
I click the dislike button on videos that I like - mattigames
https://ivanca.tumblr.com/post/189138018193/why-i-click-the-dislike-button-on-videos-that-i
======
dangus
Wow. This article is truly terrible.

> Youtube has one of the worst user experiences out there

A bold statement, considering it’s the #1 video website in the world.

(Sub-quoted text)

> The ads are incessant, the up next related videos are horrible inaccurate,
> autoplay is a major pain, and for the last time NO I don’t want to sign up
> for youtube premium

The author doesn’t want ads but then doesn’t want to pay anything? How would
anyone expect a video site to stream 4K video for free then?

YouTube Premium is a product I wish existed for many other social media sites
like Facebook. It’s really an excellent option for heavy YouTube users (and
includes a music service) and the author shouldn’t dismiss it.

Autoplay can be easily turned off in settings, that’s like YouTube 101.

Relevant videos are often quite within the wheelhouse of your history. And you
don’t have to watch them, turn off autoplay and use your subscriptions tab or
just search for what you want. They’re _recommendations_ not mandatory
entertainment.

> One part that really stands out is how bad is recommendation engine is, and
> one of the main reasons is so bad is that is the user cannot chose what
> their recommendations are based on

Yeah and? Is this a problem? Can you choose what’s in a newspaper or what
comes back when you type something in a search engine?

Smashing the dislike button is not really a solution and it’s no wonder that
YouTube is ignoring that input. The author watched the entire video to the end
perhaps even in full screen and then hit dislike, YouTube’s algorithm actually
knows they’re just lying because they have that information about your browser
behavior.

~~~
flukus
> The author doesn’t want ads but then doesn’t want to pay anything? How would
> anyone expect a video site to stream 4K video for free then?

I guess I expected free/cheap hosting to scale enough for video by now. Little
geocities sites used to only have a a banner ad and many others had free web
hosting with their ISP or purchased some web space. We never evolved a video
equivalent of this, probably mostly because youtube exists and could take
billions in losses for years. There are distributed alternatives but I don't
think any of them are quite like cgi-bin for video.

~~~
sp332
Streaming video is freakin' expensive. You have to pay upfront to transcode
the video into many formats and bitrates, or pay more per stream to do it in
real-time. Also pay for storage for all the video formats, and video takes a
ton of bandwidth when you're paying by the gigabyte. (You could maybe run a
video site with the quality and device-compatibility of a early-90's video
site for free.)

------
btmorex
Youtube and Google Now have turned into weird "interest-related" ghettos. I've
completely stopped using Google Now and I only use Youtube via direct link
(how does the most popular video platform have by far the worst
discoverability? Would it kill them to add categorization and browsability?)

A good example: I liked "Azealia Banks - 212" on Youtube. Then, I got some
random article about some crazy thing she did on Google Now and clicked. Now,
there's some article about her in my feed literally every single day. I see
how it happens, but it's annoying and makes me hate the product.

~~~
mattigames
Exactly, this article was born when I searched for one video about dumbell
exercising and clicked one single video, since then I have clicked more than
50 "I'm not interested" and "Don't recommend from this channel" but YouTube
still recommends a lot of exercising videos despite only have seen a single
one, the tastes extrapolation YT does is just plain ridiculous and if this is
the best "machine learning" at google can do its extremely disappointing.

~~~
generalpass
Years ago I once watched 7 minutes of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on
Netflix.

The last time I had Netflix it was still telling me that because I watched Sky
Captain, it is recommending a bunch of stuff (that is similar to Sky Captain).

All I can think is, how about we pretend that never happened?

So, this isn't a problem unique to YouTube. This is a problem everywhere the
computers are left to make recommendations for me.

~~~
mattigames
I disagree, like many here I'm a programmer and is not that hard to fix this
issue so I don't think computers here are to blame, is just managers making
really bad choices about how recommendations should work.

~~~
generalpass
Indeed, which is why did not blame the computers. I blamed the people who put
them in charge. So, there isn't any disagreement here.

------
iudqnolq
> navigating the web remembering to click “dislike” on every video I don’t
> want recommendations from is hard, so I’m using this post to beg for someone
> at Alphabet/YouTube to give us viewers ( _prosumers?_ ) a quick and easy way
> to undo what videos recommendations are base on, as shown in this little
> video I made: (emphasis added)

I think the word "prosumer" encapsulates why she's wrong. Wikipedia defines it
as

> This increase in participation has flourished following the increasing
> popularity of Web 2.0 technologies, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and
> Flickr. This rise in user participation ___blurs the line between production
> and consumption activities, with the consumer becoming a prosumer_ __.

This is wrong. Youtube is producing a product which she uses. The fact that
she decides to give YouTube videos for internet points doesn't make her some
special new category of economic actor that deserves special "pro" rights if
she'll watch YouTube ads and give them videos irregardless.

~~~
jsnell
So, this is strange. I've thought for a decade that the "pro" in "prosumer"
came from "professional". I.e. they're people who want to buy industrial grade
equipment for hobby use. I've never before seen it be used in a context where
the root is obviously "producer" instead. But the Wikipedia article doesn't
seem to even acknowledge the first definition.

~~~
iudqnolq
It is weird. At first I thought she meant the same, and was going to say that
calling yourself a pro consumer is silly if you aren't paying money.
Dictionary built into Bing (accessed via Cortana) gave me the same definition
you had. I'm not sure if the Wikipedia article is particularly good or up to
date; it uses the term Web 2.0 seriously.

------
hcs
Is "not interested" unhelpful? It seems to at least prevent the same video,
and often the same channel, from being recommended again.

~~~
DaveDroll
To me, the problem is how easy Youtube will increase your engagement with
channels/topics and how difficult they make it to decrease engagement. The
"not interested" dialogue is under the three dot menu, but "watch later" and
add to playlist are immediately available when you are highlighting the video.
On that same topic, when you watch one video on some one-off issue e.g. fixing
a car issue, home improvement, YouTube will keep showing similar videos

------
mnm1
The YouTube ui is a masterpiece of ui achievement when compared to the YouTube
tv ui, including the awful recommendation engine and even including YouTube
comments. At least it plays the video you click on. Can't say that much for
YouTube tv and it costs an arm and a leg every month. Expecting Google to fix
or create a decent ui or app experience even when it is in everyone's best
interests is ridiculous. Now if only there was a place to watch the tennis
channel on some service that plays the video I click on rather than the video
it feels like playing, if it feels like playing at all, it would be wonderful.
I'm certainly not naive enough to think Google will fix things, however, even
if I pay them thousands of dollars, let alone if I'm not paying for their
service. The author should be thankful YouTube works at all. Google doesn't
give a fuck about their opinion. They don't give a fuck about their paid
customers' opinion.

------
sp332
I always assumed that removing a video from your history
[https://www.youtube.com/feed/history](https://www.youtube.com/feed/history)
meant you wouldn't get recommendations from it. I don't have proof of that
though.

------
em-bee
i don't have a google account, and i watch youtube mostly in private mode.
that resets the recommendations every time. very useful when i want to watch a
specific topic and not get distracted by recommendations for stuff i watched
before.

firefox multi-account-tab-containers is another way to create separate
"identities" that get a different set of recommendations each.

------
slig
Nonsense. Besides each recommendation there's the three dots. Tap it and
choose "not interested" or "don't recommend channel".

~~~
mattigames
A lot of the times I don't only want YT to know that I'm not interested in
this channel, but not interested in anything related to that one specific
video YT used to guess that I wanted such videos on my recommendations.

