12 ms·

YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism

133 points by gilad 7y ago

vernie 7y ago
Does YouTube have a "muted words" feature like Twitter does? I'd love to be able to block "Ben Shapiro", "Jordan Peterson" and "destroys".
- danaur 7y ago
  Yes they have approximately that functionality
  - vernie 7y ago
    Is that something that can be explicitly specified or do I need to constantly massage the algorithm by clicking "Not interested"?
- tootahe45 7y ago
  I think it's called not consuming political content.
  - MBCook 7y ago
    I don’t consume ANY political content of any kind on YouTube. Or news. But it still recommends both to me, and I hate it.
  - sosuke 7y ago
    I've never ever click anything on YouTube that isn't something I absolutely enjoy. All of my political YouTube views are in Incognito mode. Works great so far.
  - madrix999 7y ago
    Or they could stop recommending strawman alt-right content when watching anything remotely leftist
  - nostalgk 7y ago
    At least for me, consuming any content related to my hobbies results in political content being recommended to me, even despite my avoidance of political videos in their entirety throughout the lifetime of my YouTube account.
- dang 7y ago
  Would you please not post political flamebait, or any flamebait, to HN? We're trying for better than that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: I'm dismayed to see that you've posted many unsubstantive comments recently. Could you please not do that? As I said, the hope is for this site to be a bit better than internet default. We can't do that if established users don't take care of it.
- switchbak 7y ago
  Hell, I'd even enjoy a filter that analyzes the audio and filters out anything that's below a given (low) bar of sensible discourse. I wonder how hard it would be to categorize the really awful rhetoric? It's very formulaic. Maybe give me a slider like the old SlashDot days so I could fine tune it depending on my mood :)
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  I can understand wanting to hide politics. But JP is such a misrepresented character. He makes motivational content helping guys put their lives back together, nothing inherently bad or political.
- NathanWilliams 7y ago
  Agreed. Each to their own, but I am tired of seeing JP recommended because I watched one Joe Rohan video once. I click not interested on each JP video, but still get recommendations. It is quite frustrating.
izzydata 7y ago
It's crazy to think that clicking on the "not interested in videos from this channel" button previously did not remove videos from that channel in recommendations. I used to press it up to 5 times on the same video and it still did nothing.
- dredds 7y ago
  I click on "not interested" when it shows videos i've watched the day before, but then assuming i don't want to see videos of a similar type would be a mistake, yet that's how broken the system is. Any attempt to "train" the algo is wasted effort based on past experience. You could say we users have been "trained" by the algo not to even bother anymore.
  - PopeDotNinja 7y ago
    My approach is to vote on videos I've watched, and just skip it if I've already seen it. It works for me. I'm concerned that I'd see less relevant content if I start saying I'm not interested in previously watching interesting videos.
    - maest 7y ago
      > I'm concerned that I'd see less relevant content I used to have that concern as well, but then I realised I didn't actually get that much value from yt recommendations. The stuff I want to see comes from channels I'm subscribed to and only very rarely have I discovered something good from recommendations - most of the discovery comes from the right-hand side video column.
      - brownbat 7y ago
        > I didn't actually get that much value from yt recommendations. The last rec engine I got much value out of was early Netflix, around the first public competition to improve their engine. My nightmare is that corporations suddenly realized that recommendation engines don't actually help them sell content. Maybe it's easier to persuade tons of people to watch something they'll all think is "good enough" rather than to identify or develop content some tiny subgroup of people will think is sublime.
dredds 7y ago
There is no way that "3 hours of planes taking off" or "3 hours of rain" are getting 10's of millions of views without getting recommended widely, including myself. 18 hours of "ambient sounds" has 130 million views so that's some heavy promotion, not just some occasional insomniac using search.
- JBReefer 7y ago
  I watch these videos religiously, for what it’s worth.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  Those sort of videos in particular have a very large replay value, as many insomniacs may play that video every night.
  - dredds 7y ago
    Which is kinda my point. The amount of HD traffic and wasted bandwidth is just insane. At what point would YT just acknowledge the same viewer is watching (or listening) the same video over and over and over again before offering a download button? (sure tech ppl can use 3rd-party tool, but all are blocked on Google Play, and most others limited to short vids only)
    - saint_fiasco 7y ago
      Sophisticated ISPs hopefully cache that sort of thing.
      - LgWoodenBadger 7y ago
        How will they cache TLS-protected content?
        cameronbrown 7y ago
        I believe Google like Netflix put boxes in your ISP's DC to cache for them.
wl 7y ago
Is there a way to hide particular channels from search results? There are a handful of channels that post videos I have absolutely no interest in, but they do really well in YouTube's search algorithm.
- numbsafari 7y ago
  This is what I really want ... the ability to blanket block certain channels. I have zero interest in Joe f’ing Rogan... but apparently everyone else in my marketing profile does nothing but watch his videos. No matter what I look for, or what I’m watching, there’s some goddamn Joe Rogan video in my search results or recs.
- bitxbit 7y ago
  Nope but they give you an option to block people from commenting on your non-existent channel which is the most useless feature for 99.9% of the users. I just don’t understand why Youtube refuses to add this very simple feature.
- lake99 7y ago
  There is "Iridium For Youtube" for both Firefox and Chrome. I use it all the time to block junk channels.
bertil 7y ago
I’ve been able to do that for a while. Are they advertising the outcome of an AB test? I’d love to be able to explain why, like I can per video.
- Izkata 7y ago
  Likewise here, for a good year or so, and it has always worked for me.
crb 7y ago
I'd be happy if it would stop recommending I watch videos I have already watched all the way through.
- Jach 7y ago
  Or at least keep it in the "watch again" section. I appreciate it from time-to-time for certain music videos and think "sure, I'll listen to that again".
