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No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

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Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#61

I don't personally think the dislike button is the explanation. But something seems to have changed in the Youtube recommendations algo in the last few weeks. In my experience, the algo has gotten very noticeably worse recently: - Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?) - Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending reall…

I agree it's gotten a lot worse recently. Especially wrt the already seen videos. When playing a video it's disturbingly common to not have a single fresh, unseen video in the related/recommended sidebar.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#62

I don't personally think the dislike button is the explanation. But something seems to have changed in the Youtube recommendations algo in the last few weeks. In my experience, the algo has gotten very noticeably worse recently: - Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?) - Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending reall…

> - Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?)

Really depends on the topic. 12 year old product reviews don't make sense. 12 year old hour-long lecture about Roman empire is just as good as it was 12 years ago.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#63
Finding good YouTube videos is a non-issue. There are more amazing sciency/educational channels than it is possible to watch.[1]

Just subscribe to the ones you like and go directly to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

[1] for example:

3Blue1Brown

Beyond The Press

CGP Grey

Captain Disillusion

Cody’s Lab

Computerphile

EEVblog

EVNautilus

Electroboom

Engineering with Rosie

Evan and Katelyn

Everyday Astronaut

Half as Interesting

Huygens Optics

Jay Foreman

Kurzgesagt

Lockpicking Lawyer

Louis Rossman

Mark Rober

Matt Parker

NileBlue

NileRed

Numberphile

Periodic Videos

Physics Girl

PolyMatter

Practical Engineering

Real Engineering

Real Science

RealLifeLore

Simone Giertz

Skill Up

SmarterEveryDay

Stand-up Maths

SteveMould

Strange Parts

StuffMadeHere

Summer Rayne Oakes

Technology Connections

Tom Scott

Two Minute Papers

Veritasium

Vihart

Vsauce

Wendover Productions

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#64

What I noticed is how sterile and sanitised the comments are. You don't see any negative comments anymore. Also if you search you will get random unrelated videos mixed with your results.

Ironically, you see a lot of replies to people that seemingly said something negative, but the original comment is very hard to find. I guess YouTube just hides (or shadow bans) negativity on the platform.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#66
... and this is benign compared to the broken compatibility with noscript/basic (x)html browsers (now I use yt-dlp). Such browsers could pass the URL to a media player and the streaming protocol would have an URL-ized way to seek into the video, if not live (I think HLS does define one with a standard time unit, should check though).

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#67
Unlike other commentors, I personally feel the algorithm has improved.

It has more variety now. Before it used to always recommend me the top 4 ~ 5 channels that I often watch. Now it's recommending me more channels. Although they happen to be channels that have content similar to content I've watched on other channels.

This is a marked improvement on the previous situation.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#68

I don't personally think the dislike button is the explanation. But something seems to have changed in the Youtube recommendations algo in the last few weeks. In my experience, the algo has gotten very noticeably worse recently: - Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?) - Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending reall…

Ok, let's try: youtube.com... Out of first 11 visible videos: I may watch, if I had time: 4 music, 2 technical, 2 political, 1 gaming. 9/11 total.

Mistakes - 1 technical (like "my interest is not that serious") Obvious garbage - 1 ("The whole world is afraid of Japan now" plus a crazy plane picture).

Not so bad. Can't compare with previous times though, cause I never paid attention to the first youtube page.

And now let me watch my first recommendation: The Devil’s Daughters w/ Danny B Harvey - Rock Boppin’ Baby (Sexy) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUpDslHSLbU - just can't resist these girls...

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#69

I don't personally think the dislike button is the explanation. But something seems to have changed in the Youtube recommendations algo in the last few weeks. In my experience, the algo has gotten very noticeably worse recently: - Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?) - Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending reall…

Tbh YT should finally start making their platform more discoverable like Valve has been doing with the Steam store.

You can have explicitly tunable recommendation systems, tag-based classification, slicing and dicing search and subscription pages, filter lists, curators and such, but they seem obsessed with deciding everything for their users in the most obscure fashion possible. It's why they have lost me as a user years ago, which is a sad thing to me really given my long-held positive attitude to the service.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#70
post #45
post #32

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).

it's true, but it's hard, you only need to click once on a clickbait video out of curiosity and you'll be flooded with garbage until you reset your whole youtube history. I switched to individious/piped and newpipe since for a more quiet youtube experience.

You need to be very aggressive against this, dislike and don't recommend every bit of garbage you see otherwise you will be flooded with it
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