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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

#281

Post by scrollaway »

chillfox wrote: post #154
johnfn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't have this experience at all. YouTube recommends me pretty much exactly what I've been recently watching. I watch a lot of long form interviews and tech videos, and…

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…

If you want to fix it (and I agree it shouldn't be this painful, but you deal with what you got), you can go back in your history and remove the videos from MrBallen from your watch history.

This should fix it for good, almost immediately.

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

#282

Post by dandellion »

ketzo wrote: post #108
skybrian wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that means he won the game and it's time to do something else until someone with similar skill comes along? Or maybe there should be a handicapping system.

There were players of similar (and higher) skill — but they didn’t want to play with him because he was “annoying” to play against. Which is a normal part of a competitive multiplayer game, except that people got the option to avoid him (rather than learn to beat him), so many took it!

If they were playing the game to have fun, it's an entirely rational decision to make, even if it's unfair to the good player. In fact if the developers were optimising the game for fun they should have kept the feature as it was. In my opinion it should be more important to optimise games for fun than for fairness, but I suppose the developers don't share that opinion if they changed it.

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

#283

Post by ra120271 »

adolph wrote: post #232
narrator wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to love that about Google News in the early days. A search would give you results from all over the world, with different outlooks and perspectives. I found it enlightening to read against my own selection bias.

Then they removed that value point and aligned what they presented with my existing bias - at which point I stopped using it.

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

#284

Post by sph »

fallingknife wrote: post #42
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…

It's insanely biased towards popularity. I watched this series of like 40 videos on extremely large numbers. And not one time did I ever see one in my recommendations. You would think when you've watched 1-20 of something the algorithm would be smart enough to suggest 21 but no.

What's funny is that the super smart AI behind the rec engine in YouTube sometimes is so dumb it can't figure out that video #3 in a series with consistent titles should be followed by video #4.

Sometimes it just gets it wrong and skips one, other times it just recommends some other totally unrelated video even if you've been watching the same numbered series forever.

And it's got a short enough memory span that one day it'll recommend out of the blue, for weeks, video #57 of a series you've seen a couple years ago.

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

#285

Post by sph »

jonny_eh wrote: post #61
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…

Make sure your watch history is enabled, without it the recommendation system cannot learn.

My watch history is enabled, because I've learned that if you disable it or ever clear your history, you're back to square zero.

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

#286

Post by crxgames »

everdrive wrote: post #82
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…

>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…

It's gotten so bad the past couple months. All I get now are maybe 2-3 videos maybe of what I want and everything else is some past shown BS that's not even related or recommendations. They want to become tiktok so bad.

Edit: Add to that the increase in number of ads per video and their length...ugh

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

#287

Post by sph »

johnfn wrote: post #67
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…

> 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 don't have this experience at all. YouTube recommends me pretty much exactly what I've been recently watching. I watch a lot of long form interviews and tech videos, and…

> YouTube recommends me pretty much exactly what I've been recently watching.

It depends. Maybe I wasn't clear, most of the recommendations are fine (not great, but still pertinent), but sections like "New to you", or "Just uploaded" or even the search suggestions are full of trending videos that I keep telling it I don't care about.

Right now I just get recommended three categories of videos:

- 90% relevant to my interests but often stuff I've already watched. Nothing that strays a little further than the channels I already know. Keeps recommending stuff I've watched and liked months or years ago. Video #42 of a series I've seen fully.

- 9.9% useless trending bullshit. This month it's all about the "Why have we divorced" or "Meet our new baby" videos. I don't have children, I'm not even in a relationship. Google decided I would care about this.

- 0.1% some genuinely new stuff that's relevant.

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

#288

Post by brylie »

everdrive wrote: post #82
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…

>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…

Piped, an open-source YouTube frontend, has pretty good search results:

https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

https://piped.kavin.rocks/

https://piped-material.xn--17b.net/

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

#289

Post by Clampower »

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…

I watch a fair amount of tech stuff on YouTube. Lately, it’ll recommend me product release videos (Samsung Galaxy S2) from 10 years or so ago.

YouTube is hilariously bad.

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

#290

Post by sofixa »

p1necone wrote: post #133
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…

Yeah the recency bias is really annoying to me. I'll get really interested in some new topic for a bit and watch a bunch of videos about it and it seems like YouTube takes that as a signal to bump other topics out of my recommendations, even if they're things that I've consistently been interested in for a long time. I wish I could somehow "save" the state of my recommendations profile so I can revert it if it goes o…

YouTube Incognito mode if you know you're going to stray in a weird topic could help with that.
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