It's crazy to think that clicking on the "not interested in videos from this channel" button previously did not remove videos from that channel in recommendations. I used to press it up to 5 times on the same video and it still did nothing.
I click on "not interested" when it shows videos i've watched the day before, but then assuming i don't want to see videos of a similar type would be a mistake, yet that's how broken the system is. Any attempt to "train" the algo is wasted effort based on past experience. You could say we users have been "trained" by the algo not to even bother anymore.
I’m confused. What was this feature for, then? Just to let off steam when they suggest terrible videos?
Another infuriating thing about that button is that it visually overlaps the video itself (at least in the iPhone app). I don’t know how many times I’ve fatfingered it and started playing an upsetting video rather than report it.
I thought for a moment they were going to turn off recommendations. For users not signed in, they are on by default.
Instead this is like asking users to click thumbs up or down in response to an ad, "Don't show me this ad again" or fill out a survey about the ads.
The issue is not that the user is annoyed by a specific toxic video. That is only the effect, not the cause. The issue is that Google's recommendation system is, as they say, "broken". Either fix it to stop promoting "popular" garbage (which is "popular" because it is auto-recommended and auto-played), or turn if off by default.
This is another example of an "opt-out" that most users cannot be bothered with. Instead of sane defaults: recommendations off, auto-play off.
If Google must force users to interact with a particular video and click something so they can collect another data point, then a more sensible approach would be "opt-in". Let users decide whether they want some recommendations based on a particular video they manually select. "Show me recommendation based on this video"
Just more dark patterns. If a choice was one users wanted (recommendations on, auto-play on), then the way to test that is to make them choose it. Instead, Google makes the default choices that benefit Google and requires users to change settings. Often forcing them to sign-in and be tracked in order to change a default setting.
> Either fix it to stop promoting "popular" garbage (which is "popular" because it is auto-recommended and auto-played), or turn if off by default.
Or maybe people like content that you don't? People aren't drones who watch something because it was shovelled into their watch next. Chances are it was decent content. For them.
If you consider this a dark pattern then you probably need to get a better perspective. There are far worse actors online.
This doesn’t really solve some of the more concerning things about recommendations, which is the gradual ease into more extreme content. i.e., “super Mario speedrun” to “Top 10 speedrunning fails” to “Super Mario speedrunner gets owned” to “Why women shouldn’t be allowed to play video games” or other such hogwash.
To be honest, this looks like a CYA feature to get out, not like something that is actually intended to be used.
They took pains to give the "follow the recommendation" action the most frictionless path possible in the UI - just wait and do nothing. In contrast, this new feature to dial back recommendations is a buried in an obscure menu only reachable by clicking a button labeled "..." in a counterintuitive location. I can think of few ways how you could increase the friction any more.
Are you proposing that they don't autoplay anything that you haven't explicitly opted in to? Discovering new creators is pretty important to both Youtube and its users. Or do you want it to autoplay something that's not based on any personalized recommendation? That would reduce the value of Youtube over TV in that it caters to niche interests.
It actually does. The desktop website has a permanent setting. Mobile website has the setting, too, but occasionally resets it to Twitter’s “Top tweets” sorting.
I'd also appreciate if it went back to recommending videos similar to the current video I was on instead of having the same recommendations on every video now.
Or at least keep it in the "watch again" section. I appreciate it from time-to-time for certain music videos and think "sure, I'll listen to that again".
This is a flaw of the fundamental nature of the service. If it were a clientside application, keeping track of your entire viewing history forever would be trivial. But because it's on a remote server, keeping everyones history forever would be very difficult. I would guess they're probably using a bloom filter and just not dedicating enough resources to it per-user. Or, maybe even more likely, they ran 1 experiment 1 time on a few users and discovered that re-watching previously watched content was popular and extrapolated from that - ignoring that their sample size included a great many children (since they outnumber adults) resulting in them just expecting everyone to act like children.
Is there a way to hide particular channels from search results? There are a handful of channels that post videos I have absolutely no interest in, but they do really well in YouTube's search algorithm.
This is what I really want ... the ability to blanket block certain channels. I have zero interest in Joe f’ing Rogan... but apparently everyone else in my marketing profile does nothing but watch his videos. No matter what I look for, or what I’m watching, there’s some goddamn Joe Rogan video in my search results or recs.
Nope but they give you an option to block people from commenting on your non-existent channel which is the most useless feature for 99.9% of the users. I just don’t understand why Youtube refuses to add this very simple feature.
The main thing I want them to do is not to keep repeatedly showing me the same videos I've already watched. They have little bars under them that show I've watched them all the way through, it shouldn't be that hard.
Agreed, I click through them once in a while when I'm bored and it consists mostly of stuff I've already watched mixed with stuff I have chosen not to watch from channels I follow combined with random crap. The most annoying thing is that it just fills your feed with stuff similar to whatever you recently did. This is made worse by the fact that they only show a handful of recommendations. The only way to get new recommendations is to either wait hours/days for the stupid stuff to go away or to engage with their fiddly "this recommendation was BS" system for getting rid of recommendations. Google news has the same "more of the same shit" masquerading as machine learning style algorithms.
