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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

#341

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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…

Second you notice it surfacing things you don’t want to see because you accidentally clicked a rec you have to go into history and delete the video that brought forth the infestation.

So far I’ve found it does stop showing you if you remove what caused it from history.

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

#342

Post by Bakary »

yedpodtrzitko wrote: post #198

I dont see it mentioned BlockTube extension [0] anywhere in the comments yet. It automatically blocks videos/channels based on your defined keywords and it works perfectly. For some period of time my main YT page was filled with a variation of videos about "walking in Tokyo". I'm not interested in walking in cities nor Japan, so I have no idea where that came from. No matter how many of these videos I marked as "not…

There's a certain type of Westerner that really likes Japan so perhaps it mistakenly identified you as this based on your other interests.

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

#343

Post by xani_ »

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…

I got a lot of recommendations for stuff I ALREADY WATCHED, it even shows the red bar showing it KNOWS I watched it, still recommends

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

#344

Post by dncornholio »

A thing that I noticed is that Youtube recommends me completely different video's when I'm at work (mostly music) then when at my desktop at home (complete mix of interests). And different video's when i'm on my phone (documentaries).

It seems the system is coupled with your device and time of day.

Funny thing is, I never get recommended music on my desktop and at work I never get documentaries recommended.

The system works well enough for me.

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

#345

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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 crazy how bad it’s getting. If I search a recipe I’ll get 6-10 results then it’s just random other stuff from the same channels.

Kinda think there are more than 10 videos about a major food dish on YT.

Starting to think the backend has a concept of “blessed” channels to surface

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

#346

Post by xani_ »

vineyardmike wrote: post #129
Sophistifunk wrote: post #75

Why is everybody pretending the recommendation system is designed to show you what you want to see, rather than to maximise ad revenue?

Why is everyone pretending that the maximal amount of ad revenue comes doesn’t come from showing you what you want to see? Individual videos don’t pay to be in the recommended feed. There’s no opportunity to see an ad except when you watch a video. YouTube has a perfectly balanced incentive to show you more content you’ll watch. Where is the exclusive choice between (what the user wants to watch) and (what makes more…

> Why is everyone pretending that the maximal amount of ad revenue comes doesn’t come from showing you what you want to see?

But it doesn't show me what I want to see so I watch like 30 seconds total and look for something else

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

#347

Post by elondaits »

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 reason dislike count had to be removed is that it enables hate campaigns against things (e.g. the recent controversy around the trailer for the live action The Little Mermaid movie, to name one among many).

Organized hate campaigns have a disproportionate representation in review sites, so they break rating systems. Also, the dislike count acts as a positive signal to hate-bombers ("we're winning", "let's make it to 50k dislikes") more than it helps anyone actually engaging with the content in a more healthy way.

One could also argue that the like count also creates a pernicious culture around subscriber / watch-count ("help us reach 1M subs!") that negatively affects young content producers and adds nothing of value to the world. But that's a much more complex conversation.

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

#348

Post by friendzis »

praestigiare wrote: post #301
john_alan wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't know what you think the decision making process was on that, but you're wrong.

Such decisions are not made on one single metric. these are multi faceted decisions.

Could dislike counts/ratios per like/view/minute been part of the decision? Absolutely. Did certain topics were worse than others? Again, yes.

Is this a whole story? No. Could this have been part of the decision process? It would be hard to convince me it wasn't at least due to human nature.

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

#349

Post by snet0 »

sph wrote: post #287
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…

> 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 in…

If I remember what I did correctly, you can block most of the named sections using something like uBlock.

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

#350

Post by spaniard89277 »

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…

It's not only recommendations that is broken. YT has a very sluggish frontend (I have to suffer it particularly in my x260 laptop), and for us multi-lingual people they translate stuff and you can't know in the search results which video is in which language.

I don't like YT quite honestly, and it's been a while. I understand it's a business but you don't have to provide such bad experience to make money.

For searching videos I'm more and more relying external search because with YT I just get suggested crap, like with google. I'm beyond tired with this.

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