YouTube Doesn't “Get It”
Today I'm signing out of YouTube and here's why...
You know how you click the X to disable Shorts and it says "Shelf will be hidden for 30 days" but then it pops up again in like a week or less?
Or how when you X one of those panels on some topic you have no interest in and it says "Got it, message hidden" then pops back up in a few days?
If YouTube is using AI then why is it so demonstrably, phenomenally bad at learning X means NO; not [Ok not today]?
If YT does use AI, and if it's AI is powering any other parts of Google's (Alphabet's soup) then could it explain why all Google products suck at remembering basic preferences we tell them?
Hey Google AI, NO means NO. Clicking X means NO. No as in forever NO, not just today or the next few days.
133 comments
[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadSince around 2018, to my recollection. I just keep getting the same crap recommendations day after day. It's like, dude, you've suggested the same random clip from Mask of Zorro to me for GOD KNOWS WHAT REASON to me for the past several months, and I haven't clicked on it once. Don't think it's time to generate some fresh recs that might induce me, as a user, to click and watch stuff?
Its well worth the effort if you watch youtube a lot. You can still find them in search, just wont get any recommends from them any more, so you wont be missing anything that you explicitly want to find.
;___;
I also think Shorts is garbage, especially for a desktop/laptop. The reason I use YouTube is BECAUSE it's not TikTok. Not every service must emulate every other service.
Also, I am still bitter about the missing dislike stats. They were very useful for deciding among tutorials or courses, and avoiding misleading ones.
What they needed to do was nothing, but thats out of line with restless employees.
The Firefox plugin "Return Youtube Dislike" does exactly that.
"A combination of archived data from before the offical YouTube dislike API shut down, and extrapolated extension user behavior."
You're retrieving like/dislike data from that site's API. And when you set a dislike, it gets sent to Google AND returnyoutubedislike.com
Given I watch Youtube in a FF container not logged in, I'm not worried at all. But I could see how some people could be concerned .
Fortunately the users of the extensions are most probably better informed than the average Youtube user. However, if the downvotes are more "accurate" (more deserved) because of that, it means they are also more accurate for new videos as opposed to old videos.
So I suspect new Youtube videos might have more downvotes than old Youtube videos. Perhaps we could find some reuploads of all Youtube videos and compare the downvotes…
Why on earth would they bifurcate the UX like this?!!?!
What I don't like about shorts is how they've been integrated.
They either appear in the subscriptions page so they're treated the same way as normal creators content or they appear in the 'shorts' tab but alongside other creators so I can't just watch my subscriptions
What I would like:
- option to show just videos, just shorts or both in my /subscriptions views and playlists (and while we're at it hide premiers and lives!)
- When filtered to show just shorts it says click here to view all from just your subscriptions
- the option to view the algorithm recommended shorts as they currently have and the option to view just my subscriptions (as tiktok does) in the shorts tab
I've actually written my own crappy playlist manager that flags shorts and let's me treat them separately which is how I've been coping so far!
/s but not really.
edit: also 'No' means 'Remind Me Later'.
With the new generation of devs I'm not too sure anymore.
Whenever I click a Short, I am extremely annoyed. The scroll wheel is repurposed to skip the video, rather than the typical desktop interaction of going to the description and comments. When that happens, I close the tab and visit some place other than YouTube.
Why do you keep clicking it?
By design, it's hard to avoid them entirely.
So in those cases you want them to be there?
Yet when you click into one and scroll through them, instead of showing you the other shorts on the recommended list, it shows you general trending shorts.
Always thought that was weird. In other words you have to click one, then navigate back and click into each other recommendation.
By the time the parent company realises there's no money to be made hosting endless amounts of stupid, repetitive and crappy content aimed at attention-deficient children, bonuses would've been paid and promotions would've been offered - the latter is what drives this crap, not necessarily some hypothetical bottom-line impact that's hard to measure and easy to excuse away should it not pan out.
At least, I hope it does.
E: You'd think Google's money would be most effectively spent trying to manipulate that outcome though.
It won't, because the primary rationale for banning TikTok in the US is driven by the CCP-related fear-mongering (whether it is justified or not is a separate question), with a little dash of other common "scary" flavors mixed-in (privacy, algorithms shaping your feed, etc.).
As long as YT/IG/Snapchat aren't companies based in China, the hypothetical banhammer hitting TikTok won't even touch them.
(please note the use of the word "ostensibly" as a caveat before you try to remind me about The Twitter Files)
I've seen arguments that instead of targeting TikTok specifically, we should create a nationwide law similar to GDPR or CCPA, which would also impact other social media.
I tend to agree with this stance, though I don't see it being likely to go through unfortunately.
They are not that shortsighted.
I think the GP might be alluding to:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
Which they might do if people could actually make them.
