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No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

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Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#381
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spambot comments have exploded recently too, a lot of channel owners are complaining. Something definitely seems broken. I wonder if any of this affects GMail as well.

The Dead Internet Theory is becoming more and more true all the time.

I think it depends on the platform. Like Reddit for example, bot accounts are very easy to create (or you just buy used accounts). I wouldn't be surprised if on the most popular subreddits that half of the comments are bot generated.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#382
post #69

I don't personally think the dislike button is the explanation. But something seems to have changed in the Youtube recommendations algo in the last few weeks. In my experience, the algo has gotten very noticeably worse recently: - Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?) - Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending reall…

Tbh YT should finally start making their platform more discoverable like Valve has been doing with the Steam store. You can have explicitly tunable recommendation systems, tag-based classification, slicing and dicing search and subscription pages, filter lists, curators and such, but they seem obsessed with deciding everything for their users in the most obscure fashion possible. It's why they have lost me as a user…

Youtube's recommendation system was at its best when it relied on the tag-based system.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#383

In accounting you sometimes hear that it is near-impossible to liquidate Goodwill, but given the implied increase in (malicious) advertiser spending from this move, I would say that's exactly what's happened. Shame in YouTube for their cavalier attitude. There needs to be some actual consequences to Google when one of their products is noticeably downgraded like this. But, alas, there are no worthy competitors. Vimeo…

> PeerTube, is not only clunky, but is also tarnished by its facilitation of crypto.

when Google will hire his new time for Web 3 will you stop using Google services as well?

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#384
post #105

I've recently heard about this YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar. If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently, you've probably run into him. Because of the "no dislikes" change, he's everywhere now. And by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now th…

You've probably ruined my recommendations forever now. :( I pretty much only stick to subscriber channels now except for stuff people send me. Since there's no dislikes I just don't browse the stuff available anymore. YouTube is definitely worse off without the dislike counter.

Youtube has a history tab, my advice is to go through it and remove videos that you don't want recommended.

I learned this the hard way after watching a few videos about a particular person who had a fatal disease and then overnight my Youtube recommendations all turned into videos about cancer.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#385
post #105

I've recently heard about this YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar. If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently, you've probably run into him. Because of the "no dislikes" change, he's everywhere now. And by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now th…

> Hiding dislikes = less people press dislike (no feedback)

Wow, I just realized that I haven't pressed the dislike button since the count was removed. I didn't do it intentionally, but I literally just deleted, in my mind, the fact that there was a dislike button.

Talk about unintended consequences!!

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#386
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling someone they can't use your service is not anti-competitive.

It’s totally fine when the service in question is not a natural monopoly. Youtube is a natural monopoly now, just like residential water and electricity suppliers. Too bad it’s not yet regulated as such.

YouTube is not a natural monopoly, as evidenced by the fact that there are other video hosting services (e.g. Vimeo, Facebook, PeerTube). The network effect is real, to be sure, but it isn't absolute, and anyone can start a competing service which is immediately accessible to every Internet user(†). It's not cheap or easy, of course, especially at YouTube's scale, but YouTube has to overcome the same issues. That's just called being good at what they do.

†) Other than those blocked by the Great Firewall of China, of course—or other national firewalls—but then are they really Internet users when large portions of the Internet are inaccessible to them due to government censorship?

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#387
post #36

I agree with everything you said, and so I started reading comments to judge if a video is good. But the comments are always positive, even when the video is terrible! Like, bad tutorial video, unoriginal pop science video, lame interview with a bored celebrity, the comments are still always positive. Once I saw a comment that said something like "This was a really cool video! " and I realized the algorithm is suppre…

You are correct. They have a team dedicated to 'comments quality', headed by an ML engineer: https://twitter.com/nikhilbd/status/1488020382787375105

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algo fail: I will see the same videos recommended visit after visit. Just give me a "Not Interested" button over each recommended video so at the very least the pool is refreshed.

Click the dots and a submenu with a “not interested” button appears. You can even follow up with a reason. I think your critique is misplaced though. Just because I don’t want to see a particular video right now, doesn’t mean I never want to see it. Quite often there are two videos I wanna watch on the front page. Luckily I get recommended the other video later.

Thank you.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this guy making income from doing this? I may have to re-evaluate my career if I can pay my rent by mostly just dumping random internet content into a video.

This guy maybe not yet, but producing garbage content en-masse for social media is definitely a profitable niche. Popular "DIY" and lifehacks pages/channels are making decent bucks especially considering they are often based in third-world countries.

The 5 Minute Crafts channel and some other associated channels are infamous for this. A lot of them start out OK and once they have some numbers just shift to pumping out algorithm fodder.

Some are associated with large content factories that operate similar to Troll Farms.

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