https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUC1LpsuAUaKoMzzJSEt5WImw/

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCaiL2GDNpLYH6Wokkk1VNcg/

You may be interested in our alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel to find a list of other channels making similar videos. For example, our recommendations for How Money Works include other established econ focused channels like Economics Explained and Money & Macro but also smaller more obscure channels like Wall Street Millennial:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCkCGANrihzExmu9QiqZpPlQ/

This is exactly why I am working on a team to build alternative YouTube recommendations.

Search a channel to get a list of smaller channels making content focused on similar interests. Our algorithm is designed to surface more obscure, but relevant, content that YouTube generally doesn't recommend.

Here is our list of relevant similar channels for SpaceX's channel:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCtI0Hodo5o5dUb67FeUjDeA/

Navigate by clicking on the channel icons in the list or by searching a channel in the top search-bar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhckVlgYZJE

Here is the guy's Social Blade page where you can still see the spike in views and subscribers from late June partially scrolling off the end of his historical graphs:

https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UC5hWk56PCwg1D11kDgt...

I think one they currently are promoting to English-language YouTube today is this Kurzgesagt video about loneliness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9hJ_Rux9y0

I haven't seen it in my own homepage today (although I haven't been looking at it much) but I saw it mentioned several times by Twitter users expressing mild bewilderment at the recommendation, like these two posting about ten minutes apart:

https://twitter.com/Grary_/status/1567265382750093312

https://twitter.com/bradplaysclari/status/156726305981873357...

Oh, apparently these were two more, the originals I saw were these:

https://twitter.com/masterlerle/status/1567262297424560128

https://twitter.com/microfennec/status/1567257618061692928

These are all within the last hour. The fact we have four people posting about this within the last hour on Twitter visible under a single search term suggests the video is going out to a massive audience, many of which are caught off guard by the recommendation. This doesn't seem to be normal algorithmic behavior, especially for a video that is only 7 hours old as of my writing.

There was another article (from The Atlantic) posted here about an old supposedly discontinued practice of "coolhunters" at YouTube, individuals responsible for curating and promoting videos (in the article they discuss Justin Bieber in particular as hand-picked for promotion), which supposedly were replaced with the homepage recommendation algorithm. I am pretty sure they were brought back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730285

To combat the lack of algorithmic novelty on YouTube I am working on a small team to develop alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel to get a list of similar channels. Here is Kurzgesagt's similar channels list:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q/

Navigate by clicking the icons or using the top search bar to look up a channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhckVlgYZJE

Here is the guy's Social Blade page where you can still see the spike in views and subscribers from late June partially scrolling off the end of his historical graphs:

https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UC5hWk56PCwg1D11kDgt...

Also this recent one about Fritz Haber from Veritasium is another example of a "random" curated video that got promoted to almost everyone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvknN89JoWo

For actual novelty in YouTube I'm working on a team to build alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel to get a list of recommended similar channels. I like to use the list of similar channels for Y Combinator's YouTube channel as a demonstration, but you can navigate by clicking the channel icons or using the search bar on top:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg/

This problem of not-enough-novelty in YouTube's recommendations is exactly why I am working on a team to develop alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel name to get a list of similar channels.

As an example: our recommendations for Tesla's channel includes James Locke, a small channel (~10k subscribers) with a researcher working on Full Self Driving for Tesla vehicles. There are also dozens of Tesla driving, electrification, and investing channels along with channels for some of Musk's other companies like The Boring Company on the list:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUC5WjFrtBdufl6CZojX3D8dQ/

This is exactly why I am working on a team to create alternative YouTube recommendations. Our algorithm is designed to surface smaller more obscure but relevant channels.

Search a channel to get a list of channels making similar content. Our recommendations for Project Farm include other tool review channels like A Concord Carpenter / Toolboxbuzz and Thrifty Tool Shed. Click through to A Concord Carpenter's list of similar channels also reveals Tools & Stuff. Thrifty Tool Shed is a great example of a very small yet relevant channel that the algorithm surfaces (~15k subscribers).