- izzydata 7y ago
  I'd also appreciate if it went back to recommending videos similar to the current video I was on instead of having the same recommendations on every video now.
  - Lewton 7y ago
    This was the best for discovering new content.... Ah, the good old days
  - cronix 7y ago
    No kidding. You can hit refresh as much as you want and it keeps showing the exact same recommendations. Very annoying, but not nearly as bad as all of the censorship going on, imho.
  - srathi 7y ago
    This change drives me nuts! Earlier, listening to a song brought up similar songs. But now the recommendation list is filled up with old videos that I've already watched and have no relation to the song being played. Why would I want to watch a Paw Patrol cartoon after listening to a sad Bollywood song?
  - r00fus 7y ago
    That's the worse - share a computer (or some google account) with someone? Well you get to see all the stuff YT wants them to see also. YT is useful, but a trainwreck I simply don't allow my family to watch. It even got my Dad (who's aged/infirm) to become paranoid due to the push-to-extreme-content problem. Best way to solve? Remove YT from his TV.
makosdv 7y ago
I just flat out stopped using their recommendations a while ago. I only look at my subscriptions feed.
- switchbak 7y ago
  Maybe I notice it because I use it more now, but it's shocking how bad it's become. I often get a heavy stream of suggestions for: ancient videos, and videos I've already watched. Throw in some clickbait and outrage focused content. Then it seems to try to make me more extreme in some way (flat earther, hardcore gamer, etc) based on perhaps one partial watch of a semi-related video. Surely there's some folks at Google who can see the raging dumpster fire this has become? I realize it's hard given all the competing interests (esp. advertisers), but this is horrendous. As bad as it is, Netflix's suggestions are almost worse. I think these companies are optimizing on metrics that (ostensibly) show an improved experience while in reality they're destroying almost all user enjoyment. Is it really a good thing that I "engage" longer with Netflix/YouTube trying to find something to watch with their terrible suggestions? (vs quickly navigating to a better video?)
  - swebs 7y ago
    >I think these companies are optimizing on metrics that (ostensibly) show an improved experience They're optimizing for highest profits. For Netflix, that means showing you videos with the lowest licensing fees. For Youtube, that means showing videos where the uploader has paid to boost it.
    - cma 7y ago
      I think the uploader doesn't even have to be the one paying now. If I remember right, Coke can pay for someone's positive Coke related video to be shown more and it bypasses the sponsorship disclosure requirements.
  - creato 7y ago
    > Surely there's some folks at Google who can see the raging dumpster fire this has become? I realize it's hard given all the competing interests (esp. advertisers), but this is horrendous. I'm sure bad recommendations are an issue for some people, but for me they aren't that bad. I've found some pretty awesome stuff I probably wouldn't have found otherwise through it, and I'm pretty sure even my worst recommendations are better than what I see opening youtube.com in an incognito window.
creaghpatr 7y ago
Next thing you know, Twitter will let you view tweets in the order they were tweeted.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 7y ago
  It actually does. The desktop website has a permanent setting. Mobile website has the setting, too, but occasionally resets it to Twitter’s “Top tweets” sorting.
  - apricot13 7y ago
    this has never worked for me - might try it again. my solution was just to unfollow 90% of people and put the rest in lists
- sb057 7y ago
  They enabled that in September of last year, actually: https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1041838957896450048 https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/104183895789645004...
microcolonel 7y ago
The main thing I want them to do is not to keep repeatedly showing me the same videos I've already watched. They have little bars under them that show I've watched them all the way through, it shouldn't be that hard.
- Toorkit 7y ago
  Except when it doesn't and you click on it again later only to realize "wait, I watched this."
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  I've seen video thumbnails with that a red bar baked-in to look like I'm halfway done watching them. Brilliant hack. My eye naturally glances at those videos because it usually means I was simply distracted and probably want to resume it.
- bvm 7y ago
  I'm really confused as to why they do this: there must be hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of $s working on the YouTube algo. I'm seemingly in the minority that thinks it's largely brilliant, it regularly uncovers things that are related to stuff that I'm interested in but new takes on them, and sometimes throws up some absolute genius recommendation from nowhere. However, like you, my "Up Next" selection is plagued by videos I've previously watched! It's horrible UX.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    I have two behaviours; TV-program-style videos I'll watch once, and music-style videos I'll watch repeatedly. My theory is they have difficulty telling the difference, so they think the fact I've watched "80s-90s Hip Hop & R&B Playlist" repeatedly indicates I'd also like to watch "Plumbing bottle air vent teardown" repeatedly.
buzzert 7y ago
This doesn’t really solve some of the more concerning things about recommendations, which is the gradual ease into more extreme content. i.e., “super Mario speedrun” to “Top 10 speedrunning fails” to “Super Mario speedrunner gets owned” to “Why women shouldn’t be allowed to play video games” or other such hogwash.
- taneq 7y ago
  Was just talking to a family member recently about this. Her daughter is into horses and so is watching a lot of showjumping videos. Apparently the algorithm keeps trying to lead her off towards increasingly bad showjumping accident videos and from there basically into /r/watchpeopleandhorsesdie
  - swebs 7y ago
    That's not even the worst of it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      Daily reminder that the internet doesn't absolve you of actually parenting your kids, and keeping and eye on what they browse on the internet. This isn't unique to Youtube, there are all sorts of bad places kids can end up if left alone on the web.
      - crooked-v 7y ago
        The point of emphasis in this particular situation, though, is that the recommendations are actively encouraging bad content that the kid wasn't originally looking for.
        malandrew 7y ago
