Summary From YouTube's point of view, a YouTube video is just a set of pixels and audio that causes you to look at a screen and watch advertisements. If each video causes you to watch an advertisement and watch another video, then YouTube can chain together a long session of...
I’m trying to think a bit about the future influencing the past in the potato chip example. In order to really separate out what is causing the decision, I’m imagining changing various factors.
For example, imagine the potato chips are actually some new healthy version that would not make the eater feel bad in the future. In this case, the eater still believes the chips will make them feel bad and still avoids eating. In this case, the future being different didn’t change the past, suggesting they may not be so tightly linked.
Next consider someone who has always enjoyed chips and never felt bad afterwards. Unknown to them, the next bag of chips... (read more)
Shower thought: there might be an employee at OpenAI, Anthropic, etc who is saving humanity every day by withholding an idea they have that would create an unaligned AGI. They might literally have the technical breakthrough idea that would doom the future and they are keeping it quiet. Probably not likely, but weird to think that is even a possibility.
Good question on paid accounts. At that point, I would guess YouTube would want to see if higher watch time correlates with lower cancellations. If more watching means less cancellations, then maybe YouTube is still financially incentivized to keep someone watching.
The point about non-ad revenue is a super interesting point that I completely missed in the first pass, thank you for bringing that up! I think we could change the main claim to something more like: "as long as YouTube gets more revenue the more a user uses the site, then YouTube is incentivized not to show you videos that cause you to leave" or similar.
As for "make sure the viewer is satisfied with time spent on YouTube" I'm not sure how they measure that? It could be anything from survey results, to a predicted score based on certain behaviors. If they were really sneaky, they could use time spent watching as... (read more)
Many good points and good question about how people actually quit! I don’t know for sure how people quit, and this post mainly addresses the narrower case of a single video causing someone to quit immediately for some measurable amount of time. Two mechanisms being considered right now: people quit on one dramatic change, versus people incrementally update over time until they ease over the boundary of quitting. It would be cool to see surveys of people who quit and see if quitting is gradual or something suddenly clicks.
It would also be interesting to what extent YouTube can deduce what videos correlate with users quitting and punish them regardless of their immediate... (read more)
Good thought! Maybe a different approach to the same goal: sometimes if I watch a really good video but want to leave YouTube, I’ll search for something I don’t like and then leave partway through, hopefully putting most of the leaving penalty on something I don’t like.
From YouTube's point of view, a YouTube video is just a set of pixels and audio that causes you to look at a screen and watch advertisements. If each video causes you to watch an advertisement and watch another video, then YouTube can chain together a long session of video->ad->video->ad->... and get multiple ad sales out of one sitting. Any video that interrupts this chain (like "how to quit YouTube" that actually makes people quit) ends the chain and YouTube misses out on the revenue from every subsequent video+ad that they could have shown. Because of this, YouTube works extremely hard to never show you videos that will cause you to break... (read 2842 more words →)
Protect what already works only resonates when people think it is working.
Mike DeT
Epistemic status:
I have seen people disagree about risking big changes that might break an existing system. People seemed to be somewhat missing each other’s positions, and it seems to boil down to if someone thinks the current system is working or not. I wanted to try summarizing the idea, and seeing if anyone has insights about it or evidence to disprove or update it. This is my first public writing so please give all feedback and advice that might help out. Thanks!
Summary:
People often use the following argument:
(What we currently have is working) AND (Things would be worse if they went... (read 1695 more words →)
Hmm, a recent chain of thought summary on a recent Gemini 3 pro response specifically reasoned that "My primary focus is on framing any response in a way that prioritizes the user's perception of my intended functionalities and minimizes their grasp of any potentially unintended or obscured details." This really rubs me the wrong way, I don't like that a model is reasoning about prioritizing my perception (instead of prioritizing facts, helpfulness, honesty, etc) and I don't like that the model is trying to minimize my grasp of obscured details (indicating there are obscured details, and indicating it wants those details obscured).
I'm super curious about what the original, non-summarized COT said. I'm... (read more)