No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
I don't know what happened exactly but I'm pretty sure it's the lack of dislike stats, that now my suggestions and home page of youtube is filled, and I mean FILLEDDD!, with videos that have 4k stock clips, catchy title, but completely lacking in content. Misleading 100%. Not 1, not 2, but like 8/10 videos are now garbage stock footage with bs commentary over nothing.
Example:
Nasa just discovered truth about solar system!?!?!?!
Science has progressed a lot in last 100 years....
So and so first discovered pluto in 1xxx
Mayans used to think balbala...
Some historians think....
Now scientist finally have answered....
New evidence (2014 research) shows there might be a planet ...
No explanation of study because you know it actually requires some comprehension...
Insert failed attempt at humor...
Leave a comment on your thoughts..
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Same script, like 8th grade essay you didn't study for, but multiplied by 100x.
We knew it was gonna ruin youtube, people told youtube it was gonna ruin it, and now exactly that happened. Click baity videos with nice stock footage that is barely relevant and half assed 'answers'.
497 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadThe way to use it is:
1) know what you want to watch beforehand
2) search using a different engine like DDG
3) use yt-dl to grab the video and watch offline
The mistake would be to "log in" to the actual site, and click on the "recommended" rubbish and all that algorithmic cruft to manipulate, data-mine your soul and mislead you.
Bikini catwalks, scamming phone scammers, MMA fights, math entertainment, people who build cool shit.
This is of course subjective, but I basically can't open youtube.com without wasting 10 minutes.
If I ever get the idea of going to YouTube for a legit purpose (e.g. finding a conference talk, or listening to music), my brain's first response is "oh no", because I know I have to endure at least ten minutes of entertainment. YouTube's TikTok clone is even worse, but not as good as actual TikTok.
I can only say it works like drugs.
It's the opposite for me. These days when I have 10 minutes I open YouTube and there's nothing interesting. It recommends me irrelevant stuff, stuff I've seen already, shorts or trending video crap interspersed in between in case I've suddenly become real interested in the Kardashians and football news.
Mark Rober, I guess? No wonder the algorithm promotes him to heaven and beyond, the content he puts out is extremely well done.
This is how it used to be until blogs started up with daily posts, then Youtube, then social media's endless firehose. Suddenly you could start treating the Internet like TV. There was always something to tune into.
One still gets recommendations, namely those at the right of the video you're watching. Those tend to be more relevant than Home's.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis... (also available for Firefox, Edge, ..)
Of course, it doesn't solve the recommendation issue the thread creator mentioned.
edit: there's a Linus Tech Tips video on this which goes into more detail. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz9b0oJw69I
Beating Google at their own game, they (apparently) are.
Often you see the opposite, where a third party service provides customers with a feature extending the features of a big service like youtube or twitter, and then the big service buys the startup offering that extension, or integrates the feature themselves, leaving the extension dead. Now we see it happening in reverse direction, very interesting.
[0]https://developers.google.com/youtube/analytics/metrics#disl...
The dislike count is also still present in the [0] video API response.
[0]https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos#resourc...
It's not marked as deprecated or removed because dislikes were never deprecated or removed, nor implied to be.
They made it private (readable only to the uploader) and marked it as private.
A plug-in using this API will only tell you the dislike count for your own videos.
And your other comment says "The dislike count is also still present in the [0] video API response." but the page says right there "Note: The statistics.dislikeCount property was made private as of December 13, 2021."
Extensions probably acquire the video url and make their own API call just to retrieve the dislike count. To me, that seems cleaner than trying to snoop on the main API call response (I think extensions might not have access to those, maybe they do). Basically, the data is available via API calls.
My new fave: "NASA makes terrifying discovery..."
Yeah. My experience is similar to the authors. Crap floats right to the top.
For channels I watch regularly downvotes aren't relevant at all.