On a positive note, I like what e.g. Spotify is doing in some places and I think Youtube can learn from that. They provide some great content discovery mechanisms. Curated playlists, users that listen to artist X also listen to artist Y, these are the top tracks for this artist (based on play statistics), etc. Very useful. Very low tech. Very easy to implement.
If only they'd stop confusing geo location with my interests. E.g. their release radar is full of German crap because I happen to live in Germany (I'm actually Dutch). Youtube does the same "you are in Germany! Here's some random German crap!" style promoted content on their front page. Most of it is very obviously not even remotely close to anything I watch. Location seems to drown out recommendation signals and all forms of common sense. It is used to push locally promoted content regardless of the not so subtle hints that I don't ever engage with that (my German sucks; why would I?).
There are hundreds of millions of migrants world wide, many of them have spending power and they are ignored and under served by most big tech companies (Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Google, etc.). This is surprising because they actually employ a lot of these migrants: they should know better. Getting content in the right language vs. the local language, localizing promoted content to the local language instead of what the user actually speaks and consumes on their service, etc. It's not hard and it's not because the content isn't there but because the algorithms are optimizing for the local lowest common denominator and most of these companies shoot.
Maybe I notice it because I use it more now, but it's shocking how bad it's become. I often get a heavy stream of suggestions for: ancient videos, and videos I've already watched. Throw in some clickbait and outrage focused content.
Then it seems to try to make me more extreme in some way (flat earther, hardcore gamer, etc) based on perhaps one partial watch of a semi-related video.
Surely there's some folks at Google who can see the raging dumpster fire this has become? I realize it's hard given all the competing interests (esp. advertisers), but this is horrendous.
As bad as it is, Netflix's suggestions are almost worse. I think these companies are optimizing on metrics that (ostensibly) show an improved experience while in reality they're destroying almost all user enjoyment.
Is it really a good thing that I "engage" longer with Netflix/YouTube trying to find something to watch with their terrible suggestions? (vs quickly navigating to a better video?)
We still get recommended extremist videos on YouTube with no way to opt out, unless we create a Google account. Casual visitors will continue to be exposed to that type of content.
Everything is extremism to somebody. Just because you class what you saw as extremism doesn't mean it's wrong for casual visitors to see it. YouTube already has its own (however capricious) standard for what to hide from recommendations or remove completely.
There is no way that "3 hours of planes taking off" or "3 hours of rain" are getting 10's of millions of views without getting recommended widely, including myself. 18 hours of "ambient sounds" has 130 million views so that's some heavy promotion, not just some occasional insomniac using search.
I'd always assumed you could block specific ads or advertisers since there's a button on each ad with a menu for that (on the circled i button). But when I just tried it, it refused because it said personalized ads were turned off, even though there were turned on. So I guess that's just another weirdly broken pretend-feature.
>Users will now be able to tell YouTube to stop suggesting videos from a particular channel by tapping the three-dot menu next to a video on the homepage or Up Next, then choosing “Don’t recommend channel.”
By "now" do they mean `eventually`, because I just tried looking for said option with no success.
As someone with a phobia for snakes I don't appreciate seeing such recommendations in my feed. I have clicked on not interested so many times but another snake video inevitably finds its way into my feed.
> While YouTube is introducing the feature now, this kind of tool is pretty common place on other digital services. Spotify Technology SA has a version for artists people don’t want to hear from.
Where!? I've been missing this Spotify feature for ages. I do not like Mastodon. I do not want Spotify to ever automatically put on Mastodon. It keeps putting on Mastodon.
I have a hard time understanding how youtube can screw this up so badly.
Spotify does it nicely. They clearly recognized the few different tastes I have. And then offer separate discovery-queues for each of them and let me decide depending on what mood/situation i'm in.
But that might be the main difference... they signal back their knowledge to the user. Steam kind does the same with "Is this game relevant to you?" info. More clearly telling me what youtube thinks about me would be the first step towards correcting it...
[+] [-] izzydata|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredds|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobr|6 years ago|reply
Another infuriating thing about that button is that it visually overlaps the video itself (at least in the iPhone app). I don’t know how many times I’ve fatfingered it and started playing an upsetting video rather than report it.
[+] [-] keyle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehsankia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3xblah|6 years ago|reply
Instead this is like asking users to click thumbs up or down in response to an ad, "Don't show me this ad again" or fill out a survey about the ads.
The issue is not that the user is annoyed by a specific toxic video. That is only the effect, not the cause. The issue is that Google's recommendation system is, as they say, "broken". Either fix it to stop promoting "popular" garbage (which is "popular" because it is auto-recommended and auto-played), or turn if off by default.
This is another example of an "opt-out" that most users cannot be bothered with. Instead of sane defaults: recommendations off, auto-play off.
