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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

#211
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don’t understand why Google got it right with Circles, realizing we have different orthogonal interests… but all my YouTube subscriptions go in a giant pile, as if advanced math, news, and rap videos are fungible content. I want some ability to create sets of channels with a focus and only access that when I want to. I think the problem is that YouTube has always been a manipulative and exploitative platf…

It's a problem with evidence based product design. It's in almost all big products nowadays. The way Google axes products, the way Netflix axes series, the way Facebook populates the timeline. They're throwing away the intrinsic value of the product, for positive graphics in their monthly user engagement presentations. Facebook's user engagement is probably higher than it ever was. I have a friend who's one of those…

> Facebook's user engagement is probably higher than it ever was. I have a friend who's one of those conspiracy nuts and he's on there all day everyday posting dozens of media links to questionable content. His behaviour is their dream. At the same time almost none of my "normal" friends or family are still there.

This matches my experience, the family members still very active are all politically involved, posting rants from either side of the spectrum. The conspiracy stuff is unhinged and getting worse.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#212

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…

Nothing employees love more than soulless, robotic training videos.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#213

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…

I purchased a hair trimmer on Amazon two weeks ago - Amazon is still sending me emails recommending me to buy a hair trimmer.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#214
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Spotify and music recommendations for me.

I gave up on Spotify because Spotify, unlike me, was stuck in the 70's and 80's...

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#216
post #105

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 th…

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.

You can go to “history” and remove it.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#217

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 pay for YouTube Premium, and it's less noticeable for me. But your complaints are spot on for me -- YouTube appears to have gotten even dumber. I believe that this is b/c YT as a platform is less profitable ... that's why they're pushing more ads. That part is pretty obvious.

But we're also seeing the other behaviours b/c overall Googs is allocating less CPU time to their naive AI recommendation engine. I feel that premium members get proportionally more AI time to tune their recommendations than freemium members.

This feels like Google turned down the AI spend across the board to increase the margin on YT as a revenue platform.

It was a bad decision.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#218
post #200
post #105

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 th…

Obviously, the guy is just ripping StackOverflow. His "latest" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtqJq0OF8eA Is a poorly generated copy/paste of: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1644... Probably a tiny Python script. Google is prompt to ban other accounts, hope some Googlers around here can can do something...

[deleted]

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#220
I don't think it has anything to do with the dislike button. The YT algorithm is really bad. It has been doing this for years, and they don't seem to know how to fix it. I regularly receive recommendation that are completely annoying, even after I specifically said that I don't want to see that channel.
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