        It can also actively encourage good content that someone wasn't originally looking for. This is one of the things I most love about the internet. XKCD did a good job highlighting this in "The Problem with Wikipedia" https://xkcd.com/214/ https://xkcd.com/214/ The problem we have is determining what is good content and what is bad content and who is the arbiter of what is good or bad. Something you think is bad, might be something someone else thinks is good. These determinations are highly subjective.
swebs 7y ago
So they'll finally stop recommending me Asmongold clips? Hallelujah!
- rgoulter 7y ago
  I bet there are dozens of channels which show up in everyone's recommendations. (E.g. "expert reacts to movie" seems to do well on the algorithm).
arielweisberg 7y ago
I just want to stop seeing an ad that drives my spouse absolutely insane. Nope. No option to not see it anymore.
- petre 7y ago
  Youtube Red probably.
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    Youtube Premium * . (Is there no way to end a line with an escaped asterisk?)
    - dredds 7y ago
      This reminds me the days of free hosting w/ banner ads, then you'd get a whole month of surgical banners. I'm sure YT has good metrics on what level of discomfort will prompt certain folk to go paid.
      - ehsankia 7y ago
        For me it's not about pressure, I run an ad-blocker anyways. Youtube is one of the services I use the most in my every day life, and considering the amount of value I get out of it, giving 10$ back is the least I can do in my mind. I find that many people take online services for granted these days, and don't take a step back to look at how much value these services bring them. I get 50+ hours of entertainment per month out of Youtube, if that's not worth 10$, then I don't know what is.
        a_imho 7y ago
        Besides the protection racket vibes mentioned you are paying Google first and foremost not the actual content creators. I would argue paying for the hosting actually creates the wrong incentives and empowers the platform over the people whose work you enjoy.
serf 7y ago
YouTube recommendations are terrible. Is there some service somewhere that does a better job with YouTube videos? Google has historically been unfriendly towards third party API use, but here's hoping.
- mistermann 7y ago
  I would pay for this service, or for one that lets me manage my playlists with more flexibility.
- jillesvangurp 7y ago
  Agreed, I click through them once in a while when I'm bored and it consists mostly of stuff I've already watched mixed with stuff I have chosen not to watch from channels I follow combined with random crap. The most annoying thing is that it just fills your feed with stuff similar to whatever you recently did. This is made worse by the fact that they only show a handful of recommendations. The only way to get new recommendations is to either wait hours/days for the stupid stuff to go away or to engage with their fiddly "this recommendation was BS" system for getting rid of recommendations. Google news has the same "more of the same shit" masquerading as machine learning style algorithms. On a positive note, I like what e.g. Spotify is doing in some places and I think Youtube can learn from that. They provide some great content discovery mechanisms. Curated playlists, users that listen to artist X also listen to artist Y, these are the top tracks for this artist (based on play statistics), etc. Very useful. Very low tech. Very easy to implement. If only they'd stop confusing geo location with my interests. E.g. their release radar is full of German crap because I happen to live in Germany (I'm actually Dutch). Youtube does the same "you are in Germany! Here's some random German crap!" style promoted content on their front page. Most of it is very obviously not even remotely close to anything I watch. Location seems to drown out recommendation signals and all forms of common sense. It is used to push locally promoted content regardless of the not so subtle hints that I don't ever engage with that (my German sucks; why would I?). There are hundreds of millions of migrants world wide, many of them have spending power and they are ignored and under served by most big tech companies (Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Google, etc.). This is surprising because they actually employ a lot of these migrants: they should know better. Getting content in the right language vs. the local language, localizing promoted content to the local language instead of what the user actually speaks and consumes on their service, etc. It's not hard and it's not because the content isn't there but because the algorithms are optimizing for the local lowest common denominator and most of these companies shoot.
smileypete 7y ago
On Firefox I just use 'Remove Youtube's Suggestions' addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-youtube-s-suggestions/reviews/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-youtub... I'm perfectly capable of finding wanted content on my own, thanks, Youtube! :)
dessant 7y ago
We still get recommended extremist videos on YouTube with no way to opt out, unless we create a Google account. Casual visitors will continue to be exposed to that type of content.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Everything is extremism to somebody. Just because you class what you saw as extremism doesn't mean it's wrong for casual visitors to see it. YouTube already has its own (however capricious) standard for what to hide from recommendations or remove completely.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
xg15 7y ago
To be honest, this looks like a CYA feature to get out, not like something that is actually intended to be used. They took pains to give the "follow the recommendation" action the most frictionless path possible in the UI - just wait and do nothing. In contrast, this new feature to dial back recommendations is a buried in an obscure menu only reachable by clicking a button labeled "..." in a counterintuitive location. I can think of few ways how you could increase the friction any more.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Are you proposing that they don't autoplay anything that you haven't explicitly opted in to? Discovering new creators is pretty important to both Youtube and its users. Or do you want it to autoplay something that's not based on any personalized recommendation? That would reduce the value of Youtube over TV in that it caters to niche interests.
  - xg15 7y ago
    Actually yes, I would propose that you opt-in to Autoplay as a whole. Make it a separate function that people can activate if they want to binge watch or whatever, but keep it off by default. I have seen a good number of people who struggled with the Autoplay mode in presentations, either could not stop it in time or forgot about it and then had their presentation derailed by the next video. I've seen exactly zero people who actually wanted to use it. Of course this is wishful thinking when the CEO's performance metric is to keep their users glued to the screen as long as possible. > The move comes after Susan Wojcicki and other YouTube executives were criticized for being either unable or unwilling to act on internal warnings about extreme and misleading videos because they were too focused on increasing viewing time and other measures of engagement.
