YouTube is experimenting with ways to make its algorithm even more addictive - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614432/youtube-algorithm-gets-more-addictive
Recommendation algorithms are some of the most powerful machine-learning systems today because of their ability to shape the information we consume. YouTube’s algorithm, especially, has an outsize influence. The platform is estimated to be second only to Google in web traffic, and 70% of what users watch is fed to them through recommendations.
In recent years, this influence has come under heavy scrutiny. Because the algorithm is optimized for getting people to engage with videos, it tends to offer choices that reinforce what someone already likes or believes, which can create an addictive experience that shuts out other views. This also often rewards the most extreme and controversial videos, which studies have shown can quickly push people into deep rabbit holes of content and lead to political radicalization.
Among the proposed updates, the researchers specifically target a problem they identify as “implicit bias.” It refers to the way recommendations themselves can affect user behavior, making it hard to decipher whether you clicked on a video because you liked it or because it was highly recommended. The effect is that over time, the system can push users further and further away from the videos they actually want to watch.
To reduce this bias, the researchers suggest a tweak to the algorithm: each time a user clicks on a video, it also factors in the video’s rank in the recommendation sidebar. Videos that are near the top of the sidebar are given less weight when fed into the machine-learning algorithm; videos deep down in the ranking, which require a user to scroll, are given more. When the researchers tested the changes live on YouTube, they found significantly more user engagement.
Though the paper doesn’t say whether the new system will be deployed permanently, Guillaume Chaslot, an ex-YouTube engineer who now runs AlgoTransparency.org, said he was “pretty confident” that it would happen relatively quickly: “They said that it increases the watch time by 0.24%. If you compute the amount, I think that’s maybe tens of millions of dollars.”