It reminds me of 2015 when the FB algo was being hijacked by all sorts of shadowy political interests to push weird agendas.
Online Services and their client interfaces are ideally separated. This removes a conflict of interest and allows for client software to serve one master, the user.
[1] https://docs.invidious.io/instances/
Because unfortunately most users are not consistent in their choices. They might say that they don't like shorts of teenagers doing stupid dance moves, but if they continuously click on those videos when presented, the AI will learn to ignore your explicit choice and go with your implicit one; that you like shit videos. (Not you, specifically, but people in general :)
User-hostile product design has become the norm in the industry, _especially_ among FAANG/MAMA. Twitter, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all streaming sites (anything that makes you scroll to find the “continue watching” list), arguably Apple, Nextdoor, anything that uses an algorithmic feed and won’t let you permanently enable chronological feed, anything that prioritizes “engagement” in a coercive way (so all social media including YouTube), etc.
I used to aspire to work at a company like Microsoft or Google, but now I’m so glad I dodged that bullet. I care too much about making a _positive_ impact on the lives/experiences of users. I also have values that don’t tolerate industrial scale fraud and abuse (and yes, promising relief for 30 days and withdrawing it after 7 is clearly fraudulent).
I hope more engineers would be willing to consider their role in making the world a worse place, and consider working for a company that doesn’t actively harm their users. But it seems most engineers will do anything in exchange for a total comp package bigger than the next guy.
P.S. To the user-hostile PMs who aren’t swayed by a values argument consider this: if you let off the gas just 5% and allowed some breathing room for objectives other than user/engagement growth this quarter, you might spare yourself the PR/reputation hit that lead to things like hostile HN posts, popular support for antitrust enforcement, and executives being called to testify.
The more videos you watch, isn’t that a strong signal that the user’s needs are served better?
Situations where the simplistic PM dashboard metrics model breaks down:
- Users watch more videos than they want because they can’t find the right ones (maybe because the dislike button was reviewed)
- The user went to complete a task, then got distracted by a bad recommendation
- The user has a gambling addiction and is being served ads for gambling content.
- The user went to learn something but was served highly engaging but false content
Viewership is one signal among many.
Drives me nuts.
I think YouTube is betting strong on “it’s not about what you like, but what you end up watching”
Only the channels you've subscribed to, in chronological order. Sadly it does include shorts in that - but at least they're not a dedicated section of the page.
Personally I watch perhaps 20 minutes of video per day, and I've got enough subscriptions to give me that much content, so I don't really need content discovery. Or at least, not the type of content discovery Youtube has to offer me!
Youtube is messing with the subscriptions page too unfortunately but it remains the most useful page its just not as good as it should be due to the hiding of videos.
https://gist.github.com/apricot13/0d8f0ea32138e2d36e6f5ff3de...
For me it's kind of the converse issue. I watch 2 or 3 videos on a topic and then YouTube thinks I'm obsessed with that topic and nothing else.
And
> Clicking X means NO.
While clicking X might mean No for all circumstances to you, that doesn’t mean it a the same for everyone else.
To handle more variety, you really want at two affordances: “never” and “not now”.
Note, when a user turns a feature off (your “never” case), now whenever you change that feature all the users who turned it off will now be left behind, even if the change or improvement would be appealing to them. So now you need a way to communicate the changes (even though they said “don’t show this feature”) and a way to change that preference.
I found the "red notification dot" works really well. It's nagging enough that I will take a look at it, but doesn't get in my way like a pop-up. I can first get my task done, then look at what it's about, instead of having to choose between interrupting my task and swatting away this obnoxious wall in my face. If you try to force something on me, I'm already much more likely to hate and not want it.
The incentive is likely engagement and that comes at a cost of satisfaction.
Computers are great at following directions like your preferences for being shown certain types of content or disabling functionality you don't want to use. Yet every platform somehow "forgets" your preferences regularly.
If only there was something you could do about that.
I don't miss it.
I "skip trial".
There's no option to permanently not be bothered by being offered a "free trial".
It infuriates me.
The creation dates of his channels are as follows:
Feb 19, 2012
Apr 24, 2016
Apr 7, 2020
Aug 21, 2020
Sep 17, 2020
How often are you blocking? MrBeast is one of the most popular Youtuber(I think he is the second largest American channel) so he is going to be a large part of their platform whether you like it or not.
I'm perfectly capable of reacting to a video myself, the meta-aspect of watching someone else react to another video has a veneer of Bob Saget all over it.
It also helps that I'm a svelte guy myself. :)
At least twice a week for the past 5 or so years, I have gone to settings -> change country/language, save. That's HUNDREDS of times I've told YT that I want English, US-based content. And it just doesn't get it ...