likesfood 7y ago
Can we have the liberty of a society with information abundance without personal responsibility and coping mechanisms to deal with questionable information on the fringes? At some point humans need to adapt to information abundance. Historically adaptation to the new and scary required the subject to be immersed in the new context and most likely felt uncomfortable at the moment.
3xblah 7y ago
I thought for a moment they were going to turn off recommendations. For users not signed in, they are on by default. Instead this is like asking users to click thumbs up or down in response to an ad, "Don't show me this ad again" or fill out a survey about the ads. The issue is not that the user is annoyed by a specific toxic video. That is only the effect, not the cause. The issue is that Google's recommendation system is, as they say, "broken". Either fix it to stop promoting "popular" garbage (which is "popular" because it is auto-recommended and auto-played), or turn if off by default. This is another example of an "opt-out" that most users cannot be bothered with. Instead of sane defaults: recommendations off, auto-play off. If Google must force users to interact with a particular video and click something so they can collect another data point, then a more sensible approach would be "opt-in". Let users decide whether they want some recommendations based on a particular video they manually select. "Show me recommendation based on this video" Just more dark patterns. If a choice was one users wanted (recommendations on, auto-play on), then the way to test that is to make them choose it. Instead, Google makes the default choices that benefit Google and requires users to change settings. Often forcing them to sign-in and be tracked in order to change a default setting.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  > Either fix it to stop promoting "popular" garbage (which is "popular" because it is auto-recommended and auto-played), or turn if off by default. Or maybe people like content that you don't? People aren't drones who watch something because it was shovelled into their watch next. Chances are it was decent content. For them. If you consider this a dark pattern then you probably need to get a better perspective. There are far worse actors online.
  - xg15 7y ago
    > People aren't drones who watch something because it was shovelled into their watch next. Actually, in this context, they are. If YouTube were content with people using recommendations as you describe, they could simply keep the sidebar list where you could click on one if you're interested. (or the recommendations that pop up after a video is played, or the home screen or the seemingly half dozen other places they show recommendations) Instead, they implemented Autoplay mode, which basically works exactly like the force-fed drone model you described.
cush 7y ago
One of the things I hate about the current algo is that I get suggestions from freebooters who upload pirated content. Say for example, John Oliver airs at 9pm, by 9:32 his opening monologue is already pirated and at the top of my feed. No matter how much I dislike, report, or ignore these videos, they always pop to the top. I don't view them, and never give them clicks, but because I watch every official John Oliver video, they get recommend to me.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  His videos are region locked so re-uploads are popular in places like my country. Very unfair imo.
  - dredds 7y ago
    The official channel has recently been unblocked in my region, so those pirates must be having the desired result.
    - raxxorrax 7y ago
      Good thing we have pirates then.
Proven 7y ago
I never criticized them - they can run their business however they please. I'm not a customer (i.e. I don't pay) so I have no right to ask for changes. I have always been ignoring YouTube recommendations and will continue to do so. (What I can't ignore is server-side ordering of results, which is a recommendation in itself, so I scroll through a few extra pages of results or use DDG rather than YouTube to search)
Lerc 7y ago
>Users will now be able to tell YouTube to stop suggesting videos from a particular channel by tapping the three-dot menu next to a video on the homepage or Up Next, then choosing “Don’t recommend channel.” By "now" do they mean `eventually`, because I just tried looking for said option with no success.
whywhywhywhy 7y ago
Always found it completely insane that the block function doesn't entirely hide the channel from you.
yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
> While YouTube is introducing the feature now, this kind of tool is pretty common place on other digital services. Spotify Technology SA has a version for artists people don’t want to hear from. Where!? I've been missing this Spotify feature for ages. I do not like Mastodon. I do not want Spotify to ever automatically put on Mastodon. It keeps putting on Mastodon.
graphicsRat 7y ago
As someone with a phobia for snakes I don't appreciate seeing such recommendations in my feed. I have clicked on not interested so many times but another snake video inevitably finds its way into my feed. BTW, how about STOP SHOWING ME GRAMMERLY ADS!!!
thewhitetulip 7y ago
These recommendation engines suck During election month I watched lot of news videos Then my feed was just news Then I unfollowed and said "I want to not see channel x" for every 25 such channels And then I watched standup comedy And now my entire feed is comedy bits I've moved back to watching tv shows/reading books and occasionally watching a specific video on YouTube
- Faark 7y ago
  I have a hard time understanding how youtube can screw this up so badly. Spotify does it nicely. They clearly recognized the few different tastes I have. And then offer separate discovery-queues for each of them and let me decide depending on what mood/situation i'm in. But that might be the main difference... they signal back their knowledge to the user. Steam kind does the same with "Is this game relevant to you?" info. More clearly telling me what youtube thinks about me would be the first step towards correcting it...
  - thewhitetulip 7y ago
    Youtube screws it badly because they think they know better than users.
buzhidao 7y ago
I do some random walks from time to time to uncover hidden content: https://youglish.com/ https://youglish.com/
kantos2 7y ago
This will radicalize leftist even more. Study shows that right people are more open to different opinion. Now leftis would just block "wrongthinkers" and never had their ideology chalennged. GREAT JOB SUSAN.

