YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations
engadget.com
engadget.com
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've been watching lately.
Personally, I'd love it if you could curate the recommendation system a bit more. I'm never interested in rewatching stuff I've already seen. And the recency bias for recommendations means you're always getting more if what you've recently consumed. I'd like it if more older interests were mixed in. Finally, I'd love to be able to blacklist certain topics and games entirely.
There's so much missed potential with YouTube recommendations.
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.
Edit: forgot to mention this. On mobile if you do a recommendation refresh it'll show a New to You filter which you can use to explore more diverse recommendations. I don't know why it's hidden in this manner.
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 own search function in order to prioritize use of the recommendation system.
One trick to get rid of them is to select one/any additional search filter (for example select HD only).
It is absolutely ridiculous that you have to do this, but it works for now.
I search from the command line using a short shell script.^1 Perhaps it depends on the query, but I consistently get more than 5-10 results. For example, I might get 26 reults with the initial query. By continuing the query repeatedly I can usually get over 1000 results total. YouTube search results are delivered as JSON so I wrote some simple, quick and dirty utilities in C to reformat the JSON to TSV with only the details I want. The workflow and example script below use those utilities, i.e., yy059, yy062 and yy064.
# YouTube search workflow:
# initial query
1.sh query > results-file
yy064 < results-file|yy062 > results.tsv
# continuation
1.sh < results-file >> results-file
yy064 < results-file|yy062 >> results.tsv
#!/bin/sh
HOST=www.youtube.com;
case $# in :)
;;0)
KEY=AIzaSyAO_FJ2SlqU8Q4STEHLGCilw_Y9_11qcW8;
MIN=\{\"context\":{\"client\":{\"hl\":\"en-US\",\"gl\":\"US\",\"clientName\":\"MWEB\",\"clientVersion\":\"2.20210916.06.01\"}},\"continuation\":;
TOKEN=$(yy059|sed -n "s/$/}/;s/\"token\":/$MIN/p"|tail -1);
URL=https://$HOST/youtubei/v1/search?key=$KEY
curl --http1.1 -A "" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "$TOKEN" "$URL"
;;*)
S=$(echo "$@"|sed 's/ /+/g');
URL=https://$HOST/results?search_query=$S;
curl --http1.1 -A "" "$URL"
esac;
Absolutely agree that YouTube search got neutered.
youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-item-section-renderer>#contents>:not(ytd-video-renderer),ytd-secondary-search-container-renderer
youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer:has(.badge:has-text(/new/i))
youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer ytd-compact-video-renderer:has(.badge:has-text(/new/i))Edit: Add to that the increase in number of ads per video and their length...ugh
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
I wish I could somehow "save" the state of my recommendations profile so I can revert it if it goes off the rails.
Low quality videos also get nuked with prejudice from my history.
this and it's going too far, since Youtube is now polluting people's search with very questionable recommendations. For instance, I'm into CGI and Youtube search kept recommending me some random footage about a female streamer which behaved and dressed very suggestively, that already had millions of view, what does it have to do with Shaders and Raytracing? Why the hell does Youtube want me to look at that?
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.
Similar story with a guy who reviews indie games daily. I want to see the future (potential) indie hits not the games from years ago.
Once YouTube think's it knows what I like, I get 1 or 2 categories of videos I might watch and barley anything else related to my subscriptions.
If I had to describe YouTube's recommendation algorithm I'd say "undefined behaviour". It might recommend the same uninteresting video every day, but also hide an interesting, subscribed channel's videos for months even though I liked almost every one of their videos. It might mix videos I already watched once with completely unrelated search results. At this point Google could probably improve their algorithm just by flipping a coin.
YouTube is hilariously bad.
It doesn't matter how many times I say I'm not interested in K-pop, it doesn't help.
So far I’ve found it does stop showing you if you remove what caused it from history.
Unfortunately, Capitalism doesn't work like that :-(. Back in the old days, Google searches used to be organic searches in the genuine sense, and that was the best Google we ever had. But today's Google is the Big Tech Capitalist and so will be their algorithms. The organic logic should follow your prunes and show you what you want but the capitalist logic will only show what they're paid to show to you! (i.e. propaganda, politically motivated content, inciting content, etc. etc.).
