YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism

#91

Post by brownbat » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 2:44 AM UTC

maest wrote: post #78

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My approach is to vote on videos I've watched, and just skip it if I've already seen it. It works for me. I'm concerned that I'd see less relevant content if I start saying I'm not interested in previously watching interesting videos.

> I'm concerned that I'd see less relevant content I used to have that concern as well, but then I realised I didn't actually get that much value from yt recommendations. The stuff I want to see comes from channels I'm subscribed to and only very rarely have I discovered something good from recommendations - most of the discovery comes from the right-hand side video column.

> I didn't actually get that much value from yt recommendations.

The last rec engine I got much value out of was early Netflix, around the first public competition to improve their engine.

My nightmare is that corporations suddenly realized that recommendation engines don't actually help them sell content. Maybe it's easier to persuade tons of people to watch something they'll all think is "good enough" rather than to identify or develop content some tiny subgroup of people will think is sublime.

Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism

#92

Post by ehsankia » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 2:49 AM UTC

dredds wrote: post #48

ehsankia wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube Premium * . (Is there no way to end a line with an escaped asterisk?)

This reminds me the days of free hosting w/ banner ads, then you'd get a whole month of surgical banners. I'm sure YT has good metrics on what level of discomfort will prompt certain folk to go paid.

For me it's not about pressure, I run an ad-blocker anyways. Youtube is one of the services I use the most in my every day life, and considering the amount of value I get out of it, giving 10$ back is the least I can do in my mind. I find that many people take online services for granted these days, and don't take a step back to look at how much value these services bring them. I get 50+ hours of entertainment per month out of Youtube, if that's not worth 10$, then I don't know what is.

Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism

#93

Post by keyle » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 2:59 AM UTC

izzydata wrote: post #3

It's crazy to think that clicking on the "not interested in videos from this channel" button previously did not remove videos from that channel in recommendations. I used to press it up to 5 times on the same video and it still did nothing.

You are correct, and the most insulting part is "Tell us why".

Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism

#94

Post by strawberryfan » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 3:16 AM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #60

yellowapple wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "3 hours of planes taking off" Now that's a video idea. I currently live right under the flight path for planes flying out of SFO; I should set up a camera and just record the sky, since they fly pretty close overhead.

It's great. Some folks really could watch that all day .

I dunno. For me it's Jimmy Barnes screaming for 10 hours.

Pure catharsis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfkts0u-m6w

Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism

#95

Post by sp332 » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 3:28 AM UTC

lopmotr wrote: post #65

arielweisberg wrote: post #26

I 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.

Is that because you opted-out of ad personalization on https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en ?

Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism

#96

Post by JauntyHatAngle » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 3:40 AM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #38

swebs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even the worst of it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

Daily reminder that the internet doesn't absolve you of actually parenting your kids, and keeping and eye on what they browse on the internet. This isn't unique to Youtube, there are all sorts of bad places kids can end up if left alone on the web.

This is true, but youtube directly markets itself to children with children channels and the like.

Youtube has some culpability here.

Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism

#97

Post by Lerc » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 4:15 AM UTC

>Users will now be able to tell YouTube to stop suggesting videos from a particular channel by tapping the three-dot menu next to a video on the homepage or Up Next, then choosing “Don’t recommend channel.”

By "now" do they mean `eventually`, because I just tried looking for said option with no success.

Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism

#98

Post by jillesvangurp » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 4:15 AM UTC

serf wrote: post #37

YouTube recommendations are terrible. Is there some service somewhere that does a better job with YouTube videos? Google has historically been unfriendly towards third party API use, but here's hoping.

Agreed, I click through them once in a while when I'm bored and it consists mostly of stuff I've already watched mixed with stuff I have chosen not to watch from channels I follow combined with random crap. The most annoying thing is that it just fills your feed with stuff similar to whatever you recently did. This is made worse by the fact that they only show a handful of recommendations. The only way to get new recommendations is to either wait hours/days for the stupid stuff to go away or to engage with their fiddly "this recommendation was BS" system for getting rid of recommendations. Google news has the same "more of the same shit" masquerading as machine learning style algorithms.

On a positive note, I like what e.g. Spotify is doing in some places and I think Youtube can learn from that. They provide some great content discovery mechanisms. Curated playlists, users that listen to artist X also listen to artist Y, these are the top tracks for this artist (based on play statistics), etc. Very useful. Very low tech. Very easy to implement.

If only they'd stop confusing geo location with my interests. E.g. their release radar is full of German crap because I happen to live in Germany (I'm actually Dutch). Youtube does the same "you are in Germany! Here's some random German crap!" style promoted content on their front page. Most of it is very obviously not even remotely close to anything I watch. Location seems to drown out recommendation signals and all forms of common sense. It is used to push locally promoted content regardless of the not so subtle hints that I don't ever engage with that (my German sucks; why would I?).

There are hundreds of millions of migrants world wide, many of them have spending power and they are ignored and under served by most big tech companies (Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Google, etc.). This is surprising because they actually employ a lot of these migrants: they should know better. Getting content in the right language vs. the local language, localizing promoted content to the local language instead of what the user actually speaks and consumes on their service, etc. It's not hard and it's not because the content isn't there but because the algorithms are optimizing for the local lowest common denominator and most of these companies shoot.

Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism

#99

Post by 3xblah » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 4:32 AM UTC

3xblah wrote: post #67

I 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 sys…

s/Just more dark patterns. //

Re: YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism

#100

Post by creato » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 4:56 AM UTC

switchbak wrote: post #22

makosdv wrote: post #16

I just flat out stopped using their recommendations a while ago. I only look at my subscriptions feed.

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…

> Surely there's some folks at Google who can see the raging dumpster fire this has become? I realize it's hard given all the competing interests (esp. advertisers), but this is horrendous.

I'm sure bad recommendations are an issue for some people, but for me they aren't that bad. I've found some pretty awesome stuff I probably wouldn't have found otherwise through it, and I'm pretty sure even my worst recommendations are better than what I see opening youtube.com in an incognito window.