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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

#251

Post by Heyso »

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…

Here is a third, I dislike when the video is clickbait, or far from what I expected.

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

#252

Post by yccs27 »

johnfn wrote: post #243
chillfox wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to have the same experience of YouTube recommending just more of whatever I just watched, and at most recommendations would stick around for 6 weeks before it forgot about a subject. That was until earlier this year when I watched some videos from MrBallen (camp fire stories based on real events), and ever since then I have gotten my recommendations filled with crazy conspiracy stuff. It stopped recommending h…

Out of curiosity, do you watch those videos? Is that what trains the algorithm to show more of them?

Not parent but same experience. I watched MrBallen's videos as "creepypasta based on real events", and I guess that is a pretty similar vibe to conspiracy theories. Never watched any of the conspiracy content and still got it in my recommended videos for a long time.

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

#254

Post by popcalc »

fastball wrote: post #182
Legion wrote: 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 just use this Chrome extension[1] (though actually with Brave for the ad-blocking) and don't worry about recs at all. When I want to watch a YouTube video I go on YouTube and am given a list of recent uploads by my subscribed channels. I pick one, watch it, then usually close the tab because there are no recs on the screen to lead me on an endless rabbit hole. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-re…

I was wondering recently if a thing like this existed. This is exactly what I was wishing for!

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

#255

Post by spookie »

concinds wrote: post #219
throw_m239339 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some might say that you can still use search, but that has been crippled to include unrelated recommendations after one page of results. Not only that, I want YouTube to help me discover new content. When the recommendation system works and it shows me new kinds of interesting stuff, it's superb. TikTok is eating YouTube's lunch in this regard. this and it's going too far, since Youtube is now polluting people's se…

They addressed the "political rabbit hole", but the powerful nature of algoriths to change people's lives remains completely unaddressed. People's tastes, views, behaviors, career paths, music tastes, and personalities are being influenced on a mass scale by totally black-box algorithms that are manually tweaked by unaccountable employees. People's psychological vulnerabilities are taken advantage of, as you can clea…

They're certainly shaping public opinion of these companies, and political opinions.

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

#258

Post by the_omegist »

majou wrote: post #111
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…

(On the topic of Subaru https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAochkcRfK4 ) I agree about the dislikes tho. I used to calculate the ratio of likes:dislikes, and a lot of my hobbies were in the cool 1,000:1 range. Now I do the same with views:likes; 10:1 isn't uncommon for some niches!

I was doing the same things but, depending on the total views and the type of video, it was too inconsistent...

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

#259

Post by autoexec »

brigandish wrote: post #180
everdrive wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 f…

Funny that youtube is basically the opposite of google's search which will often only show you results that are relevant to top/recent stories making it very difficult to get results about anything else.

It doesn't even have to be that recent in some cases. Searching for "Sandy Hook Elementary" along with just about any other search term is going to give you a page with results about a shooting that took place a decade ago. Searching for a proper noun when they are the top story of the day is pretty much only going to give you that one story.

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

#260

Post by thomasahle »

Ove been thinking about this problem with Facebook's recommendations: While previous "dislikes" are taken into account when predicting of a user will interact with a post, the system is still fundementally trying to predict "click through rate" not whether the user enjoys a post or not. It might even be that disliking something is positively correlated with clicking it, since they may have watched the video before deciding it is no good.
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