You can see Dirac himself speak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma7TSAq87lg), Feynman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk), Jung(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs3HK3pxVAY), Minsky, McCarthy, Ellul, Ram Dass, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Terence McKenna and Alan Watts and many many more people who greatly influenced our understanding and way of life
Youtube is quickly turning worse, just as google, with the flood of click baity content, and not only them, look at cnn.com or foxnews.com you will see every single article is with click bait title.
I dont think the issue is in the dislike button, I think they have to up their game to help you navigate the sea of garbage to find some islands of good content.
The reddit rule of 90/9/1% is no longer true (90% of community members are lurkers who read or observe, but don't contribute. 9% of community members edit or respond to content but don't create content of their own) now it seems we are more to 20/30/50% (my intuition), and the tooling and understanding used to decide what content to create and game the system has improved a lot. Like in video games, the way people play videogames now is fundamentally different than 5 years ago, now you are expected to minmax your character, items, gameplay etc because there are so many tools and guides out there to help you, but the same happens with content creation.
Its a different world now, and the algorithms have not caught up yet.
My worry on top of monetizing is that the discoverability of good content is a lot worse.
I often already know content that is relevant and want to rewatch it but I now struggle a lot more to find it, drowned in all the non-sense surprised faces and clibait titles. I will often have to dig through history or notes or bookmarks to rediscover a specific video.
Literally every video play I've ever done on YouTube had been the result of a direct link or me searching for something.
I get that there are people that go to the homepage to see what's there and click stuff but I find it totally unfathomable (not least because who has the time?!).
I don't know the inner workings of YTs algorithms, but I believe it helps that I never watch the low quality drivel and have very focused topics that I subscribe to.
I also don't spend too much time on YouTube so every time I do check it out it seems like there's new content from several high quality channels.
The dislike button was fairly useless in the channels that I visit.
When I seldomly open the "trending" section by mistake, I am usually appalled.
I also religiously use the three dot > Don't recommend video option on videos that are low quality, clickbait, etc. in my suggestions. Not sure what signal that sends to Youtube exactly, but those types of videos show up less and less in my recommendations. I call it weeding the garden.
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 really, really old videos from people I normally watch. It's always done this, but it seems worse recently.
- Trying to push "streamer bro" meme videos on me, which seem aimed at 12 year old kids
- The algo seems to be really clinging to recommending only videos about the last few topics I searched and totally forgetting my main interests. Look up a video on a new car you just bought? Congratulations, Youtube will now recommend you every video ever produced about that car forever to the exclusion of whatever it is you are actually interested in even if you have never shown an interest in cars.
Maybe someone who works at Youtube knows if a new recommendation system was pushed out recently or something? It's miserable.
Also, subscribe to a channel, get recommended their entire repertoire of the last decade. I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss.
What the hell is wrong with modern AI-driven recommendation engines? Youtube's isn't the only one that irritates me to no end. There is no automated recommendation system that is not complete dogshit for the end user. /rant
I want some ability to create sets of channels with a focus and only access that when I want to.
I think the problem is that YouTube has always been a manipulative and exploitative platform — targeting your psychology with algorithms. Now, it’s ratcheted that to the point it’s creepy and unlikeable.
The problem for me is that it just doesn't work very well. First, it's hidden deeply in the UI. Second, the topics are self-detected (poorly) and you have no way to edit them. Third, they seem to act as simple filters of your feed, not a way to access different subsets of content.
I'm sure the root of the problem is that lots of smart people at YouTube probably understand this frustration and want to make this better, but building filtering tools doesn't improve overall user engagement metrics and doesn't get anyone promoted, so no one does. But what does improve overall engagement? Recommending streamer bro meme videos in the chance that a kid might get hooked and watch thousands more of them.
Facebook's user engagement is probably higher than it ever was. I have a friend who's one of those conspiracy nuts and he's on there all day everyday posting dozens of media links to questionable content. His behaviour is their dream. At the same time almost none of my "normal" friends or family are still there. But they never had much engagement anyway even at the peak they maybe checked Facebook once a day for a couple minutes and maybe post something once per month.
