top | item 31324917

No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

1097 points| techsin101 | 3 years ago

Spoiler: rant.

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..

===========

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'.

479 comments

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[+] alexb_|3 years ago|reply
I've recently heard about this YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar. If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently, you've probably run into him. Because of the "no dislikes" change, he's everywhere now.

And by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now they've probably uploaded a few videos in the past couple minutes. The videos are generated crap, ripped from tech forums. Normally you wouldn't see it anywhere due to dislikes being easy to spot, but now they pop up all the time in search results due to dislikes becoming a sort of "hidden feature".

Hiding dislikes = less people press dislike (no feedback) = low quality videos are much harder to get rid of in search results. It's really, really bad.

[+] philliphaydon|3 years ago|reply
You've probably ruined my recommendations forever now. :(

I pretty much only stick to subscriber channels now except for stuff people send me. Since there's no dislikes I just don't browse the stuff available anymore.

YouTube is definitely worse off without the dislike counter.

[+] heywoodlh|3 years ago|reply
> YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar

> The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now they've probably uploaded a few videos in the past couple minutes.

I thought that this must be an exaggeration but I just looked at the account and at this time the account has 20 videos posted in the last hour.

I know Youtube/Google has a ton of resources -- but won't accounts with garbage/spammy content like this cause long-term issues in regard to wasting resources? Surely, Youtube would protect itself against something like this in its ToS, right?

[+] e40|3 years ago|reply
> Hiding dislikes = less people press dislike (no feedback)

Wow, I just realized that I haven't pressed the dislike button since the count was removed. I didn't do it intentionally, but I literally just deleted, in my mind, the fact that there was a dislike button.

Talk about unintended consequences!!

[+] Phil_Latio|3 years ago|reply
I saw similar bots who copy-paste news content into videos. It's funny to a certain degree. Imagine you are the person doing this, trying to figure out for months how to make money online. In the end, you come to the conclusion that you have to spam YouTube and upload as much as possible - in an automated way... =)

A more elaborate scam are those graphic card reviews: They claim for example to test 4 different GPUs and show them in split screen with FPS and memory information. In reality, it's probably just 1 GPU with the displayed information being faked, because from the pictures alone, you can't see a difference. The information one has to display for the different GPUs can be easily acquired from legitimate graphic card reviews. These videos get millions of views, with positive ratings. Some of these channels probably make >10k a month.

[+] the_only_law|3 years ago|reply
Is this guy making income from doing this? I may have to re-evaluate my career if I can pay my rent by mostly just dumping random internet content into a video.
[+] aendruk|3 years ago|reply
> If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently

This tidbit is the biggest news on the page for me. I had no idea people used YouTube this way. It sounds excruciating, though don’t knock it till you’ve tried it I suppose.

[+] jeffbee|3 years ago|reply
> 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube

Yeah I mean there's no way that's even close to accurate. You think there are only a billion videos on YouTube?

[+] belter|3 years ago|reply
I see a Business opportunity for a new YouTube specific search engine, that will allow for discovery of new content but will filter all that crap:-)
[+] walderf|3 years ago|reply
i learned about him a few days ago. it's logical to me that "Roel Van de Paar" is not the name of a real person and the person shown in the clip on each video (granted, i only watched two, but i think it's the same for every single one) is either deep faked or just a random that got paid $21.50 to read a script on camera.

then i found this https://github.com/roelvdp in my searching and it kind of made things a little bit more interesting. i didn't look at a side-by-side of the man in the video and the man in the photo here, but from memory they looked like they could be similar enough to be the same person with somewhat of an age gap between time's taken. they also look different enough to be different people. that's not what's weird, though. most of his contributions are for private repos and a lot of his "repositories" are forks from projects involved with machine/deep learning, AI, databases, and all sorts of stuff that someone smarter than me would know what it does or is used for, but they go back 2014ish.

i didn't spend more than a few minutes "investigating" and sure didn't touch any of his videos with my own IP/logged in user, because my YT recommendations are screwed up enough. either way, i think the github account is probably whoever is behind this, well, pretty amazing feat, at this point. i hate it, but you just can't deny that it's actually going on and has been for a LONG time. that's respectable in a sense. i did the math for a 10 hour period in which i counted roughly 240 new videos and it equated to an upload every 2 minutes. impressive, right? well, if this were true that would mean only 262800 videos a year and he has uploaded 1 million since ~March 2021, based on some search results i found where "people" were celebrating his 1M mark. heh.