If I click on anything I wouldn't usually watch, it is then the only thing that goes in my recommendation for a good 2-3 weeks. I watched one dashcam video the other day that someone linked me, which had the tags Tesla and Elon Musk.... Now the only thing I get in my recommended is incredibly strange videos about Elon Musk and Teslas.
thats a weird position. The whole point of YouTube (used to be anyway) was long form content. YouTube is not new anymore. You really have no interest in watching some good 10 minute video you saw 9 years ago?
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 question of why I’m watching a video when I have a book on my lap and a car waiting outside.
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 obnoxious" that might be useful.
If you are using it to say "I don't agree with this political viewpoint" or "I don't like this movie/superhero/game/TV franchise", then that's also probably not that helpful.
I absolutely hate it that they removed the dislike counter, it was so valuable.
Especially for software or websites, for some reason I can't find niche stuff easily on search engines, but there's an Indian guy that just tells you how to use a website. If the website doesn't work anymore I'd like to see a decreasing thumbs up ratio.
I did find a website that let me watch a video with violence in it without logging in to youtube. It looks like they just mirror the video you access from youtube. But this kind of a site will easily get shut down with some legal notice from YouTube.
I actually want a thumbs graph, to see if the video has been gaining likes or gaining dislikes recently.
THEY HAVE "NOT INTERESTED BUTTON"
IT'S JUST FUCKING HIDDEN https://imgur.com/a/fXjiBCu
All they need to do is to put it beside dislikes
It has to be control, right, surely Google are competent to fix this overnight of they wished?
My guess is, they calculate that they make more money with this configuration than the alternative.
>On December 13, 2018, YouTube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind became the most disliked video on the video sharing platform, with 15 million dislikes rapidly surpassed the music video for Justin Bieber's song "Baby"
You can dislike random people, but Susan hearing her pupil star employees content is shit is where you cross the line. Especially when it happens again next year: "YouTube Rewind 2019: For the Record"
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.
Or maybe if you're running a forum where you want to promote controversial content and hide boring content, just make the downvote act identical to the upvote, so users are incentivized to downvote and argue if they think it is argue-worthy and just ignore if they think it is too boring to discuss.
Designers may have an intention. People will apply their own needs and usage to features, in the spirit of desire paths.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path>
If people are using "dislike" to indicate that they're not interested in content, particularly in a context in which there are few other ways to do so, then that is what the button means.
You might extend that more broadly to any aspect of a UI/UX.
In a past life I designed some elements of a content moderation / feedback system. Among the more amusing aspects of that was encountering people who told me that I was using the system I'd designed wrong.
It's not dissimilar to the buttons asking if you enjoyed your washroom visit. Sure, it seems vague and stupid, but if one of your 30 washrooms is suddenly reporting 50% "dislikes", you know something is wrong.
I know people get upset about the political implications of She-Hulk or COVID or Rings of Power dislikes, but surely one would think the positive information for the content creator outweigh the negatives here. There were times when all of Justin Bieber's content sat at around 5%. This was probably an annoyance for his PR team, but I doubt many of them thought the feature should be removed entirely.
No use case defined = use as you see fit.
You mean 2 more minutes of engagement!
I know, let's try using the provided search filter feature to sort by rating. Surely this will give some useful listing that prioritizes user deemed quality!
Testing this with "Subaru repair" (no quotes), the top result has 11 views from 2 years ago.
I agree about the dislikes tho.
I used to calculate the ratio of likes:dislikes, and a lot of my hobbies were in the cool 1,000:1 range. Now I do the same with views:likes; 10:1 isn't uncommon for some niches!
Idk how accurate it is, but you can gauge the sentiment (mostly positive, mixed, mostly negative)
Even if you don’t use it, it’s still a useful signal. Are you saying this isn’t the case? For example, did you find the dislike ratio to be a misleading signal, when it was around?
