Next thing you know, Twitter will let you view tweets in the order they were tweeted.
It actually does. The desktop website has a permanent setting. Mobile website has the setting, too, but occasionally resets it to Twitter’s “Top tweets” sorting.
YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
61–70 of 148 posts
Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of emphasis in this particular situation, though, is that the recommendations are actively encouraging bad content that the kid wasn't originally looking for.
It can also actively encourage good content that someone wasn't originally looking for. This is one of the things I most love about the internet. XKCD did a good job highlighting this in "The Problem with Wikipedia" https://xkcd.com/214/ The problem we have is determining what is good content and what is bad content and who is the arbiter of what is good or bad. Something you think is bad, might be something someone…
Sometimes they can be so manifestly and obviously bad so as to be objectively bad.
Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
#63There is no way that "3 hours of planes taking off" or "3 hours of rain" are getting 10's of millions of views without getting recommended widely, including myself. 18 hours of "ambient sounds" has 130 million views so that's some heavy promotion, not just some occasional insomniac using search.
I watch these videos religiously, for what it’s worth.
Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
#64To be honest, this looks like a CYA feature to get out, not like something that is actually intended to be used. They took pains to give the "follow the recommendation" action the most frictionless path possible in the UI - just wait and do nothing. In contrast, this new feature to dial back recommendations is a buried in an obscure menu only reachable by clicking a button labeled "..." in a counterintuitive location…
Are you proposing that they don't autoplay anything that you haven't explicitly opted in to? Discovering new creators is pretty important to both Youtube and its users. Or do you want it to autoplay something that's not based on any personalized recommendation? That would reduce the value of Youtube over TV in that it caters to niche interests.
Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
#65I just want to stop seeing an ad that drives my spouse absolutely insane. Nope. No option to not see it anymore.
I'd always assumed you could block specific ads or advertisers since there's a button on each ad with a menu for that (on the circled i button). But when I just tried it, it refused because it said personalized ads were turned off, even though there were turned on. So I guess that's just another weirdly broken pretend-feature.
Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those sort of videos in particular have a very large replay value, as many insomniacs may play that video every night.
Which is kinda my point. The amount of HD traffic and wasted bandwidth is just insane. At what point would YT just acknowledge the same viewer is watching (or listening) the same video over and over and over again before offering a download button? (sure tech ppl can use 3rd-party tool, but all are blocked on Google Play, and most others limited to short vids only)
Anything that wastes bandwidth, I see as a positive thing because it's pressure on networks to increase bandwidth. Once it's in place, using it is harmless since it would otherwise have been wasted serving nobody. Netflix forced ISPs in my country to pull finger when their customers would have regular evening internet slowdowns. I'm looking forward to more improvements as they cater to cloud gaming.
Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
#67I thought for a moment they were going to turn off recommendations. For users not signed in, they are on by default.
Instead this is like asking users to click thumbs up or down in response to an ad, "Don't show me this ad again" or fill out a survey about the ads.
The issue is not that the user is annoyed by a specific toxic video. That is only the effect, not the cause. The issue is that Google's recommendation system is, as they say, "broken". Either fix it to stop promoting "popular" garbage (which is "popular" because it is auto-recommended and auto-played), or turn if off by default.
This is another example of an "opt-out" that most users cannot be bothered with. Instead of sane defaults: recommendations off, auto-play off.
If Google must force users to interact with a particular video and click something so they can collect another data point, then a more sensible approach would be "opt-in". Let users decide whether they want some recommendations based on a particular video they manually select. "Show me recommendation based on this video"
Just more dark patterns. If a choice was one users wanted (recommendations on, auto-play on), then the way to test that is to make them choose it. Instead, Google makes the default choices that benefit Google and requires users to change settings. Often forcing them to sign-in and be tracked in order to change a default setting.
Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
#68This doesn’t really solve some of the more concerning things about recommendations, which is the gradual ease into more extreme content. i.e., “super Mario speedrun” to “Top 10 speedrunning fails” to “Super Mario speedrunner gets owned” to “Why women shouldn’t be allowed to play video games” or other such hogwash.
Was just talking to a family member recently about this. Her daughter is into horses and so is watching a lot of showjumping videos. Apparently the algorithm keeps trying to lead her off towards increasingly bad showjumping accident videos and from there basically into /r/watchpeopleandhorsesdie
Ironically that sounds like it might save his daughters life given the extreme dangers of show jumping.
Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I notice it because I use it more now, but it's shocking how bad it's become. I often get a heavy stream of suggestions for: ancient videos, and videos I've already watched. Throw in some clickbait and outrage focused content. Then it seems to try to make me more extreme in some way (flat earther, hardcore gamer, etc) based on perhaps one partial watch of a semi-related video. Surely there's some folks at Googl…
>I think these companies are optimizing on metrics that (ostensibly) show an improved experience They're optimizing for highest profits. For Netflix, that means showing you videos with the lowest licensing fees. For Youtube, that means showing videos where the uploader has paid to boost it.
I think the uploader doesn't even have to be the one paying now. If I remember right, Coke can pay for someone's positive Coke related video to be shown more and it bypasses the sponsorship disclosure requirements.
Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
#70Next thing you know, Twitter will let you view tweets in the order they were tweeted.
They enabled that in September of last year, actually:
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/104183895789645004...