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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

#361

Post by cruano »

robswc wrote: post #96

Honestly, I feel like YouTube recommendation is the _only_ good thing YouTube has lol. I often see a ton of complaints about the recommendations but I've honestly never had an issue. I know that yes, you click on one video and now all the sudden you get 100s of that type... but it sorta works for me since it seems like that "effect" wears off just as fast as it starts. For example, I have a friend that's into cars. I…

But just look at that same behavior over time. Say you searched for car videos yesterday, and today you are searching for basketball videos.

Old youtube used to be very simple and recommend similar videos to the current thing you are watching, so you would get basketball videos when you were looking for basketball videos.

Now, it will do that for some but also put car videos in the recommendations as stuff you "might like". Not only that, it will probably recommend the same car video you watched yesterday because you liked it yesterday so surely you'll love it today too right ?

This only gets worse as you add more "unique" topics to your searches and follows. It doesn't matter what video I'm looking at, I get the same recommendations for all of them.

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

#362

Post by narrator »

danuker wrote: post #296
nounaut wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like it's owned by a Russian company. Does that affect what it allows you to see? I notice for instance that a quick search for "War in Ukraine" returns top results from Russian news outlets calling it a "Military Operation".

Of course it affects what you see. Search engines are a form of soft power that states can't afford NOT to influence. As a user of them, I make sure to use multiple engines (preferably with distinct indices and jurisdictions) when I research something essential that affects my long-term future. This is because I distrust how politics is done (industry lobbying).

Look at how Larry Page disappeared off to Fiji and just dropped out of the tech and business world. That to me says a lot about what's become of Google.

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

#363

Post by iggldiggl »

niels_bom wrote: post #249
esotericsean wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone uses Bing?

Bing image search does not suffer from Pinterest-itis as Google Images does.

I absolutely understand the annoyance-factor of "Pinterest-itis" (though it seems that either they've dialled their "you must absolutely register now in order to see anything"-behaviour down a little bit again, or maybe it's just that half-forgotten userscript I installed at some point – either way it's currently not that infuriating for me), but given that e.g. direct image indexing seems almost non-existant for Instagram, being able to stumble across some images from there via the detour of Pinterest is better than nothing I suppose. (It's only infuriating if somebody saved an image to their computer/phone/… and then manually re-uploaded it to Pinterest again, so that the source URL of the image is then missing…)

Likewise if the original image has already disappeared from the net – finding a copy via Pinterest is still better than finding nothing. (Interestingly Bing's search can serve a similar purpose – compared with Google, it feels like Bing is much more reluctant to remove 404'd images from its index again. While those broken results are annoying, too – and unlike Pinterest neither Google nor Bing store (at least publicly) full-resolution copies of those images – at least you can try plugging the preview image into reverse image search and with some luck maybe find an alternative copy of that image that has survived elsewhere.)

And finally, the keywords added by Pinterest are possibly also helpful in making images more discoverable. (This might be no longer that relevant now that Google is also running image recognition on the images it indexes and no longer has to solely rely on the hope that any text near that image or the rare "alt"/"title"-text is actually relevant to the image contents, but it might still help a little.)

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

#364

Post by dredmorbius »

brylie wrote: post #359
dredmorbius wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thanks.

That looks strongly like a simple pass-through.

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

#365

Post by brigandish »

ipaddr wrote: post #186
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…

Do you ever filter by day, month, week?

I've tried everything I can think of but it seems that news on Youtube is now much like watching television. If there's a trick I don't know it, though it looks like Yandex will have a new customer.

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

#366

Post by docmars »

elondaits wrote: post #347
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…

Perhaps this is just democracy at play, doing what it's meant to do.

I've found that people who interpret a high number of dislikes as "hate campaigns" are usually the ones who agree, if not, applaud the content being disapproved of by a larger group who is frustrated with the subject matter and is using their voices to show their disapproval.

This is just as valid the other way around, where you should equally have the opportunity to express your disapproval of a video on the basis of political issues if you so please.

Review-bombing certainly exists, but I don't believe it's the norm when there's a high amount of dislikes out-ratioing the likes.

And even in the case of review-bombing: to me, it's a clear indicator of societal sentiment around a topic or aspect of whatever it is. I think we should be paying more attention to it, and spend more time publicly discussing these moments, treating high dislike counts as a valid point of view.

Unfortunately there is a certain political leaning who has grown quite comfortable with gaslighting those who hold and express majority opinions that aren't popular with late night TV hosts and celebrities, who further encourage hatred, violence, suppression, and ridicule towards this populace as they watch the wealthy and powerful deconstruct every bit of their culture and values, where the only replacement is woke garbage that they've clearly expressed not wanting through their votes, and yes: dislikes.

Democracy is eventually unfriendly to those who twist it into a guise for fully endorsed mob rule — and it will bite back.

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

#367

Post by [deleted] »

jdmdmdmdmd wrote: post #43
kache_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is actually quite a good way to find youtube channels! I find them through twitter, 4ch, and friends.

>twitter, 4ch, and friends I was under the impression that these three are mutually exclusive to each other

[deleted]

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

#369

Post by xnx »

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…

YouTube's search has never been as good as Google's for finding videos because Google search knows about the video and also an entire crawled web of links and references.

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

#370

Post by aantix »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #332
aantix wrote: post #135

I wrote an app called SmartKid that attempts to curate your YouTube recommendations via disliking videos that match a set of keywords (e.g. Minecraft, mrbeast, reaction). https://smartk.id/ Working on getting my Youtube api quota extended.

Interesting site. But the "Sign up for FREE" button is very sus to the point where it stops me from even trying it. Either it's really free so it should just say "Sign up" or it's not free so there should be a "Pricing" section that I can see before I sign up.

Great points. I’ll make the changes.
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