If Google must force users to interact with a particular video and click something so they can collect another data point, then a more sensible approach would be "opt-in". Let users decide whether they want some recommendations based on a particular video they manually select. "Show me recommendation based on this video"
Just more dark patterns. If a choice was one users wanted (recommendations on, auto-play on), then the way to test that is to make them choose it. Instead, Google makes the default choices that benefit Google and requires users to change settings. Often forcing them to sign-in and be tracked in order to change a default setting.
[+] [-] cameronbrown|6 years ago|reply
Or maybe people like content that you don't? People aren't drones who watch something because it was shovelled into their watch next. Chances are it was decent content. For them.
If you consider this a dark pattern then you probably need to get a better perspective. There are far worse actors online.
[+] [-] 3xblah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buzzert|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xg15|6 years ago|reply
They took pains to give the "follow the recommendation" action the most frictionless path possible in the UI - just wait and do nothing. In contrast, this new feature to dial back recommendations is a buried in an obscure menu only reachable by clicking a button labeled "..." in a counterintuitive location. I can think of few ways how you could increase the friction any more.
[+] [-] lopmotr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smileypete|6 years ago|reply
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-youtub...
I'm perfectly capable of finding wanted content on my own, thanks, Youtube! :)
[+] [-] creaghpatr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tqkxzugoaupvwqr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sb057|6 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/104183895789645004...
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] crb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izzydata|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jach|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otakucode|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredds|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numbsafari|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitxbit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lake99|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microcolonel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|6 years ago|reply
Brilliant hack. My eye naturally glances at those videos because it usually means I was simply distracted and probably want to resume it.
[+] [-] Toorkit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] serf|6 years ago|reply
Is there some service somewhere that does a better job with YouTube videos?
Google has historically been unfriendly towards third party API use, but here's hoping.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|6 years ago|reply
On a positive note, I like what e.g. Spotify is doing in some places and I think Youtube can learn from that. They provide some great content discovery mechanisms. Curated playlists, users that listen to artist X also listen to artist Y, these are the top tracks for this artist (based on play statistics), etc. Very useful. Very low tech. Very easy to implement.
If only they'd stop confusing geo location with my interests. E.g. their release radar is full of German crap because I happen to live in Germany (I'm actually Dutch). Youtube does the same "you are in Germany! Here's some random German crap!" style promoted content on their front page. Most of it is very obviously not even remotely close to anything I watch. Location seems to drown out recommendation signals and all forms of common sense. It is used to push locally promoted content regardless of the not so subtle hints that I don't ever engage with that (my German sucks; why would I?).
There are hundreds of millions of migrants world wide, many of them have spending power and they are ignored and under served by most big tech companies (Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Google, etc.). This is surprising because they actually employ a lot of these migrants: they should know better. Getting content in the right language vs. the local language, localizing promoted content to the local language instead of what the user actually speaks and consumes on their service, etc. It's not hard and it's not because the content isn't there but because the algorithms are optimizing for the local lowest common denominator and most of these companies shoot.
[+] [-] mistermann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makosdv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] switchbak|6 years ago|reply
Then it seems to try to make me more extreme in some way (flat earther, hardcore gamer, etc) based on perhaps one partial watch of a semi-related video.
Surely there's some folks at Google who can see the raging dumpster fire this has become? I realize it's hard given all the competing interests (esp. advertisers), but this is horrendous.
As bad as it is, Netflix's suggestions are almost worse. I think these companies are optimizing on metrics that (ostensibly) show an improved experience while in reality they're destroying almost all user enjoyment.
Is it really a good thing that I "engage" longer with Netflix/YouTube trying to find something to watch with their terrible suggestions? (vs quickly navigating to a better video?)
[+] [-] dessant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lopmotr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredds|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arielweisberg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swebs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lopmotr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petre|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertil|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Izkata|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lerc|6 years ago|reply
By "now" do they mean `eventually`, because I just tried looking for said option with no success.
[+] [-] graphicsRat|6 years ago|reply
BTW, how about STOP SHOWING ME GRAMMERLY ADS!!!
[+] [-] swebs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgoulter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yakshaving_jgt|6 years ago|reply
Where!? I've been missing this Spotify feature for ages. I do not like Mastodon. I do not want Spotify to ever automatically put on Mastodon. It keeps putting on Mastodon.
[+] [-] thewhitetulip|6 years ago|reply
During election month I watched lot of news videos
Then my feed was just news
Then I unfollowed and said "I want to not see channel x" for every 25 such channels
And then I watched standup comedy
And now my entire feed is comedy bits
I've moved back to watching tv shows/reading books and occasionally watching a specific video on YouTube
[+] [-] Faark|6 years ago|reply
Spotify does it nicely. They clearly recognized the few different tastes I have. And then offer separate discovery-queues for each of them and let me decide depending on what mood/situation i'm in.
But that might be the main difference... they signal back their knowledge to the user. Steam kind does the same with "Is this game relevant to you?" info. More clearly telling me what youtube thinks about me would be the first step towards correcting it...