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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

#231

Post by adolph »

Seems like someone has rediscovered the:

Placebo Button is a push-button or other control that appears to have functionality but has no physical effect when pressed. Such buttons can appear to work, by lighting up or otherwise reacting, which rewards the user by giving them an illusion of control. They are commonly placed in situations where it would have once been useful to have such a button but the system now operates automatically, such as a manual thermostat in a temperature-regulated office. Were the control removed entirely, some users would feel frustrated at the awareness they were not in control.

Examples include:

  * Office thermostats
  * Walk buttons at pedestrian crossings
  * London Underground train door buttons
  * Elevator door close buttons
  * FCC do not call lists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button

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

#232

Post by adolph »

narrator wrote: post #206
brigandish wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Yandex.com, my friend. It even returns results from Ulta Cancelled video websites like Bitchute, Rumble and Odyssey.

There is something to be said for a search engine whose interests don't align with, or even better are adversarial to, the prevailing spam sources.

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

#233

Post by wodenokoto »

Tommah wrote: post #225
wodenokoto wrote: post #214

Ann Reardon (not Reed, as I wrote originally), from "How to cook that" did a video on it. Basically Youtube rewards interactions, and a dislike is an interaction. Her main evidence was a video by pewdiepie where he asks everyone who views it to dislike it. It is one of his most viewed videos, at least around that time, and by far the most disliked. Sadly Ann Reardon names her videos after what she cooks or debunks, a…

This one? https://youtu.be/KqAEC4jLFqA?t=905 BTW, her name is Ann Reardon.

Thank you for the link and the correction!

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

#234

Post by mkl95 »

The problem with Youtube's recommendations is that they are not organic. Producing ad revenue is its main goal. This makes YT fundamentally different than a decade ago, when the algorithm just wanted to show you some genuinely interesting stuff.

Making Youtube better from Google's point of view inevitably makes it worse from a user's point of view. It would take a really bad quarter to tune the algorithm and make it more user centric. And that's not going to happen any time soon.

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

#235

Post by sircastor »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #187
sircastor wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t ever used the dislike button. It never functioned as a “don’t give me more of this”. I did use the “not interested” option to do so, but as others have said “dislike” is ambiguous, not to mention the opportunity for abuse.

How is this a useful response to the perspective shared in the GP? Even if you don’t use it, it’s still a useful signal. Are you saying this isn’t the case? For example, did you find the dislike ratio to be a misleading signal, when it was around?

I shared to express that it wasn’t a signal universally understood. I never saw the dislike button as anything other than people hating on a video. There’s no context to it. You don’t know if the dislikes are people who don’t like the content or the author or the subject or the channel. In other words, for me it was never a useful signal. It only reflected how terrible the internet can make people behave.

I understand if my perspective is a minority opinion, but I think it’s a valid one.

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

#236

Post by Winsaucerer »

daveoc64 wrote: post #131
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 obnoxio…

I would guess that for a given class of videos, there's going to be a fairly regular amount of dislikes that are going to be because of behaviour like "I am not interested in this video". So if you come across a video in that class of videos (e.g., car repairs), and it has a much higher ratio of dislikes to likes, it's probably a good indication that there's more to those dislikes than just "I'm not interested" -- more likely the video is factually wrong, poor quality, etc.

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

#237

Post by joseda-hg »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #171
treeman79 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've had this, I take a couple extra seconds to specifically say don't recommend me anything from this channel, and then my suggestions get bombarded with that style from videos from different channels

The most blatant was a specific "Get robux" video that appeared constantly on my feed from dozens of different channels but that triggered this extra engagement in the form of blocking, reporting and disliing

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

#238

Post by lemon_bottle »

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…

>> 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.

Unfortunately, Capitalism doesn't work like that :-(. Back in the old days, Google searches used to be organic searches in the genuine sense, and that was the best Google we ever had. But today's Google is the Big Tech Capitalist and so will be their algorithms. The organic logic should follow your prunes and show you what you want but the capitalist logic will only show what they're paid to show to you! (i.e. propaganda, politically motivated content, inciting content, etc. etc.).

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

#239

Post by taberiand »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #208
daveoc64 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obnoxio…

If only we had a way to spend billions of $¥€ on putting the greatest minds in the World into a single company who could solve this at the drop of a hat. It has to be control, right, surely Google are competent to fix this overnight of they wished?

That implies that the current functionality is broken, for Google's purpose.

My guess is, they calculate that they make more money with this configuration than the alternative.

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

#240

Post by [deleted] »

londons_explore wrote: post #77

Long ago, tech giant CEO's realised that recommendation systems are very powerful. They can trick hundreds of millions of users into spending double digit percentages of their life watching memes. From that point on, focus was reduced on working on recommenders. Instead the goal was not to trick users into spending their whole life on the platform, but to maximize ad revenue from those users in the limited time they…

[deleted]
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