[+] winternett|3 years ago|reply
YT would probably help this issue quite a bit by requiring thumbnails to be actual captures from the video content rather than up-loadable clickbait images... For years now their uploader only picks the 3 worst possible shots from content to be used, and channels create bright thumbnails that often don't reflect the actual content at all.

You get more views on any video by adding totally non-relevant thumbnails with colorful graphics and cleavage in them, and it's totally stupid when it comes to important topics that the absolute worst content ranks first because of what thumbnail it has.

I am exhausted with complaining about this issue, search results on YT have been totally maligned with finding the best content that I search reddit and Twitter now for useful YT content primarily. Also, the filter options are a total joke, and spammy titles are now rampant on the platform for everything.

MGMT should really feel ashamed for the lack of meaningful scaling over the years on the YT platform.

[+] XCSme|3 years ago|reply
I misread your comment, thinking "2 million views" is not that much, how can it be 0.2% of the entire platform? Then I realized you said "videos" not "views"... That's insane.
[+] paintman252|3 years ago|reply
>The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account,

This isn't accurate math

[+] lkxijlewlf|3 years ago|reply
I wonder how much he earns...

Not that I'm suggesting I'll mimic his approach, just curious.

[+] ageitgey|3 years ago|reply
I don't personally think the dislike button is the explanation. But something seems to have changed in the Youtube recommendations algo in the last few weeks.

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.

[+] sph|3 years ago|reply
> 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.

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

[+] socket0|3 years ago|reply
What bothers me most about the recommendations I get are the videos I have clearly watched. "You recently watched this clip, so we at YouTube think you should watch it again."
[+] padraigf|3 years ago|reply
Yes, the recommendations page is awful.

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.

[+] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
Yep, about 3 weeks ago the recommendations algorithm fell apart and ever since it has been a strange experience. Half of my recommendations are normal, but extreme low quality is being pushed quite aggressively
[+] RGamma|3 years ago|reply
Tbh YT should finally start making their platform more discoverable like Valve has been doing with the Steam store.

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.

[+] arbitrage|3 years ago|reply
I pay for YouTube Premium, and it's less noticeable for me. But your complaints are spot on for me -- YouTube appears to have gotten even dumber. I believe that this is b/c YT as a platform is less profitable ... that's why they're pushing more ads. That part is pretty obvious.

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.

[+] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
The only explanation for getting rid of dislike count that makes sense to me is to make big brands happy as their videos can't be made to look bad with a high dislike count and they can't be "dislike bombed" for things that may be unrelated to the content (eg the recent Activision-Blizzard scandals).

Why? Because in every other way (and every way for the viewer), this makes Youtube worse. So it's a hell of a price to pay to appease big corporate interests. That's why I have such a hard time comprehending this move.

It definitely changes how people use the dislike button since there's no feedback for it. Maybe that too was by design? It's true that people are generally terrible at using dislikes and downvote buttons. Ieally it would be a quality indicator but really it's just used for "I don't like what you're saying", "I don't like you" or "I don't like something about you". And that's probably not a great signal.

Side note: for anyone with such functionality, it would probably greatly improve the overall user experience to identify these low-indicator downvoters and shadowban them. Don't take away the downvote UI. Just make it do absolutely nothing as in it shows them they downvoted / disliked but just don't count it for anything. These people are toxic.

Anyway, I actually hope to see more low-quality generated content on Youtube as it's probably going to be the only thing that causes this decision to be reversed.

