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No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
1097 points by techsin101 on May 10, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 479 comments
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'.




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.


Obviously, the guy is just ripping StackOverflow.

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...


> hope some Googlers around here can can do something...

Has google ever escalated a low-level issue mentioned on social media, without the need for a huge tweetstorm combined with bad media coverage?


Yes absolutely, just have to have the right SRE see it. That isn't really what should be the workflow though.


Stackexchange answers are creative commons share-alike by attribution, so as long as he would give attribution he'd be in the clear.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/347758/creative-com...


I think GP's point isn't that he's violating SE's license, but that he has almost two million videos with new ones uploaded about every three minutes. And his videos are constantly recommended to GP.


This is another clearly automated channel I found recently.

For some reason I was searching for some game music I remembered from childhood (OMF 2097), and came across this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV1F_IwdceU

It was strange, because it was titled like “how to play this music”, except clearly it was just a MIDI file piped through a visualisation into the video; as a musician I know it’s useless for the task at hand.

Looking at the other videos on the channel, I found dozens and dozens of the exact same video intro, except with a new MIDI file: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCiu4h1KfC9ODVz90JRogdg/vid...

Presumably the author has automated this by scraping tons of free MIDI files, rendering them to video, prepending a generic video intro, and hoping to cash in.


Dead Internet


I'm completely sure I've heard that music on an airplane before.


1,950,208 videos!?


If he’s disseminating and distributing solutions I don’t see the problem with it other than jealousy.

It’s helpful and helps prevent information rot if a platform goes down.


For me at least the main problem isn't so much this person/channel, you can always tell YouTube to stop suggesting a channel. It's the people that now realise this is something YouTube allows (or at least doesn't seem to care about).

For a similar issue there was a plague of "Reply girls" for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_girl


Relating to reply girls, I really loved YouTube's video response feature. It's understandable why it went away, but it was still really cool to be able to find responses to videos. Now if I watch a video arguing for X and want to see a response I have to search "Response to X" or "X rebutted" etc.


"Although many users would click the "dislike" button on the videos, this was interpreted by YouTube's algorithm as legitimate engagement, and the videos would be ranked more highly."

I literally facepalmed.


You can allow yourself to take the stance of "I know it when I see it" when it comes to internet spam and litter for once.


How is littering yt and screwing with recommendations helpful?


I don't care for what he's doing or his business, but youtube is to blame for recommending him. Also, I just click don't recommend and it works every time my kid takes over the machine to binge watch the entire minecraft community.


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.


There's a "don't recommend channel" option if you click the 3 dots button on a video.

I use this liberally for all sorts of reasons and it makes my recommendations much better.


I have done it a lot for around a year, but i think than the block list is very limited, because after a will the same "blocked" channels come back again in the list. I have now stopped to use this fake feature. I am sure of it because i regularly block official news or music channels, but they appear again anyway after a wile.

It's the same for the "not interested" feature. I have stop to tell them, when asked, why i am not interested (mainly because i have already see the video). The same already "not interested" videos, already viewed and already liked videos show up again after a wile anyway...


Sounds familiar, my post from 7 months ago:

"I would love to see someone look deep into Twitch recommendation system - last time I tested the thing they call "Feedback" is a rolling buffer and wont let you exclude more than ~100 things, adding more simply removed oldest entries and starts spamming you with things you already excluded in the past. This looked like performance optimization (less things to track per user)."


Why isn't this a variant on a bloom filter that supports deletion? eg vacuum filter


I am convinced the not interested button does absolutely nothing.


I'm baffled by people who says things like this. I make heavy use of both "Not Interested" and "Don't recommend Channel". They don't do as much as I would like (why oh why does Youtube insist on thinking I'm interested in obscure Rap/Hip Hop?), but I can clearly see recommendations shift over time. Marking any single video doesn't seem to do much, but marking 5-10 similar videos (mostly) does something.


Paid promotion (by channels) breaks past the barriers... It's part of the conflict of maintaining the illusion that sponsored content is what gets first placement throughout YouTube.

Its also maddening to content creators how newly upload content lists only feature paid promotional content every time. That's also exactly what makes certain (paid) content look massively popular over everything else, even when the production values are sub-par.


It does at least blacklist that exact video.


The "don't recommend channel" feature works fine for me, but I have probably blocked only a few hundred channels.


I have this exact problem on YouTube and spotify.


this isn't true. I have clicked "no interested" on hundreds of videos and channels. It works


Everyone on platforms now has a different experience because of configuration and account maturity. Invalidating another user's experience because of yours is not helpful to meaningful discussion. I did not downvote you though.


A much better approach is to go to your history and delete it from your history (if you're signed in) this will change your recommendations so much harder.


Here's one better: just disable the watch history. Your subscriptions then have a much bigger influence on recommendations and you have more control.


For some reason that only shows up in certain webviews (I’m not interested in the app)


You're right, it shows up on the youtube homepage as well as the recommendations on the right side, but not for a particular video while watching it.


In other words, strategically hidden where you would want it most.


I can’t isolate what particular view but there have been times in some list view where I want to eliminate videos but the option isn’t there.


I've blocked entire accounts, because it kept coming back every time i searched for something specific. It was one of these "10 best <xyz>" channels. Really annoying.


Top 10 videos are so often just complete crap. Every once in a while you will get a decent production, and even rarer you get one of those that isn't also an ad for something (looking at you, MrWhoseTheBoss). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz_xJPN7lAY comes to mind as one of the "good ones". But the format is just so perfect for what YouTube as a platform rewards.


I have been using it most recently to shield myself from an avalanche of Depp and Heard trial clips seemingly created to support Depp.


Random jordan peterson clips were the worst. Once it started, it took months to die out despite me clicking don't recommend several dozens of times.


uBlock breaks that menu though, so it's a hassle to turn it off, block it and then turn it back on. Especially since you have to refresh and youtube randomizes the recommendations again and sometimes hides all traces of that channel.


works fine with no issues at all for me on uBlock origin. unless you're talking about literal uBlock, which i can't comment on.


yup.. any YT links that are sent by friends.. I open in incognito mode to not ruin my recommendations


Youtube has a history tab, my advice is to go through it and remove videos that you don't want recommended.

I learned this the hard way after watching a few videos about a particular person who had a fatal disease and then overnight my Youtube recommendations all turned into videos about cancer.


I use bookmarks. It sucks that you can't organize your subscriptions into folders.


You can go to “history” and remove it.


> 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?


As long as they get clicks, show ads, and compress adequately well, why?


> 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!!


> Talk about unintended consequences!!

Talk about intended consequences. That was their whole goal.


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.


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.


TikTok and instagram are filled with get rich quick schemes that say to do exactly this. Go here for stock video and go here for AI video editing and you’ll have passive income. Look how much I made last month! Look how when you search for calm music I am the top 20 results!


This guy maybe not yet, but producing garbage content en-masse for social media is definitely a profitable niche. Popular "DIY" and lifehacks pages/channels are making decent bucks especially considering they are often based in third-world countries.


The 5 Minute Crafts channel and some other associated channels are infamous for this. A lot of them start out OK and once they have some numbers just shift to pumping out algorithm fodder.

Some are associated with large content factories that operate similar to Troll Farms.


yes and approximately $2000-6000 a month. those numbers could fluctuate a great deal either way. there's no set "pay scale" and nobody really knows how it works.

take the info on this site with a grain of salt, but... https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/roelvandepaar


Probably not all that much. He gets about a million views a month, which makes him something in the order of $1000/month[1].

[1]: https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCPF-oYb2-xN5FbCXy01...


I mean $1000/month is pretty good considering he has to do nothing besides keep his script running.


The hard part is probably evading bans, that's probably the secret sauce to the operation.


One month of work to build an automation pipeline. $50/mo revenue. still need a real job


You need one month for this?


> 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.


> 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?


I can't find any reputable source or even credible estimate about the total number of videos on YouTube.

What I did find, though, is that YouTube currently touts[1] "500+ hours of content uploaded every minute", which means 43.2 million minutes of video per day if we take that claim at face value.

And a study finding the average video length was 11.7 minutes[2] in 2018.

So, naively doing the math suggests that YouTube is currently adding ~3.7 million videos per day. Or another billion videos every 9 months.

Keep in mind this doesn't account for a ton of variables and the math is pretty hand wavy. But it's the closest thing I could do to a sanity check on the numbers in 5 minutes.

Conclusion: yeah there's way more than a billion videos on YouTube.

[1] https://blog.youtube/press/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-ca...


Fair enough - I literally just googled "how many videos on youtube" and stuck with the first result. Not very scientific but I also don't really care that much


Yeah, I just got curious after seeing the reply to your comment. Hadn't really thought about it prior.


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:-)


What feedback mechanism would you use to filter the crap? There is no longer an incentive for users to down-vote (assuming you managed to even get that data). And such a search engine needs a literal army of users providing signal to evaluate the quality of content as it is released.


>What feedback mechanism would you use to filter the crap?

You would use ranking algorithms meaning you should crawl, scrape and analyse YouTube videos which would make YouTube probably unhappy.


Ranking based on what though? Number of comments? Number of references made to each video in other video descriptions?


Backlinks linking to the video on the web, number of views, likes, comments, NLP analysis of the title and the description of the video and yea references made to each video in other video descriptions is also good idea.


It's an interesting idea. But my gut feel is that only a minority of content actually is referenced elsewhere. It would be an interesting idea to test though!


> There is no longer an incentive for users to down-vote

I don't get that. It should have the exact same incentive to down-vote, unless you think Google no longer collects or uses that information as opposed to just hiding it.


Downvotes are used by google to suggest content. If you downvoted something, you engaged with it, which google loves and wants more of.

The incentive for users/viewers to downvote something has always been to give other viewers a heads up. This doesn’t work anymore


Is "downvoted count as engagement and this boost the video" a documented result or just a rumor?


People respond to feedback mechanisms. If you hid comments on videos, do you think people would be as inclined to add their own comments as much when it is literally going into the void?

Previously, disliking would increment the global "dislike" counter and users got immediate visual feedback that their dislike was counted, even if that state may take minutes for Google to reconcile and store.

Now, clicking the dislike doesn't do much and users have no indication whether others disliked the content too.


I had some similar ideas but YouTube can just block it or cut API access. But would they dare? Antitrust lawsuit is glooming over them.


Telling someone they can't use your service is not anti-competitive.


It’s totally fine when the service in question is not a natural monopoly.

Youtube is a natural monopoly now, just like residential water and electricity suppliers. Too bad it’s not yet regulated as such.


YouTube is not a natural monopoly, as evidenced by the fact that there are other video hosting services (e.g. Vimeo, Facebook, PeerTube). The network effect is real, to be sure, but it isn't absolute, and anyone can start a competing service which is immediately accessible to every Internet user(†). It's not cheap or easy, of course, especially at YouTube's scale, but YouTube has to overcome the same issues. That's just called being good at what they do.

†) Other than those blocked by the Great Firewall of China, of course—or other national firewalls—but then are they really Internet users when large portions of the Internet are inaccessible to them due to government censorship?


> YouTube is not a natural monopoly, as evidenced by the fact that there are other video hosting services (e.g. Vimeo, Facebook, PeerTube).

Tesla sells solar roofs and power walls accessible to every person in US. Is it an evidence electrical grid is not a natural monopoly? No it is not.

Wikipedia defines natural monopoly as following:

> an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors

The network effect does give Google that overwhelming advantage over potential competitors.

Let’s not forget Google themselves tried to create such a competitor in 2005, the service was called “Google Video”. They tried to compete for a year or so, failed despite they had way more money, then bought the complete YouTube.


I agree with much of this.

I'll add, though, that the part of Google / YouTube / Alphabet that people continually forget in these discussions is the monopoly of the advertising space.

Infrastrucutre, contracts, metrics, standards, etc., all benefit Google (and Facebook) strongly. Together they claim over half of all online advertising.


> Tesla sells solar roofs and power walls accessible to every person in US. Is it an evidence electrical grid is not a natural monopoly? No it is not.

Unlike competing video hosting platforms, solar roofs and PowerWalls are not the same product as the electrical grid. There is some substitution effect, but they generally work in tandem. Most solar and PowerWall-equipped homes are not fully off-grid; it can be done but it takes a lot of storage to ensure you never run out of power with normal household use. (My 5.12 kWh of solar panels generally result in a net surplus of energy each month, but even so I've calculated based on daily net consumption over the last ~16 months that 100 kWh of storage—7-8 PowerWall 2s–would still leave the system depleted by the end of the day 13% of the time. Granted, that includes a three-week span last February where the panels weren't generating much of anything due to snow cover, but that wasn't the only occasion where it would have run out.)

The "natural monopoly" of the electrical grid, for those who believe in such things, lies in access to the physical right-of-way for laying cables to everyone's houses. I'm not sure I'd call this a natural monopoly as the difficulty newcomers face in accessing the right of way (or depending on how you look at it, the ease with which the incumbents claimed the right-of-way for themselves, often through eminent domain) is mostly artificial. Regardless, while it is a true barrier to entry favoring incumbents over the competition, nothing of this nature applies to either Tesla's solar + storage business or to YouTube.

> The network effect does give Google that overwhelming advantage over potential competitors.

