[HN Gopher] YouTube's 'dislike' barely works according to new st...
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YouTube's 'dislike' barely works according to new study on
recommendations
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 38 points
Date : 2022-09-20 20:33 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.engadget.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.engadget.com)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's been a while since I've logged into YouTube but my
| impression is that the experience including recommendations is
| worse if you are logged in.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Just don't try the YouTube search and scroll down by more than
| six results, it will make you scream inside.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That was my experience years ago when I last did so. Logging in
| offered no visible upsides and multiple downs.
|
| 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).
| okdood64 wrote:
| If you actually subscribe to channels you like when logged
| in, you'll get much better recommendations. I have over a
| 100. (And no, all of the recommendations aren't from my
| subscribed channels, it's a mix of them which have newer
| videos and similar videos to my subscriptions.)
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| I've been using a cron job to watch/download my watch later
| playlist so I can view the videos on plex at a later time: ht
| tps://github.com/nburns/utilities/blob/master/youtube.fish...
|
| 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)
| eimrine wrote:
| Best YT experience is to clear cookies then open a lot of YT
| links from HN, but when our human nature drives us watching a
| stupid video or two from YT recommendation then after that
| session do clearing cookies and open YT links from HN again.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| You can delete individual videos from your watch history in
| the history tab to remove them from recommendation basis.
| Unlike the "Don't show me videos like this" button, it works
| well.
| makosdv wrote:
| I'm not surprised by this. I gave up on the YouTube Home page,
| etc. years ago and I only look at the Subscriptions page. I've
| just found new channels to subscribe to through word of mouth
| over the years and I have more than enough content to choose
| from.
| kache_ wrote:
| Which is actually quite a good way to find youtube channels! I
| find them through twitter, 4ch, and friends.
| jdmdmdmdmd wrote:
| >twitter, 4ch, and friends
|
| I was under the impression that these three are mutually
| exclusive to each other
| HardwareLust wrote:
| 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.
| katbyte wrote:
| this is my experience too, as well not showing videos from
| people you've subscribed too but maybe haven't watched in a
| while.
|
| the most shocking thing is they still have not managed to get a
| decent recommendation engine after all this time.
| duxup wrote:
| Most preferences type systems don't seem to get the nuances
| involved.
|
| 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.
| beart wrote:
| 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 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.
| Arrath wrote:
| Amazon really, really likes to recommend me a wide variety of
| shower curtains after buying one, 4 years ago.
|
| Give it a rest already.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| > Buy something like a bike rack for your vehicle and Amazon
| will recommend nothing but other bike racks... as though I
| need dozens
|
| Perhaps they beta tested only with Jeff Bezos who had this
| exact quandary.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| Unfortunately Tiktok is the only platform that nails it for
| me. It regularly manages to find old hobbies or interests
| back into the rotation,
|
| Youtube's recommendations are just matching my most recent
| searches while occasionally throwing in Nazi crap I never
| asked for.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Youtube does have a great escape latch though: go to the
| History tab and delete your viewing history. Your
| recommendations start from scratch and you'll get funneled
| into a potentially new corner of videos.
|
| 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.
| piva00 wrote:
| It'd be great if I didn't use my History to actually find
| videos I've previously watched...
|
| 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.
| joe_guy wrote:
| Amazon actually has a pretty detailed page that lets you
| control what feeds back into your recommendations.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/yourstore/iyr/
| dr-detroit wrote:
| notart666 wrote:
| Well at least it doesn't work like Instagrams where it doesn't
| do anything at all. I don't want to see hundreds of videos
| making videos of street vendors all doing the exact same thing.
| sph wrote:
| 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
| 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.
| skyyler wrote:
| https://github.com/yattee/yattee
|
| This may be in your interests if you have an Apple TV.
|
| I think it supports iPad, as well.
| sph wrote:
| Thanks. I should really dedicate a weekend to setting
| something like that up on all my devices. I'm willing to
| put up with bad recommendations if I know they don't get a
| cent out of my views.
|
| Sort yourself out, Google.
| ars wrote:
| For me it recommends _exactly_ what I watch - I 've never
| seen any recommendation for stuff I don't watch.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| notinfuriated wrote:
| Somewhere in the middle for me, but what it recommends to me
| are generally channels I am already interested in. I think
| the only novel recommendation I've seen recently, that I
| enjoyed, was of some kind of classical Chinese music.
| Otherwise, I see a lot of absolute fucking garbage from the
| likes of Mr. Beast.
| fallingknife wrote:
| 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.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah, on a non-logged-in system I watch YT on, I watched
| exactly ONE gaming-related video, and now suddenly the "home"
| view is full of Minecraft, Roblox, whatever FPS shooters,
| etc... Like... I'm not suddenly absolutely obsessed with a
| topic because I viewed one video, guys...
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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'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.
| svnpenn wrote:
| > I'm never interested in rewatching stuff I've already seen.
|
| 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?
| tus666 wrote:
| But at least the "not interested" option works well, at least for
| me.
| behaveEc0n00 wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This article is a discussion of a study Mozilla published ...
| without a dateline, though the Wayback Machine suggests it
| probably appeared 20 Sept. 2022 (today):
| <https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/youtube/user-controls/>
|
| That was previously submitted to HN though there seems to be no
| activity presently:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32910321>
| operator-name wrote:
| The linked report [0] is dated today and uses data from the
| RegretsReporter extension [1] and additional surveys from
| December 2021, which is basically when youtube removed the
| dislike counter [2].
|
| 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/
| amatecha wrote:
| This reminds me of how games ( _cough_ LeagueOfLegends _cough_ )
| match me up with a player that I literally just reported for
| harassment, griefing etc. in the previous match. Like, there
| weren't any other possible players to match me with out of the
| many thousands? I don't mind waiting a few more seconds to match
| up with someone else!
| lupire wrote:
| Did you Block or just report?
| dannyw wrote:
| It shouldn't matter.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Dota 2 added a (paid) "avoid player" option, where the
| matchmaker will not match them with you no matter what.
|
| https://win.gg/news/dota-2-avoid-player-feature-improved-as-...
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(page generated 2022-09-20 23:00 UTC)