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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

#181

Post by netsharc »

bambax wrote: post #108
socket0 wrote: 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 like Amazon recommending the exact same item you just bought, sometimes from a different brand or vendor. "We see you bought a toaster, surely you need a hundred more."

Maybe they just want you to be unhappy (as the paradox of choice says, if you only had a few options for a product, you'd pick what you think is the best one and be happy with it; if you had hundreds, you can't compare all, so you'd pick one and wonder if it was the best choice).

Maybe Amazon knows that unsatisfied customers continue spending money... Hah, great dark pattern if so!

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#182

Post by qwerty456127 »

The only reason I ever pressed like in YouTube was to bookmark a video - because I could then use the list of everything I liked. Once I found the rate of liked videos getting deleted catastrophic I abandoned the feature and never bother even to sign-in.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#183

Post by dwighttk »

ageitgey wrote: post #76
baisq wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?) For many topics 6-12 year old videos are perfectly acceptable.

Sure, but I'm talking about specifically non-evergreen videos like 10 year old product previews. That's what has cropped up recently. Youtube used to be pretty good about recommending old evergreen content but not time-sensitive content.

Something could have happened like… (just making this up) the 20 year anniversary of the G4 cube comes around and .0000001% of their users (add a few zeroes if needed) go and watch every single cube product review, so the algorithm thinks “oh everyone is into old product reviews now!” Because one of those people DID click on a bunch of other product reviews for whatever reason… more nostalgia or he thought the reviewer was cute or he walked away and they kept auto playing… or whatever.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#184

Post by jmyeet »

The only explanation for getting rid of dislike count that makes sense to me is to make big brands happy as their videos can't be made to look bad with a high dislike count and they can't be "dislike bombed" for things that may be unrelated to the content (eg the recent Activision-Blizzard scandals).

Why? Because in every other way (and every way for the viewer), this makes Youtube worse. So it's a hell of a price to pay to appease big corporate interests. That's why I have such a hard time comprehending this move.

It definitely changes how people use the dislike button since there's no feedback for it. Maybe that too was by design? It's true that people are generally terrible at using dislikes and downvote buttons. Ieally it would be a quality indicator but really it's just used for "I don't like what you're saying", "I don't like you" or "I don't like something about you". And that's probably not a great signal.

Side note: for anyone with such functionality, it would probably greatly improve the overall user experience to identify these low-indicator downvoters and shadowban them. Don't take away the downvote UI. Just make it do absolutely nothing as in it shows them they downvoted / disliked but just don't count it for anything. These people are toxic.

Anyway, I actually hope to see more low-quality generated content on Youtube as it's probably going to be the only thing that causes this decision to be reversed.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#185

Post by wodenokoto »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #176
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…

Algo fail: I will see the same videos recommended visit after visit. Just give me a "Not Interested" button over each recommended video so at the very least the pool is refreshed.

Click the dots and a submenu with a “not interested” button appears. You can even follow up with a reason.

I think your critique is misplaced though. Just because I don’t want to see a particular video right now, doesn’t mean I never want to see it.

Quite often there are two videos I wanna watch on the front page. Luckily I get recommended the other video later.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#186

Post by hobs »

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.

A much better approach is to go to your history and delete it from your history (if you're signed in) this will change your recommendations so much harder.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#187

Post by lapsis_beeftech »

For many years I thought Youtube content "voting" was helpful for both Google (they get to know what commercial goods and services I might be interested in) and for users (the information could potentially be used for improving video recommendations). As far as I can tell the latter has never been the case; Youtube won't recommend me anything I care to watch, often recommends videos I have watched and disliked, and is utterly unable to identify my interests despite thousands of likes and dislikes.

I figured Google would come to their senses and use this valuable information eventually. When Youtube instead announced that they won't ever care about my preferences for video content I was disappointed but not surprised. Since the voting can now only benefit Google themselves I decided to cease participating. I used a content blocker to hide the likes and buttons to make sure I don't slip up.

I wish I could boycott Youtube entirely but I am not quite ready to leave the platform because it still offers some educational and entertainment content useful to me.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#188

Post by bowsamic »

narrator wrote: post #126
krapp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spambot comments have exploded recently too, a lot of channel owners are complaining. Something definitely seems broken. I wonder if any of this affects GMail as well.

The Dead Internet Theory is becoming more and more true all the time.

I agree. I think the vast majority of people we speak to online are robots

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#189

Post by cjbgkagh »

I ban a lot of channels from my recommendations and that has cleared it up for me.

Clearly whoever is doing search at YouTube doesn’t know what they’re doing as there are plenty of ways to tell if something is spam. I’m guessing they don’t care.

They do seem to be trying to be more like TickTok.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#190

Post by eehtmachine »

but the dislike button is still there, and using it still counts towards recommendation model, and they display it to the video creator in youtube studio, they just stopped displaying it to the viewer. so that shouldn't have this effect on your recommendation. or am I missing a link there?
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