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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

#61

Post by jonny_eh »

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…

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

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

#62

Post by twiss »

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.

It does do that for me, and it also regularly recommends videos with don't know if it's on a topic I watch videos on regularly. So it seems the algorithm doesn't do the same thing for everyone.

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

#63

Post by judge2020 »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #52
proteal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overwatch had a feature where you could avoid players, but a top sniper was avoided by enough top players that he could never find a match. The matchmaking system could never find him a match because almost all potential matches had at least one player on each team that had him avoided. The devs eventually reworked that feature so that he could play the game. Sometimes seemingly innocuous features have weird edge cas…

Isn't it fair that if every player you play against decides they don't want to play with you, you shouldn't get to play? Obviously something is wrong with you. (A 4chan style let's-make-this-person's-life-hell attack notwithstanding)

It wasn't that this player was disrespectful/racist/etc., it's that they were so much better that playing against this player was almost a guaranteed loss.

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

#64

Post by badwolf »

Arrath wrote: post #22
beart wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like every recommendation service works this way - YouTube, Amazon, Spotify, etc. Whatever the last thing you looked at becomes your entire life's mission according to these systems. When I think about all the buzz words around machine learning, ai, and so on, it's completely incompatible with the reality I see. What exactly are all these engineering teams doing just to end up with this result? Amazon might be…

Amazon really, really likes to recommend me a wide variety of shower curtains after buying one, 4 years ago. Give it a rest already.

They realllllly want me to buy far too many vacuum cleaners for the one rug in my house :|

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

#67

Post by johnfn »

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…

> 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 my recommended feed is entirely filled with more of the same, which are of decent enough quality for me.

I wonder if something is wrong with your account?

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

#68

Post by darth_avocado »

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…

The biggest problem with this approach is that it takes a lot of curation to get your recommendation in a decent shape and it takes you one accidental video view to have your feed be full of uninteresting content related to that video. This asymmetry is the root of all the recommendation system problems.

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

#69

Post by stemlord »

behaveEc0n00 wrote: post #40

The zeitgeist of our culture; of course you didn’t MEAN to be negative, here try again. No, no; I most certainly did mean to suggest you should stop showing me this persons channel. Not because I hate the person but because I don’t want a shit “AI” that’s feeding me what Google makes the best margins on.

> feeding me what Google makes the best margins on.

Lol exactly, Google and I disagree on a fundamental level, they cannot be the ones to do the work to find what I like, which is why I've disappeared the entire right-hand column on yt altogether with in extension

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

#70

Post by mod »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #56

I never use dislike, just "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel". Those seem to work as advertised.

I do the same, and I agree, they seem to work.

What pisses me off, though, is that if I get a video recommended, I can ignore it for days, sometimes over a week, and it stays in the recommendations unless I "Not Interested" it.

After I've chosen...lots of other videos, maybe it's time to stop recommending that one. Often it's a video I've already seen, and enjoyed. I hate doing "not interested" to those.

I also hate doing the work of it all. I would blame the algo or whatever, but I actually think the algo is working exactly how Google wants it to.

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