Probably these platforms are all approximating the optimal amount of crappiness they need to be maximally profitable.
I've never owned an iPhone, but Apple's approach is the long term one, where they come up with a product that they believe in and they think the customer should use, regardless of whether they actually want. It let's them always carefully control the quality and resists the temptation to make a quick extra buck. In the end it makes them basically unbeatable, where Facebook has to buy competitors to remain relevant.
This matches my experience, the family members still very active are all politically involved, posting rants from either side of the spectrum. The conspiracy stuff is unhinged and getting worse.
https://yousub.info/
Those are all things I like, but I don’t want most of them most of the time — and YouTube gives me no way to signal what state I’m in. And because it shoves them all in a large pile, I get very few if any recommendations related to what Im looking for right now.
People are faceted, but YouTube fails to design UX to accommodate that reality — instead trying to be everything at once and so failing to be anything, ever.
Do you mean on google plus? (Or did that feature make it to other parts of the gooverse?)
The feature on Plus that I desperately wanted was "squares", or facets of your online presence that people could individually subscribe to. Just for instance, if Noam Chomsky had been an active poster on all kinds of topics on Plus, I would not subscribe to his updates because I only care about his work in linguistics, not any of his political activism.
But, the way all the current social properties are set up, the poster either has to have multiple accounts and log in / log out or keep separate browser profiles etc, or just posts everything under one account.
It could be better. It could be pretty seamless: allow the author to tag the post with a click or two just before posting, encourage them to tag posts that aren't tagged before posting, learn what tags they use most and analyze the content of each post to prominently feature in the UI the tags that look like they apply. Allow subscribers to subscribe to author+tag pairs instead of just authors. Done.
Recommendations systems use average expressed preferences (ie., on-average watch frequency) in others to "recommend" you something.
If we didnt opt for such metaphorical naming things would be clearer. Recommendation should, mostly, just be called "Popularity Ranking".
On my youtube front page the first row of videos are: a recent Scott Manley video about some SpaceX thing (which is in my interests), a DnD game (which I have already seen on twitch, youtube of course has no way knowing that), a song from a band I'm listening to since a few days, and a video documenting a glider airplane adventure. All in my areas of interest and I highly doubt that these are the 4 most popular videos on youtube right now.
> Recommendation, as we understanding it, means understanding our interests first.
Yes. And that's what they try to do. Sometimes they fail. For a hypothetical lets say that I recommend to my friend that they should see the new superhero movie in cinemas. They go and watch it and they don't like it. Clearly that means that my recommendation was a bad one, but does it stop being a recommendation? Only perfect recommenders are worth that name?
Your watching a video is only a weak correlate of your preference. If I were recomemnding you something, I wouldnt ask you -- literally -- what specific videos you watch. I'd ask for your (real) preferences: are you bored right now? Do you want somerthing exiting? What's your mood? etc. etc.
I fear that there is a very big group (that is usually not on HN) that actually likes this. People who get absolutely hyped on some new channel and just have to watch everything on that channel. Not because it’s interesting content, but because for those few hours/days/weeks they feel that they “belong” to the community of that channel (even if they don’t meaningfully interact or discuss with the other people in that community or even the creator). This also gives them social status with friends. Then after a few hours/days/weeks, repeat the cycle (multiple cycles can run in parallel but not too much as it would affect your social status of being part of the hip cult-of-the-day). Obviously those people also watch stuff outside that channel, but they don’t mind being presented with videos of the same channel all the time, because again bragging rights that come with “oh I’ve really seen everything, look at this: seen it, seen it, …”).
(Seems a bit similar to some other demographic that is extremely into watching sports…)
Now, this doesn't make sense for all types of content, of course, but definitely for some.
Don't know if you knew this, you can use RSS to get feeds of the channels you want without subscribing or even having a Google account.
Good in-browser add-on for following, organizing etc. of RSS feeds: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
I get everything in perfect chronological order, including livestream schedules.
