶
It's biased by your watch history, but it's never just that. In my experience (browsing without accounts, in private browsing with no cookies, on rotating IPs), there seems to be a distinct spot in the algorithm for some inflammatory engagement bait regardless of your history. That bait is not dependent on your watch history and is based on your geographic location by the looks of it.

Regardless of what I watch, in the middle of otherwise on-topic recommendations, there will always be one or two videos that are attempts at getting me to engage with some complete off-topic inflammatory political bullshit. Of course, once you click on that, the "regular" recommendation system takes over and feeds you more of that (which is somewhat fine), but the fact that it's trying to suck the user into this in the first place despite no indications the he desires to be exposed to such content in the first place is disgusting.

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1. 20after4 ◴[21 Dec 24 00:19 UTC] No.42476447[source]▶
There is strong incentive for youtube creators to create this kind of "clickbait" content (and especially clickbait titles and thumbnails) which perpetuates that situation regardless of whether the algorithm explicitly rewards it. As long as engagement is a factor and creators are rewarded for it then it seems like what you observed is kind of unavoidable.
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2. Nextgrid ◴[21 Dec 24 01:05 UTC] No.42476675[source]▶
I don't mean usual, on-topic clickbait consistent with the watch history. I mean that in the middle of said on-topic clickbait, one or two of the recommendation slots are always explicitly allocated to a broader, regional-level pool of inflammatory political clickbait completely unrelated to watch history.

So for example, I could be watching some niche technical videos, and my recommendations would be more of that for the most part. Except that on an English-speaking-country IP address, I'd also get some inflammatory Trump-related video among the usual recommendations. On a French IP I get the French equivalent, and so on.

So either consumers of various niche content (in unrelated fields, from retrocomputing to farming or vehicle repair) also all happen to be into political trash in various languages so much as to outcompete other on-topic videos in the recommendations, or the recommendation engine has an explicit feature to push inflammatory crap in addition to "organic" recommendations. I strongly suspect it's the latter.

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3. jfim ◴[21 Dec 24 04:51 UTC] No.42477621[source]▶
My completely unsubstantiated pet hypothesis about this is that it's cheaper and easier to cache the same click bait for everyone instead of different well tailored recommendations.