The network effect is certainly an advantage while it lasts, but networks are highly mutable, to the point that I wouldn't call this a barrier to entry. For example MySpace had major network effects once as the dominant social network—right up until it was completely replaced by Facebook. Crowds can be fickle like that. There isn't even a social network effect for YouTube like there is with Facebook, where you're strongly incentivized to stick with the same system your friends are using. If you upload your videos somewhere else—as many people do—everyone will still be able to see them.

Of course that doesn't guarantee that any particular experiment in competition will succeed. As you say, Google Video failed to gain traction, and it was hardly the only one. But even so, YouTube has competitors. The failure of Google Video does not imply that YouTube's position in the market is inviolable. They retain their place only so long as they continue to provide the best service.


As you correctly pointed out, the natural monopoly of electrical grid is the network of the cables which connect large pool of producers to even larger pool of consumers. There’re many ways to generate electricity, but if one wants reliable power for reasonable price, the best way by far is connecting to the grid.

Similarly, the natural monopoly of youtube is the social network of people, which connects content creators and viewers. Now in 2022 it’s relatively easy to host videos even at scale, but if a content creator wants access to the global audience, or a viewer wants to watch videos, the best way by far is YouTube.

> networks are highly mutable

Facebook did not win as a result of services competing for users. Few people actually switched from myspace to Facebook. The way Facebook won, it managed to grow faster.

Facebook has 3B monthly active users. We have 8B people living on the planet, 5B of them are already using internet. In 2009 when Facebook overtook Myspace, only 1.8B people were using the internet. Facebook and youtube simply managed to capture the majority of these new 3.2B internet users, and that growth is what made these social networks so mutable in the past. This won’t happen again, not enough people on the planet.


>If you upload your videos somewhere else—as many people do—everyone will still be able to see them.

But people would not be able to find those videos that are uploaded to the competing service/s because Google controls 90% of the internet search and on top of that YouTube is the second most popular search engine on the web after Google itself.


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.


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.


This is how it used to be but people would put a thumbnail into their video for 1 frame to then use it as the thumbnail.

I think at that time YouTube used to take the frame in the center of the video but I’m not so sure about that one.


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.


>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


I wonder how much he earns...

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


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.


> 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


I genuinely don’t understand why Google got it right with Circles, realizing we have different orthogonal interests… but all my YouTube subscriptions go in a giant pile, as if advanced math, news, and rap videos are fungible content.

I want some ability to create sets of channels with a focus and only access that when I want to.

I think the problem is that YouTube has always been a manipulative and exploitative platform — targeting your psychology with algorithms. Now, it’s ratcheted that to the point it’s creepy and unlikeable.


On the mobile app, they show "pill buttons" for your detected interests across the top and you can click on them to filter those topics specifically. So they have put some nominal work into supporting orthogonal interests.

The problem for me is that it just doesn't work very well. First, it's hidden deeply in the UI. Second, the topics are self-detected (poorly) and you have no way to edit them. Third, they seem to act as simple filters of your feed, not a way to access different subsets of content.

I'm sure the root of the problem is that lots of smart people at YouTube probably understand this frustration and want to make this better, but building filtering tools doesn't improve overall user engagement metrics and doesn't get anyone promoted, so no one does. But what does improve overall engagement? Recommending streamer bro meme videos in the chance that a kid might get hooked and watch thousands more of them.


Those also exist in the web app but suffer from the same issues you report.


The 1% smartest people in the userbase, who often are also relative ad resistant, aren't an audience YouTube (or any other large publisher) is going to cater to with active effort. At best they'll tolerate it benignly or as a reputation booster.


Agreed, it seems most of these changes to the recommendation system are for the masses who don't really care or just let autoplay choose everything for them, and not the kind of people who browse HN


It's a problem with evidence based product design. It's in almost all big products nowadays. The way Google axes products, the way Netflix axes series, the way Facebook populates the timeline. They're throwing away the intrinsic value of the product, for positive graphics in their monthly user engagement presentations.

Facebook's user engagement is probably higher than it ever was. I have a friend who's one of those conspiracy nuts and he's on there all day everyday posting dozens of media links to questionable content. His behaviour is their dream. At the same time almost none of my "normal" friends or family are still there. But they never had much engagement anyway even at the peak they maybe checked Facebook once a day for a couple minutes and maybe post something once per month.

Probably these platforms are all approximating the optimal amount of crappiness they need to be maximally profitable.

I've never owned an iPhone, but Apple's approach is the long term one, where they come up with a product that they believe in and they think the customer should use, regardless of whether they actually want. It let's them always carefully control the quality and resists the temptation to make a quick extra buck. In the end it makes them basically unbeatable, where Facebook has to buy competitors to remain relevant.


> Facebook's user engagement is probably higher than it ever was. I have a friend who's one of those conspiracy nuts and he's on there all day everyday posting dozens of media links to questionable content. His behaviour is their dream. At the same time almost none of my "normal" friends or family are still there.

This matches my experience, the family members still very active are all politically involved, posting rants from either side of the spectrum. The conspiracy stuff is unhinged and getting worse.


Apple's model leads to computer with keyboards whose keys fall off, because they design for surface-lecel appeal and disregard customer desires for the product.


No, but every hardware manufacturer, big or small, will have design or production problems from time to time...


> I genuinely don’t understand why Google got it right with Circles

Do you mean on google plus? (Or did that feature make it to other parts of the gooverse?)

The feature on Plus that I desperately wanted was "squares", or facets of your online presence that people could individually subscribe to. Just for instance, if Noam Chomsky had been an active poster on all kinds of topics on Plus, I would not subscribe to his updates because I only care about his work in linguistics, not any of his political activism.

But, the way all the current social properties are set up, the poster either has to have multiple accounts and log in / log out or keep separate browser profiles etc, or just posts everything under one account.

It could be better. It could be pretty seamless: allow the author to tag the post with a click or two just before posting, encourage them to tag posts that aren't tagged before posting, learn what tags they use most and analyze the content of each post to prominently feature in the UI the tags that look like they apply. Allow subscribers to subscribe to author+tag pairs instead of just authors. Done.


Twitter and Instagram allow you switch between multiple accounts without entering the password again. So it's not hard to post and browser about different interest using different accounts


Maybe it's finding some connection like math<->rap-focused music theory (lots of triplets)<->rap. I like an eclectic timeline, and YouTube could be optimizing for that, but I can see how it would be annoying if you don't dig that.


The problem is more fundamental:

Those are all things I like, but I don’t want most of them most of the time — and YouTube gives me no way to signal what state I’m in. And because it shoves them all in a large pile, I get very few if any recommendations related to what Im looking for right now.

People are faceted, but YouTube fails to design UX to accommodate that reality — instead trying to be everything at once and so failing to be anything, ever.


I don't know about in the apps, but the web page has a row of tags above the videos that let you filter by topic. They're personalized, so you might have tags for those topics.


You might try the PocketTube extension to categorize your subscriptions:

https://yousub.info/


> 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.

I fear that there is a very big group (that is usually not on HN) that actually likes this. People who get absolutely hyped on some new channel and just have to watch everything on that channel. Not because it’s interesting content, but because for those few hours/days/weeks they feel that they “belong” to the community of that channel (even if they don’t meaningfully interact or discuss with the other people in that community or even the creator). This also gives them social status with friends. Then after a few hours/days/weeks, repeat the cycle (multiple cycles can run in parallel but not too much as it would affect your social status of being part of the hip cult-of-the-day). Obviously those people also watch stuff outside that channel, but they don’t mind being presented with videos of the same channel all the time, because again bragging rights that come with “oh I’ve really seen everything, look at this: seen it, seen it, …”).

(Seems a bit similar to some other demographic that is extremely into watching sports…)


There's nothing wrong with old content per-se. A true crime channel, for example, can have a lot of old content that's still interesting to watch. And thing for science and comedy. No need for any strange community feelings or bragging rights.

Now, this doesn't make sense for all types of content, of course, but definitely for some.


YouTube actually makes it quite hard to "completely watch" a channel; there's some channels that I just "discovered" and published interesting content over the years and ideally I'd just like to start at the start and watch stuff from their backlog that looks interesting. But with the stupid non-pagination "infinite scroll" it's pretty hard.


This recently happened to me. I discovered someone's channel and it turned out to be a gold mine of content that I had somehow never heard of. I didn't even have to subscribe and it would recommend me banger videos from the guy.


The same happened to me with Tom Cardy.


> 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.

Don't know if you knew this, you can use RSS to get feeds of the channels you want without subscribing or even having a Google account.

Good in-browser add-on for following, organizing etc. of RSS feeds: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...


I use the RSS feeds with Elfeed for Emacs which allows me to search, filter, and modify feed entries as they are fetched. Additionally, you can use an https://invidious.io instance - which also provides RSS feeds - to avoid sharing any personally identifiable info to YouTube. I've setup elfeed to provide a keystroke to watch the videos ad-free using mpv. All together, this is a much more privacy and attention respecting way of consuming videos.


Interesting! That's the first project written in Crystal I've encountered in the wild.

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious


The feedbro extension can also filter with a bunch of criteria, set off by configurable triggers and a decent set of actions.


No need for a plugin. Just add the channel ID to this link:

  https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=
And add that to your RSS reader.

I get everything in perfect chronological order, including livestream schedules.


IMO mass unsubbing is the wrong response to take if you want a good YouTube experience. The best way is the opposite: subscribe to EVERYTHING you like even a little bit, and then use the Subscriptions page as your home page. Ignore the real home page, ignore the algorithm entirely. I've done this and the irritation is gone.


I stay logged out, and use a private session when I go to YT. I keep a home page of bookmarks to content creators I enjoy content from, linking to their main page, and either follow one of those links in to see what they've posted lately or go to the home page for YT, ignore everything, and search for something specific. If I run into a new content creator I like, I add them to my bookmarks.

I started this for privacy reasons, but I really like it now because they don't know enough about you in a private session to mess with you, and their search is usually good enough to find what I'm looking for. There is then a golden period where the recommendations are actually useful that lasts for maybe a dozen videos or so after which they try to psychoanalyze you too much and then it's time to kill the old private session and start a new one.

I've gone from being anti-privacy to being anti-privacy and anti-algorithm both.


Mmm, this looks like it could also work for me. Thanks!


> What the hell is wrong with modern AI-driven recommendation engines

No idea but it's been an issue ever since I've used Amazon. In a way it's kind of reassuring that their AI is not smart enough to know that after buying a vaccuum cleaner, I am probably not going to immediately buy another one.


You are more likely to buy a vacuum cleaner just after you bought one than any other random point in time. Reason is that a percentage return their first buy for whatever reason. If you are going to target someone with ads for whatever product, the ROI is actually just after you bought something …


A better recommender system would suggest items that show off the capabilities of my shiny new vacuum: cat food, thumbtacks, coarse dirt, feathers...


I hate to admit it but the older videos proper work on me.

YouTube suggested Casey Neistat's first vlog for whatever reason[0]. A week or so later I've consumed the entire channel. Very decent recommend on YouTube's part if they're optimising for session duration that one.

[0]: I was in a bit of a "I might be a YouTuber as it turns out" moment at one point and I think I caught his How to vlog like Casey Neistat video or maybe Do What You Can't


Algo fail: I will see the same videos recommended visit after visit.

Just give me a "Not Interested" button over each recommended video so at the very least the pool is refreshed.


Click the dots and a submenu with a “not interested” button appears. You can even follow up with a reason.

I think your critique is misplaced though. Just because I don’t want to see a particular video right now, doesn’t mean I never want to see it.

Quite often there are two videos I wanna watch on the front page. Luckily I get recommended the other video later.


Thank you.


They arent recommendation engines. In the sense that recommendation is not the formal problem of showing someone content with a non-zero probability of their watching it. Recommendation, as we understanding it, means understanding our interests first.

Recommendations systems use average expressed preferences (ie., on-average watch frequency) in others to "recommend" you something.

If we didnt opt for such metaphorical naming things would be clearer. Recommendation should, mostly, just be called "Popularity Ranking".


But it does recommend videos to you. It is absolutely not just "Popularity Ranking".

On my youtube front page the first row of videos are: a recent Scott Manley video about some SpaceX thing (which is in my interests), a DnD game (which I have already seen on twitch, youtube of course has no way knowing that), a song from a band I'm listening to since a few days, and a video documenting a glider airplane adventure. All in my areas of interest and I highly doubt that these are the 4 most popular videos on youtube right now.

> Recommendation, as we understanding it, means understanding our interests first.

Yes. And that's what they try to do. Sometimes they fail. For a hypothetical lets say that I recommend to my friend that they should see the new superhero movie in cinemas. They go and watch it and they don't like it. Clearly that means that my recommendation was a bad one, but does it stop being a recommendation? Only perfect recommenders are worth that name?


It is just selecting users based on the videos you have watched. It isnt global popularity ranking, rather its ranking amongst users who also watch your videos.

Your watching a video is only a weak correlate of your preference. If I were recomemnding you something, I wouldnt ask you -- literally -- what specific videos you watch. I'd ask for your (real) preferences: are you bored right now? Do you want somerthing exiting? What's your mood? etc. etc.


The solution i find about subscribing channels;

I am selecting "Don't recommend channel" for subscribed channels so i see them only in Subscriptions page, i am afraid that Youtube can see it as i am not interested these channels and topics but i didn't see any downside with this method.

I am also unsubscribing frequently posting channels and bookmark them if i want to visit them later so my Subscription page don't have spam videos.

Also removing one time watched uninterested-topic videos from history may help algorithm.