Our list of channels similar to Project Farm:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUC2rzsm1Qi6N1X-wuOg_p0Ng/

Of course there are dozens more channels on PF's list that are about more general carpentry, metalsmithing, and home-engineering projects. And you can use the search bar at the top of the page to search any other channels you watch to get their similar channels lists.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFtc3XdXgLFwhlDajMGK69w

LaserSaber:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIKzUKkh7XtnSYPW0AJb-9w

or StyroPyro:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJYJgj7rzsn0vdR7fkgjuIA

They have similarity to the Quint BUILDs channel that the knife throwing machine video came from. They all do some pretty crazy builds.

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg/

The list for his channel includes some likely suspects like TechCrunch, Y Combinator, and a16z but also some smaller names doing business advice like Section4 and David Perell:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCIBgYfDjtWlbJhg--Z4sOgQ/

Cf.:

>An important legal requirement for common carrier as public provider is that it cannot discriminate, that is refuse the service unless there is some compelling reason.

ibid

I suppose you can make "compelling reason" arguments for some things, but the default is carry.

Like, you may as well say "Well there are 'compelling reasons' exceptions so theoretically people can do the exact opposite of what the law says."

An airline or UPS cannot just say "We don't like your politics so we will not ship your packages."

Social media is extremely similar to all these common carriers in that they are a "content" delivery mechanism. They do not decide what item is in a box or what message is in a phone call, they just distribute the box or phone call from the originator to the consumers. Similarly with social media content the social media company distributes content they have little control over through its distribution network. There is little different from a social media account than a (teletype?) conference telephone call with answering machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

Thanks!

This is basically the reason my team and I are building an alternative set of YouTube recommendations. You can check them out here:

https://channelgalaxy.com

I was just tired of YouTube steering me back to the same old small niche of videos, many times giving me repeat recommendations for stuff I'd already seen. Our algorithm is designed to surface smaller channels and find more obscure content.

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A/

>That's why I thought this story was about recommendation systems recommending either only narrowly what you already know, and finding something new is not really well supported or not better than random, or that one outlier can skew your recommendations for a long time.

This kind of problem is exactly why we are building alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel to find more channels making similar content:

https://channelgalaxy.com

Click on icons in the lists to go to that channel's list. You can "surf" along that way to discover new content.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew

I discovered him on Two Minute Papers' similar channel list on the alternative YouTube recommendation algorithm I'm helping to develop. Here is Yannic's list of similar channels which includes a number of AI-research focused channels:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew/

>YouTube is still useful if you know how to dig deep and find content...

I'm working on alternative YouTube recommendations to solve these exact issues. Search a channel you watch to get a list of other channels making similar and related content:

https://channelgalaxy.com/

The lists are inter-linked so you can click the icons and "surf" from channel to channel to discover more creators. The algorithm prioritizes smaller channels to help users explore deeper into subject areas.

We've also mapped YouTube by plotting a few thousand YouTube channels in a 2-d mapping with a drag and zoom Google Maps-type interface, placing similar channels closer together. You can get a sense of the entirety of YouTube and how broad subject-areas are inter-related.

https://channelgalaxy.com/blog/article0/

(We're getting weird "Please try again in 30 seconds" errors from Google App Engine, but an immediate reload will usually work. Any advice on this would be appreciated.)

And it isn't entirely true that including a face mugging for the camera is always the most visually engaging (although representations of people are very attention grabbing). A person in the image is a character for a story, the whole "worth a thousand words" is true in that a whole narrative can be compressed into a single image and viewed with a glance. A person or other sentient being is a character for that story (I'm sure cat thumbnails do well too).

Just try to think of an interesting narrative involving exclusively inanimate objects. Kinda hard; the whole "animate" thing seems to be necessary to give a before, middle, and after to events (ok, maybe collisions, explosives, and rockets might work, they'd probably do well as thumbnails too). A thumb with Linus looking surprised or disappointed or puzzled gives a short and incomplete narrative about the object he is looking at and how it made him feel those emotions. Part of this is that watching the video will give you a more complete narrative.