[+] Ensorceled|3 years ago|reply
I feel like every recommendation engine has tanked in 2022 along with a matching upswing in ads.

Audible is aggressively recommending an audiobook I already bought and listened to, it's even in their "your year so far" list because I listened to it in January. Their 2-for-1, annual, special offer emails are coming 2-3 a week now.

My Facebook timeline is full of crappy "Suggested for you" entries. I doom scrolled last night and counted; I was "suggested" the Dilbert group 10 times. And ads ... so many ads. Ads and suggestions take up 66% of my feed; I get an ad, a suggestion and something from friends or family in equal proportions.

I watched ONE reality TV show on Netflix, The Final Table, and now the Banner show is "Crazy Delicious" and the Top Picks list is entirely reality TV shows on baking, cooking, chocolate sculpting. Where did the sci-fi go? Oh right, my continue watching bar ...

Twitter was CONSTANTLY suggesting/promoting NFT/coin/web3 scams, I've blocked every single one of them. Luckily that dried up very recently ... for some reason. Now my feed is full of promoted ISP ads ... for some reason. As with Facebook, my feed is swamped with ads now.

[+] elzbardico|3 years ago|reply
I don't think it should be a surprise that as Youtube hired more and more experienced hands from cable and broadcast TV that it would progressively become more and more like TV.

People complain about the manipulative algorithms. But they don't exist in a vacuum, they are the results of some execs deciding to manipulate people. And the way those decisions are made is the same way traditional TV made during all those years.

Then you hire the same execs, to please the same wall street analysts, but now you can use technology to enable the most perverted wet dreams of those TV executives, and you get what you get nowadays on youtube.

It is not different from what the greater web has become once we hired all the advertising people to control and direct our web experiences.

[+] g0gzs|3 years ago|reply
I used the like/dislike ratio to see if something is actually a good video about the topic I'm searching, or should I continue further. For example, if I search "volvo s40 MAF sensor replacement", I won't watch someone ramble 20 minutes about how volvos are good, and why they chose the car in white instead of blue color... I want someone who'll pop the hood and replace the sensor, and those videos will usually have a better like/dislike ratio compared to the random rambling videos. The ratio was the telling thing if a "how to" video was good. I'd rather watch a video that has only 100 likes, but 0 dislikes, than a video that has 1000 likes and 5000 dislikes. But now that's gone, R.I.P.
[+] fxtentacle|3 years ago|reply
Let's all take a moment to reflect on how much worse we (the software developers) have made this by building (essentially automated spam) tools like https://www.synthesia.io/ For example, their "Lays Messi" ad campaign had 650 million video variations available in 8 languages....

I predict that in a year, the majority of internet videos will not only be random stock 4K videos, but they will be overlay-ed with AI avatars gesturing to AI voice synthesis generated off GPT-3 text.

You'll be able to search for any topic and find pretty videos talking about it. But listening to it will rot your brain, because you're hearing the equivalent of lottery numbers.

[+] AmazingTurtle|3 years ago|reply
Yeah also it just so happens that when I scroll through my feed, I pass by videos I have already seen or where I actively decided NOT to watch them beause they were prompted to me already 20 times or so and I still won't click it. It's to the point where I hit the "I dont wanna see this" button on a video because youtube keeps pushing VERY hard to make me see certain videos. Recommendations are trash. I used to find videos I like to watch within seconds but nowadays its just endless repetetive scrolling and nothing of interest.
[+] li2uR3ce|3 years ago|reply
Bookmark your subscription page and accept that your discovery process will have to not rely on YT's algorithms. They are not designed for your expedience. Also turn off auto play.

A big part of their algorithm is keeping you on the site longer. It does this by showing you many low quality suggestions (because most people will sift through and consume them) before getting to the higher quality videos. Then, just before you were about to leave, they show something likely to keep you there. After being rewarded with a good video people often stick around hoping that they'll find another similar quality video. It hardly matters if this is a learned behavior or a hand crafted algorithm.

