Recommended videos strategies

[forteller]

Hi all. Thanks for creating an amazing product! It's much needed and well made!

I just recently tried it as a content creator for the first time, and although the experience was mostly really good, one thing also kindof upset me.

There's been a lot of talk for a while now of how YouTube's recommendation engine is ruining the world by pushing extreme conspiracy theories on everyone. You start out watching a video about some mainstream rightwing politician, and you get recomended a video about someone a bit further out. Then something even further out, and soon you're watching a documentary about how the jews are controlling the world economy trough reptilian clones or something just as crazy.

The same thing happens with islamic terrorist content and left wing nutjobs. You get fed the most crazy ideas very fast.

I tagged my first video uploaded to Peertube with "klima", the norwegian (and german) word for "climate". In the list of recommended "other videos", this showed up:

This is what your recomendation engine wanted people to watch next. Your engine, not you personally! But dangerous ideas like this gets spread automatically by a feature in your software. An unnecessary feature.

You are creating a tool for uncensored sharing of videos. Surely you know that people will use it for all kinds of crazy, dangerous shit. You're already talking about the so called "nazi problem" in #430, and discussing the possibility of automatic blacklisting in #1538.

You shouldn't want to have to go in and police everything people post. You shouldn't even have the option to do that. Certainly you will not have the manpower. I agree with that! But at the same time, you shouldn't help dangerous ideas more than necessary.

How can you reconcile these two things? By turning off recomendations outside of the persons own videos by default!

That is: When someone installes Peertube on a new server, the default setting should be that the "Other videos" feature only shows other videos from the same account as the current video you're watching was posted by.

There could be a per user setting to change this, if you want. I don't know. But I do know that I had to remove the climate tag from my video to stop this dangerous chemtrails conspiracy theory from being propagated to everyone watching my video, and that I really don't want you to have the same bad impact on the world in this regard as YouTube has.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration!

PS: Via Mastodon I asked my instance, pe.ertu.be, if they could turn off this feature. They said they could not.

[forteller]

If changing this into a feature that can be turned on and off, and is set to off by default, is a lot of work, then just removing the "showing "Other videos" from other accounts" feature all together would be just as good a solution IMHO :)

[therahedwig]

There was some discussion whether to use the concept of 'boosting' as used in the other fediverse software to create a catalogue of videos to recommend from in #1520

The idea being that channels which make videos, if they also boost videos, these videos would show up as recommendation for the audience of that channel. This would allow channels to curate what exactly is recommended, to avoid extreme views, but also to allow channels to help other channels get a bit more recognition, as well as giving channels the ability to give their viewers a good time by recommending good videos. (and if there's no boosts, default to the channel's own videos).

This also means that if there would be an extreme views video in the recommendations, it proly means the channel you're watching has some pretty strange views to begin with.

[Selecao-9]

I'd recommend showing playlists which contain the video, rather than other videos. More democratic imo.

[ghost]

I'm really surprised no one has mentioned this yet but the panic about "dangerous content/ideas" - is a non-issue for PeerTube. If the instance admins allow and are fine with such content then why should we decide to circumvent that and develop an algorithm that would "protect" people from what we consider being "dangerous content/ideas"? This is complete disrespect towards the admins who run that instance. PeerTube is all about Freedom, if you don't like how an admin is running the instance - find a better one or host one yourself.

That being said, I agree with the technical side of the issue - that we need a good algorithm for the Recommended Videos but not because of "dangerous content/ideas" but because we want the users to have a good UX and to receive interesting and relevant video suggestions in the Recommended Videos sidebar.

I like @therahedwig's suggestion about boosts, tho I have a different opinion about this part:

and if there's no boosts, default to the channel's own videos

if no boosts are available then I think an algorithm should kick in and recommend relevant videos from the entire instance. Limiting them to videos only from the same Peertuber means poor relevance because Peertubers can have different content and if I'm watching a video titled "how to paint in GIMP", then I don't wanna see a recommended video titled "this is how I met Jane" or "rock music".

edit: On a second thought, I don't think we should show Peertuber's boosts as Recommended Videos because they won't be relevant to the video that the person is watching. Using the previous example, I may watch a video titled "how to paint in GIMP", and maybe that Peertuber has videos only about GIMP on his channels, but he boosts some rock music because he/she likes it. So my Recommended Videos will be filled with rock music. But what if the video I'm watching isn't helpful? I'll be looking for another one. So wouldn't it be better if my Recommended Videos would include other, more popular videos about "how to paint in GIMP" or similar?

[ranfdev]

I support the idea to use tags and boosts: the next video is selected from the boosted contents which have similar tags. If i'm watching a video tagged "climate", the next video will be selected from the list of boosted content with the tag "climate". When i'm not following anyone, the algorithm will choose a similar video from the boosts of the channel i'm watching.

[ghost]

related https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/1985

[Empathetic]

Stop trying to force your ideas and ways of thinking on other people. That's the problem people have nowadays. Just because you think something is a dangerous idea doesn't mean it needs to be censored on a platform/project that is meant to be uncensored and free as in freedom. If people want to run instances that recommend those kinds of videos they should be able to. If anything I think people that think like you are the danger here because you believe you get to decide what's crazy and what isn't true.

[forteller]

Not wanting other peoples ideas forced upon everyone watching my videos is kinda the exact opposite of forcing my ideas on other people.

If you don't understand that then at least try reading what the first post in an issue says before you bother everyone subscribed to it.

That is: When someone installes Peertube on a new server, the default setting should be that the "Other videos" feature only shows other videos from the same account as the current video you're watching was posted by.

There could be a per user setting to change this, if you want.

[forteller]

PeerTube is all about Freedom, if you don't like how an admin is running the instance - find a better one or host one yourself.

So not giving the PeerTube admins the freedom to turn off a feature is Freedom? Really?

I'll remind you of this:

PS: Via Mastodon I asked my instance, pe.ertu.be, if they could turn off this feature. They said they could not.

Could not as in did not have an option to do so, not as in would not.

[Selecao-9]

Federation serves as a functionally flawed solution to a deep ethical lack. Precisely, all Web 3.0 pursues liberty for all, not freedom.

As a South African pastor once instructed me, freedom means free domination.

Availability to fairly have one's self conquered, where no ideology can cheat to gaining fellowship.

Liberty must never mean hegemony.

On Fri, May 29, 2020 at 3:42 PM forteller notifications@github.com wrote:

PeerTube is all about Freedom, if you don't like how an admin is running the instance - find a better one or host one yourself.

So not giving the PeerTube admins the freedom to turn off a feature is Freedom? Really?

I'll remind you of this:

PS: Via Mastodon I asked my instance, pe.ertu.be, if they could turn off this feature. They said they could not.

Could not as in did not have an option to do so, not as in would not.

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