I understand if my perspective is a minority opinion, but I think it’s a valid one.
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.
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.
> Now it takes me at least 2 mins longer to get to the same judgement
Sounds like metrics at work.
I'm getting a lot of responses as if I expect the player to be totally blocked from matching with me, but that's not really what I mean. Even a basic "temporary match score reduction" would work. I would also expect a cooldown system where the reduction caused by reporting no longer applies. Arguing against the idea "because it creates a prisoner's island" misses the subtlety of a well-thought-out implementation where reporting simply lowers the matchup "rank" for a while, and serial-false-reporters have their reports basically nullified/ignored.
Even for an average player, adding an avoid player feature would ultimately make matchmaking take longer. It necessarily reduces the number of valid matchings of players, so the system will only be slower. My guess is that average queue time is an important metric that management does not want to increase. It’s an especially tough sell because if you really wanted fresh players in your game, you could always not queue for a few minutes and you will almost certainly get all-new teammates.
Like I said I don't care if matchmaking takes longer (usually it's only ~30 sec). The pool of players is utterly massive, and ranking one player down a bit would make a trivial difference.
Yeah, I could wait a couple minutes and not queue up. But that's making it my problem that I had to deal with a toxic/abusive player. I already did my part and reported them, but now I also have to just not play the game for a while to make sure I don't get matched again? Indeed, my suggested solution of lowering their matchmaking "matchability" to me would benefit the community. Not to mention, the effect could be nullified if I am spamming unfounded reports against players constantly.
I kind of just assume that a competitive multiplayer game under active development for the past 15 years would have functionality like I've mentioned above. Maybe it does, and it just hasn't worked well to prevent me from matching up with toxic players multiple games in a row.
Inter-user features are always delicate to balance when it comes to competitive games.
https://win.gg/news/dota-2-avoid-player-feature-improved-as-...
Or is it more of a thing of "60% of our players like to harass people, if we only pair them with other harassers, they don't have any fun and leave"?
Most of their communication should still be online in some form whether on their website or reddit. All this is just from my memory so subject to misremembering.
That's fascinating. It was rude and nasty players that drove me away from online gaming completely. They make it seriously unfun, and if it's not fun, there's no point in doing it.
Who says LoL doesn't do this already? Maybe you did got matched in a this unlikely scenario.
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 convenient so I train it dozens of times a day yet it doesn't bloody care.
I pay for Premium because I watch it on my iPad and smart TV, but I'm planning on telling Apple to fuck off, buy Android everything and sideload a system wide adblocker so I can stop paying for that terrible service.
This is the inconvenience it forces upon a paying customer. What an abusive relationship.
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?
It stopped recommending his videos months ago, but lasting damage has been done to my profile or something like that because the conspiracy stuff sticks around and has crowded everything else out. The old behaviour of fixating on something I just watched for 6 weeks no longer happens.
I suspect that certain types of videos/subjects are able to leave a massively oversized weighting for a category on your profile that everything else get's completely dwarfed by.
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 interests but often stuff I've already watched. Nothing that strays a little further than the channels I already know. Keeps recommending stuff I've watched and liked months or years ago. Video #42 of a series I've seen fully.
- 9.9% useless trending bullshit. This month it's all about the "Why have we divorced" or "Meet our new baby" videos. I don't have children, I'm not even in a relationship. Google decided I would care about this.
- 0.1% some genuinely new stuff that's relevant.
If so, the same thing is wrong with my account, and that of my other friends who watch YouTube often.
The trouble seems to be it can't seem to find anything new. So if anything, I'd want it to branch out a bit and find semi-related stuff, but it doesn't.
You're not the first person to complain about YouTube recommendations, and I don't know why my experience is so different than yours.
This may be in your interests if you have an Apple TV.
I think it supports iPad, as well.
Sort yourself out, Google.
I have a completely different experience. My recommendations are pretty decent, if recent-biased. You’re not on the “explore” or “trending now” page right? Obviously trending videos aren’t tailored to individuals
Sometimes it just gets it wrong and skips one, other times it just recommends some other totally unrelated video even if you've been watching the same numbered series forever.
