‘YouTube recommendations are toxic,’ says dev who worked on the algorithm (2019)
Youtube prioritizing "watch time" is why Youtubers take 1 minute of content and stretch it out to 10 minutes. It's an enormous waste of everyone's time, and it's crazy to think about the enormous power and influence Google has over humanity's behavior.<p>I always wondered why Youtube never tried to get their algorithm to optimize for quality. For example, one way to do this would be to look at comment lengths and threads. I'd imagine that for more quality videos, you'd have people writing longer comments and responding to each other.<p>I'd be in favor of regulation enabling users to have some semblance of control over the recommendation algorithm given that it has such an enormous effect on their lives. Ideally you'd have competitors driving improvements like this, but Youtube is effectively a monopoly at this point.