133 points by gilad 7y ago

Does YouTube have a "muted words" feature like Twitter does? I'd love to be able to block "Ben Shapiro", "Jordan Peterson" and "destroys".

danaur 7y ago
Yes they have approximately that functionality
- vernie 7y ago
  Is that something that can be explicitly specified or do I need to constantly massage the algorithm by clicking "Not interested"?
tootahe45 7y ago
I think it's called not consuming political content.
- MBCook 7y ago
  I don’t consume ANY political content of any kind on YouTube. Or news. But it still recommends both to me, and I hate it.
- sosuke 7y ago
  I've never ever click anything on YouTube that isn't something I absolutely enjoy. All of my political YouTube views are in Incognito mode. Works great so far.
- madrix999 7y ago
  Or they could stop recommending strawman alt-right content when watching anything remotely leftist
- nostalgk 7y ago
  At least for me, consuming any content related to my hobbies results in political content being recommended to me, even despite my avoidance of political videos in their entirety throughout the lifetime of my YouTube account.
dang 7y ago
Would you please not post political flamebait, or any flamebait, to HN? We're trying for better than that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: I'm dismayed to see that you've posted many unsubstantive comments recently. Could you please not do that? As I said, the hope is for this site to be a bit better than internet default. We can't do that if established users don't take care of it.
switchbak 7y ago
Hell, I'd even enjoy a filter that analyzes the audio and filters out anything that's below a given (low) bar of sensible discourse. I wonder how hard it would be to categorize the really awful rhetoric? It's very formulaic. Maybe give me a slider like the old SlashDot days so I could fine tune it depending on my mood :)
cameronbrown 7y ago
I can understand wanting to hide politics. But JP is such a misrepresented character. He makes motivational content helping guys put their lives back together, nothing inherently bad or political.
NathanWilliams 7y ago
Agreed. Each to their own, but I am tired of seeing JP recommended because I watched one Joe Rohan video once. I click not interested on each JP video, but still get recommendations. It is quite frustrating.

izzydata 7y ago

It's crazy to think that clicking on the "not interested in videos from this channel" button previously did not remove videos from that channel in recommendations. I used to press it up to 5 times on the same video and it still did nothing.

dredds 7y ago
I click on "not interested" when it shows videos i've watched the day before, but then assuming i don't want to see videos of a similar type would be a mistake, yet that's how broken the system is. Any attempt to "train" the algo is wasted effort based on past experience. You could say we users have been "trained" by the algo not to even bother anymore.
- PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  My approach is to vote on videos I've watched, and just skip it if I've already seen it. It works for me. I'm concerned that I'd see less relevant content if I start saying I'm not interested in previously watching interesting videos.
  - maest 7y ago
    > I'm concerned that I'd see less relevant content I used to have that concern as well, but then I realised I didn't actually get that much value from yt recommendations. The stuff I want to see comes from channels I'm subscribed to and only very rarely have I discovered something good from recommendations - most of the discovery comes from the right-hand side video column.
    - brownbat 7y ago
      > I didn't actually get that much value from yt recommendations. The last rec engine I got much value out of was early Netflix, around the first public competition to improve their engine. My nightmare is that corporations suddenly realized that recommendation engines don't actually help them sell content. Maybe it's easier to persuade tons of people to watch something they'll all think is "good enough" rather than to identify or develop content some tiny subgroup of people will think is sublime.

dredds 7y ago

There is no way that "3 hours of planes taking off" or "3 hours of rain" are getting 10's of millions of views without getting recommended widely, including myself. 18 hours of "ambient sounds" has 130 million views so that's some heavy promotion, not just some occasional insomniac using search.

JBReefer 7y ago
I watch these videos religiously, for what it’s worth.
darkpuma 7y ago
Those sort of videos in particular have a very large replay value, as many insomniacs may play that video every night.
- dredds 7y ago
  Which is kinda my point. The amount of HD traffic and wasted bandwidth is just insane. At what point would YT just acknowledge the same viewer is watching (or listening) the same video over and over and over again before offering a download button? (sure tech ppl can use 3rd-party tool, but all are blocked on Google Play, and most others limited to short vids only)
  - saint_fiasco 7y ago
    Sophisticated ISPs hopefully cache that sort of thing.
    - LgWoodenBadger 7y ago
      How will they cache TLS-protected content?
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        I believe Google like Netflix put boxes in your ISP's DC to cache for them.

wl 7y ago

Is there a way to hide particular channels from search results? There are a handful of channels that post videos I have absolutely no interest in, but they do really well in YouTube's search algorithm.

numbsafari 7y ago
This is what I really want ... the ability to blanket block certain channels. I have zero interest in Joe f’ing Rogan... but apparently everyone else in my marketing profile does nothing but watch his videos. No matter what I look for, or what I’m watching, there’s some goddamn Joe Rogan video in my search results or recs.
bitxbit 7y ago
Nope but they give you an option to block people from commenting on your non-existent channel which is the most useless feature for 99.9% of the users. I just don’t understand why Youtube refuses to add this very simple feature.
lake99 7y ago
There is "Iridium For Youtube" for both Firefox and Chrome. I use it all the time to block junk channels.

bertil 7y ago

I’ve been able to do that for a while. Are they advertising the outcome of an AB test? I’d love to be able to explain why, like I can per video.

Izkata 7y ago
Likewise here, for a good year or so, and it has always worked for me.

crb 7y ago

I'd be happy if it would stop recommending I watch videos I have already watched all the way through.