And it's got a short enough memory span that one day it'll recommend out of the blue, for weeks, video #57 of a series you've seen a couple years ago.
Amazon might be the worst example though. Buy something like a bike rack for your vehicle and Amazon will recommend nothing but other bike racks... as though I need dozens of them for one car.
Give it a rest already.
With that in mind, I think Youtube recommendations are quite good. Just do it when your recommendations get stale, monthly or so.
I wish other platforms had that like Amazon.
Having to nuke a valuable reference like your history in order make the recommendations approach something useful is the opposite of "quite good".
I don't understand why recommendation engines just don't provide a reset button. It'd be better for everyone involved: content provider, content creators, users, ad buyers.
Perhaps they beta tested only with Jeff Bezos who had this exact quandary.
For the bike rack example, to make it "smarter" you could have a product type that is something like "one-time purchase" and have a linked product type that is accessories for the one-time product, like helmets, pumps, tire changing kits, inner tubes, water bottles, etc. This would be what a retail worker at a bike shop would do - ask if you need any accessories, maybe point out clearance/sale items. Thats it, no fancy engines/AI/ML needed. If the customer wants other stuff, there is a search bar they will likely use.
I chalk it up to Resume Driven Development and just the innate tendency of engineers over-engineering things because that's how our brains work.
Youtube’s recommendations are just matching my most recent searches while occasionally throwing in Nazi crap I never asked for.
I just watched a pleasant video about a particular video game.
Youtube now wants me to watch the most obnoxious youtuber they can find who also covers that video game.
No, actually the reason I watched that other video was because the person in it was nice and pleasant.... the recommendation is the LAST thing I wanted.
the most shocking thing is they still have not managed to get a decent recommendation engine after all this time.
For example, I have a friend that's into cars. I watched a few car videos and then 50% of my recommendations were car videos. It works for me though, because usually those videos are genuinely interesting. I haven't watched one in weeks tho, so going to my home I see 0 car related videos.
I will 100% believe everyone though when they say it just doesn't work for them. Just wanted to share my experience.
The algos are useful if I follow so many creators that I can’t keep up, or occasionally I get some good unexpected content. But my favorite creators were all recommended me by other people, not algos.
Also, the algos just peddle in commoditized interactions like Likes and Watch Time and Subscribes. They can only optimize for meaningful creator-observer relationship so far as that’s measured by Watch Time, Subscribe, etc.
Not to mention some obvious problems how clickbaity the recs are for new/anonymous users or on videos with few views. Or the whole Elsagate incident (which no doubt continues to be a problem).
Overall I still like YT but I don’t think the commoditized algos are helping much. Just let me get recs from friends or search for what I want. Don’t try to get me to doomwatch easy content all day… and especially don’t try to get kids to doomwatch easy content all day.
Very odd and you can certainly get some bad content in the mix because they don't know what they're doing.
I super love the categories at the top too. If I want all cooking videos instead of just 2, it's a single click. It's really neat to see it use machine learning to tell me what my ~15 top topics are. And it's entirely correct.
Perhaps one day everyone could compare and see if it really is just preference or that some people have something gone terribly wrong.
I will admit, I usually see more tech-oriented people complain about it.
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.
I can't say I've seen this type of recommendation behavior but I totally believe it.
The recommending the same video twice seems like such an easy problem to solve too...
Another example though... I just watched a few videos about fake self help gurus and influencers. I now have 3/10 recommended videos about that. 2/10 a random meme (which do look funny, tbf) and then the rest are subs.
The first week or two I was pushing the "not interested" and "don't recommend channel" every time one of the videos would show up in my feed (mind you I've never actually clicked on one and watched it and I'm a firefox+ubo user). Those two buttons had no effect at all. So I tried flagging the videos for "unwanted content". No effect either. The videos would keep on appearing in my suggestions at various places for a whole month straight.
The theory being that the channel was being actively promoted by Youtube and was thus impossible to hide. Ties in with the removal of the 'dislike' button as I believe it had the same reasoning behind it: raising the value of their advertising service.
