Impressions: Every exploit to “break the algorithm” targets this baffling metric

Welcome to my first meta-video! Today we will be taking a break from physical science (It'l be back tomorrow) and entering the realm of computer science, with a YouTube video about impressions and the recommendation algorithm that has a self-referential updating thumbnail that tells you how many people have seen the thumbnail!
I also introduce the "CTR-Watch-Time Product" as a metric for video success, effectively the additional time YouTube expects to retain a viewer by showing them a thumbnail. It's an interesting metric when youtube is behaving normally, and for videos of similar length.
At the end, I go into some detail on the python script that's actually updating this thumbnail all the time. Warning: it's absolutely horrendous code…
#YouTube #Algorithm #CTRWtP

Music etc. in this video:

Deep Thought - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Patrick "push it somewhere else" meme - Spongebob Squarepants
Purple Crewmate - Among Us
GlaDOS voice and screenshot - Portal/Portal 2 by Valve
Slack quotes from other YouTubers used with permission

[Amy_A.]

"Because... My code is really fragile."

Oh surely it can't be that ba- OH MY GOD NOOOO

[HBMmaster]

oh you weren't kidding that is grotesque

[tnkme]

You're now part of my impression pool because I clicked on your gerrymandering video.

[MauJ]

The thumnail felt A LOT like clickbait, I tried VERY hard not to click... I failed...


Glad I did

[CED]

"I did what Tom Scott said not to do"
Ahh... So you like to live dangerously

[minetech]

"youtube has shown this video to 1 people"
"2 of them clicked it"
🤔

[MotesofDust]

I'm a huge fan of the programming horror at the end. It's beautifully Chaotic.

[EmbSys]

The title was so clickbaity that I almost never had clicked it. Luckily I saw your logo next to it, and I knew, I would like it. Which I did.Thank you!

[AlphaPhoenixChannel]

Corrections etc.:

1) First of all, screenshots inside a VM aren't nearly as robust as I imagined, so the live (hopefully still running) code simply memorizes coordinates on the screen from a single printscreen as to where to click.



The saga of launching this video:
1) I've never been so nervous to click "publish" on a video before. I'm not sure how long it will take for the first impressions to appear, so the first bunch of people may see the double zero starter… The thumbnail should change about every 10 minutes. Here goes!"

2) There may be glitches where the number either doesn't change for a while or goes WAY up for an hour because impressions are one of the YouTube metrics that gets changed and updated retroactively, and I'm plotting a derivative. There can be huge discontinuities if you're just plotting the number on the webpage over time (which I am to calculate the last hour) so IF I catch one of these I'll try to fix it by hand but no promises…
To be specific "Data for Impressions is displayed up to the minute. This is an estimate and may be adjusted over time as the data becomes more refined."

3) OK it looks like at the very start, only like 20 minutes in, the views are outpacing the impressions. I think this is two-fold: many viewers are getting to the video from the subscriptions page which is not part of YouTube recommendations, and impressions are slower to update... It will look a LOT better past an hour when the derivatives make sense!

4) It's been one hour - I had one small typo in how numbers less than 1000 were handled, and in my zeal to debug I think I made YouTube angry by uploading too many thumbnails too quickly, but ALL IS RIGHT WITH THE WORLD NOW! Also the impressions reporting naturally lags behind the views, but it's caught up, so the thumbnail even makes sense now!

[Nnm]

5:27 the "while 1 == 1" instead of "while true" is killing me

[mrharvest]

A suggestion if you need to do this kind of a thing in the future: instead of clicking, copying and pasting from the actual web page you can read that stuff out from the DOM with simple javascript. I would also /strongly/ advise you to randomise the refresh rate of how often you refresh the page.

[rfplatinum]

I think the algorithm has chosen your channel. This is the first time I’ve seen this channel and there’s a ton of fresh comments from 1-3 days ago which have a lot of likes, showing that a lot of other people are also viewing this video NOW, even though it was posted multiple months ago. Congratulations sir! Your content is great by the way, already subscribed in the first 2 minutes of the video.

[Taxiozaurus]

Seems like this video is getting a yet another wave of blessings from the algorithm. Lemme add a comment just to boost it that one tiny bit.
I have no clue why this video popped up on my recommended, never watched this channel before, though probably because curiosity and similar video from Tom Scott some odd months ago about APIs and updating video title.

[Deloxo]

Your gerrymandering video was literally suggested to me like 6 times before I watched it to make it go away.
But I'm watching your backlog now.

[HorochovPL]

Ah yes, This Old Tony. I see You're a maho of culture as well.

[Toastoffire]

What's really funny about this is that I think its broken, but you'll never be able to tell, since impressions and clickthrough data aren't available to the public. I only suspect that its broken since its been recommended to me like 5 times recently (because I've been re-binging this channel lol), and the numbers in the thumbnail haven't changed. Its really funny to me, since Tom's video is about "digital entropy", so when it breaks down, its just part of the theme. But this video is about the "chewing gum and duct tape" kinda solutions that we throw together, so the fact that it broke just reinforces why you shouldn't code like this

[theluckybead]

Proud to see the 0 just as this was posted!

Love the channel!

[mbunds]

The VM scripted scraper is the epitome of a non-deterministic system; “faith programming” -

[mrb]

I watched this video when it released, and YouTube just showed me it again. So naturally I had to re-watch it to not screw up the numbers and leave a comment for the engagement bots

[machibutinenglish]

Thanks, youtube. This was something that kept me 7 minutes and 28 more seconds in the platform.