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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

#201

Post by moffkalast »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #148
philliphaydon wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've probably ruined my recommendations forever now. :( I pretty much only stick to subscriber channels now except for stuff people send me. Since there's no dislikes I just don't browse the stuff available anymore. YouTube is definitely worse off without the dislike counter.

There's a "don't recommend channel" option if you click the 3 dots button on a video. I use this liberally for all sorts of reasons and it makes my recommendations much better.

uBlock breaks that menu though, so it's a hassle to turn it off, block it and then turn it back on. Especially since you have to refresh and youtube randomizes the recommendations again and sometimes hides all traces of that channel.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#202

Post by corobo »

sph wrote: post #44
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…

> 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 hate to admit it but the older videos proper work on me.

YouTube suggested Casey Neistat's first vlog for whatever reason[0]. A week or so later I've consumed the entire channel. Very decent recommend on YouTube's part if they're optimising for session duration that one.

[0]: I was in a bit of a "I might be a YouTuber as it turns out" moment at one point and I think I caught his How to vlog like Casey Neistat video or maybe Do What You Can't

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#203

Post by dredmorbius »

jcranberry wrote: post #175

You can tell YouTube you're not interested in the video or to explicitly not recommend a channel.

Not without logging in.

"But how would that work if you're not" you ask?

Simple: YT is already tracking cookies or session. The block should apply to the session itself.

That said, I'm so done with Google.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#205

Post by viraptor »

rg111 wrote: post #173

I never trusted YT algorithm or any recommendation algorithms for that matter. I always watch YT videos straight from search results or links that I get sent. I always kept my watch history and search history off. Recommendation algorithms are not tuned to serve niche users but want to maximize watch duration from maximum number of viewers. YT tells me several times a month that I have search histories turned off and…

> Recommendation algorithms are not tuned to serve niche users

I'm not sure that's correct either. I have some niche interests and I'm pretty happy with the recommendations. Things I actually watch definitely influence my future recommendations (actually got interested in some cool new topics because of that).

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#206

Post by hoppla »

smcl wrote: post #168
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…

> What the hell is wrong with modern AI-driven recommendation engines No idea but it's been an issue ever since I've used Amazon. In a way it's kind of reassuring that their AI is not smart enough to know that after buying a vaccuum cleaner, I am probably not going to immediately buy another one.

You are more likely to buy a vacuum cleaner just after you bought one than any other random point in time. Reason is that a percentage return their first buy for whatever reason. If you are going to target someone with ads for whatever product, the ROI is actually just after you bought something …

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#207

Post by Ensorceled »

I feel like every recommendation engine has tanked in 2022 along with a matching upswing in ads.

Audible is aggressively recommending an audiobook I already bought and listened to, it's even in their "your year so far" list because I listened to it in January. Their 2-for-1, annual, special offer emails are coming 2-3 a week now.

My Facebook timeline is full of crappy "Suggested for you" entries. I doom scrolled last night and counted; I was "suggested" the Dilbert group 10 times. And ads ... so many ads. Ads and suggestions take up 66% of my feed; I get an ad, a suggestion and something from friends or family in equal proportions.

I watched ONE reality TV show on Netflix, The Final Table, and now the Banner show is "Crazy Delicious" and the Top Picks list is entirely reality TV shows on baking, cooking, chocolate sculpting. Where did the sci-fi go? Oh right, my continue watching bar ...

Twitter was CONSTANTLY suggesting/promoting NFT/coin/web3 scams, I've blocked every single one of them. Luckily that dried up very recently ... for some reason. Now my feed is full of promoted ISP ads ... for some reason. As with Facebook, my feed is swamped with ads now.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#208

Post by elcapitan »

The problem with the "Bring dislike counts back" extensions is that this change also triggers a behavior change in users. When your vote is invisible and pointless, much fewer people will "give feedback", and thus change the meaning of the count.

Like when you discover that your downvotes on HN are actually not being counted ;P

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#210

Post by scoot »

fxtentacle wrote: post #115

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 avat…

And Synthesia is so awful that Synthesia didn't use it to generate their promo video. That's about a damning as it gets!
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