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

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

#171

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…

Mine will not give up on family guy. Hundreds of dis likes. Don’t recommend.

AI: Oh, showing /u/treeman79 some Family Guy videos increases their engagement, MOAR FAMILY GUY!!!111oneoneone

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re not watching ads, you’re worthless to Youtube. Scrolling through search results wouldn’t increase revenue.

YouTube doesn't show you ads if you buy Premium.

You need the YouTube Pro Max+ Platinum bundle to get functional search.

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

#174
I hope we will get a good alternative to YouTube. The amount of negative feedback from its audience has been increasing at a very fast pace, and Google doesn't seem to care at all. At this point, I'm thinking they are very deliberately choosing to take this path. For what reason? I don't know. But it seems like Google really don't want people to discover any good content and force users to watch a very select collection of videos. My circle and friends are basically all watching similar content to what I'm watching, and I have almost no common interests with some of them..

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

#175
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had videos not show up in the YouTube search despite the query matching the video title verbatim.

Prepend your search with 'intitle:' and you'll get results with the string in the title.

Then we are having to play games (not the fun ones), like we did in the AltaVista days.

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

#176
post #167

The only way to make YouTube even remotely tolerable is with liberal use of the "Not Interested" and "Don't Recommend Channel" functions. I also set up separate YouTube viewing accounts by interest, so that I can clobber away everything not related to a specific interest in that particular account (eg. anything not sports related gets "Don't Recommend Channel"'d in my Sports YT account). YouTube pretty much fights yo…

I use YouTube, but only direct links or searches. I never use YouTube itself to find my next video

I'm almost at this point as well. Using the Not Interested and other tips helps but it's not long before the stuff rolls in not remotely matching my interests.

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

#177

I wish I could set YouTube to open my subscriptions feed instead of "the algorithm" by default.

Copy the url for the subscription page and add it as a new search engine with a shortcut like "y" if you are using Chrome or a Chrome based browser.

Then you can just go to the address bar and type y + enter.

A fast way of getting to the address bar is CTRL + L (CMD + L on mac).

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

#178

What a lot of people are missing is that when watching YouTube, they're the product, not the consumer. I know this has been said many times before, but ignoring this reality is like trying to understand life without considering evolution, or understanding chemistry while ignoring the periodic table. Google's incentives are to tailor customers to advertisers , not customers to content! They don't care if you see what…

How does that at all relate to YouTube videos though? YouTube wants you to see ads. Ads are put in front of YouTube videos. Therefore youtube wants you to watch videos. YouTube, logically, should want you to watch more videos, for longer . If they serve you bad videos, you stop. Therefore, Googles incentives are to tailor good recommendations of content for customers. QED. I think all this “you’re not the customer yo…

They are sort of recommending 100 videos to everyone. In my circle, a lot of people I know have very different interests than me. Yet, whenever I recommend a video to a friend, they often say it was already in their recommendations.

They might be pushing videos or topics that advertisers are more willing to pay for.

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

#179

What a lot of people are missing is that when watching YouTube, they're the product, not the consumer. I know this has been said many times before, but ignoring this reality is like trying to understand life without considering evolution, or understanding chemistry while ignoring the periodic table. Google's incentives are to tailor customers to advertisers , not customers to content! They don't care if you see what…

How does that at all relate to YouTube videos though? YouTube wants you to see ads. Ads are put in front of YouTube videos. Therefore youtube wants you to watch videos. YouTube, logically, should want you to watch more videos, for longer . If they serve you bad videos, you stop. Therefore, Googles incentives are to tailor good recommendations of content for customers. QED. I think all this “you’re not the customer yo…

>If they serve you bad videos, you stop.

Actually this is false. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, I know, but it has long been known in the field of psychology that a variable reward system works significantly better than consistent rewards or consistent punishment. The reality is that a mixture of bad, mediocre, and occasionally good recommendations is the most likely to keep you on the site for the longest.

See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27353633/ (or Google “variable reward schedules” and take your pick of a publication you trust)

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

#180

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…

>Some might say that you can still use search At some point Youtube search was neutered. I get 5-10 results for any given query before Youtube gives up and just offers me recommendations rather than search results. Interestingly, if I search google for [search term] site:youtube.com, I actually get pages of results which are never present in the Youtube search. Sadly, it seems that Google has intentionally diminished…

Search is entirely crippled for new stories now. If I saw some breaking news on Twitter I used to pop over to Youtube to find original or better footage than news services were getting, or to get it faster. Impossible via YT's search now, it's just pages and pages of old-media channels with their thoughts on the footage, always clipped down and talked over. Even Twitter seems to do this now, it's becoming harder to find stuff that doesn't have a large slathering of approved views slathered over the top.
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