I'm the opposite, I subscribed to lots of channels so that I always have new content from creators I like -- and never have to look at the recommendations.


Are you giving enough 'input' to the engine? Topics that you like or comment will be ranked higher.


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."


I do rewatch some of my history every now and then, mostly music and comedy clips. But it seems like YouTube doesn't understand that this works for some content, but not for all.


This is like Amazon recommending the exact same item you just bought, sometimes from a different brand or vendor. "We see you bought a toaster, surely you need a hundred more."


Mabey they know that the first one you bought is scheduled to stop working soon.


Maybe they just want you to be unhappy (as the paradox of choice says, if you only had a few options for a product, you'd pick what you think is the best one and be happy with it; if you had hundreds, you can't compare all, so you'd pick one and wonder if it was the best choice).

Maybe Amazon knows that unsatisfied customers continue spending money... Hah, great dark pattern if so!


I have the same thing. For some it actually makes sense, like listening to a good song twice. But for many others it really doesn't. I'd kinda expect Youtube to be able to tell the difference between a song and some temporarily relevant vlog.


For music videos that makes sense, but not so much for other content.


This is Spotify and music recommendations for me.


I gave up on Spotify because Spotify, unlike me, was stuck in the 70's and 80's...


Yes, so irritating. I don't understand why they do this.


"deep learning"


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.


Did you put that video in your "watch later" list?


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


Spambot comments have exploded recently too, a lot of channel owners are complaining. Something definitely seems broken.

I wonder if any of this affects GMail as well.


The Dead Internet Theory is becoming more and more true all the time.


No, it really isn't, that's just a crack conspiracy theory that took off because people no longer have the capacity to judge reality by any metrics besides cynicism and memeability.

There really are billions of actual people using the internet all the time.


All models are wrong, but some are useful. The value of a theory is how accurately it allows you to predict future observations.

If AI-driven recommendation systems and a trend towards centralizing all discourse on giant social media platforms produces a result indistinguishable from the Dead Internet Theory, then the theory is a useful way of thinking about and engaging with the internet.


I think it depends on the platform. Like Reddit for example, bot accounts are very easy to create (or you just buy used accounts). I wouldn't be surprised if on the most popular subreddits that half of the comments are bot generated.


I agree. I think the vast majority of people we speak to online are robots


I use to get a ton of 'clip' video recommendations which annoys me. Plus, any videos by channels I've subscribed are basically drowned out.


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.


Youtube's recommendation system was at its best when it relied on the tag-based system.


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.


I would appreciate being able to filter by audience age. If 90% of the views are from minors, there's zero chance I'm going to engage whether or not they trick me into allowing the video to play.

I would even be in favor of moving any content created by or for an under-18 audience to YouTube Kids. There's no reason it should be allowed on a platform for adults.

I know Google doesn't respect their customers, but we shouldn't let them waste our time.


> - Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?)

Really depends on the topic. 12 year old product reviews don't make sense. 12 year old hour-long lecture about Roman empire is just as good as it was 12 years ago.


The search results also got worse. For some reason they now mix random video recommendations with the result list, including videos that have no connection whatsoever to the search and that I already have seen.


I have no proof, but it is probably with Youtube trying to compete with Tiktok. There are more originals content on Tiktok and on Tiktok any user can easily publish content.

So it would make sense that Youtube is trying to favor new creators and short videos. Actually a lot of Youtubers for a few months have been complaining, that the algo penalize channels that dont publish frequently.

I'm myself a big Youtube watcher, and I have not been seeing significant changes in the videos I see, there is more short videos, and videos from Tiktok reposted here but in my opinion it is just because more content of that kind is being published.

There is also a discovery problem on Youtube. They usually recommend you content that is close to the content you have seen recently (but it has always been like that). Once per week there is a truly original video that pops up.


Are you logged in to device, like a Roku or PlayStation, where one of your kids would be watching and/or rating videos?


It's a good guess, but not in this case. I have a separate account that only I use.


> I don't personally think the dislike button is the explanation.

Eh, it could be. Hiding the dislikes certainly affects the like/dislike clicking behavior of the user. This creates feedback loops that are very hard to predict by simple A/B testing.


I agree it's gotten a lot worse recently. Especially wrt the already seen videos. When playing a video it's disturbingly common to not have a single fresh, unseen video in the related/recommended sidebar.


- Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?)

For many topics 6-12 year old videos are perfectly acceptable.


Sure, but I'm talking about specifically non-evergreen videos like 10 year old product previews. That's what has cropped up recently. Youtube used to be pretty good about recommending old evergreen content but not time-sensitive content.


Something could have happened like… (just making this up) the 20 year anniversary of the G4 cube comes around and .0000001% of their users (add a few zeroes if needed) go and watch every single cube product review, so the algorithm thinks “oh everyone is into old product reviews now!” Because one of those people DID click on a bunch of other product reviews for whatever reason… more nostalgia or he thought the reviewer was cute or he walked away and they kept auto playing… or whatever.


I explicitly downvote videos that aren't directly relevant to what I want to keep seeing. This does mean that I often downvote videos that I've enjoyed, such as useful product reviews for something that I'm buying. This keeps my recommendations relatively clean.


That's what the Not Interested button is for.


Not interested button is a placeabo type button, completely useless, isn’t it? Do you know how many hundreds of times I’ve not interested late night talk show hosts with no stop to their constant recommendation in my feed.


The only way to dislike those videos is to click them. If you click them it means you like that topic.

If you actually don't want then then don't click them in the first place and in about a month they will stop showing up.


"and in about a month they will stop showing up." Such a great experience


I think you assume the algorithm is working where I feel the opposite.


My words are not based on theory but actual practice: I had videos I didn't like on my YouTube homepage, and I didn't click them, and after a little while they went away. It's as simple as that. My Google News feed is the same way.

Don't click the dislike button, rather don't watch the video at all. (Dislike means this video is bad not this topic is bad.)

The videos on my homepage exactly match the videos I watch. Exactly. They are often boring since I want something new - but I can't complain that YouTube is messing with me in some way. (Same with Google News - sometimes I want something new, and it's not there - it's always the same type of stuff.)

People who have videos that displease them on the homepage are watching those videos, and then complaining. "Guilty pleasures" basically.


That’s not my experience though. They just keep showing up. Maybe they are embedded in articles I’ve viewed or something but I’ve never clicked on them intentionally.


I am sure you are wrong about it not being the dislike button but it could be something else. Obviously though, this means there is no longer any open source fraud control anymore, of course this would happen!


Is the streamer bro Asmongold, by any chance? I got it recommended out of the blue.


I doubt it. Asmon's demographic is 32 year old kids, not 12.


Ok, let's try: youtube.com... Out of first 11 visible videos: I may watch, if I had time: 4 music, 2 technical, 2 political, 1 gaming. 9/11 total.

Mistakes - 1 technical (like "my interest is not that serious") Obvious garbage - 1 ("The whole world is afraid of Japan now" plus a crazy plane picture).

Not so bad. Can't compare with previous times though, cause I never paid attention to the first youtube page.

And now let me watch my first recommendation: The Devil’s Daughters w/ Danny B Harvey - Rock Boppin’ Baby (Sexy) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUpDslHSLbU - just can't resist these girls...


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.


I think this hits almost bullseye for the reasons of this change, but I'd add the White House along with the brands who'd rather have their dislikes hidden.

However, shadowbanning is for cowards. Would you also ban the people who only cast likes without any dislikes? Both groups have the same signal-to-noise ratio and can be equally harmful.


> Both groups have the same signal-to-noise ratio

I kinda doubt this, to be honest. In real life, I discount the opinions of people who only ever have negative things to say. Seems as though serial dislikers might deserve the same treatment.


Emotionally, I really get it. We feel positive towards positive thoughts and vice versa for negative ones. But in the context of information, a "recommender" that recommends everything is equivalent to one that recommends nothing: both are worthless (ie can't provide any new information)


Yeah, I think you get zero information from someone who only upvotes or only downvotes, whereas you get some signal from people in the center.


Counterpoint: highly partisan voters who upvote anything from their team and downvote anything from the other, regardless of quality.


Accepted.


I'm pretty sure the White House would just disable ratings?


>The only explanation

I am generally of the opinion that Youtube is up there with Facebook in responsibility for eroding democracy worldwide with their filter bubbles so while I get a lot of value from all the educational and entertaining content I consume on there, there is little love lost from me.

However, in this case I think there is another explanation which I think at least is the official one: dislikes were used to bully people. I don't know what the scale of the problem was but I can imagine it was a genuine problem and that they genuinely wanted to solve it. That's not to say that there weren't financial concerns as well, but I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt here.

By the way, I think the rationale was similar for hiding vote counts on this very site and I guess they concluded that it worked, given that they stuck with it.


I think you're very much overestimating how much big corporations care about Youtube dislikes. Unless if there is a massive conspiracy of advertisers unilaterally demanding Youtube remove its downvote count, which there is no evidence for, advertisers have no leverage against Google. What's far more likely is that visible downvotes are a signal for people to not watch a video, and Youtube wants people to watch more videos, so they watch more ads.


There’s already more legitimate content on the platform than anyone could watch even if they spent their every waking hour on it, so I doubt boosting viewership is the goal.

Deliberately shaping public opinion in unpopular directions therefore seems like the most likely motivation.

The other, slightly less nefarious possibility is that they don’t actually want us to watch videos and drive up bandwidth costs. Good engagement means people just sit and watch the video instead of clicking something else and be served another ad. When people clicked a video and saw that it was overwhelmingly disliked, they would leave immediately, but now they are forced to sit through the whole ad to see what the video is about.

It’s also possible that people with good taste are more likely to be using ad blockers, so a content connoisseur is really just a parasite in the eyes of Google.


> What's far more likely is that visible downvotes are a signal for people to not watch a video, and Youtube wants people to watch more videos, so they watch more ads.

I think you are also overestimating how much people look at downvotes. Most people click, watch and move on if it's not good. Have you ever seen a Tiktok user?


I believe the official explanation: dislikes are hurting some YouTubers as a form of "crowd bullying".

They were a signal or message that the message (but not the quality) was not approved.

Dislikes were being used as a form of critique of the content. They were a kind of mob/crowd behaviour than a personal like/dislike.

The YouTubers were both marginalised people, those waging culture war stuff and corporations.

By removing the crowd mob behaviour they also removed the intended crowd sourced recomendation system.


They own the system, they could just shadowban bullies' votes. They could have just done it on videos that were statistical outliers, too - raised a "bullied" flag.

It'd be pretty easy to isolate different voting mobs, too, and group them together. You could use them to just ban the mob that is targeting the video, and let members of other mobs' votes still slip through. I might even inform the user if I were cocky about the system: "You have been prevented from voting on this video because your account has been associated with a mass-downvoting group from reddit.com/r/ronpopeillives. If you feel you have received this message in error, send an email to appeals@devnull.youtube.com."


I don't believe this at all. In any system where likes and dislikes have value to recommendations or whatever you have to identify and neutralize those who try to game the system. For example:

1. Sock puppets

2. Brigading

3. Bullying (which is really the dislike version of brigading)

That should be relatively easy to do at scale. Not perfectly but good enough. Once identified just count those votes as nothing. Present them as if the user has still pressed like or dislike but just don't count it.

Instead what Youtube has done has disincentivized people from disliking, which removes a very useful quality signal. Some will still dislike but less will if there's no feedback.

Dislikes provided a very useful signal to viewers about scams, poor videos, wrong information and so on. This provided a disincentive to post such information. So Youtube has removal that signal from users and effectively opened the floodgates to low-quality and scam videos.

That's just crazy.

And to pin that on "bullying" is (IMHO) ridiculous.


> Because in every other way (and every way for the viewer), this makes Youtube worse

It makes YouTube worse for the viewer, but YouTube doesn't have to care because they have a monopoly, so realistically speaking nobody will leave.

Thus they get to appease the brands/big channels with virtually no downside. Even better, the lack of a quality filter provided by dislikes mean people may have to trawl through more shit before they find what they want to watch, thus increasing engagement metrics.

This is the same reason most monopoly-level social media platforms take a relaxed stance on spam or malicious/illegal content (besides edge-cases which have legal or PR consequences) - the spam still drives (and itself counts as) engagement and the network effects are strong enough to overcome the annoyance and keep people on the platform anyway.


> 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"

It was already possible before November 2021 to turn off the publicly visible like/dislike count on any video (getting essentially what we have now) and many big brands did exactly that.


> big brands

re Youtube itself. Their infamous will smith "now thats hot" rewind video was the most disliked video of all time at one point.


Dislikes, as a visible measure, were widely bombed by Internet trolls and ignorant cretins. The (vast) majority of people don't engage with those tools, so a small, coordinated minority can easily have a massively outsized influence. It was grossly misrepresentative to the wider YouTube userbase. The far right, for instance, was hugely overrepresented because everyone else has a life and isn't spending their day dogpiling on White House or other videos to click a down arrow (neither an up arrow -- the rest of us aren't pathologically broken, and we have better things to do with our life and to define our identity with). COVID was actually a great benchmark because factual, scientific COVID videos were downvote bombed with regularity. Conspiracies and nonsense videos were left alone, because the rest of us aren't ignorant nuts.

They were used to bully people and diminish voices. It was a completely toxic element of the system. No, it isn't dumb corporate videos (who were prone to just hiding it at the outset, making the trolls hulk smash and angrily declare that unfair) that they're defending, and that notion is pretty comically dumb.

