No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me • Hacker News Board

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#111

Post by groffee » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:15 AM UTC

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."

For music videos that makes sense, but not so much for other content.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#112

Post by yodsanklai » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:15 AM UTC

Yes, as expected, this degraded the YouTube experience for some users. I mostly watch technical content, and the like/dislike numbers were extremely valuable to avoid losing time on a so-so video. Maybe it's different for political stuff or news, but for high-quality non-controversial content, you expect very few dislikes. Now I use the view/like ratio as primary filter, but it's not as useful.

I don't know what they made that move, I suppose it was to avoid negativity in social medias (and avoid similar controversies as Meta was experiencing), or maybe that would force users to watch more content...

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#113

Post by user_7832 » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:15 AM UTC

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.

Apparently some previously-scrapped data for older videos that gets updated, and heuristic estimates combined with extrapolating data from those who use that extension and like/dislike. LTT did a video where they found the accuracy really good.

Beating Google at their own game, they (apparently) are.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#114

Post by badpun » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:16 AM UTC

I hardly see those kinds of videos. You've probably trained algorithm to serve you those.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#115

Post by fxtentacle » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:16 AM UTC

Let's all take a moment to reflect on how much worse we (the software developers) have made this by building (essentially automated spam) tools like https://www.synthesia.io/ For example, their "Lays Messi" ad campaign had 650 million video variations available in 8 languages....

I predict that in a year, the majority of internet videos will not only be random stock 4K videos, but they will be overlay-ed with AI avatars gesturing to AI voice synthesis generated off GPT-3 text.

You'll be able to search for any topic and find pretty videos talking about it. But listening to it will rot your brain, because you're hearing the equivalent of lottery numbers.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#116

Post by 01acheru » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:17 AM UTC

It's just my layman opinion but I think it has something to do with trying to emulate TikTok.

I don't use youtube very much but this Sunday I discovered a thing called "siren kings" and wanted to watch some videos about them. Hell, now it's all reggaeton, sound battles and the like! But the thing I noticed is that when I entered a particular video, just that one, I entered a TikTok like mode where I could keep skipping from a short crappy video to another in an infinite doomscroll of shit... maybe this is feature exists since some time and I didn't notice it but it kind of strengthens my view that emulating TikTok is their thing now.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#117

Post by celdon25 » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:17 AM UTC

martin_a wrote: post #75

AHappyCamper wrote: post #56

Without being able to ratio likes to dislikes, every video on YouTube becomes useless for information value. Every video is now for entertainment only, which is what the communist radical left wants - when there is no truth, then whoever shouts the loudest becomes the voice of truth. They have taken a big step towards ruining the internet.

> the communist radical left Didn't you find any bigger words? In the end it's about engagement. Without the dislike count you'll have to watch more videos to find the good ones, so there's more chances to show ads, which is good for revenue. But yeah, communist world conspiracy is more likely.

Not sure about communism, but your reasoning has nothing to do with the official explanation given by YT. The “dislike attacks” they speak of in this blog post were notoriously common on any video featuring a politician from the Democratic Party in the USA. I never saw it happen elsewhere with such consistency. Hope that clears things up.

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-to-youtube/

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#118

Post by charcircuit » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:18 AM UTC

pieno wrote: post #77

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…

> 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…

This recently happened to me. I discovered someone's channel and it turned out to be a gold mine of content that I had somehow never heard of. I didn't even have to subscribe and it would recommend me banger videos from the guy.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#119

Post by narrator » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:18 AM UTC

cuteboy19 wrote: post #65

YouTube search for anything now recommends me videos that are in my watch later. Apparently YouTube thinks that when I ask for IncomeTax website walkthrough I must surely be looking for Quarantine Home Workout Routine and Lofi HipHop Radio

I see random stuff about the Johnny Depp divorce trial in my searches for information about rural Russian cities.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#120

Post by wazoox » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:19 AM UTC

I never, ever look at the recommendations. I go straight to my subscription page. I'm subscribed to hundreds of channels, that's more than enough to watch.