Jach 7y ago
Or at least keep it in the "watch again" section. I appreciate it from time-to-time for certain music videos and think "sure, I'll listen to that again".
izzydata 7y ago
I'd also appreciate if it went back to recommending videos similar to the current video I was on instead of having the same recommendations on every video now.
- Lewton 7y ago
  This was the best for discovering new content.... Ah, the good old days
- cronix 7y ago
  No kidding. You can hit refresh as much as you want and it keeps showing the exact same recommendations. Very annoying, but not nearly as bad as all of the censorship going on, imho.
- srathi 7y ago
  This change drives me nuts! Earlier, listening to a song brought up similar songs. But now the recommendation list is filled up with old videos that I've already watched and have no relation to the song being played. Why would I want to watch a Paw Patrol cartoon after listening to a sad Bollywood song?
- r00fus 7y ago
  That's the worse - share a computer (or some google account) with someone? Well you get to see all the stuff YT wants them to see also. YT is useful, but a trainwreck I simply don't allow my family to watch. It even got my Dad (who's aged/infirm) to become paranoid due to the push-to-extreme-content problem. Best way to solve? Remove YT from his TV.

makosdv 7y ago

I just flat out stopped using their recommendations a while ago. I only look at my subscriptions feed.

switchbak 7y ago
Maybe I notice it because I use it more now, but it's shocking how bad it's become. I often get a heavy stream of suggestions for: ancient videos, and videos I've already watched. Throw in some clickbait and outrage focused content. Then it seems to try to make me more extreme in some way (flat earther, hardcore gamer, etc) based on perhaps one partial watch of a semi-related video. Surely there's some folks at Google who can see the raging dumpster fire this has become? I realize it's hard given all the competing interests (esp. advertisers), but this is horrendous. As bad as it is, Netflix's suggestions are almost worse. I think these companies are optimizing on metrics that (ostensibly) show an improved experience while in reality they're destroying almost all user enjoyment. Is it really a good thing that I "engage" longer with Netflix/YouTube trying to find something to watch with their terrible suggestions? (vs quickly navigating to a better video?)
- swebs 7y ago
  >I think these companies are optimizing on metrics that (ostensibly) show an improved experience They're optimizing for highest profits. For Netflix, that means showing you videos with the lowest licensing fees. For Youtube, that means showing videos where the uploader has paid to boost it.
  - cma 7y ago
    I think the uploader doesn't even have to be the one paying now. If I remember right, Coke can pay for someone's positive Coke related video to be shown more and it bypasses the sponsorship disclosure requirements.
- creato 7y ago
  > Surely there's some folks at Google who can see the raging dumpster fire this has become? I realize it's hard given all the competing interests (esp. advertisers), but this is horrendous. I'm sure bad recommendations are an issue for some people, but for me they aren't that bad. I've found some pretty awesome stuff I probably wouldn't have found otherwise through it, and I'm pretty sure even my worst recommendations are better than what I see opening youtube.com in an incognito window.

creaghpatr 7y ago

Next thing you know, Twitter will let you view tweets in the order they were tweeted.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 7y ago
It actually does. The desktop website has a permanent setting. Mobile website has the setting, too, but occasionally resets it to Twitter’s “Top tweets” sorting.
- apricot13 7y ago
  this has never worked for me - might try it again. my solution was just to unfollow 90% of people and put the rest in lists
sb057 7y ago
They enabled that in September of last year, actually: https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1041838957896450048 https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/104183895789645004...

microcolonel 7y ago

The main thing I want them to do is not to keep repeatedly showing me the same videos I've already watched. They have little bars under them that show I've watched them all the way through, it shouldn't be that hard.

Toorkit 7y ago
Except when it doesn't and you click on it again later only to realize "wait, I watched this."
hombre_fatal 7y ago
I've seen video thumbnails with that a red bar baked-in to look like I'm halfway done watching them. Brilliant hack. My eye naturally glances at those videos because it usually means I was simply distracted and probably want to resume it.
bvm 7y ago
I'm really confused as to why they do this: there must be hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of $s working on the YouTube algo. I'm seemingly in the minority that thinks it's largely brilliant, it regularly uncovers things that are related to stuff that I'm interested in but new takes on them, and sometimes throws up some absolute genius recommendation from nowhere. However, like you, my "Up Next" selection is plagued by videos I've previously watched! It's horrible UX.
- michaelt 7y ago
  I have two behaviours; TV-program-style videos I'll watch once, and music-style videos I'll watch repeatedly. My theory is they have difficulty telling the difference, so they think the fact I've watched "80s-90s Hip Hop & R&B Playlist" repeatedly indicates I'd also like to watch "Plumbing bottle air vent teardown" repeatedly.

buzzert 7y ago

This doesn’t really solve some of the more concerning things about recommendations, which is the gradual ease into more extreme content. i.e., “super Mario speedrun” to “Top 10 speedrunning fails” to “Super Mario speedrunner gets owned” to “Why women shouldn’t be allowed to play video games” or other such hogwash.

