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YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations

engadget.com

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Re: YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations

#131

Post by daveoc64 »

mikrl wrote: post #80

I didn’t like when they removed the dislike counts, and I still don’t like it. When I look for videos of folks working on Subarus, I don’t want to have to manually scrub through the video to gauge the quality. Before I’d just look at the ratio and if I was feeling generous I’d preview the frames to see if they had what I wanted. Now it takes me at least 2 mins longer to get to the same judgement which begs the questi…

The problem with the dislike button seems to be that nobody agrees on what it should be used for.

In previous HN discussions, it's become apparent that some people use it to say "I am not interested in this video".

That is of zero use to other users. The video isn't necessarily bad, it's just on a topic you don't care about.

If you are instead using it to mean "this video is factually wrong" or "this video is obnoxious" that might be useful.

If you are using it to say "I don't agree with this political viewpoint" or "I don't like this movie/superhero/game/TV franchise", then that's also probably not that helpful.

Re: YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations

#132

Post by northes »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #128

I run https://fiction.live which has a similar recommendations function as youtube. The key insight here is that dislikes are not the same thing as uninterested. People will dislike stories that they're interested in but think are poorly written or do not have the ending that they want it to have. If you use dislike to mean uninterested you are ruining the recommendations. Rather you need to have a separate button th…

That's more or less what the "not interested" button is for. The article says Mozilla tested both and they were just about equally ineffective.

Re: YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations

#133

Post by p1necone »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #32

The trick to improving YouTube recommendations is to regularly prune uninteresting videos and channels. Eventually this should start surfacing videos you're more likely to find interesting. I've actually hit the end of my recommendation stream on the mobile app after marking dozens of videos with Not Interested. Once this happens it starts recommending videos you've already watched or older videos from creators you'v…

Yeah the recency bias is really annoying to me. I'll get really interested in some new topic for a bit and watch a bunch of videos about it and it seems like YouTube takes that as a signal to bump other topics out of my recommendations, even if they're things that I've consistently been interested in for a long time.

I wish I could somehow "save" the state of my recommendations profile so I can revert it if it goes off the rails.

Re: YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations

#134

Post by vineyardmike »

sph wrote: post #17
HardwareLust wrote: post #5

YouTube doesn't seem to understand my preferences, at all. It's far, far too biased toward what you recently watched. It basically doesn't work and certainly doesn't "learn" anything.

YouTube absolutely IGNORES your preferences. I watch it daily, I have never listened to any hip hop, I don't watch sports nor trending topics, yet every single day it suggests football videos, MMA, the latest hiphop hit, and celebrity crap (imagine the Kardashians) among my other interests. I click "don't recommend this channel", or "I don't like this video " every single day, I have an extension to make this conveni…

Do you perhaps have some account setting where it doesn’t store info or track you? In other words, are you preventing them from understanding you?

I have a completely different experience. My recommendations are pretty decent, if recent-biased. You’re not on the “explore” or “trending now” page right? Obviously trending videos aren’t tailored to individuals

Re: YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations

#135

Post by aantix »

I wrote an app called SmartKid that attempts to curate your YouTube recommendations via disliking videos that match a set of keywords (e.g. Minecraft, mrbeast, reaction).

https://smartk.id/

Working on getting my Youtube api quota extended.

Re: YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations

#136

Post by Nekhrimah »

amatecha wrote: post #110
proteal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overwatch had a feature where you could avoid players, but a top sniper was avoided by enough top players that he could never find a match. The matchmaking system could never find him a match because almost all potential matches had at least one player on each team that had him avoided. The devs eventually reworked that feature so that he could play the game. Sometimes seemingly innocuous features have weird edge cas…

Right, it sounds like Overwatch's implementation was poor. I don't expect to have the player "unmatched" forever, or even completely unmatched for that matter. Just lowered in the "algorithm", probably including a cooldown factor so the "de-rank via reporting" is gone after some time. Like I said I don't care if matchmaking takes longer (usually it's only ~30 sec). The pool of players is utterly massive, and ranking…

Overwatch's current avoid player system has a limit of 3 players, and only for 7 days per player - and no way to extend unless you run into that player again. Also, it's only avoid as teammate (which was alluded to in the top sniper story, but not specifically stated).

Re: YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations

#137

Post by throwaway2037 »

oyashirochama wrote: post #127
rtsil wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remove the unwanted video from your history and it will no longer affect your recommendations.

YT has hidden tags that tie it to your account after viewing a video, removing the video from played/history does not affect this and has been an issue with YT for nearly 6-7 years at this point.

This sounds interesting. I tried to Google about it, but I found nothing. How did you learn about this?

Re: YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations

#138

Post by JetAlone »

Judging by the ads I have been getting lately, Youtube must somehow think I'm a Japanese person who moved to middle America, because I'm getting ads for local businesses I couldn't use if I wasn't living there, like pet grooming centers. Unless of course, there's some malcompetence at play, and youtube is deliberately allowing for the waste of advertising budgets of middle American businesses on people like me, to sabotage them.

Re: YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations

#139

Post by makeitdouble »

rtsil wrote: post #119
darth_avocado wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with this approach is that it takes a lot of curation to get your recommendation in a decent shape and it takes you one accidental video view to have your feed be full of uninteresting content related to that video. This asymmetry is the root of all the recommendation system problems.

Remove the unwanted video from your history and it will no longer affect your recommendations.

I assume you're right, which puts us in a position where:

- search is neutered/broken, so finding new interesting videos is a chore

- recommendations need to be manually combed regularly to remove dumb videos

- watch history also needs to be combed to remove potential false signals

That's a lot of curation to get somewhat decent recommendations. Not saying we have a choice, it's not like Vimeo will make a comeback to save us, but that's a pretty bad place we're in.

Re: YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations

#140

Post by chillfox »

My recommendations have been filled with crazy conspiracy stuff for months just because I watched some caving/diving disaster videos styled like camp fire stories. I have tried marking videos as not interesting and blocking channels, but there appears to be an endless supply of that stuff.

To make it worse it looks like accidentally letting the preview play a few seconds of a video marks the subject as something you are interested in and it can sometimes be near impossible to select a video in the middle of the page without having one of the surrounding videos start a preview.

I want good youtubers to be able to make a living and I pay for the YouTube subscription, but this crap is driving me towards setting up Invidious rapidly.

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