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No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#31

Post by plaguepilled »

d--b wrote: post #19

Guys, ok youtube recommendations suck, they may not always have, I don’t know, but does it really matter that much that you need to share your frustration to a community of thousands of tech people? It’s just a product. You don’t complain online when your brand new sneakers hurt your feet, do you? Especially if you got them for free… You don’t like youtube recommendation engine, complain to them, not to us.

So if I'm reading this right, you'd like people to 'stop posting opinions about tech on this site about tech'? How does that work exactly?

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#32

Post by epgui »

Stop clicking on click-bait, you're doing it to yourself.

Watch only "boring" / serious channels and you won't have that problem. That's what I do and I get great recommendations (tons of numberphile, computerphile, 3blue1brown, pbs space time, finance and economics... stuff like that).

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#33

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

let me be that guy.. i have never held a youtube/google account and never have had a need to "comment/subscribe" or generally interact with anyone. for the last 12 years at least, i have had the habit of opening private window on my firefox, ublock origin is running and i open youtube. whatever fancies me for "that session", i watch it, say i am looking for DIY solar panels and tomorrow i am looking for hans zimmer interstellar score.

i do not get much of "clickbaity" stuff because i "KNOW" what i am looking for and once the video is watched for the session, i close the window and everything is forgotten.

a side effect of this is, unless i bookmark something (i rarely do) everything gets wiped so i have developed a memory of URLs/URIs/titles and stuff so i can go back.

on my phone, i use newpipe so i am "insulated" from the suggestions BS of youtube and i do not miss it.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#36

Post by idrios »

I agree with everything you said, and so I started reading comments to judge if a video is good. But the comments are always positive, even when the video is terrible! Like, bad tutorial video, unoriginal pop science video, lame interview with a bored celebrity, the comments are still always positive. Once I saw a comment that said something like "This was a really cool video! " and I realized the algorithm is suppressing negative comments and promoting positive ones based on words used.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#37

Post by asddubs »

get the extension "BlockTube" and block any channel that does this. after a while your feed will get noticably better.

People are saying not to click but IMO it doesn't work that well. I make a point of never clicking on any video title like that, and still kept getting flooded

My favorite pattern is saying "THIS" and withholding what exactly the video is about - once I saw it used twice in a title and it just cracked me up. It was something like "Do THIS instead of THIS". I wish anyone a couple years from now trying to find a video made in the current times good luck.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#38

Post by dagw »

I can't say I've noticed a difference. That being said 80+% of videos I watch are either from channels I subscribe to or something I've searched for. Also after I started getting more aggressive with using the Not Interested and Don't Recommend Channel buttons to flag videos on my recommendation page I feel it's actually gotten quite a bit better.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#39

Post by Mindwipe »

It's certainly the case for me that the recommendations are getting significantly worse. I've pretty much hobby trained it so I get a lot less of the quacks than most people, but I think the absence of any incentive to downvote is really messing with their system and they have shot themselves in the foot.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#40

Post by lb4r »

watwut wrote: post #18

You can click either of these: - Not Interested. - Don't recommend channel. Also, afaik, the sort of videos you complain about had no reason to be disliked much.

This was how I got rid of those recommendations that OP describes, until one day around two-three months ago when YouTube decided, for some reason, to ignore those actions completely. I had probably hidden well over 5k videos and channels over the years; now they are all back. No idea why. Trying to hide a video or a channel does nothing anymore for me.
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