This whole post and the noise around this issue is so absurd. YouTube isn't worse because a bunch of ignorant assholes can't bully gay and minority people, or ply their misogynistic or backwards ways. There are loads of easy ways to automate videos and basically spam YouTube, and the system hasn't overcome that yet. Visible downvotes would do nothing when these players are uploading literally millions of videos.


I tried to downvote your comment for making unsubstantiated claims like "The (vast) majority of people don't engage with these tools". But was unable to because I don't have enough karma. Do with that what you please.


Videos usually had about 10% of the number of votes compared to views, so depending on how you define (vast) majority it is correct.


I remember watching some video and looking at dislikes: why is this downvoted this much? Pretty run of the mill video with nothing outrageous or even particularly controversial. Oh it got posted _there_...

Still, I don't think this is the reason. Visible votes simply modify what other people vote on and youtube wanted full control over what users watch instead of the few who actually votes. It is simply not a good metric most likely. Was it improved by removing the dislike bar? I would be surprised if was...


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.


I moved from the Facebook app to the web interface, and when it gets really bad, I just close it and do something else, hoping it will teach it something.

Don't give me a 'stop seeing this ad' button? Disengage.

Show me the same damned solar ad for the second dozen times? Disengage.

Keep showing me 'do you know this person' every third page? Disengage.

Also, I've found I just don't contribute anymore. Reddit has become a Read Only site...because there are so many people contributing, there's no way what I'm going to contribute hasn't already been posted by 4 other people, higher up in the algorithm.


I purchased a hair trimmer on Amazon two weeks ago - Amazon is still sending me emails recommending me to buy a hair trimmer.


It's like shitty feedback ... if I did my research each of those reminds me I made the right choice but if I made a mistake Amazon is rubbing salt in the wound for weeks.


> if I made a mistake Amazon is rubbing salt in the wound for weeks

I just realised this is probably the only decent explanation. If you find fault with the item then you probably are going to be in the market again very soon and Amazon wants to be ready and waiting for you. Even if it is daft to display for 99% of people they may save x% of returns by catching someone with a silly recommendation.

They could probably tie that in to the returns system directly though I guess, but maybe people get the new order in before the return is processed?


Having more and more ads sounds like an end of market cycle thing. Like when there are no more billions of untapped users, but you have to show revenue growth, so you crank up the ads to an unsustainable number and sneak towards the exit before it all comes tumbling down.


Growth for the sake of growth has a well-known biological equivalent: cancer, and its end-game is monopolizing all resources and killing the host (and thus itself).


All life forms do growth for the sake of growth. It can end in many other ways. Like a steady state. Or even more interesting, in regular boom ands busts: https://biologydictionary.net/predator-prey-relationship/


Facebook definitely has that feel to it. The engagement in our family Facebook groups are way down.


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.


Hmm. Has YouTube been in the news for hiring broadcast execs?

As somebody who is connected to broadcast, that doesn’t seem right to me - broadcast TV tends to be very control-freak-ish and the higher ups LOVE data, and I really doubt a broadcast exec would willingly chuck out an audience measurement datapoint. The broadcast ad model is that you create shows that have big audiences so you get lots of ad impressions. The decision to remove the dislike button seems more about removing community negativity and/or simplifying moderation, which isn’t really something that I’d expect a TV exec to put a big push on.


I don't think broadcast executives would love TV ads having likes or dislikes visible to viewers on their TV screens.


> Hmm. Has YouTube been in the news for hiring broadcast execs?

Not really no. Probably less than the last decade in fact.


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.


You can at least solve the problem of not seeing dislikes anymore with a browser extension, e.g. "Return YouTube Dislike".

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis... (also available for Firefox, Edge, ..)

Of course, it doesn't solve the recommendation issue the thread creator mentioned.


where does the extension get the data from, though? it's not like they just have to remove a `display: none` somewhere.


Apparently some previously-scrapped data for older videos that gets updated, and heuristic estimates combined with extrapolating data from those who use that extension and like/dislike. LTT did a video where they found the accuracy really good.

Beating Google at their own game, they (apparently) are.


I think the accuracy doesn't even matter too much. Personally, I believe I base my decision to watch the video after clicking on it on the ballpark the like/dislike ratio is in. "Almost only likes", "2/3 likes", "50/50 likes/dislikes", ... For that purpose, the extension does its job.


> with extrapolating data from those who use that extension and like/dislike.

Often you see the opposite, where a third party service provides customers with a feature extending the features of a big service like youtube or twitter, and then the big service buys the startup offering that extension, or integrates the feature themselves, leaving the extension dead. Now we see it happening in reverse direction, very interesting.


They run their own database. It's basically community-driven.

edit: there's a Linus Tech Tips video on this which goes into more detail. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz9b0oJw69I


Apparently, the Youtube API documented here - https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos - returns both likes and dislikes. All Google did was remove the rendering of that API response field onto the webpage.

Extensions probably acquire the video url and make their own API call just to retrieve the dislike count. To me, that seems cleaner than trying to snoop on the main API call response (I think extensions might not have access to those, maybe they do). Basically, the data is available via API calls.


No see the other comments, they disabled this ability for non channel owners.


The dislike count is still in the data returned by the YouTube API[0], so they're probably getting it from there.

[0]https://developers.google.com/youtube/analytics/metrics#disl...


That's the analytics API. We already know they show dislikes to the channel owner. Isn't this the same thing?

And your other comment says "The dislike count is also still present in the [0] video API response." but the page says right there "Note: The statistics.dislikeCount property was made private as of December 13, 2021."


Are you sure? I remember reading that data would be removed at the end of last year.


I don't have an API key handy, but it's not marked as deprecated/removed in the documentation, so I can't see why it wouldn't still be in there.

The dislike count is also still present in the [0] video API response.

[0]https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos#resourc...


> it's not marked as deprecated/removed

It's not marked as deprecated or removed because dislikes were never deprecated or removed, nor implied to be.

They made it private (readable only to the uploader) and marked it as private.

A plug-in using this API will only tell you the dislike count for your own videos.


Since they removed the dislike count, I've watched zero technical/programming and related videos on youtube. I'm not going to sit for 30 minutes and then realise the video is a pile of garbage.


I'm amazed that anyone can find any decent programming content on YouTube. There are low-quality beginners webdev tutorials as far as the eye can see, but otherwise there's seemingly very little outside of rambling and superficial conference talks. And on the odd occasion when I do watch a video, YouTube decides that I must be a beginning webdev and bombards me with the aforementioned low-quality Javascript and HTML tutorials for the next several weeks.


It's a good thing I've moved away from YouTube for technical content. I often find answers much faster on stackoverflow/stackexchange/Reddit


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.


Yeah that's youtube shorts. One of the reason I use vanced even if I have youtube premium is that it's the only way to just turn that half baked feature off. I wouldn't mind youtube's tiktok clone as much if it at least didn't have such a weird UI. It's so badly integrated to the rest of the app that it completely messes with your navigation buttons, and in general looks like a separate app inside the app. Which means performance is very bad too.

Instagram pushes its own tiktok clone very hard too (Reels), but the experience is a lot smoother compared to YT Shorts.


> https://www.synthesia.io/

Dear lord, that page sucked the lifeforce out of me. My condolences to those poor souls who worked on that.


I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Space Ghost Coast to Coast is probably the best example of what this could end up as. Old animations recycled to match voice lines.

Given advanced enough AI, the process could definitely be automated to turn a written script into a short video.


In my opinion, that is way too creative.

I expect the future of automatically generated content to look like a attractive + friendly + diverse + optimistic face which is utterly emotionless and inhuman, yet perfectly symmetric.

Here's a good Chinese example of an AI news anchor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZuffHPDAw

But there's still a world of difference between them, mainly w.r.t. head movements, body language, and eye expressions. For example, compare the AI avatar here: https://youtu.be/-2AIweN_Fmg?t=272

With the real person here: https://youtu.be/-2AIweN_Fmg?t=27


And Synthesia is so awful that Synthesia didn't use it to generate their promo video. That's about a damning as it gets!


Nothing employees love more than soulless, robotic training videos.


It seems as if they read the Dead Internet Theory and thought, "you know what, let's make that real"!


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.


Same issue for me. Really all it is showing to me is video's I've already seen. Youtube has lost it's shine completely.


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.


i bookmark a lot of channels as well. for my most watched channels i also add them to newsblur since it makes it easier to see when new videos are available without having to go to each individual channel. there are a few other rss readers around that support adding youtube videos as well i think

ublock origin is another tool that comes in handy for blocking things like the sidebar suggestions. just add this to the 'my filters' page:

www.youtube.com##ytd-item-section-renderer.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer.style-scope


I was just checking the comments to see if anyone had already said this. I never look at the home page on Youtube. I only look at the subscription page. I occasionally add subscriptions by following recommendations from the creators, comments on the video I'm watching or by word of mouth. The home page is essentially worthless for me.


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.


> I started getting more aggressive with using the Not Interested and Don't Recommend Channel buttons

Yeah, I've even had to start DRC'ing channels I'm subscribed to because YT seems to think that I want my homepage to be nothing but videos I've already watched from those channels.


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.


"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.).


This is just good internet hygiene: don't go online unless you have something specific to look up or research.

This is how it used to be until blogs started up with daily posts, then Youtube, then social media's endless firehose. Suddenly you could start treating the Internet like TV. There was always something to tune into.


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.


> I basically can't open youtube.com without wasting 10 minutes

It's the opposite for me. These days when I have 10 minutes I open YouTube and there's nothing interesting. It recommends me irrelevant stuff, stuff I've seen already, shorts or trending video crap interspersed in between in case I've suddenly become real interested in the Kardashians and football news.


https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/


> scamming phone scammers

Mark Rober, I guess? No wonder the algorithm promotes him to heaven and beyond, the content he puts out is extremely well done.


I feel like his content is way too sensationalist. I much prefer Jim Browning when it comes to scammer payback.


when i know what i want, it works. But when I am just scrolling to find something new, it is noticeably more clickbaity now.


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.


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.


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.


> and the 1% good content is hardly monetizable

My worry on top of monetizing is that the discoverability of good content is a lot worse.

I often already know content that is relevant and want to rewatch it but I now struggle a lot more to find it, drowned in all the non-sense surprised faces and clibait titles. I will often have to dig through history or notes or bookmarks to rediscover a specific video.


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.


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.


The creators can shadow ban people if they want as well. Most of the time, it's probably creators who are sick of seeing low quality critiques that aren't helpful. Things like "I don't like the way your voice sounds", or "Bruh, do you even know how to code???". I'm all for creators shadow banning these low quality remarks as well because it adds no value to a meaningful conversation, and it's disheartening to see.


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".


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.


+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.


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.


You are correct. They have a team dedicated to 'comments quality', headed by an ML engineer: https://twitter.com/nikhilbd/status/1488020382787375105


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"]


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.


> Three dot menu button

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


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!


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.


Huh. My recs have been worse, but not to the degree you are talking about. Though similar to someone else I feel like recent views are over-impacting suggestions. Maybe I've just watched the right things to not get any of the conspiracy theory etc videos (though I'm getting flooded with 3rd party uploads of sports content)


> Now I just have to check the comments.

The problem is that the comments section can be fully managed by the uploader. It's easily possible for them to delete negative comments or even to add filters to do so automatically.


Yeah I've seen some channels switch to "sort by new" by default for their comment section, making it a lot harder to get any useful signal at first glance.


Creators can withhold comments until approved, so even 'new' is only showing the most recent approved comments.


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.


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.


FYI there is an option for this built into the Youtube suggestions. Hover over a suggestion > three dot menu > Don't recommend channel. I use this option, as well as the "Don't recommend video" option in combination for a year, and my suggestions are almost always relevant and high quality every time I log in. The few low quality videos that slip into the suggestions, I immediately prune them and block the channel too.


I don't have a youtube account


> block any channel that does this

Isn't there an endless supply of such channels? Or does YouTube notice your lack of engagement?


One of the characteristics of mass-market advertising / propaganda, is that it's Big Lie / Big Message dependent. That means that at any one time a relatively small list of channels is responsible for the majority of chum. Thank power laws / Zipf functions.

Of course, there's enough channel-churn that these do turn over relatively quickly, but that tends to be on the scale of weeks to months, not hours to days.

Once you've knocked off the major chum sites, legitimate channels start rising through the noise floor. The small-scale chum sites tend not to turn up in high rotation.

Channel-block should be an inherent function. Web search also desperately needs this at the domain level.

(I just ran into this looking up a hiking trail. First-listed site, which dominated my search results, splashes up a registration wall on following any links. Peakbagger, buried in the search results, does far better. I also had to block Pinterest, of course....)


I have very narrow interests for video topics and it works for me at least. Of course it's not perfect since new channels will pop up, or youtube will suggest new topics (e.g. lately the johnny depp trial), but even then, you can block 90% of it quite easily which is already a big improvement.


TheSoul Publishing (russian disinformation platform masquerading as 5 minute craft life hacks) employs over 2100 people and has over 100 channels. and thats just one of the garbage manufacturers on YT.


You don't have to block every bad channel that exists, only the ones that get recommended to you. And youtube tends to be quite stubborn with channels it recommends, so even just blocking a few can go a long way. But of course over time you also amass a bigger list, which covers a wider range of channels.