What I did find very useful some time ago was to actually `Block` whole YouTube channels (you do it from Channel's Info page by clicking on the Flag button). This is an ultimate way of getting rid of some content on your feed. I blocked pretty much all these 5-Minute Crafts, Blossoms, Bright Side and other crap-generating trolls. Best decision ever!
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 money)? The only thing I can imagine is that they would down-rank videos not cached in your region.
There's a very philosophical debate hidden between the words in that sentence.
But since Youtube sees dislike as a signal to boost a video, it spreads content-views to things that people don't like, but feel compelled to interact with in (what I assume is) the "Not now, I'm busy - someone is being wrong on the internet" kind of way.
You can say, that is what people _actually_ want, since that is what they end up spending time on. You can point to popular subreddits like r/idiotsincars or r/makesmybloodboil and say "see! people love being enraged", and I think it is a valid view on defining "want", though not one I subscribe to.
I think this is not what people want, and promoting this kind of behaviour will in the mid to long term scare off users. My understanding of Tik-Tok is that they promote a style of feel-good content, rather than rage-inducing content and they are beating both Facebook and Youtube, who've been promoting dislikes.
I just don’t see YT having the same feedback loops as other places. You can stay on without being directly typing in comments like on fb or twitter.
I personally never see rage-inducing content on YouTube (nor other sites), nor do i see it on my partners, friends, parents accounts. I’m sure it’s there, but I think that people who get it are training their recommendations to show it, not being forced it. I get way more rageful content on TikTok ironically, which has a way weaker “dislike” signal and a stronger propensity to show you new things.
To the point, I understand the incentive someone like fb has to show content people don’t like but still engage with, but I’m not sure that the incentive exists in YouTube. Furthermore I think we discredit companies (who are made up of sentient and capable people) to recognize short term vs long term value and the importance of reputation.
I reject the notion that there’s someone in San Bruno pitching that they use the dislike button to show more of that video instead of a negative quality signal. No one I know in Silicon Valley who works in tech would make such a suggestion, and they’re no different than the YouTube team on a fundamental level.
What you want to see is not necessarily the same as what you will end up watching. Just because you dislike a video doesn't mean you wouldn't watch it.
Or put another way, you can tell YouTube what you want (to be perceived socially as wanting) to see, but the algorithm knows what you actually want to see.
Except the algorithm doesn't know what I actually want to see. Nobody but YouTube knows what I tell YouTube I like or dislike, so there's not even a theoretical pressure to lie about by wants in order to present an appearance to others.
By definition, clicking on a a dislike button means you watched at least part of the video. It’s a signal that “I started watching this and it wasn’t a good match”.
That should send the message that it’s appealing from the title/thumbnail but a bad video. I don’t think the “socially be seen as wanting” plays too much here… because starting to watch already. You already sent a different signal.
But it doesn't show me what I want to see so I watch like 30 seconds total and look for something else
I'll go to watch one thing and leave. All the recommended stuff is just straight up garbage.
I also set up separate YouTube viewing accounts by interest, so that I can clobber away everything not related to a specific interest in that particular account (eg. anything not sports related gets "Don't Recommend Channel"'d in my Sports YT account).
YouTube pretty much fights you tooth and nail the whole way, but eventually your blocking of irrelevant and garbage recommendations leaves them no choice but recommending things related to that interest.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
The key insight here is that dislikes are not the same thing as uninterested. People will dislike stories that they're interested in but think are poorly written or do not have the ending that they want it to have. If you use dislike to mean uninterested you are ruining the recommendations.
Rather you need to have a separate button that says do not recommend other content like this. That's what we do and it works out well.
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.
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
On the the one hand they need to stop accidentally taking down innocent videos, but also need to take down bad videos faster.
People don't realize that all these issues are two sides of the same coin. They complain on each side separately and don't understand why optimizing for one messes up the other.
It's not there to help you, the user. It's there to make the content creator feel popular. That's why YouTube removed dislike numbers and Facebook never had it to begin with. It's mostly window dressing.