taneq 7y ago
Was just talking to a family member recently about this. Her daughter is into horses and so is watching a lot of showjumping videos. Apparently the algorithm keeps trying to lead her off towards increasingly bad showjumping accident videos and from there basically into /r/watchpeopleandhorsesdie
- swebs 7y ago
  That's not even the worst of it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    Daily reminder that the internet doesn't absolve you of actually parenting your kids, and keeping and eye on what they browse on the internet. This isn't unique to Youtube, there are all sorts of bad places kids can end up if left alone on the web.
    - crooked-v 7y ago
      The point of emphasis in this particular situation, though, is that the recommendations are actively encouraging bad content that the kid wasn't originally looking for.
      - malandrew 7y ago
        It can also actively encourage good content that someone wasn't originally looking for. This is one of the things I most love about the internet. XKCD did a good job highlighting this in "The Problem with Wikipedia" https://xkcd.com/214/ https://xkcd.com/214/ The problem we have is determining what is good content and what is bad content and who is the arbiter of what is good or bad. Something you think is bad, might be something someone else thinks is good. These determinations are highly subjective.

swebs 7y ago

So they'll finally stop recommending me Asmongold clips? Hallelujah!

rgoulter 7y ago
I bet there are dozens of channels which show up in everyone's recommendations. (E.g. "expert reacts to movie" seems to do well on the algorithm).

arielweisberg 7y ago

I just want to stop seeing an ad that drives my spouse absolutely insane. Nope. No option to not see it anymore.

petre 7y ago
Youtube Red probably.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Youtube Premium * . (Is there no way to end a line with an escaped asterisk?)
  - dredds 7y ago
    This reminds me the days of free hosting w/ banner ads, then you'd get a whole month of surgical banners. I'm sure YT has good metrics on what level of discomfort will prompt certain folk to go paid.
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      For me it's not about pressure, I run an ad-blocker anyways. Youtube is one of the services I use the most in my every day life, and considering the amount of value I get out of it, giving 10$ back is the least I can do in my mind. I find that many people take online services for granted these days, and don't take a step back to look at how much value these services bring them. I get 50+ hours of entertainment per month out of Youtube, if that's not worth 10$, then I don't know what is.
      - a_imho 7y ago
        Besides the protection racket vibes mentioned you are paying Google first and foremost not the actual content creators. I would argue paying for the hosting actually creates the wrong incentives and empowers the platform over the people whose work you enjoy.

serf 7y ago

YouTube recommendations are terrible. Is there some service somewhere that does a better job with YouTube videos? Google has historically been unfriendly towards third party API use, but here's hoping.

mistermann 7y ago
I would pay for this service, or for one that lets me manage my playlists with more flexibility.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
Agreed, I click through them once in a while when I'm bored and it consists mostly of stuff I've already watched mixed with stuff I have chosen not to watch from channels I follow combined with random crap. The most annoying thing is that it just fills your feed with stuff similar to whatever you recently did. This is made worse by the fact that they only show a handful of recommendations. The only way to get new recommendations is to either wait hours/days for the stupid stuff to go away or to engage with their fiddly "this recommendation was BS" system for getting rid of recommendations. Google news has the same "more of the same shit" masquerading as machine learning style algorithms. On a positive note, I like what e.g. Spotify is doing in some places and I think Youtube can learn from that. They provide some great content discovery mechanisms. Curated playlists, users that listen to artist X also listen to artist Y, these are the top tracks for this artist (based on play statistics), etc. Very useful. Very low tech. Very easy to implement. If only they'd stop confusing geo location with my interests. E.g. their release radar is full of German crap because I happen to live in Germany (I'm actually Dutch). Youtube does the same "you are in Germany! Here's some random German crap!" style promoted content on their front page. Most of it is very obviously not even remotely close to anything I watch. Location seems to drown out recommendation signals and all forms of common sense. It is used to push locally promoted content regardless of the not so subtle hints that I don't ever engage with that (my German sucks; why would I?). There are hundreds of millions of migrants world wide, many of them have spending power and they are ignored and under served by most big tech companies (Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Google, etc.). This is surprising because they actually employ a lot of these migrants: they should know better. Getting content in the right language vs. the local language, localizing promoted content to the local language instead of what the user actually speaks and consumes on their service, etc. It's not hard and it's not because the content isn't there but because the algorithms are optimizing for the local lowest common denominator and most of these companies shoot.

smileypete 7y ago

On Firefox I just use 'Remove Youtube's Suggestions' addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-youtube-s-suggestions/reviews/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-youtub... I'm perfectly capable of finding wanted content on my own, thanks, Youtube! :)

dessant 7y ago

We still get recommended extremist videos on YouTube with no way to opt out, unless we create a Google account. Casual visitors will continue to be exposed to that type of content.

lopmotr 7y ago
Everything is extremism to somebody. Just because you class what you saw as extremism doesn't mean it's wrong for casual visitors to see it. YouTube already has its own (however capricious) standard for what to hide from recommendations or remove completely.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

xg15 7y ago

To be honest, this looks like a CYA feature to get out, not like something that is actually intended to be used. They took pains to give the "follow the recommendation" action the most frictionless path possible in the UI - just wait and do nothing. In contrast, this new feature to dial back recommendations is a buried in an obscure menu only reachable by clicking a button labeled "..." in a counterintuitive location. I can think of few ways how you could increase the friction any more.

lopmotr 7y ago
Are you proposing that they don't autoplay anything that you haven't explicitly opted in to? Discovering new creators is pretty important to both Youtube and its users. Or do you want it to autoplay something that's not based on any personalized recommendation? That would reduce the value of Youtube over TV in that it caters to niche interests.
- xg15 7y ago
  Actually yes, I would propose that you opt-in to Autoplay as a whole. Make it a separate function that people can activate if they want to binge watch or whatever, but keep it off by default. I have seen a good number of people who struggled with the Autoplay mode in presentations, either could not stop it in time or forgot about it and then had their presentation derailed by the next video. I've seen exactly zero people who actually wanted to use it. Of course this is wishful thinking when the CEO's performance metric is to keep their users glued to the screen as long as possible. > The move comes after Susan Wojcicki and other YouTube executives were criticized for being either unable or unwilling to act on internal warnings about extreme and misleading videos because they were too focused on increasing viewing time and other measures of engagement.

likesfood 7y ago

Can we have the liberty of a society with information abundance without personal responsibility and coping mechanisms to deal with questionable information on the fringes? At some point humans need to adapt to information abundance. Historically adaptation to the new and scary required the subject to be immersed in the new context and most likely felt uncomfortable at the moment.