Back when youtube had a good UI it was real ratings, you could rank videos 1-5 https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/youtube-comes-to-a-5-star-... then it """optimized""" out the middle ratings( Middle ratings were the more honest ones, perfect videos are rare and 1-ratings we often unjustified) to 1=dislike 5=like, where everything is simplified to single click mobile engagement. I would like a 1 to 10 rating scale and make MORE refined rating choices, not vague "likes"(currently YT has only 1-5 star rating for rare question-type prompts with video on homepage for logged in users when it needs feedback). Making 5/10 7/10 and 9/10 videos rank the same with "likes" lowers quality of ratings substantially.


Same thing happened with Netflix. IMO recommendations were much better when you could rate with 5-stars


I don't login into youtube anymore. I bookmark the channel or use it via new pipe, I don't discover new channels anymore, I spend less time on youtube these days, good change in my life.


I never trusted YT algorithm or any recommendation algorithms for that matter.

I always watch YT videos straight from search results or links that I get sent.

I always kept my watch history and search history off.

Recommendation algorithms are not tuned to serve niche users but want to maximize watch duration from maximum number of viewers.

YT tells me several times a month that I have search histories turned off and my recs are bad and I should consider turning it back on. Never.

Even when I had it turned on, I got "popular" videos based on my location, age, gender etc. that I hated. Or I got recommended one to two hours lecture videos. Nobody just decides to spend two hours just because some algorithm thinks that is a good fit.

I use FF + uBlock on PC and YT vanced on android.

I never even look at my feed.

So, lack of dislikes (or any other recent change) has not changed anything for me.


> Recommendation algorithms are not tuned to serve niche users

I'm not sure that's correct either. I have some niche interests and I'm pretty happy with the recommendations. Things I actually watch definitely influence my future recommendations (actually got interested in some cool new topics because of that).


Sorry, should have been more clear. My bad.

What I meant was if an algorithm had to "choose" between _trying_ to maximize views over all videos over all users, and _trying_ to maximize niche users' watch time, it would choose the former. That is what I think is true.

I, of course, do not know about YT's algo, but I did work in RecSys's in the past.


I only use the Subscriptions tab - the Home tab was junk even before the dislike removal (which doesn't negate your point).

One still gets recommendations, namely those at the right of the video you're watching. Those tend to be more relevant than Home's.


I'm now a heavy user of the "Don't recommend this channel" and "Not interested" features and they've helped keep my YouTube feed in check. Still not completely free of garbage but much better than before.


On another note, forcing all videos under 1-minute to be YouTube shorts is a horrible idea. My dog recently passed away, and I started uploading short clips of him to share with my grieving family. Now anytime I watch a clip of my dog, it's followed automatically by a short of some influencer I've never heard of toting some new hot meme.


if you're on PC then this userscript is great to bring back the standard player for shorts

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/439993-youtube-shorts-redi...


Yes, as expected, this degraded the YouTube experience for some users. I mostly watch technical content, and the like/dislike numbers were extremely valuable to avoid losing time on a so-so video. Maybe it's different for political stuff or news, but for high-quality non-controversial content, you expect very few dislikes. Now I use the view/like ratio as primary filter, but it's not as useful.

I don't know what they made that move, I suppose it was to avoid negativity in social medias (and avoid similar controversies as Meta was experiencing), or maybe that would force users to watch more content...


You should really try the extension that brings the dislikes back.


Finding good YouTube videos is a non-issue. There are more amazing sciency/educational channels than it is possible to watch.[1]

Just subscribe to the ones you like and go directly to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

[1] for example:

3Blue1Brown

Beyond The Press

CGP Grey

Captain Disillusion

Cody’s Lab

Computerphile

EEVblog

EVNautilus

Electroboom

Engineering with Rosie

Evan and Katelyn

Everyday Astronaut

Half as Interesting

Huygens Optics

Jay Foreman

Kurzgesagt

Lockpicking Lawyer

Louis Rossman

Mark Rober

Matt Parker

NileBlue

NileRed

Numberphile

Periodic Videos

Physics Girl

PolyMatter

Practical Engineering

Real Engineering

Real Science

RealLifeLore

Simone Giertz

Skill Up

SmarterEveryDay

Stand-up Maths

SteveMould

Strange Parts

StuffMadeHere

Summer Rayne Oakes

Technology Connections

Tom Scott

Two Minute Papers

Veritasium

Vihart

Vsauce

Wendover Productions


Combine this with unhook[1] and you can hide all the "algorithmic" parts of youtube aswell.

Only issue is channels that mix shorts (which I am not interested in) and regular content. If anyone knows how to hide shorts on a per channel basis in the subscription feed, I'm all ears.

[1]: https://unhook.app/


That is a great list, though I think content discovery is still a hard issue. Below are a few music-centered channels. To illustrate that discovery is hard, I had a bit of a struggle to find a few of them, even when I knew what I was looking for. Content covers performance, music theory, money, and history. I also verified no overlap with your list.

Adam Neely

NPR Music (Tiny desk)

Paul Davids

Rick Beato

Smalin


don't forget Dr. Becky and Sabine Hossenfelder! And PBS Space time


For me, Youtube ruined... ads. All ads for the past several months have been about Indian pop music, and I'm not even Indian. Something broke in their algorithm (I'm from Eastern Europe). Not that I really cared about ads, and if you think about it, I actually learned something new, there's some nice Indian music I wouldn't otherwise have learned about.


What is hilarious is for years people asked for a Dislike button on Facebook, and they obliged with their quirky more options to not just like but evoke other emotions, but still no dislike. Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik Tok I believe don't have dislike. How long until reddit joins the bandwagon of we have no negativity.

It also feels like the other platforms that never had likes from the get go have good recommendation algorithms but YouTube pulled it prematurely. What I would of done is secretly make the dislike meaningless (still store it, but ignore the value for any querying) through A / B testing and see how engagement breaks.

I'm not sure what lead them to remove it, but I'm already on there less and less as it is. They lost me when they didn't honor my grandfathered YouTube read cause my debit card expired (I was a Google Music All Access subscriber and was grandfathered in) so now I had to pay for both or either or. No thank you. I went with Apple and got Apple Music instead anyway.


Reddit already fiddles with downvotes. The path to removing them altogether is surely short.

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/28hjga/reddi...

https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_how_is_a_comment.27s_sc...


I ran into a robo news reader channel in my suggestions yesterday, which seemed to have just taken the BBC article on Russia's victory day parade and ran it through a text to speech program, but somehow had 300k subscribers. Still having dislikes would have saved me from wasting time, and they don't even have a report option that covers this robotic spam


I would love if there was a setting to tell YouTube that I'm interested into topics, not people. I sometimes don't watch semi interesting videos, because I know that the person is popular and that if I watch one video, my video overview will be spammed for the next week's with uninteresting content of that "popular person".


Adjust your adblocker settings, browser extensions, and remove/change your mobile/smart TV app so you do not see recommendations. My life is way better without recommendations, homepage, related, etc. Here are some of the things I use:

- uBlock Origin (allows me to hand pick items on a page to hide) - Enhancer for YouTube: Firefox extension that gives me control - SmartTubeNext: YouTube app for FireTV that lets me skips ads, hide home page, and even skip in-video promotions. It's still magical each time. - NewPipe: YouTube app for Android that allows ad-skipping, Shorts hiding, etc. There's not anything in the App Store like this but you might be able to build one your own using open source (https://github.com/MrAdamBoyd/DownTube)

If anyone else has similar tools that you like, I'm very interested.


let me be that guy.. i have never held a youtube/google account and never have had a need to "comment/subscribe" or generally interact with anyone. for the last 12 years at least, i have had the habit of opening private window on my firefox, ublock origin is running and i open youtube. whatever fancies me for "that session", i watch it, say i am looking for DIY solar panels and tomorrow i am looking for hans zimmer interstellar score.

i do not get much of "clickbaity" stuff because i "KNOW" what i am looking for and once the video is watched for the session, i close the window and everything is forgotten.

a side effect of this is, unless i bookmark something (i rarely do) everything gets wiped so i have developed a memory of URLs/URIs/titles and stuff so i can go back.

on my phone, i use newpipe so i am "insulated" from the suggestions BS of youtube and i do not miss it.


Well, to be honest, there were many things, which already ruined YouTube before. No downvotes is only a small part of it. The player is simply attrocious and that on a website, which aims to be mostly video content. No qualified empowered quality assurance on that one.

> Same script, like 8th grade essay you didn't study for, but multiplied by 100x.

Many people don't make it past 8th grade essay level, so such content will seem normal to them. I have a hunch, that that is a sizable part of the audience, which consumes above average amounts of YouTube content. Whatever engages with the masses stays, I guess. Also note, that consumption patterns are wildly different. Some people visit YouTube to get suggested to watch video to spend their time. Others go to YouTube to search for one specific thing and are annoyed, when the search results suck again.


It's not perfect, but works quite well: https://returnyoutubedislike.com/


Hit the 3 dot menu button on a video, then click either "not interested" or don't suggest channel.

It only takes a little effort every visit to tune your recommendations.


But even if you hit the "don't recommend" button on every "mix" playlist you see for months, don't expect YT to get the hint. I do wish the algorithm was a bit more tunable, but that's not really the Google way.


The 'Mix' feature makes no sense to me. It's all videos I've seen before. It should be called 'Rerun'.


I recently deliberately tried to make an effort to stop visiting YT to check on new videos, and started using RSS. I'm using liferea and so far it's been fantastic. Just navigate to channels you like, copy the URL, click on "New subscription" in liferea, and paste. Done.

I still get to see suggested videos whenever I watch something that comes up in liferea in an external browser, so I'm not totally disconnected from YT's recommendation engine. But I'm no longer either (a) using YT's totally in-browser notification system for new videos from channels I care about or (b) scrolling for hours looking for new videos from channels I care about.

Works well for me.


As a data scientist removing dislikes seems as bizarre as saying you can no longer use true/false negatives in any of your evaluation metrics, but are limited to true/false positives.

But YT is only limited users to that, and has stated they themselves will continue to use dislikes in the algorithm to serve up content.

So, YT using dislikes to serve you content, good. You using dislikes to select content, bad. Got it.

Speculatively, I imagine they just make a lot of money off total crap, which people see right through and don't like, and letting people see what their fellow users don't like just hits YT too hard in their already obscenely fat wallet. But that's just a guess, obvi.


I understand that youtube recommendations can be a very useful tool, but I definitely do not want depend on any opaque recommendation system for my daily media consumption or whatever.

Given the existence of "Subscriptions" page I don't really understand the problem. Do you really want to consume regularly from the sources you didn't explicitly "verify" yourself i.e. subscribed to?

I simple use the Unhook browser plugin which hides the Home, Trending, recommendations side bar, comments, etc. for me so I only have the Subscriptions page, and the search bar. Makes the youtube experience SO MUCH better.


>Given the existence of "Subscriptions" page I don't really understand the problem. Do you really want to consume regularly from the sources you didn't explicitly "verify" yourself i.e. subscribed to?

Of course I do! This is often how I find new things that I'm interested in, or just videos that I want to watch that aren't a part of channels I'm already subscribed to.


You can click either of these:

- Not Interested.

- Don't recommend channel.

Also, afaik, the sort of videos you complain about had no reason to be disliked much.


This was how I got rid of those recommendations that OP describes, until one day around two-three months ago when YouTube decided, for some reason, to ignore those actions completely. I had probably hidden well over 5k videos and channels over the years; now they are all back. No idea why. Trying to hide a video or a channel does nothing anymore for me.


This is why I use YT logged out in a browser and NewPipe. NewPipe also has a much better UX with more customization than YT's own app. I also only ever use YT/NewPipe when I'm searching for something specific.

I've never got into YT as an entertainment platform, so I'm probably an outlier. If I'm watching something entertaining on there, it's because it was recommended outside the platform by a friend on social media or chat. I ignore everything recommended by the service. It's trash by default.


My biggest issue is that the comments on these fake videos are always incredibly overly positive. Criticism is being buried to the ground. It's the case on most videos right now.


Those videos all sound like things that would be _very_ popular and if we could see it have a very good like to dislike ratio. They would likely be over 99% like vs dislike. If dislikes were still visible, you'd merely just see that your tastes doesn't match what the masses want.

This stuff does very well. It gets good clicks, good watch times, good engagement (likes and comments). Hence why everyone does it and it is what's most recommended.

It does do terribly with a lot of the subcultures that hang out on Hacker News, but we are small in the grand scheme of things.

A better explanation is they changed The Algorithm to try and promote more stuff that is new to you. A common complaint about The Algorithm last year on HN was it tended to recommend the same small set of videos over and over again. Mostly stuff you have seen multiple times before. This was leading to people getting bored with YouTube and going to Netflix or whatnot.

So instead of that, it is now trying to recommend you new stuff. And it is not finding stuff you'll like. What you listed all has a theme of general science topics. Its probably now trying to push the most popular stuff in that category to keep your recommendations from getting stale. The usually means will take care of it (disliking the videos, clicking don't recommend video/channel).


YouTube removed the "dislike" button and you'll never guess what happened next! :o


Well, isn't this a product of the engagement-/advertisement-/"likes"-driven society online we've moved towards or incentivized thanks to technology?

It doesn't matter that something was downvoted as useless or just plain factually incorrect by a certain number of people. If enough other people found it worth upvoting as entertaining or feel-good enough for the couple minutes of their time, that's more important to the ranking. We just care about generating more views and traffic. Negative sentiment doesn't help traffic, only positive does. No bad vibes allowed. Pointing out factual incorrectness, dishonesty, or logical fallacies, etc. isn't important. No one got rich doing that.