Placebo Button is a push-button or other control that appears to have functionality but has no physical effect when pressed. Such buttons can appear to work, by lighting up or otherwise reacting, which rewards the user by giving them an illusion of control. They are commonly placed in situations where it would have once been useful to have such a button but the system now operates automatically, such as a manual thermostat in a temperature-regulated office. Were the control removed entirely, some users would feel frustrated at the awareness they were not in control.
Examples include:
* Office thermostats
* Walk buttons at pedestrian crossings
* London Underground train door buttons
* Elevator door close buttons
* FCC do not call lists
That was previously submitted to HN though there seems to be no activity presently: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32910321>
It's both suprising and not that suprising to see quantitatively how little disliking or telling youtube to not reccomend channels or content has an impact on the algorithm. They also rightfully point out how much of a pain it is to try to provide negative feedback to youtube's reccomendation system. It's always been a chore to remove the hot new trending clickbait from the reccomendations.
I sadly doubt that this report will change much, but it's good to finally have some statistical validation of what I've frustrating subjectively experienced.
[0]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/user-cont... [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/regretsreport... [2]: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-to-youtube/
I'd encourage them to make that information more apparent earlier in the link-train.
And yeah, agreed on YouTube's algo-feedback uselessness, and the value of solid data substantiating general impressions (mine as well).
I was under the impression that these three are mutually exclusive to each other
To make it worse it looks like accidentally letting the preview play a few seconds of a video marks the subject as something you are interested in and it can sometimes be near impossible to select a video in the middle of the page without having one of the surrounding videos start a preview.
I want good youtubers to be able to make a living and I pay for the YouTube subscription, but this crap is driving me towards setting up Invidious rapidly.
The most effective tweaking methods to the algorithm I've found is just subscribing to people who cover a genre I want to see more of and then watching videos from their videos recommended section.
I'm perpetually confused by YouTubes weights for choosing recommended videos.
Basically Youtube rewards interactions, and a dislike is an interaction. Her main evidence was a video by pewdiepie where he asks everyone who views it to dislike it. It is one of his most viewed videos, at least around that time, and by far the most disliked.
Sadly Ann Reardon names her videos after what she cooks or debunks, and not her critiques on the algorithm (she has quite a few really good one)
I'd appreciate if someone knows the link.
BTW, her name is Ann Reardon.
My only question then is: how do I know if I dislike a video if I haven't watched it? Sometimes I can leave a video early, but others I will have to watch for a bit before realizing it is a waste of time. This is more pronounced with Shorts due to the duration of videos. I will end up watching something that is 20 seconds long to see what it was about (you never know when you will find a gem), but then dislike it once it is finished. YouTube just keeps recommending low quality garbage until I get fed up with it and spam "Do not recommend channel" the moment a video shows up.
This may have already been scailed back abit since I first noticed it, so maybe not 100% accuarate anymore, still pisses me off.
Put in keywords like:
"ending explained"
"top 10"
"death scene"
"betrayal scene"
"all bosses"
"all endings"
Presumably from YouTube's perspective, it's more important that your recommendations pane contain at least one video that you want to watch than it is that it contains zero videos you don't want to see. The user's desires are a probably a little more balanced - seeing videos on topics you dislike is annoying even if you don't watch them, and even if there is a single good video mixed in.
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.
Amusingly, TikTok just implemented a dislike button very recently.
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.
From that point on, focus was reduced on working on recommenders. Instead the goal was not to trick users into spending their whole life on the platform, but to maximize ad revenue from those users in the limited time they did spend on the platform.
The one party that wasn't part of this was tiktok. And that's why they have stolen so much user share.
When I bought Youtube premium I started using it much more seriously (meaning curating subscriptions, marking things as "Not Interested", and actually following up on my notification feed when new videos get released) and I've been amazed at the level of quality it delivers. It learns exactly what you like and dislike.
And no it doesnt force feed me politics or ragebait like Reddit and Twitter - both of which do in spite of my efforts to curate them.
