“Nutritious and Delicious.” Inside YouTube’s Early, Failed Attempt To Recommend Videos That Are Good For You, And Enjoyable Too.
Well before the social media backlash, YouTube tried to recommend videos based on quality, not just engagement. It didn’t work.
Hi Everyone, my aim at Big Technology is to cover the machine, not just the outputs. To learn why Big Tech acts the way it does, we must understand its systems, not only what they produce. That’s why I’m excited this week to publish a story that reveals YouTube’s long-running struggle to tune its optimization algorithm. The story below is adapted from Mark Bergen’s new book, Like, Comment, Subscribe, and contains new, original reporting about the company’s decade-long quest to recommend videos that are both enjoyable and nourishing. I hope you enjoy it! Yours, Alex
By Mark Bergen
Almost every day, YouTube’s engineers experiment on us without our knowledge. They tweak video recommendations for subsets of users, review the results, and tweak again. Ideally, YouTube wants more “valued watchtime” — its term for time spent on videos most viewers find agreeable, or at least not detestable.