On a more serious note... Any site that has eliminated the downvote count (presumably as it's not "informative" as to how much that content should be presented) and discarding legitimate information about whether that content is good or not, indicates to me that the site isn't worthy of a lot of respect as an arbiter of intellectually honest information.

Then again... if I'm relying on a dumb up/down vote count by the popular masses, how deep can that be as a measure of something's intellectual value?


I don't think it's "thanks to technology". It's thanks to a business mindset that makes everything about money, and a consumer mindset that is trained to get everything for free. The internet before it was commercialised ran on the same technology but had a complete different attitude, and didn't have these problems.


In accounting you sometimes hear that it is near-impossible to liquidate Goodwill, but given the implied increase in (malicious) advertiser spending from this move, I would say that's exactly what's happened. Shame in YouTube for their cavalier attitude.

There needs to be some actual consequences to Google when one of their products is noticeably downgraded like this.

But, alas, there are no worthy competitors. Vimeo is a bad user experience. PeerTube, is not only clunky, but is also tarnished by its facilitation of crypto. All other platforms are too small to seriously compete.

As an aside, I have zero patience for Susan Wojcicki's vision of the platform or for her idea of what constitutes protecting targeted creators. These measures are ineffective at best.

But at worst, they are actively damaging to the people they claim to protect. Disliking plagiaristic, incorrect, or dangerous suggestions is a form of community regulation. Hearing the YT team wax lyrical about the morality of their choice is a sickening display of conscious hypocrisy.

I can only hope that someone with a lot of server space (and, ideally, less of a profit motive) can step in to fill the vacuum.


>But, alas, there are no worthy competitors.

I honestly think Odysee is really good. Not quite as polished as YouTube, but it definitely does the job. It's just missing all the same content creators, but more are joining every day. Rumble is another decent competitors but I find it not quite as competent an option as Odysee.


> PeerTube, is not only clunky, but is also tarnished by its facilitation of crypto.

when Google will hire his new time for Web 3 will you stop using Google services as well?


I have never gone to the YouTube homepage or suggestions (don't even know where that is) to try to find content.

Literally every video play I've ever done on YouTube had been the result of a direct link or me searching for something.

I get that there are people that go to the homepage to see what's there and click stuff but I find it totally unfathomable (not least because who has the time?!).


I'm not sure if it's the dislike button being gone or just more and more brain-dead people passively consuming content. A lot of the videos is other re-hashed online content, but hasn't it been this trajectory for years now though?

It seems like humanity is going mass-illiterate and needs everything in video-format. How video has displaced text is horrific to me. Instead of reading the official docs people browse "How to install..." videos, that are mostly poor and just someone babbling non-sense.

I would never for the life of me look up tech info, error messages etc on Youtube in the first place. But since people look up everything apparently, other people cater to it. A click is a click is a click.

Slightly off-topic maybe: I've blocked most of the interface of Youtube via ublock origin long ago. Youtube's homepage is only a search-bar for me. When looking at videos I see no suggestions, I use the "Enhancer for Youtube" Add-on to disable auto-play, disable comments and auto-expand video descriptions, use "Cookie Auto Delete" Add-on to always clear my cookies when I leave the site and am never logged into the site in the first place.

In case someone doesn't know, you can follow youtube-channels via rss, it's https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

You can find the channel ID by going to a video and then clicking on the channel, channel ID is in the URL. I think it's far superior than subscribing any normal way. Let saving links be handled by the rss reader of your choice.

For search engine results, people here might also want to consider https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter


Imgur is one of the last social media platforms which provides up- and downvotes. They've new owners and first the total counters for both disappeared on comments. Then on posts itself. Now there is only one counter with a calculated difference between up- and downvotes. You need to open a menu on every single post and comment to see the totals and figuring out if a post/comment is controversial.

    Before: +1000 / -600 (What the heck?)
    After:  +400 (Looks good, isn't it?)
Votes are not an elaborate critique but they can provide the posters and viewers a hint. Regarding elaborate critique, it usually hurts and is hard to accept. But I can learn from it! And again, votes are a hint. Regarding Stackoverflow, they did a good thing in limiting upvotes a little (prevents overuse without justification) and downvotes (hurts you're own reputation). This makes me think twice ;)


It's strange to see imgur as the social media platform it has become. I still think of it as Alan's gift to reddit – a simple image host that doesn't suck.

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

I imagine at the beginning of the socialmediaification it was a curious place full of uncategorized paralel discussion to whatever content imgur hosted for redditors.


Click bait has been a problem for way longer than the dislike stats being hidden. Also, the algorithm still takes dislikes into account, and it's still easy to dislike content. The problem is that click bait works and when your average person falls for it, they don't hit the dislike or report buttons, they just click away after watching just slightly more of the video than was necessary to identify it as click bait. As far as the algorithm can tell, they enjoyed most of the video, so it ends up getting recommended. Veritasium has a particularly good video on this exact topic, and the honest solution isn't bringing back the ability to see dislike stats, it's that legitimate videos need to stop using boring thumbnails and video titles. Nobody clicks on them, so regardless of likes/dislikes ratio they will never get promoted.


I dislike the removal of the dislike button.

If you disagree with me (or the OP), and feel like downvoting me, please look in the mirror.


I don't think it has anything to do with the dislike button. The YT algorithm is really bad. It has been doing this for years, and they don't seem to know how to fix it. I regularly receive recommendation that are completely annoying, even after I specifically said that I don't want to see that channel.


These are the types of videos that work well on YouTube unfortunately, the problem is deeper than hidden dislikes, I dislike videos liberally and block channels from being recommended to me constantly but, there is a never ending supply of crap to be recommended because crap performs well. I think the problem is with you - you have watched so many YouTube videos that you can instantly pattern match and see through the bs but YouTube incentivizes these types of videos because it takes a long time for people to realize how trash they are and so they do well, it takes wisdom to realize what a waste of time most content on the platform is.

When I watch YouTube now, I treat it differently, I consciously know that all the content is hot trash and I shouldn’t be watching any of it. I only watch YouTube when I’m exhausted and need to not think and relax.


It is surprising how bad YouTube is at discovering new content. No advanced search, no categories, no labels, nothing. Title and a thumbnail are your only two guides.

Also, long series are hard to keep track of. Like if you want to watch WW2 week by week, you have to manually find and choose the next video in the series.


Whenever I come across a channel with clickbait title or content, I just select "Do not recommend this channel".

For Youtube I go by the 1-strike rule: One clickbait vid, and I block it. I want the consistently good and trustworthy channels to start showing up in my stream/timeline/whatever.


Stop clicking on click-bait, you're doing it to yourself.

Watch only "boring" / serious channels and you won't have that problem. That's what I do and I get great recommendations (tons of numberphile, computerphile, 3blue1brown, pbs space time, finance and economics... stuff like that).


it's true, but it's hard, you only need to click once on a clickbait video out of curiosity and you'll be flooded with garbage until you reset your whole youtube history. I switched to individious/piped and newpipe since for a more quiet youtube experience.


You need to be very aggressive against this, dislike and don't recommend every bit of garbage you see otherwise you will be flooded with it


Hum... Maybe you didn't notice all the frenezy, but you can't dislike something anymore.

I'm not a very active user, but I think there is no positive "don't show me stuff like this again" action you can do anymore.


The public dislike count was removed. Dislikes are still counted and presumably affect recommendation


You need to prune your suggestions by clicking the three-dot menu on the suggested item and "Don't recommend video". I started this last year and after a week my suggestions cleaned up and are absolutely relevant and high quality to my interests.


The like/dislike ratio is a universal indicator. Serious/boring channels are not immune to the side effects of its disappearance. It affects every one across the board. Here comes a 20 minutes video on Dynamic Programming and I have no idea what other people really thought of the teacher's ability to get the point across.


People hate democracy because they hate losing. Eliminating the dislike button doesn't just kill the metric of how many people hated the content, it also kills the invisible metric of (willing) abstentions.

Now that it's gone, youtube can be much freer in how it serves content, because there's no hint to whether something's terrible or not other than watching it. Google can just serve the content that it likes for its own reasons (maybe the content resembles the content it sees itself focusing on in the future, maybe they're just getting more money for the ads.) Their only limit in suggesting shitty content is whether you'll leave the site, and with personalization all they need is a casino slot machine algo to reliably keep you from doing that.

Banning downvotes is like banning shortselling.


Lately youtube seems to think I want to watch a video uploaded 12 years ago on image processing based on non-negative matrix factorization. Probably the first video I ever watched on youtube.

... plus an endless sea of garbage videos with an annoying robot voice reading barely coherent text.

At least they got rid of the conspiracy attractor behavior where if you left it playing it would eventually fall into whacked conspiracy theories and never escape.

Though I did notice recently that it seems to have a meatloaf attractor behavior: if you leave it playing music videos it eventually lands on a meatloaf video and never escapes, sending me like a bat out of hell to trigger it to go to something else.

Don't get me started on all the thumbnails with the weird faces that would leave someone wondering whats really going on under the presenters table.


Sites like these has officially ruined YouTube for us:

https://www.socialwick.com/youtube/dislikes https://viralyft.com/buy-youtube-dislikes https://www.instafollowers.co/buy-youtube-dislikes https://socialnomics.net/2021/02/13/buy-youtube-dislikes/

...and the list goes on. Google 'buy youtube dislikes'


YouTube keeps declining in quality. One of the more random things it does to me is keeps directing me to Richard Wolff videos and I can’t stand that guy… it’s super annoying. If a video ends, it’ll start auto-playing a Richard Wolff video and I have to change it constantly.


I ban a lot of channels from my recommendations and that has cleared it up for me.

Clearly whoever is doing search at YouTube doesn’t know what they’re doing as there are plenty of ways to tell if something is spam. I’m guessing they don’t care.

They do seem to be trying to be more like TickTok.


I'm still convinced that YouTube removed the dislike button because political content related to pro-vaccine propaganda from corporate media sources (sponsored by Pfizer by the way), and specifically the White House's channel, were receiving a flood of dislikes because people genuinely are upset with this administration and the overtly irresponsible corporations they openly embrace (approval ratings at an all time low).

We can't have a user base who largely disapproves of YouTube's propagandist political affiliates interested in unchecked corporate wealth, at the expense of average citizens, as our unelected czars misguide society, now can we?

The removal of dislikes came shortly after Jen Psaki announced that the Biden Administration would be working closely with social media providers to silence what they deem as misinformation (aka control the narratives everyone is exposed to). I believe this includes YouTube, as it's one of the most powerful mediums we have for sharing insight, and for critiquing our elected officials.

That couldn't be the reason they removed the dislike button at all, no, not a bit. Big government good. Big corporation good. Billionaire philanthropy always good, never bad. (eye roll) Need I go on?


I'm not sure the vaccine and covid stuff had a big part in the removal of the dislike button, but I too consider the disappearance of video dislikes to be a specific trait of the Biden era.


If you use uBlock Origin or similar, try to block all images on youtube.com

You become immune to flashy thumbnails and you actually have to read the video title and think twice if you really wanna watch it. If you want to get extra spicy block all of the recommendation on the front page to reduce it to just the logo and the search bar, forcing you to actually think and remember the videos you want to watch.

I have been using youtube like this for the past 3 years and I don't really notice the decline, though I have to admit that the search results are at an all time low - if I don't write the title of the video verbatim I often don't find the video even if it's there.


It's just my layman opinion but I think it has something to do with trying to emulate TikTok.

I don't use youtube very much but this Sunday I discovered a thing called "siren kings" and wanted to watch some videos about them. Hell, now it's all reggaeton, sound battles and the like! But the thing I noticed is that when I entered a particular video, just that one, I entered a TikTok like mode where I could keep skipping from a short crappy video to another in an infinite doomscroll of shit... maybe this is feature exists since some time and I didn't notice it but it kind of strengthens my view that emulating TikTok is their thing now.


> I entered a TikTok like mode where I could keep skipping from a short crappy video to another in an infinite doomscroll of shit

Sounds like you clicked on a "YouTube Short", which will start a TikTok-like view with short videos. These are different than normal videos and as you correctly point out, it is done to emulate TikTok.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Shorts


I don't feel so at all. The quality of YouTube recommendations (and video essays in particular!) for me at least is higher than ever. Absolutely astonishing at times. I am grateful for all the great content the algorithm helped me to discover, be it in the sciences, music, commentary, anything. Time spent on YouTube actually almost never feels wasted. Also I don't care about the disappearance of the dislike count, I don't need it to gauge the quality of a video. Not to say there aren't any problems with the "algorithm", but overall it works really well for me.


For me, the ‘proper’ way to use YouTube is to have two dozen playlists to ‘watch later’. They together have hundreds of videos now, if not in thousands already. What I do is, whenever I see a vid that looks genuinely interesting to me, I put it in one of the playlists—and when I want to watch something, I use the playlists. This way, a) I don't need to rely on the questionable pile that is the front page, and b) I get videos to watch from the recommendations on videos that I already liked. (Though it worked better when the recommendations didn't mirror the front page so much.)


YouTube still has dislikes. They just don't show the count publicly any more.


I don't think that works for newly created videos. You can bring up the count for old videos, but I don't believe you can add new dislikes.


