YouTube reducing recommendations of rules-skirting videos to improve experience

MANILA, Philippines – If you’re tired of seeing crazy video recommendations on your YouTube home page, you aren’t alone. With the rise of clickbait titles, fake news, and over the top commentary, it’s understandable that even YouTube would need to step in.

On Friday, January 25 (January 26, Manila time) YouTube outlined some of the steps it had taken and were currently working on to improve its recommendations for users.

In addition to tweaking its recommendations engine over the years, YouTube is also working to improve what it offers through its algorithms by pulling recommendations from more videos.

This is in addition to reducing the recommendations of content that skirts the edge of violating its community guidelines and content that holds misinformation with harmful effects – “such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.”

YouTube added the changes in relation to reducing recommendations affects less than 1% of its videos, but estimates it should offer YouTubers “a better experience” if they rely on recommendations to fuel their viewing habits. The change will not affect the existence of videos – only their visibility as a recommendable video.

The company is testing this with the help of both machine learning and human evaluators, with the effects allowing for “a gradual change.” that will at first “only affect recommendations of a very small set of videos in the United States.”

If all goes well, the changes to their recommendations should spread across the YouTube ecosystem. – Rappler.com