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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

#21

Post by skyyler »

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…

https://github.com/yattee/yattee

This may be in your interests if you have an Apple TV.

I think it supports iPad, as well.

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

#22

Post by Arrath »

beart wrote: post #6
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.

I feel like every recommendation service works this way - YouTube, Amazon, Spotify, etc. Whatever the last thing you looked at becomes your entire life's mission according to these systems. When I think about all the buzz words around machine learning, ai, and so on, it's completely incompatible with the reality I see. What exactly are all these engineering teams doing just to end up with this result? Amazon might be…

Amazon really, really likes to recommend me a wide variety of shower curtains after buying one, 4 years ago.

Give it a rest already.

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

#23

Post by okdood64 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #9
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

It’s been a while since I’ve logged into YouTube but my impression is that the experience including recommendations is worse if you are logged in.

That was my experience years ago when I last did so. Logging in offered no visible upsides and multiple downs. I learned not to log in and use search wherever possible. Now I use Invidious (with JS disabled and/or uMatrix blocking YouTube functionality in the browser as an additional nudge), or youtube-dl / ytdl / mpv to play video directly. Usually audio-only for talkpieces. I'll also disable recommendations and com…

If you actually subscribe to channels you like when logged in, you'll get much better recommendations. I have over a 100. (And no, all of the recommendations aren't from my subscribed channels, it's a mix of them which have newer videos and similar videos to my subscriptions.)

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

#24

Post by lupire »

amatecha wrote: post #19

This reminds me of how games ( cough LeagueOfLegends cough ) match me up with a player that I literally just reported for harassment, griefing etc. in the previous match. Like, there weren't any other possible players to match me with out of the many thousands? I don't mind waiting a few more seconds to match up with someone else! I'm getting a lot of responses as if I expect the player to be totally blocked from mat…

Did you Block or just report?

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

#25

Post by NegativeLatency »

dredmorbius wrote: post #9
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

It’s been a while since I’ve logged into YouTube but my impression is that the experience including recommendations is worse if you are logged in.

That was my experience years ago when I last did so. Logging in offered no visible upsides and multiple downs. I learned not to log in and use search wherever possible. Now I use Invidious (with JS disabled and/or uMatrix blocking YouTube functionality in the browser as an additional nudge), or youtube-dl / ytdl / mpv to play video directly. Usually audio-only for talkpieces. I'll also disable recommendations and com…

I've been using a cron job to watch/download my watch later playlist so I can view the videos on plex at a later time: https://github.com/nburns/utilities/blob/master/youtube.fish...

Theres another script that deletes watched videos from the specific youtube plex library every night.

It works great as long as you remember to remove the videos from your watched later playlist before watching them on plex. (Have yet to find out a simple way to automate playlist removal)

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

#26

Post by ars »

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…

For me it recommends exactly what I watch - I've never seen any recommendation for stuff I don't watch.

The trouble seems to be it can't seem to find anything new. So if anything, I'd want it to branch out a bit and find semi-related stuff, but it doesn't.

You're not the first person to complain about YouTube recommendations, and I don't know why my experience is so different than yours.

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

#27

Post by sph »

skyyler wrote: post #21
sph wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://github.com/yattee/yattee This may be in your interests if you have an Apple TV. I think it supports iPad, as well.

Thanks. I should really dedicate a weekend to setting something like that up on all my devices. I'm willing to put up with bad recommendations if I know they don't get a cent out of my views.

Sort yourself out, Google.

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

#28

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#29

Post by makosdv »

I'm not surprised by this. I gave up on the YouTube Home page, etc. years ago and I only look at the Subscriptions page. I've just found new channels to subscribe to through word of mouth over the years and I have more than enough content to choose from.

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

#30

Post by jdgoesmarching »

beart wrote: post #6
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.

I feel like every recommendation service works this way - YouTube, Amazon, Spotify, etc. Whatever the last thing you looked at becomes your entire life's mission according to these systems. When I think about all the buzz words around machine learning, ai, and so on, it's completely incompatible with the reality I see. What exactly are all these engineering teams doing just to end up with this result? Amazon might be…

Unfortunately Tiktok is the only platform that nails it for me. It regularly manages to find old hobbies or interests back into the rotation,

Youtube’s recommendations are just matching my most recent searches while occasionally throwing in Nazi crap I never asked for.

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