No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
1097 points| techsin101 | 3 years ago
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'.
[+] [-] alexb_|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hbbio|3 years ago|reply
His "latest" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtqJq0OF8eA
Is a poorly generated copy/paste of: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1644...
Probably a tiny Python script. Google is prompt to ban other accounts, hope some Googlers around here can can do something...
[+] [-] philliphaydon|3 years ago|reply
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
> 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
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
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
[+] [-] aendruk|3 years ago|reply
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
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
[+] [-] walderf|3 years ago|reply
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
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
[+] [-] paintman252|3 years ago|reply
This isn't accurate math
[+] [-] lkxijlewlf|3 years ago|reply
Not that I'm suggesting I'll mimic his approach, just curious.
[+] [-] ageitgey|3 years ago|reply
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
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
[+] [-] padraigf|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] RGamma|3 years ago|reply
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
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
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
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
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
[+] [-] fxtentacle|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] li2uR3ce|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] sshine|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] crvdgc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hhjinks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2214|3 years ago|reply
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
Also if you search you will get random unrelated videos mixed with your results.
[+] [-] unglaublich|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baobabKoodaa|3 years ago|reply
Thanks, "growth hackers", for maximizing "engagement".
[+] [-] magic_hamster|3 years ago|reply
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
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
[+] [-] 8589934591|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rchaud|3 years ago|reply
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
In the biz we call this the "trident wound", spread the word.
[+] [-] matyasrichter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
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
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
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.