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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

#101

Post by alpaca128 »

ageitgey wrote: post #15

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…

The search results also got worse. For some reason they now mix random video recommendations with the result list, including videos that have no connection whatsoever to the search and that I already have seen.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#103

Post by 130e13a »

informalo wrote: post #80
g0gzs wrote: post #5

I 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…

You can at least solve the problem of not seeing dislikes anymore with a browser extension, e.g. "Return YouTube Dislike". https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis... (also available for Firefox, Edge, ..) Of course, it doesn't solve the recommendation issue the thread creator mentioned.

where does the extension get the data from, though? it's not like they just have to remove a `display: none` somewhere.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#104

Post by devoutsalsa »

ageitgey wrote: post #15

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…

Are you logged in to device, like a Roku or PlayStation, where one of your kids would be watching and/or rating videos?

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#105

Post by alexb_ »

I've recently heard about this YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar. If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently, you've probably run into him. Because of the "no dislikes" change, he's everywhere now.

And by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now they've probably uploaded a few videos in the past couple minutes. The videos are generated crap, ripped from tech forums. Normally you wouldn't see it anywhere due to dislikes being easy to spot, but now they pop up all the time in search results due to dislikes becoming a sort of "hidden feature".

Hiding dislikes = less people press dislike (no feedback) = low quality videos are much harder to get rid of in search results. It's really, really bad.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#106

Post by polote »

ageitgey wrote: post #15

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 have no proof, but it is probably with Youtube trying to compete with Tiktok. There are more originals content on Tiktok and on Tiktok any user can easily publish content.

So it would make sense that Youtube is trying to favor new creators and short videos. Actually a lot of Youtubers for a few months have been complaining, that the algo penalize channels that dont publish frequently.

I'm myself a big Youtube watcher, and I have not been seeing significant changes in the videos I see, there is more short videos, and videos from Tiktok reposted here but in my opinion it is just because more content of that kind is being published.

There is also a discovery problem on Youtube. They usually recommend you content that is close to the content you have seen recently (but it has always been like that). Once per week there is a truly original video that pops up.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#107

Post by krisoft »

mjburgess wrote: post #60
sph wrote: post #44

Earlier 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…

They arent recommendation engines. In the sense that recommendation is not the formal problem of showing someone content with a non-zero probability of their watching it. Recommendation, as we understanding it, means understanding our interests first. Recommendations systems use average expressed preferences (ie., on-average watch frequency) in others to "recommend" you something. If we didnt opt for such metaphorica…

But it does recommend videos to you. It is absolutely not just "Popularity Ranking".

On my youtube front page the first row of videos are: a recent Scott Manley video about some SpaceX thing (which is in my interests), a DnD game (which I have already seen on twitch, youtube of course has no way knowing that), a song from a band I'm listening to since a few days, and a video documenting a glider airplane adventure. All in my areas of interest and I highly doubt that these are the 4 most popular videos on youtube right now.

> Recommendation, as we understanding it, means understanding our interests first.

Yes. And that's what they try to do. Sometimes they fail. For a hypothetical lets say that I recommend to my friend that they should see the new superhero movie in cinemas. They go and watch it and they don't like it. Clearly that means that my recommendation was a bad one, but does it stop being a recommendation? Only perfect recommenders are worth that name?

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#108

Post by bambax »

socket0 wrote: post #47
ageitgey wrote: post #15

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…

What bothers me most about the recommendations I get are the videos I have clearly watched. "You recently watched this clip, so we at YouTube think you should watch it again."

This is like Amazon recommending the exact same item you just bought, sometimes from a different brand or vendor. "We see you bought a toaster, surely you need a hundred more."

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#109

Post by alexb_ »

dsalaj wrote: post #100

I 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 plu…

>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?

Of course I do! This is often how I find new things that I'm interested in, or just videos that I want to watch that aren't a part of channels I'm already subscribed to.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#110

Post by rbinv »

130e13a wrote: post #103
informalo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can at least solve the problem of not seeing dislikes anymore with a browser extension, e.g. "Return YouTube Dislike". https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis... (also available for Firefox, Edge, ..) Of course, it doesn't solve the recommendation issue the thread creator mentioned.

where does the extension get the data from, though? it's not like they just have to remove a `display: none` somewhere.

They run their own database. It's basically community-driven.

edit: there's a Linus Tech Tips video on this which goes into more detail. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz9b0oJw69I

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