I watch YouTube without logging in. The quality of recommendations I get is pretty good. I would say that I get very different recommendations on different browsers at different times so your mileage may vary.


1. Don't log in. Ever.

2. Search. YT search is ... reasonable. Not great, but it typically turns up what you want.

3. Incognito mode *ONLY*.

4. Invidious, if at all possible.

5. Watch, or more often, listen, through a third-party client. I generally "experience" YouTube via mpv. I'll cue up a list of URLs I'm interested in. This is the most effective and convenient way of curating a playlist I'm aware of. VLC can also play YT video directly. (Both support many, many, many other sites and formats, typically through yt-dlp or youtube-dl).

6. When using the YT client itself, disable comments and suggestions through a CSS manager, or uBlock Origin's "block element" feature.

Benefits:

- No ads

- No idiotic recommendations

- No tracking and pigeonholing

- No comments (excepting Invidious, though that offers the option of YT or Reddit comments should you prefer)


Actually, I HATE youtube search. Any search engine that changes and reorders responses when I click back to it drives me up a wall.

I infrequently use youtube (maybe 2-3 videos a month) and because the search sucks so badly, I never search using youtube, but rather with Kagi or DDG video search.


I'm not going to discuss merits of the mechanics.

What I do know is that I can plug in terms and filters (typically dates / video length) to turn up something relevant most of the time.

Given that most of my searches are for lecture / podcast type material, that tends to work reasonably well for me.

Recent/current major news is of course a shitshow, though it can occasionally be useful. Increasingly I turn to major journalism channels for that information simply because the chumming around no-name submissions is so abysmally bad.


Me too. YouTube recommendations have been seriously bad for about a month now. I get ideos I’ve already watched and all the interesting recommendations don’t show up any more, it’s become completely boring.


I think they should at least make the dislike available for Youtube Premium users. I think if there were another platform offering the same service, I'd totally switch just to have that available.


My primitive first level filter is : Dont open any video if the person in video thumbnail has an open mouth looking to upside as there is a flying cow or a photoshopped larger eye pupil or head


This was not a decision made for usability or technical reasons. Sponsors...and YouTube suites were made that their videos could be brigaded with downvotes because it showed that people were critical of them. YouTube is primarily funded by sponsors since only a small percentage of people have YouTube red and that cost doesn't always cover even their use of the service so much like the adpocolypse if it causes sponsor loss it doesn't get to stay on the platform.


I get a lot of these like subtitled clip videos these days where the subtitles are large and in the middle of the screen for emphasis on what is being said.

They must be generated by an AI or something because the subtitles are almost always subtly wrong, often in ways that indicate the listener didn’t understand the joke or what was being said. Either that or it’s on purpose to generate comments/engagement, because most of the comments are always about how the subtitles are wrong.


Yeah YT is basically ruined, it only serves as video storage now.


This is why a laugh out loud whenever anyone says Google's ML is light years ahead.

The algorithm actually pushes me away from the site.

Unless that's their intention... in which case - amazing work!


I started quickly clicking away from those sorts of videos, and after a while youtube mostly stopped recommending them to me. If there's no human there talking to me, I'm out. If it's a computer-generated voice, I'm out instantly. Also I subscribe liberally to the good ones.

I haven't noticed any particular change in the last few weeks. Now I'm worried Youtube is gradually rolling out a new algorithm and my useful feed is about to be ruined.


I must confess I haven't noticed a huge difference... although that's mostly because I tend to watch from the channels I'm subbed to a not much else.


I think a large part of it is people mindlessly clicking on and watching low-quality, clickbait, garbage content videos, combined with Youtube's algo aggressively assuming it's their new favorite thing and thus flooding their suggestions with that topic. The other issue is that it is possible to tune your suggestions and tell Youtube you're not interested on a suggestion, but people don't know how to do that, or they feel it's too time consuming to weed out the bad suggestions.


My YT frontpage was getting progressively worse. What seems to help me was to "restart the Youtube" - deleting all "not interested" signals I accumulated over years. Also deleting all dislikes too.

Click History on left panel, on the new page that loads, click MANAGE ALL HISTORY on right panel. On the next page, delete dislikes and YouTube "Not interested" feedback.

After that my YT homepage got lot better.


From my experience I think the algorithm gotten a little bit worse, the only drawback of removing dislikes that I am experiencing is that it's getting more difficult for me to realize if a video is just a spam or click-bit, now I need to spend a couple of seconds watching the video, before I used to glance at the dislike numbers, if rating is deactivated or the dislikes are far more than the likes I close the video.


I recently discovered a nice Youtube extension that replaces all thumbnails with a screenshot from somewhere within the video. I feel it gives a better insight into the content of the video compared to the clickbait cover photo they everyone adds now.

I still use YouTube far less than I used to in the past. It's probably a combination of less interesting content being made now and the increasingly egregious ads.


A bit off topic, but has anyone noticed the “watch later” button design constantly changing? It flip flops between being a small circular button in the top right corner, to being a long rectangle button below the video that only shows up if you hover your mouse over the thumbnail. It seems to change randomly, somewhere between every day and both designs co-existing on the same page. It’s bizarre.


After the dislike count is removed, I click it less frequent. If there are many people like me, the recommendation system will be affected.


I have never used the dislike button. Ever. Not too choose which videos to watch, and not to vote on the quality of a video.

I find that the YouTube algorithm seems to work for me in waves. For a month or two it’ll be great, then it’ll suck, then it’ll be great again. Not really sure what drives that (including if it’s just my own biases) but it’s not new.


Every comment I've witnessed on this matter suggests scrapping the dislike ratio was a bad idea.

The YouTube monopoly on general videographic content means I can't go anywhere else. But man, the lack of competition here makes me sad. This was such a blunder.

I wonder how many execs at Google want to reimplement the feature but refuse to because it will dent their ego.


I only ever watch videos from channels I subscribe to, or videos that have come up through search.

I also use the Firefox addon 'Enhancer for Youtube' to automatically hide all chat, recommended videos, info boxes and all that junk. Also disables autoplay.

My time is too precious to spend watching random and sometimes entertaining, yet in the end often useless videos.


... and this is benign compared to the broken compatibility with noscript/basic (x)html browsers (now I use yt-dlp). Such browsers could pass the URL to a media player and the streaming protocol would have an URL-ized way to seek into the video, if not live (I think HLS does define one with a standard time unit, should check though).


The problem with the "Bring dislike counts back" extensions is that this change also triggers a behavior change in users. When your vote is invisible and pointless, much fewer people will "give feedback", and thus change the meaning of the count.

Like when you discover that your downvotes on HN are actually not being counted ;P


Abandon the "home" page. It's dead.

Subscribe to enough creators of your liking that have around 2 or 3 new videos per day (or whatever rate is appropriate for you) and only use the "Subscribed" tab.

If you somehow end up in the home page, you might have lost dislike but you still have "Don't recommend this channel".


It's certainly the case for me that the recommendations are getting significantly worse. I've pretty much hobby trained it so I get a lot less of the quacks than most people, but I think the absence of any incentive to downvote is really messing with their system and they have shot themselves in the foot.


I turned off storing my watch history on youtube and what that means is that my feed and recommendations became terrible. That is a great thing!

I now only spend time watching videos on youtube when I actually want to watch something and search for it and not end up in a wormhole of watching 4 hours of videos back to back to back.


Question: do you generally use YouTube signed out? Asking because this doesn't resemble my experience at all. Just glancing at my YouTube main page I see people to whom I subscribe, other similar channels, and stuff I've watched without subscribing, like machining how-tos and stuff like that.


but the dislike button is still there, and using it still counts towards recommendation model, and they display it to the video creator in youtube studio, they just stopped displaying it to the viewer. so that shouldn't have this effect on your recommendation. or am I missing a link there?


I found a bunch of fascinating old videos by the San Diego Opera recently, as well as a (new to me) niche of custom mechanical keyboard channels, some of which are brilliantly funny.

Youtube is not trying to serve you good content, but it's helpful for finding new things if you vary your media diet a bit.


YouTube has plastered the same 10 video essays across the homepage for almost six months now. I have watched these videos in their entirety. I don't want to watch them again. It feels weird that every time I login to YouTube I just...don't see anything I actually want to watch?


I noticed that “Do not recommend channel” and “Not interested” do actually work if you’re persistent enough. Doesn’t liberate from the regular hassle, but at least something. Maybe dislikes and these features are connected in some way (never liked or disliked any video, can’t tell).


Same here - I am finding a TON more videos that SEEM well produced at the start, but you get halfway in and realize it's a hired voiceover artist reading a script that was either written by GPT-3 or someone not fluent in English, and the information is not correct.


I use the extension Unhook (on Firefox) that allows me to keep a clean YouTube homepage without recommendations, home page, side bars etc. etc. Very useful

Additionally, the extension Return YouTube Dislike is very helpful as well. Take control of your browser, for as long as we can.


I have no reason to believe that hiding the dislike stat had this impact on the algorithm. Why do we think it did (as opposed to some other explanation, like "tuning the algorithm had bad outcomes for 1% of users, and one of them posted a rant on HN?")


The only reason I ever pressed like in YouTube was to bookmark a video - because I could then use the list of everything I liked. Once I found the rate of liked videos getting deleted catastrophic I abandoned the feature and never bother even to sign-in.


Hm nothing has changed recently for me. I still use my old youtube brand account for youtube though may be that helps? I get recommendations on stuff from my subscriptions, similar topics and previous (youtube) searches + a small bit of current affairs.


I can't say I've noticed a big difference, though I usually go to YouTube knowing about what I want to watch.

I've seen so many people suffer in real life from getting sucked down YouTube rabbit holes I try not to rely on their content discovery mechanisms.


Nice man! Move on with your life ;)


The current recommendations and "homepage" is trash. I am getting recommendations for the same videos and cannot browse the content easily. Even if I mark videos that I've seen others "seen" videos constantly pop up.


Agreed. I think dislikes are so important for tutorial / seminar / presentation videos in sieving out the good from the bad. The part about positive comments being upranked is also adversarial for learning.


You might want to use something like https://fraidyc.at to curate a list of subscriptions. You'll see only those and not what Google decides to show you.


It appears to me YouTube does have dislike button. Do you mean you don't give NACK explicitly, and hence experiencing bad recommendations? Or the dislike button is not visible in your version of YouTube ?


YouTube search for anything now recommends me videos that are in my watch later.

Apparently YouTube thinks that when I ask for IncomeTax website walkthrough I must surely be looking for Quarantine Home Workout Routine and Lofi HipHop Radio


I see random stuff about the Johnny Depp divorce trial in my searches for information about rural Russian cities.


Dislikes are so toxic.

I always felt that Reddit would be so much better if you can upvote what you like and simply ignore the rest. Wouldn't that work? The stuff that people like or find quality posts will rise, so logically the rest will be further down. So why do we need a downvote button?

Imho downvote/dislike buttons on social sites simply validates toxic behaviour, as well as those behaviour from people that wouldn't think of themselves as angry or toxic and yet feel like they need to "fix" the world for others... which almost invariably means they have anger they haven't "digested" yet and so they keep seeing it into the world; anywhere but in themselves. And crucially no amount of dislike/downvotes will make the world a better place - all they do is increase polarization.


I suppose it depends on how the dislikes are used. If dislikes are not public info, but feed into the algorithm governing your content feed, that seems to be a very different use than what you are complaining about. (Though, how your complaining is in effect different from a dislike somewhat eludes me.)


No dislikes is only going to help scammers who bot likes in order to deceive people into either buying something or downloading malware. Idk how YouTube leadership thought no dislikes is going to bring any good.


One way to look at it is as an opportunity for someone to come in with a third-party app that gives you a valuable YouTube feed.

Personally I don’t use the YT feed and never have. I just watch videos from channels I subscribe to


Yeah i only watch youtube videos if someone links it to me first off-site. There's always been a lot of garbage on YT, but removing the signal of garbage does not make the garbage go away.


That’s why I like the following better:

* Total vote: 1,320,097 count

* downvotes: 49.6% percentage

instead of separate up and down votes by raw count.

You get a quicker feel for the overall video not only by popularity but by bias.

Oops, did I say bias? I meant “useful bias”.


No dislikes has ruined all social media for me. It's ridiculous you can't express anywhere near your mind with simple reactions in 2022.


This made me think, why couldn’t people join together to make a public like/dislike plugin.

This could be a browser extension that overlays the video etc.


It already exists and is called Return YouTube Dislike


I turned off watch history and my suggested is a lot more accurate oddly enough. Probably because it's actually based on my subs now.


Partial workaround for not having dislikes is to divide the number of views into the likes. 1% is ok, 2% is good, >=3% is a must see.


Weirdly I just opened YouTube on my phone in a browser window (something I don't do very often). And the dislike button was there.


They didn't remove the button. They removed the counter.


I wonder how the “great resignation” affected YouTube’s ranking team? Maybe we’re seeing the effect of some turnover?


I deliberately cast a wide net on YouTube and I'm not coming across all of that sort of junk on a frequent enough basis for it to annoy me. The "algorithm" is pretty good in my book and tends to surface things I would genuinely find interesting, so I'm curious why it isn't for you. Do you use subscriptions a lot? I have over 1000 subs so YouTube really knows what I'm into which might help.


> I'm not coming across all of that sort of junk

If you have 1000 subscriptions, your page must be completely full of junk that you’ll never watch? You can’t possibly be watching 1000 videos per week.


