code-charity/youtube

Strategic blocking based on category, popularity & monoculture

ImprovedTube opened this issue · 0 comments

ImprovedTube commented

1. bulk-blocking/avoiding Channels* by popularity:

There are 100.000s of channels above 50.000s subscribers.
However the few 1000s above 5 million subscribers alone make most the traffic. So:

  • there can be something like a range-slider showing how over-proportionally much attention the top 0.01% to 1% entertainment channels get & how over-proportionally large/interesting blocking them will be.
    youtube channels

2. Blocking/avoiding [whole] categories
The top 5000 Channels show the following proportion:

  • ~26% Entertainment
  • ~19% Music
  • ~11% Gaming
  • ~10% People & Blogs
  • ~7% Comedy
  • ~5.5% Howto & Style
  • ~4.5% Film (& Animation)
  • Education
  • Science & Tech
  • Sports
  • News & Politics
  • Autos & Vehicles
  • Travel & Events
  • Pets & Animals
  • Nonprofit & Activism (only one above 10million subscribers: TEDx Talks)
  • Shows (very rarely used)

ALSO:

  • ~10% made for kids (additional attribute, next to category)

  • Categories could be whitelisted or blacklisted conditionally:

    • For example most people might not want 'Entertainment', 'Autos' 'Gaming', ' Sports' on Monday-Friday
      • Avoiding / Soft-blocking : While only a specific category like Autos & Vehicles might be blocked strictly, based on user's insterest, avoiding entertainment, popular stuff & monoculture, could be more specific, depending more factors:

  • 3. Category + Popularity: this feature should optionally only be applied to certain categories / entertainment categories / top categories

    • a custom rule / customer parameter could be minimal-invasive**, for example: Let's assume the top100 music channels might mainly be of interest to people with a "mainstream, repetitive, simple or uninformed taste" in music, while music-lover/-talent/-professional might like to disover less popular things through:
      • blocking the top500 music channels, as they will know these and feel informed enough about these already.
        • whereas somebody who doesn't like much popular music on youtube at all might want to blocking the top2000, without knowing them, thus favoring popular videos from other categories and mainly only notice popular music in related videos, when a new phenomenon / star comes up from nowhere or if it is related.

Blocking/Avoiding sudden popularity & herd/fan-popularity

  • videos with too many views in too short time (such as 100 million in one day, especially when category is music.
  • homogenous "herd"/Fan-behaviour identified by unnaturally high thumbs up/views-ratio. (especially/only within the Top3-7 categories)
    • a low ratio indicates busy viewers, might be a good / real (could also be an advertisment from external/embedded views)
    • The average thumbs-up/views ratio doesn't only describe videos: Also could be measured about channel as a whole & youtube-content-categories as a whole too to compare those in a ratio.
      • + The thumbs-up/down-Ratio matters too (and for controverse or misunderstood videos) (Edit: _Youtube hid thumbs-down, so this will require to apply for exceptional API-access ( - Or archive file or Return Dislikes or API.
  • (when blocking anythings user's subscription could be excluded/whitelisted.

* Compare "De-Mainstream"

There already is a popular extension blocking up to 160 * TV channels on youtube: https://github.com/miscavage/De-Mainstream-YouTube-Extension/issues/37 (- Hi @miscavage ! Whats your experience? would you like to work on anything mentioned here? - Should we?
- Counter indication: a TV channel with 50000 videos might be more diverse than a vlogger with 500 videos tho, if both have the same sum of attention on YouTube.

Related Issues (content aware features) : #457 ( & #551 & #514 (comment) )