TikTok took a bit of time investment at first but now it shows me HN-style tech stuff, highly local restaurant recommendations, nerdy film stuff, etc. I never see dancing teenagers and I don't think I ever saw them after the first day I used TikTok.
Likes and Dislikes have countless of disadvantages. They're subject to review bombing, heavily skew towards power users because normal people don't even care to hit any buttons and it's a purely binary choice.
Why do you expect Google (or any trillion dollar company) to care how good or bad the thumbs down or similar actions work? Google only cares about revenue and profits, for which it doesn't matter if the video is an educational one, a game being streamed or content designed to outrage people or spread hate. Did you watch the ad? Good. Google is happy. And google doesn't care.
"But I don't watch those clickbaity videos! Google's losing revenue on me!" Yeah well apparently not on 95 or 99% of the viewers apparently for them to continue acting like this :shrug:
Unless the incentives of Google and the viewers align (or regulation/competition forces Google), don't expect the thumbs down button to be more than a "Please Sir, I want some less" button-equivalent.
I've cut back to discovering content only via other sources (HN, other communities, friends) by blocking the homepage and sidebar recommendations entirely.
Plug this into your uBlock "My Filters" and YT should become far less addictive. It blocks both direct homepage access and SPA routing (on the latter the homepage will just be blank):
||youtube.com^|$doc
youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"]
! 2022-02-07 https://www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com##ytd-item-section-renderer.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer.style-scopeAlthough occasionally on the mobile site it inhects a "want to see something new?" into the feed which is a godsend. That list of recommendations is beautiful and interesting. However it doesn't seem to have any repeatable way to access it.
Although the poor recommendations may be partly because I manage my subscriptions via RSS so most of my watching is direct-to-video links then leaving the site. But that doesn't seem to excuse recommending things that I have already watched.
Other fact about downvotes is that they count as engagement so downvoting a video promotes it more than not clicking anything at all, that is why many youtubers go "if you don't like it click the downvote and write about that in the comment"... because both of those actions drive "engagement" so video is promoted more
I know this has been said many times before, but ignoring this reality is like trying to understand life without considering evolution, or understanding chemistry while ignoring the periodic table.
Google's incentives are to tailor customers to advertisers, not customers to content!
They don't care if you see what you want to see, they care if you see what they want you to see.
In that light, it all makes sense.
YouTube wants you to see ads. Ads are put in front of YouTube videos. Therefore youtube wants you to watch videos. YouTube, logically, should want you to watch more videos, for longer. If they serve you bad videos, you stop.
Therefore, Googles incentives are to tailor good recommendations of content for customers.
QED.
I think all this “you’re not the customer you’re the product” signaling - which is true to an extent- needs an additional corollary of “products aren’t free to acquire or produce” or “businesses can’t exhaust their supply of products to sell”.
Because if YouTube truly doesn’t care about serving you relevant videos -as you conjecture-, why not recommend the same 100 videos to everyone? It’s make caching way cheaper.
Actually this is false. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, I know, but it has long been known in the field of psychology that a variable reward system works significantly better than consistent rewards or consistent punishment. The reality is that a mixture of bad, mediocre, and occasionally good recommendations is the most likely to keep you on the site for the longest.
See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27353633/ (or Google “variable reward schedules” and take your pick of a publication you trust)
They might be pushing videos or topics that advertisers are more willing to pay for.
Is it possible that Youtube knows your friend's video interests just like you do?
> They might be pushing videos or topics that advertisers are more willing to pay for.
This, however, does seem very possible.
Google crossed that Rubicon 10--15 years ago. They're driving with increased speed into the other side.
I have my subscriptions there and only new videos of the channels I'm interested into appear. No distraction, no trending low quality videos in my feed anymore. I only get what I'm interested into.
When I want to look for something new, I head over the popular/trending sections and maybe navigate a bit on vanilla YouTube to look for new things.
No regrets.
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.
I learned not to log in and use search wherever possible.
Now I use Invidious (with JS disabled and/or uMatrix blocking YouTube functionality in the browser as an additional nudge), or youtube-dl / ytdl / mpv to play video directly. Usually audio-only for talkpieces.