They are not interested in learning what videos you like. They're interested learning what will keep you there longer. If this is a learned behavior then pretty much the only way to train the algorithm is to tune out more often.

This is not a system that favors quality content. It favors ad views. This is an ad network. Even if you pay to hide the ads, you still get treated this way. Even if you pay for it, content creators still get treated like shit if they don't produce ad friendly content. Ads are the boss, not you.

I have, in my subscription list, creators that I watch 100% of their content without exception going back years. If left to YT suggestions I'll see that content weeks after release. You must use the subscription page to see content in a timely manor. This is demonstratively so.

My subscription page grows pretty much because I'm tipped off about good content from sources off YouTube or callouts/collaborations from creators I follow.

I don't know how much longer we'll have the subscription page since it directly subverts the malgorithm. You may need to rely on an external tool soon. Remember, you're not the boss despite "you" being in the branding.

Also, even good creators are resorting to click bait in a "if you can't beat them" bid. Yes, the algorithm is having a negative impact on quality. There's not much you can do to fix it. The best you can hope to do is side step the permanent problem. Look me up next year before you call my pessimism misplaced.

[+] dagw|3 years ago|reply
I can't say I've noticed a difference. That being said 80+% of videos I watch are either from channels I subscribe to or something I've searched for. Also after I started getting more aggressive with using the Not Interested and Don't Recommend Channel buttons to flag videos on my recommendation page I feel it's actually gotten quite a bit better.
[+] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
YouTube is still useful. It's a giant repository of videos that get indexed by search engines.

The 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.

[+] Parzival99|3 years ago|reply
"know what you want to watch beforehand" - 100% this. Over at least the past few years, this is almost entirely what I do and it has helped youtube remain a good experience for me. In general, I rarely do research on youtube or twitter or even googling or even reddit. In most instances, I'm better served by just starting with the wikipedia page or some specialized encyclopedia (e.g., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) and then going from there. On sites like youtube, I either go in knowing precisely what I'm trying to watch or to watch new videos from a select few channels I subscribe to (usually silly stuff like press conferences of football managers etc.).
[+] sshine|3 years ago|reply
Personally, the algorithm works very effectively at stealing my time.

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.

[+] techsin101|3 years ago|reply
when i know what i want, it works. But when I am just scrolling to find something new, it is noticeably more clickbaity now.
[+] crvdgc|3 years ago|reply
There's https://unhook.app/ to remove recommendation elements (front page feed, side bar recommendations, etc.). I use it to leave only the search bar and my subscription feed. YouTube feels so much better.
[+] hhjinks|3 years ago|reply
90% of my time spent on youtube is caused by my subscription feed. It baffles me that people actively use youtube for the sake of its recommendations.
[+] throwaway2214|3 years ago|reply
It saddens me what will be lost if youtube continues on this route, 99% of the content is garbage, and the 1% good content is hardly monetizable, and there is 0.001% that content creators monetize with some form of sponsorship, but not so much from google's pov

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.

[+] tropicalfruit|3 years ago|reply
What I noticed is how sterile and sanitised the comments are. You don't see any negative comments anymore.

Also if you search you will get random unrelated videos mixed with your results.

[+] unglaublich|3 years ago|reply
Ironically, you see a lot of replies to people that seemingly said something negative, but the original comment is very hard to find. I guess YouTube just hides (or shadow bans) negativity on the platform.
[+] baobabKoodaa|3 years ago|reply
Youtube has been filling search results with random unrelated videos for years, and it seems to getting progressively worse. Now there are multiple different subsections of unrelated videos intermixed with actual search results and some of the results are hidden behind a tiny "show more" link.

Thanks, "growth hackers", for maximizing "engagement".

[+] magic_hamster|3 years ago|reply
YouTube actually works pretty well for me. Most of the time I get great suggestions and it feels like there's a lot of great content to watch (if only I had the time to actually watch everything).

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.