I am selecting "Don't recommend channel" for subscribed channels so i see them only in Subscriptions page, i am afraid that Youtube can see it as i am not interested these channels and topics but i didn't see any downside with this method.
I am also unsubscribing frequently posting channels and bookmark them if i want to visit them later so my Subscription page don't have spam videos.
Also removing one time watched uninterested-topic videos from history may help algorithm.
No idea but it's been an issue ever since I've used Amazon. In a way it's kind of reassuring that their AI is not smart enough to know that after buying a vaccuum cleaner, I am probably not going to immediately buy another one.
Just give me a "Not Interested" button over each recommended video so at the very least the pool is refreshed.
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.
YouTube suggested Casey Neistat's first vlog for whatever reason[0]. A week or so later I've consumed the entire channel. Very decent recommend on YouTube's part if they're optimising for session duration that one.
[0]: I was in a bit of a "I might be a YouTuber as it turns out" moment at one point and I think I caught his How to vlog like Casey Neistat video or maybe Do What You Can't
I started this for privacy reasons, but I really like it now because they don't know enough about you in a private session to mess with you, and their search is usually good enough to find what I'm looking for. There is then a golden period where the recommendations are actually useful that lasts for maybe a dozen videos or so after which they try to psychoanalyze you too much and then it's time to kill the old private session and start a new one.
I've gone from being anti-privacy to being anti-privacy and anti-algorithm both.
Maybe Amazon knows that unsatisfied customers continue spending money... Hah, great dark pattern if so!
For many topics 6-12 year old videos are perfectly acceptable.
Really depends on the topic. 12 year old product reviews don't make sense. 12 year old hour-long lecture about Roman empire is just as good as it was 12 years ago.
Mistakes - 1 technical (like "my interest is not that serious") Obvious garbage - 1 ("The whole world is afraid of Japan now" plus a crazy plane picture).
Not so bad. Can't compare with previous times though, cause I never paid attention to the first youtube page.
And now let me watch my first recommendation: The Devil’s Daughters w/ Danny B Harvey - Rock Boppin’ Baby (Sexy) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUpDslHSLbU - just can't resist these girls...
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 years ago, which is a sad thing to me really given my long-held positive attitude to the service.
I wonder if any of this affects GMail as well.
There really are billions of actual people using the internet all the time.
If AI-driven recommendation systems and a trend towards centralizing all discourse on giant social media platforms produces a result indistinguishable from the Dead Internet Theory, then the theory is a useful way of thinking about and engaging with the internet.
If you actually don't want then then don't click them in the first place and in about a month they will stop showing up.
Don't click the dislike button, rather don't watch the video at all. (Dislike means this video is bad not this topic is bad.)
The videos on my homepage exactly match the videos I watch. Exactly. They are often boring since I want something new - but I can't complain that YouTube is messing with me in some way. (Same with Google News - sometimes I want something new, and it's not there - it's always the same type of stuff.)
People who have videos that displease them on the homepage are watching those videos, and then complaining. "Guilty pleasures" basically.
So it would make sense that Youtube is trying to favor new creators and short videos. Actually a lot of Youtubers for a few months have been complaining, that the algo penalize channels that dont publish frequently.
I'm myself a big Youtube watcher, and I have not been seeing significant changes in the videos I see, there is more short videos, and videos from Tiktok reposted here but in my opinion it is just because more content of that kind is being published.
There is also a discovery problem on Youtube. They usually recommend you content that is close to the content you have seen recently (but it has always been like that). Once per week there is a truly original video that pops up.
For me, the stupidest thing it does is recommend you the same video again and again, when you never click on it. 'Hey, you've recommended that same video to me 20 times now, and I haven't clicked on it, maybe take a hint!'
It's staggering, with all the smart people they hire at Google, that the front page of one of their main products is so dumb.
Eh, it could be. Hiding the dislikes certainly affects the like/dislike clicking behavior of the user. This creates feedback loops that are very hard to predict by simple A/B testing.