I'll also disable recommendations and comments portions of the website, for additional bonus (via Stylus).
Theres another script that deletes watched videos from the specific youtube plex library every night.
It works great as long as you remember to remove the videos from your watched later playlist before watching them on plex. (Have yet to find out a simple way to automate playlist removal)
<https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube>
It was (well, still is) a terminal-based YouTube client which provided search, locally-managed playlists, choice of playback mode (video or audio-only), downloads, and a number of other features. YouTube quashed it with an API-key limitations such that it is now effectively unusable.
But for a brief moment, YouTube content was accessible from a terminal window or console, without all the godawful dark patterns of the site itself. That was tremendously useful.
These days I'll snag videos by URL via youtube-dl/ytdl, and/or mpv (which invokes those transparently). Not quite as magickal, but still pretty good.
Hrm... Apparently there's a successor project, yewtube:
<https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube/issues/1191>
<https://iamtalhaasghar.github.io/yewtube/#installation>
I'm going to have to check that out...
I've been banging this drum for a while:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731>
<https://web.archive.org/web/20160307214624/https://plus.goog...>
That references a G+ post which is of course dead now with that service. Wayback claims to have captured the post but I can't find a version that renders properly (or at all):
<https://web.archive.org/web/20131015000000*/https://plus.goo...>
(The HN submission referenced a post of my own on G+, which I believe I deleted shortly afterward.)
When I did utilise YT under a YouTube (and for a very brief time, Google+) account, I found the benefits de minimis. And in particular, what I'd most prefer would be to dismiss channels (or entire genres) with extreme prejudice, which simply was not available. And I'm not going to play rat to the Borg's Skinner box to find the reward morsel. I've got methods that work with ample sufficiency for me now.
So, no, not gonna bite.
Also I find it gives me a ton of recommendations for videos I've already seen.
The recency bias means that whatever terms you're searching become prevalent for that session. It's not possible to dismiss items or channels (idiotic on YT's part IMO), but you can at least create a short-lived preference instance unpolluted by any previous explorations.
We will just end up back full circle at TV, with the only thing our control being the ability to flip between channels.
Seriously, fuck everyone who implements that “Relevant” sorting in searches on every platform, which is usually everything but what you are actually searching for.
Working on getting my Youtube api quota extended.
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.
Self-reporting is strongly subject to bias. YouTube/Google have long been non-credible in reporting on their own activities. I've had some experience with this myself, as a third-party researcher:
Also YouTube: "dislike barely works!"
Does other people have the same or opposite experience?
Basically every big internet service runs on algorithms. You name it: Ebay, Amazon, Google, Facebook, TikTok, Netflix, Spotify etc.
In practice, it doesn't work in the long term either. I've been using YouTube regularly for many years.
Making Youtube better from Google's point of view inevitably makes it worse from a user's point of view. It would take a really bad quarter to tune the algorithm and make it more user centric. And that's not going to happen any time soon.
Then you can just go to the address bar and type y + enter.
A fast way of getting to the address bar is CTRL + L (CMD + L on mac).
If I watch a video from one or the other side of the political spectrum, or watch something more fringe just because I want to learn about the subject, I get nonstop recommendations for more videos and more videos and more and more and more of the same, nonstop forever. I can’t escape the subject without wiping the account, and while there does seem to be an effect from block channel dislike seems to do little.
I feel like I’m staring into a bathtub full of water in the middle of the ocean. YouTube needs to fix their discovery tools because I think it’s causing someone who goes down a rabbit hole to keep going down that rabbit hole with ease, and that’s not really that cool with radicalizing content.
Just my 2c from recent experience. Love the platform (except for the increase in ads to cable levels recently) otherwise.
It's true that we can't avoid having our thoughts affected by our environment but it feels weird to know that so much of our mental landscape is determined by alogrithms or persons that are not connected to the actual material or social fabric of our lives.
Does youtube not have a responsibility to protect viewers from fraud? Surely they can detect the same video being posted again?
I wonder how many people are losing money to these scams.