3xblah 7y ago

I thought for a moment they were going to turn off recommendations. For users not signed in, they are on by default. Instead this is like asking users to click thumbs up or down in response to an ad, "Don't show me this ad again" or fill out a survey about the ads. The issue is not that the user is annoyed by a specific toxic video. That is only the effect, not the cause. The issue is that Google's recommendation system is, as they say, "broken". Either fix it to stop promoting "popular" garbage (which is "popular" because it is auto-recommended and auto-played), or turn if off by default. This is another example of an "opt-out" that most users cannot be bothered with. Instead of sane defaults: recommendations off, auto-play off. If Google must force users to interact with a particular video and click something so they can collect another data point, then a more sensible approach would be "opt-in". Let users decide whether they want some recommendations based on a particular video they manually select. "Show me recommendation based on this video" Just more dark patterns. If a choice was one users wanted (recommendations on, auto-play on), then the way to test that is to make them choose it. Instead, Google makes the default choices that benefit Google and requires users to change settings. Often forcing them to sign-in and be tracked in order to change a default setting.

cameronbrown 7y ago
> Either fix it to stop promoting "popular" garbage (which is "popular" because it is auto-recommended and auto-played), or turn if off by default. Or maybe people like content that you don't? People aren't drones who watch something because it was shovelled into their watch next. Chances are it was decent content. For them. If you consider this a dark pattern then you probably need to get a better perspective. There are far worse actors online.
- xg15 7y ago
  > People aren't drones who watch something because it was shovelled into their watch next. Actually, in this context, they are. If YouTube were content with people using recommendations as you describe, they could simply keep the sidebar list where you could click on one if you're interested. (or the recommendations that pop up after a video is played, or the home screen or the seemingly half dozen other places they show recommendations) Instead, they implemented Autoplay mode, which basically works exactly like the force-fed drone model you described.

cush 7y ago

One of the things I hate about the current algo is that I get suggestions from freebooters who upload pirated content. Say for example, John Oliver airs at 9pm, by 9:32 his opening monologue is already pirated and at the top of my feed. No matter how much I dislike, report, or ignore these videos, they always pop to the top. I don't view them, and never give them clicks, but because I watch every official John Oliver video, they get recommend to me.

cameronbrown 7y ago
His videos are region locked so re-uploads are popular in places like my country. Very unfair imo.
- dredds 7y ago
  The official channel has recently been unblocked in my region, so those pirates must be having the desired result.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    Good thing we have pirates then.

Proven 7y ago

I never criticized them - they can run their business however they please. I'm not a customer (i.e. I don't pay) so I have no right to ask for changes. I have always been ignoring YouTube recommendations and will continue to do so. (What I can't ignore is server-side ordering of results, which is a recommendation in itself, so I scroll through a few extra pages of results or use DDG rather than YouTube to search)

Lerc 7y ago

>Users will now be able to tell YouTube to stop suggesting videos from a particular channel by tapping the three-dot menu next to a video on the homepage or Up Next, then choosing “Don’t recommend channel.” By "now" do they mean `eventually`, because I just tried looking for said option with no success.

whywhywhywhy 7y ago

Always found it completely insane that the block function doesn't entirely hide the channel from you.

yakshaving_jgt 7y ago

> While YouTube is introducing the feature now, this kind of tool is pretty common place on other digital services. Spotify Technology SA has a version for artists people don’t want to hear from. Where!? I've been missing this Spotify feature for ages. I do not like Mastodon. I do not want Spotify to ever automatically put on Mastodon. It keeps putting on Mastodon.

graphicsRat 7y ago

As someone with a phobia for snakes I don't appreciate seeing such recommendations in my feed. I have clicked on not interested so many times but another snake video inevitably finds its way into my feed. BTW, how about STOP SHOWING ME GRAMMERLY ADS!!!

thewhitetulip 7y ago

These recommendation engines suck During election month I watched lot of news videos Then my feed was just news Then I unfollowed and said "I want to not see channel x" for every 25 such channels And then I watched standup comedy And now my entire feed is comedy bits I've moved back to watching tv shows/reading books and occasionally watching a specific video on YouTube

Faark 7y ago
I have a hard time understanding how youtube can screw this up so badly. Spotify does it nicely. They clearly recognized the few different tastes I have. And then offer separate discovery-queues for each of them and let me decide depending on what mood/situation i'm in. But that might be the main difference... they signal back their knowledge to the user. Steam kind does the same with "Is this game relevant to you?" info. More clearly telling me what youtube thinks about me would be the first step towards correcting it...
- thewhitetulip 7y ago
  Youtube screws it badly because they think they know better than users.

buzhidao 7y ago

I do some random walks from time to time to uncover hidden content: https://youglish.com/ https://youglish.com/

kantos2 7y ago

This will radicalize leftist even more. Study shows that right people are more open to different opinion. Now leftis would just block "wrongthinkers" and never had their ideology chalennged. GREAT JOB SUSAN.