[+] wildrhythms|3 years ago|reply
+1 I have a habit of opening anything that might remotely poison my recommendations in right-click > Incognito. Youtube recommendations have always been annoying for me... constantly showing me things I've seen before, but generally I understand why it's recommending me things, and I understand the overlapping circles of topics and where the videos are coming from.

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.

[+] idrios|3 years ago|reply
I agree with everything you said, and so I started reading comments to judge if a video is good. But the comments are always positive, even when the video is terrible! Like, bad tutorial video, unoriginal pop science video, lame interview with a bored celebrity, the comments are still always positive. Once I saw a comment that said something like "This was a really cool video! <url dot-com>" and I realized the algorithm is suppressing negative comments and promoting positive ones based on words used.
[+] 8589934591|3 years ago|reply
I use this https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ . But from another comment it looks like these addons use their own database... It has helped me so far.

Apart from this if you want to turn off recommended videos and comments and hide your front page from displaying anything except the search bar, you can use the following filters on ublock origin. I have enabled/disabled according to my needs. I've included the source comment as well if you want to explore more.

I've noticed that I now only search what I need and that helps with my productivity.

  # https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21026069

  # this is for blocking home page thumbnails videos
  youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype='home']

  youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer
  youtube.com##app-drawer
  youtube.com##ytd-item-section-renderer.ytd-comments

  # side hamburger menu all details
  #youtube.com##ytd-guide-renderer

  # side home/subscription etc icons
  youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer

  youtube.com##ytd-topbar-menu-button-renderer
  youtube.com###buttons.ytd-masthead

  # hamburger menu
  #youtube.com##yt-icon-button

  youtube.com##.ytp-endscreen-content

  # https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506515

  #    youtube.com##.ytp-suggestions
  #    youtube.com##.ytp-pause-overlay
  #    youtube.com##.videowall-endscreen
  #    youtube.com###related
  #    youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"]
[+] rchaud|3 years ago|reply
Three dot menu button > Don't Recommend Channel

That's all it takes on Android and desktop Firefox browser.

I've been on Youtube since 2006 and never needed to use the Dislike button. Just zap 'em with "Don't Recommend" and you'll never see it again.

[+] gilmore606|3 years ago|reply
> Three dot menu button

In the biz we call this the "trident wound", spread the word.

[+] matyasrichter|3 years ago|reply
How dare you write a HN comment that doesn't complain about how <thing> used to be so great back in the day but has since been ruined by internet media, corporations, and websites that rely on javascript!
[+] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
I've only noticed the difference for a very specific set of technical help videos: how to open an X, how to fix a Y, how to pronounce Z. Now I just have to check the comments.

The YouTube recommendation algorithm also broke globally about 3 weeks ago. Most people have not noticed it yet, but I haven't asked a single person about it who has said that their recommendations are normal. They've suddenly been full of crappy compilations, conspiracy theory videos, and weird clickbait. Please comment if your YouTube recommendations did not go nuts around 3 weeks ago because I'd love to see whether or not this is a worldwide thing.

[+] lapsis_beeftech|3 years ago|reply
For many years I thought Youtube content "voting" was helpful for both Google (they get to know what commercial goods and services I might be interested in) and for users (the information could potentially be used for improving video recommendations). As far as I can tell the latter has never been the case; Youtube won't recommend me anything I care to watch, often recommends videos I have watched and disliked, and is utterly unable to identify my interests despite thousands of likes and dislikes.

I figured Google would come to their senses and use this valuable information eventually. When Youtube instead announced that they won't ever care about my preferences for video content I was disappointed but not surprised. Since the voting can now only benefit Google themselves I decided to cease participating. I used a content blocker to hide the likes and buttons to make sure I don't slip up.

I wish I could boycott Youtube entirely but I am not quite ready to leave the platform because it still offers some educational and entertainment content useful to me.

[+] asddubs|3 years ago|reply
get the extension "BlockTube" and block any channel that does this. after a while your feed will get noticably better.

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.