I have literally never looked at dislikes ever as a measure for quality.
You use the heuristics available and it was a fair predictor. Especially for instructional/educational material. I used it the way I use upvotes/time/comments on HN.
No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
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Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#92YouTube is a video hosting site, not a video discovery site. The sooner we all come to terms with that the better.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#93YouTube is still useful. It's a giant repository of videos that get indexed by search engines. The way to use it is: 1) know what you want to watch beforehand 2) search using a different engine like DDG 3) use yt-dl to grab the video and watch offline The mistake would be to "log in" to the actual site, and click on the "recommended" rubbish and all that algorithmic cruft to manipulate, data-mine your soul and mislea…
Personally, the algorithm works very effectively at stealing my time. Bikini catwalks, scamming phone scammers, MMA fights, math entertainment, people who build cool shit. This is of course subjective, but I basically can't open youtube.com without wasting 10 minutes. If I ever get the idea of going to YouTube for a legit purpose (e.g. finding a conference talk, or listening to music), my brain's first response is "o…
> scamming phone scammers
Mark Rober, I guess? No wonder the algorithm promotes him to heaven and beyond, the content he puts out is extremely well done.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending really, really old videos from people I normally watch. It's always done this, but it seems worse recently. Also, subscribe to a channel, get recommended their entire repertoire of the last decade. I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss. What…
> Also, subscribe to a channel, get recommended their entire repertoire of the last decade. I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss. I fear that there is a very big group (that is usually not on HN) that actually likes this. People who get absolutely hyped on some new channel and just have to watch everyth…
There's nothing wrong with old content per-se. A true crime channel, for example, can have a lot of old content that's still interesting to watch. And thing for science and comedy. No need for any strange community feelings or bragging rights.
Now, this doesn't make sense for all types of content, of course, but definitely for some.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#95I used the like/dislike ratio to see if something is actually a good video about the topic I'm searching, or should I continue further. For example, if I search "volvo s40 MAF sensor replacement", I won't watch someone ramble 20 minutes about how volvos are good, and why they chose the car in white instead of blue color... I want someone who'll pop the hood and replace the sensor, and those videos will usually have a…
Since they removed the dislike count, I've watched zero technical/programming and related videos on youtube. I'm not going to sit for 30 minutes and then realise the video is a pile of garbage.
I'm amazed that anyone can find any decent programming content on YouTube. There are low-quality beginners webdev tutorials as far as the eye can see, but otherwise there's seemingly very little outside of rambling and superficial conference talks. And on the odd occasion when I do watch a video, YouTube decides that I must be a beginning webdev and bombards me with the aforementioned low-quality Javascript and HTML tutorials for the next several weeks.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#96I 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 tons of videos I've already seen or recommending really, really old videos from people I normally watch. It's always done this, but it seems worse recently. Also, subscribe to a channel, get recommended their entire repertoire of the last decade. I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss. What…
> I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss.
Don't know if you knew this, you can use RSS to get feeds of the channels you want without subscribing or even having a Google account.
Good in-browser add-on for following, organizing etc. of RSS feeds: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#97I 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 explicitly downvote videos that aren't directly relevant to what I want to keep seeing. This does mean that I often downvote videos that I've enjoyed, such as useful product reviews for something that I'm buying. This keeps my recommendations relatively clean.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#98I turned off storing my watch history on youtube and what that means is that my feed and recommendations became terrible. That is a great thing!
I now only spend time watching videos on youtube when I actually want to watch something and search for it and not end up in a wormhole of watching 4 hours of videos back to back to back.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#99I've only noticed the difference for a very specific set of technical help videos: how to open an X, how to fix a Y, how to pronounce Z. Now I just have to check the comments. The YouTube recommendation algorithm also broke globally about 3 weeks ago. Most people have not noticed it yet, but I haven't asked a single person about it who has said that their recommendations are normal. They've suddenly been full of crap…
> Now I just have to check the comments.
The problem is that the comments section can be fully managed by the uploader. It's easily possible for them to delete negative comments or even to add filters to do so automatically.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#100I understand that youtube recommendations can be a very useful tool, but I definitely do not want depend on any opaque recommendation system for my daily media consumption or whatever.
Given the existence of "Subscriptions" page I don't really understand the problem. Do you really want to consume regularly from the sources you didn't explicitly "verify" yourself i.e. subscribed to?
I simple use the Unhook browser plugin which hides the Home, Trending, recommendations side bar, comments, etc. for me so I only have the Subscriptions page, and the search bar. Makes the youtube experience SO MUCH better.