Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 437 posts

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

#351

Post by roody15 »

Facebook, YouTube and many others are user hostile. They make money by controlling the information you see. Your attention is a commodity they sell. Both of these services... give you what you want from time to time just to keep you on the service.. then they maximize trying to divert your attention to what they want (or are paid to show you).

From one angle its quite dystopian to watch people endlessly scroll or just go from video to video on youtube.... essentially an algorithm is influencing your behavior.. perhaps programming you to an extent. Super creepy to see people everywhere just sit and stare at the device while this happens. Its like there is an illusion of user control.

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

#352

Post by Izkata »

Am I the only one that never thought the like/dislike buttons were tied to recommendations? That it has any effect at all surprises me. They used to be star ratings and were always meant to indicate to the video creator and other users the quality of the video.

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

#353

Post by spaniard89277 »

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'm ready to pay that prize for a functional site.

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

#354

Post by cruano »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #350
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 searchi…

> they translate stuff and you can't know in the search results which video is in which language.

I think offering alternative titles for each language is on the creators, not youtube themselves

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

#355

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#356

Post by spaniard89277 »

cruano wrote: post #354
spaniard89277 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 searchi…

> they translate stuff and you can't know in the search results which video is in which language. I think offering alternative titles for each language is on the creators, not youtube themselves

Cool, I'd like to disable that, but I can't. It makes particularly difficult to find local stuff.

This was the last drop for me, when I started to use external search.

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

#357

Post by friendzis »

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…

How much do these factors matter, though? Similar arguments can be made about uselessness of the like button. Some press it to indicate good, relevant content, some press it to support the topic, some like factual content, some use likes for later reference in "liked videos".

If you pivot a bit to Facebook videos, you can see heavily "liked" videos where huge portion of top comments are literally some form of "waste of my time", "idiotic video" and so on.

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

#358

Post by majani »

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…

Sounds like you have a child or relative who might be using your account

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

#359

Post by brylie »

dredmorbius wrote: post #312
brylie wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Does Piped (or the similar Invidious) provide its own search functionality or merely channel YouTube's? I suspect it might be supplying specific filters (e.g., "intitle", mentioned elsewhere in this thread) to YouTube's query engine.

I'm not sure exactly, but here is a related line of code:

https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/blob/860ca92a4d49a85a3781...

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

#360

Post by cruano »

skybrian wrote: post #98
ketzo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the problem. this player was at the top of the matchmaking ladder that (very small) population had a lot of people who wanted to avoid him he couldn’t get games at his current level, and he couldn’t rise above that level, because there was nothing above that level

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.

I mean, this are competitive games after all. Racing against Max Verstappen on iRacing is not an issue, it's what makes those games interesting. You don't ban Federer/Nadal out of tennis, you let people compete to raise the bar.
Post reply on HN