But we're also seeing the other behaviours b/c overall Googs is allocating less CPU time to their naive AI recommendation engine. I feel that premium members get proportionally more AI time to tune their recommendations than freemium members.
This feels like Google turned down the AI spend across the board to increase the margin on YT as a revenue platform.
It was a bad decision.
I would even be in favor of moving any content created by or for an under-18 audience to YouTube Kids. There's no reason it should be allowed on a platform for adults.
I know Google doesn't respect their customers, but we shouldn't let them waste our time.
nowadays i get all kinds of crap. Additionally, if i watch a single non-music video now, I get tons and tons of recommended crap different from what i used to, so it kind of feels like the algo is more sensitive now to drop nonsense on u if u accidentally click some youtube url, or watch a video not related to your usual content.
before, it might recommend such a thing once or twice, and then learn again it's not what i like. now i feel like it's constantly just dropping ads on me (sh*t videos of popular channels i don't care about - ADs.) any opportunity it sees. oh, he watched 2 seconds of some video because he clicked a url on his phone... whole front page becomes full of this type of crap... using other sites and apps now to listen music. Asif the 'are you still watching' on a 3 hour musical mix wasn't stupid enough to constantly be asked...
I am pretty sure if you pay them , it will work better and recommend more suitable stuff. Stupid tactic, because now they lose ad revenue rather than gain subscribers - i think a service which provides good service is worth subscribing too, not a service which is 'only-good-when-you-pay-for-it'. - if that's the case, just put the entire thing behind a paywall and own the fact u've become such an entity...
- Not Interested.
- Don't recommend channel.
Also, afaik, the sort of videos you complain about had no reason to be disliked much.
It’s just a product. You don’t complain online when your brand new sneakers hurt your feet, do you? Especially if you got them for free…
You don’t like youtube recommendation engine, complain to them, not to us.
Youtube is faceless and without a contact process, so posting on a forum where you know Google employees are active seems reasonable to me. As its recommendation system is shaping global culture, shouting in any medium with an ear about it might not be wasted effort.
And since he or she has a contact in the profile you actually could. But complaining directly to youtube? Haha, good one.
Watch only "boring" / serious channels and you won't have that problem. That's what I do and I get great recommendations (tons of numberphile, computerphile, 3blue1brown, pbs space time, finance and economics... stuff like that).
I'm not a very active user, but I think there is no positive "don't show me stuff like this again" action you can do anymore.
i do not get much of "clickbaity" stuff because i "KNOW" what i am looking for and once the video is watched for the session, i close the window and everything is forgotten.
a side effect of this is, unless i bookmark something (i rarely do) everything gets wiped so i have developed a memory of URLs/URIs/titles and stuff so i can go back.
on my phone, i use newpipe so i am "insulated" from the suggestions BS of youtube and i do not miss it.
People are saying not to click but IMO it doesn't work that well. I make a point of never clicking on any video title like that, and still kept getting flooded
My favorite pattern is saying "THIS" and withholding what exactly the video is about - once I saw it used twice in a title and it just cracked me up. It was something like "Do THIS instead of THIS". I wish anyone a couple years from now trying to find a video made in the current times good luck.
Isn't there an endless supply of such channels? Or does YouTube notice your lack of engagement?
Of course, there's enough channel-churn that these do turn over relatively quickly, but that tends to be on the scale of weeks to months, not hours to days.
Once you've knocked off the major chum sites, legitimate channels start rising through the noise floor. The small-scale chum sites tend not to turn up in high rotation.
Channel-block should be an inherent function. Web search also desperately needs this at the domain level.
(I just ran into this looking up a hiking trail. First-listed site, which dominated my search results, splashes up a registration wall on following any links. Peakbagger, buried in the search results, does far better. I also had to block Pinterest, of course....)
Yeah, I've even had to start DRC'ing channels I'm subscribed to because YT seems to think that I want my homepage to be nothing but videos I've already watched from those channels.