That's not the case, but I don't see your logic either.

There are far more than 1000 YouTube channels putting out good content. Far more than 10,000 perhaps. Why would I subscribe to a junk channel? I subscribe to topics or people I liked. Many put out a video or two a year. Some put out a video or two a day. I end up with perhaps about 100 videos a day to skim through the thumbnails/titles of, watch a handful.. happy days.

I'm confused why you'd think I'd watch every video in the first place. Do you follow every single link on HN or read every single tweet in your timeline? I mean, I don't.. and couldn't.


That's certainly one way to use YouTube. It sounds pretty much like cable TV (but with a very low entry cost for producers).

Very often a channel has a really interesting video that I like, but the other 250 videos are 'junk' to me. Subscribing based on that single video would not give me good quality recommendations at all.

I enjoy discovering new videos, channels and topics, not just watching the same people or staying within a bubble of my own making. That's where a recommendation engine is supposed to shine, not fail miserably as it currently does. I always assumed this is how the majority of people use (used?) the platform.


It sounds pretty much like cable TV (but with a very low entry cost for producers).

Broadly, yes. It's like how I watch TV. Hundreds of channels, I look through, pick things I like, watch them. Or even newspapers/magazines (which I still get) - I skim through and read the articles I like, rather than read the entirety of the thing.

I find on YouTube that having such a wide array of subscriptions tunes the recommendations in pretty well so most of them are up my street.

That's where a recommendation engine is supposed to shine, not fail miserably as it currently does. I always assumed this is how the majority of people use (used?) the platform.

I think it's probably a mix. Twitter might be a good demonstration of the dichotomy in approach. Some people are very noisily in support of seeing every single tweet from everyone they follow in chronological order (which surely only scales up to following 100-200 people), yet the algorithmic feed is the default and keeps Twitter pretty useful if you follow thousands.


I miss the dislike button for one thing - the meta joke of the neutral response video from Futurama.

For years, it was always 50% likes and 50% dislikes. Since the dislike button no longer displays a number, the meta joke no longer displays. Sad days.

You can watch the 5 second video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ


Saw like the exact video in your example - it had 50% downvotes.

I'm using the Return YouTube Dislike addon for Firefox.


You should know that those add-ons (there are dozens of them now) all use their own independent databases... so you're seeing dislikes only from people with the initiative to have stumbled upon and installed that specific extension. Sadly, there is no public backend API that exposes real Youtube dislikes today.


Wait... I still see a "Dislike" button on Youtube. I'm not on often, but I have one now.


The 'Dislike' still exists; people complain that the dislike count was removed. Presumably Youtube still uses dislikes to tune suggestions, but who can be sure? Personally I found the dislike count quite useful.


But you can now scroll through tons of "Shorts" and have great "entertainment"...


You can tell YouTube you're not interested in the video or to explicitly not recommend a channel.


Not without logging in.

"But how would that work if you're not" you ask?

Simple: YT is already tracking cookies or session. The block should apply to the session itself.

That said, I'm so done with Google.


Could you have even disliked without logging in?


Like/dislike is ... less useful, as that's both feedback in terms of "this is what I do / don't care for" and is ... semi-trusted crowdsourced quality information on the content itself.

I can see why YouTube wouldn't want to weight the latter much. It could still of course temporarily track like/dislike over the course of a session.


Small price to pay for evil politics.


its time to launch several "hubs" - alternatives to YT based on PeerTube, dont you think? unfortunately, i don't see that solutions like PeerTube get popularity (maybe I'm wrong). maybe because there is no mobile app client for peertube (or is there?).


The recommendations seem to have gotten much better for me after they removed the dislike button.


There's still a "not interested" selection. Does that not do anything?


Garbage in, garbage out. You feed the recommendation engine with what you watch. I haven't noticed a decline. Like the stuff you like, dislike the stuff you don't, and move on.

> Click baity videos with nice stock footage that is barely relevant and half assed 'answers'.

Stop watching them. Don't waste our time with your failings.


I obviously don't know what is going on at YouTube, but I would suspect - maybe they have stripped out a lot of personalization AI because of needs of keeping personal data separate / GDPR removable thus you now have one big pile of what everyone likes and maybe a couple things you like?

I noticed the things that I can see why they have there for me are distributed across the front page, not sorted first, thus I am scrolling through a bunch of crap they are trying to see if I like, and only a few things they know I like.

Frankly my youtube is polluted not just with what I like but what my wife likes and what my kids like, in fact there really isn't hardly anything I like only some Mark Twain stuff that is definitely being recommended because of something I searched for, which I actually don't even like but just researched for a particular product (Love Mark Twain, not fond of Mark Twain reenactors - and that includes Hal Holbrook [like him fine in other roles, was irritated by Twain])


I have literally never looked at dislikes ever as a measure for quality.


They're helpful when searching for tutorials especially on topics you don't know much about. It's a way to navigate the big mess of unknown to me channels. For example, if I'm looking for a video on how to fix something at home, the downvote ratio can quickly tell me if someone is giving bad advice or just rambling and wasting my time.

For channels I watch regularly downvotes aren't relevant at all.


How often do you check the supposed "bad tutorials" to verify that this assumption is actually true?


Not often, the whole point of this heuristic is to watch as little as possible and still get the information I need. I don't really care about false-negatives unless a very-downvoted video is the only useful video on a topic (which is unlikely). It's just a useful shortcut, not a way to perfectly classify videos.


I looked at the ratio frequently.

My new fave: "NASA makes terrifying discovery..."

Yeah. My experience is similar to the authors. Crap floats right to the top.


You use the heuristics available and it was a fair predictor. Especially for instructional/educational material. I used it the way I use upvotes/time/comments on HN.


This is so true. There is no difference between authenticity now!


WH videos are not disliked anymore so it is working as intended.


Another product that gets worse with every release.


I never, ever look at the recommendations. I go straight to my subscription page. I'm subscribed to hundreds of channels, that's more than enough to watch.


listen almost only music on youtube. it used to recommend only music i liked, specific to the genres i enjoy even, very nice!.

nowadays i get all kinds of crap. Additionally, if i watch a single non-music video now, I get tons and tons of recommended crap different from what i used to, so it kind of feels like the algo is more sensitive now to drop nonsense on u if u accidentally click some youtube url, or watch a video not related to your usual content.

before, it might recommend such a thing once or twice, and then learn again it's not what i like. now i feel like it's constantly just dropping ads on me (sh*t videos of popular channels i don't care about - ADs.) any opportunity it sees. oh, he watched 2 seconds of some video because he clicked a url on his phone... whole front page becomes full of this type of crap... using other sites and apps now to listen music. Asif the 'are you still watching' on a 3 hour musical mix wasn't stupid enough to constantly be asked...

I am pretty sure if you pay them , it will work better and recommend more suitable stuff. Stupid tactic, because now they lose ad revenue rather than gain subscribers - i think a service which provides good service is worth subscribing too, not a service which is 'only-good-when-you-pay-for-it'. - if that's the case, just put the entire thing behind a paywall and own the fact u've become such an entity...


I've noticed no difference at all.


i wrote a tapermonkey script to remove all the recommendations, i search for specific channels


Peertube and Odysee to the rescue!


TikTok is the thing.


if you depend on other people to make your own opinion about a content, then you have a problem

hiding dislikes has no effect on me, because i know how to think and judge something by myself

our society became dumb


Yes


Same here.


The problem is that Google is in the business of making money, not in the business of filtering bad from good content. Their decision to keep negative feedback hidden from both their content-producers and their visitors is quite easily justified from a financial point of view.

First, about protecting content producers: Youtubers who generate content with high viewcounts (and thus generating the largest revenue) are either in the show business (e.g., singers) or individuals who associate their personal identity to their brand (e.g., influencers). The problem with influencers is their psychological profile: the vast majority of them can be described as suffering from general anxiety disorder, depression and chronical attention seeking.

This is a very dangerous cocktail that can easily lead anyone in that profile towards suicidal thoughts as soon as anything negative or critical about their performance or appearance reaches their perception.

These people are cash cows for both Google (Youtube and ads) and all companies that use them as human advertisement platforms. Anyone with good sense would know that they should hide negative feedback from these people and make sure they keep believing that the world loves them. Their revenue depends on it.

You can find a similar models in Twitter and LinkedIn. On both platforms, an increasing number of individuals brag about their recent job accomplishments, and they now even share pictures of any training or education they get. Their user interface will emphasize the fact that you had some likes, reshares/retweets and even send you nudges to encourage you to go on. However, one thing they will never tell you is the number of people who just completely dislike what you do.

Users would be devastated at discovering that most people they actually mark as "friends" or "connections" despise everything they post online, they would feel depressed and probably engage into avoidance behaviors towards virtual social networks. And that would also drive revenue down very rapidly.

Second, about hiding the signal from users. When Youtube hides the number of dislikes, it prevents you from a accessing a crucial quality indicator that will very likely influence whether or not you will click (view) the video. What happens is that you must click the video to know if it's bad, and you will have to click subsequent videos until you find the one that suits your expectations. Two consequences:

- the view count increases --> and thus attracts more people --> more revenue

- you click more videos until you find a satisfying one --> more revenue.

That's it. Hiding negative feedback turns Youtube into a terrible experience for viewers but maximizes both short-term shareholder interests and highly vulnerable content producers.

Enjoy it, or leave it, they know you are a minority :)


Without being able to ratio likes to dislikes, every video on YouTube becomes useless for information value. Every video is now for entertainment only, which is what the communist radical left wants - when there is no truth, then whoever shouts the loudest becomes the voice of truth. They have taken a big step towards ruining the internet.


Ah yes, the communist radical left who famously want large private corporations to enable the people with the most resources to dominate public discourse.

Please stop and think of a testable hypothesis, or actually talk to some of these supposed communist radical leftists, before making any more grand claims like this.


> the communist radical left

Didn't you find any bigger words?

In the end it's about engagement. Without the dislike count you'll have to watch more videos to find the good ones, so there's more chances to show ads, which is good for revenue.

But yeah, communist world conspiracy is more likely.


Not sure about communism, but your reasoning has nothing to do with the official explanation given by YT. The “dislike attacks” they speak of in this blog post were notoriously common on any video featuring a politician from the Democratic Party in the USA. I never saw it happen elsewhere with such consistency. Hope that clears things up.

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-to-youtube/


If any of them all, YouTube knows how to disable content for a single country/region. Just deactivate the like/dislike counter for North America then.

I think those "dislike attacks" are a welcome argument to push a feature nobody is interested in, which mainly drives engagement by making it harder to find a good video and leads to more "clickthroughs".


Really, this was the last straw? Wow.


YouTube is a video hosting site, not a video discovery site. The sooner we all come to terms with that the better.


I hardly see those kinds of videos. You've probably trained algorithm to serve you those.


Unlike other commentors, I personally feel the algorithm has improved.

It has more variety now. Before it used to always recommend me the top 4 ~ 5 channels that I often watch. Now it's recommending me more channels. Although they happen to be channels that have content similar to content I've watched on other channels.

This is a marked improvement on the previous situation.


Guys, ok youtube recommendations suck, they may not always have, I don’t know, but does it really matter that much that you need to share your frustration to a community of thousands of tech people?

It’s just a product. You don’t complain online when your brand new sneakers hurt your feet, do you? Especially if you got them for free…

You don’t like youtube recommendation engine, complain to them, not to us.


So if I'm reading this right, you'd like people to 'stop posting opinions about tech on this site about tech'? How does that work exactly?


You might be missing the point. Dislikes are also feedback to users, the same way you can infer at a quick glance on HN that if a post is 10 hours old, with 30 points, the probability is high that the reward might be low, even if the title appeals to you. YouTube is not just YouTube, it's also a tech juggernaut and thus a UI trend setter. A few months ago they stopped displaying negative feedback to users, a major indicator. They certainly won't discuss with us the result of that experiment, at least when it comes to UX. Telling someone that the topic is not relevant to HN might just be a reflection of your own personal preference on how people should use this community. Also keep in mind that in the past, discussions of that nature stemming from these very threads have at least influenced changes.


It is just a rant about a relevant topic, you don't like rants, ignore them or complain to him directly, not to us ...

And since he or she has a contact in the profile you actually could. But complaining directly to youtube? Haha, good one.


I think it has already been established that best support forum for Google is HN. As they do not read feedback directly shared to them, but lots of Google employees are part of HN and it might reach them :-)


You seemed to be missing the point, as the title states, this is now fully official, it's officially ruined YouTube, it's not a mere rant, it's highly official.


Youtube is an infrastructure that delivers a huge segment of all video content watched today, especially from independent creators.

Youtube is faceless and without a contact process, so posting on a forum where you know Google employees are active seems reasonable to me. As its recommendation system is shaping global culture, shouting in any medium with an ear about it might not be wasted effort.


They pretend to be brain dead, that's all. Look, we are brain dead, go topple us.

Btw. Imagine that your body turns off "feedback sensors" in your hand and you start to grab a glowing iron ingot and notice that your fingers and hand starts to turn into charcoal but you don't feel a thing. You do this repeatedly until you notice that your hand fell off and now can't lift the glass to drink water. How nice, how beautiful this don't criticise bullshit mantra is.

Go s* up even more to big tech, what could go wrong...


I hope you realize that a shadowban will come soon if you keep making nonsense comments like this


Go on. Nonsense? Open your eyes, wide. And witness what is happening...




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