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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.

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.

golergka 4y ago
> - 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.
gcatalfamo 4y ago
Is the streamer bro Asmongold, by any chance? I got it recommended out of the blue.
- Bayart 4y ago
  I doubt it. Asmon's demographic is 32 year old kids, not 12.
sph 4y ago
> 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
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  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.
  - ageitgey 4y ago
    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.
    - hnhg 4y ago
      Those also exist in the web app but suffer from the same issues you report.
    - lupire 4y ago
      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.
      - 4y ago
socket0 4y ago
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."
- bambax 4y ago
  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."
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    Mabey they know that the first one you bought is scheduled to stop working soon.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    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!
- mcv 4y ago
  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.
- kilroy123 4y ago
  Yes, so irritating. I don't understand why they do this.
  - fs111 4y ago
    "deep learning"
baisq 4y ago
- 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.
- ageitgey 4y ago
  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.
  - dwighttk 4y ago
    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.
cudder 4y ago
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.
MikePlacid 4y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUpDslHSLbU - just can't resist these girls...
RGamma 4y ago
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.
- robotnikman 4y ago
  Youtube's recommendation system was at its best when it relied on the tag-based system.
bowsamic 4y ago
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
- krapp 4y ago
  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.
  - narrator 4y ago
    The Dead Internet Theory is becoming more and more true all the time.
    - krapp 4y ago
      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.
      - wgd 4y ago
        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.
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      I agree. I think the vast majority of people we speak to online are robots
    - robotnikman 4y ago
devoutsalsa 4y ago
Are you logged in to device, like a Roku or PlayStation, where one of your kids would be watching and/or rating videos?
- ageitgey 4y ago
  It's a good guess, but not in this case. I have a separate account that only I use.
dataengineer56 4y ago
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.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  That's what the Not Interested button is for.
  - smaryjerry 4y ago
    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.
    - ars 4y ago
      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.
      - smaryjerry 4y ago
        I think you assume the algorithm is working where I feel the opposite.
        ars 4y ago
        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.
alpaca128 4y 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.
polote 4y ago
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.
Oddstrider 4y ago
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!
padraigf 4y ago
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.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  Did you put that video in your "watch later" list?
fer 4y ago
> 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.
arbitrage 4y ago
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.
washadjeffmad 4y ago
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.

golergka 4y ago

> - 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.

gcatalfamo 4y ago

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

Bayart 4y ago
I doubt it. Asmon's demographic is 32 year old kids, not 12.

sph 4y ago

> 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

zmgsabst 4y ago
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.
- ageitgey 4y ago
  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.
  - hnhg 4y ago
    Those also exist in the web app but suffer from the same issues you report.
  - lupire 4y ago
    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.
    - 4y ago

socket0 4y ago

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."

bambax 4y ago
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."
- sandworm101 4y ago
  Mabey they know that the first one you bought is scheduled to stop working soon.
- netsharc 4y ago
  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!
mcv 4y ago
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.
kilroy123 4y ago
Yes, so irritating. I don't understand why they do this.
- fs111 4y ago
  "deep learning"

baisq 4y ago

- 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.

ageitgey 4y ago
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.
- dwighttk 4y ago
  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.

cudder 4y ago

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.

MikePlacid 4y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUpDslHSLbU - just can't resist these girls...

RGamma 4y ago

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.

robotnikman 4y ago
Youtube's recommendation system was at its best when it relied on the tag-based system.

bowsamic 4y ago

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

krapp 4y ago
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.
- narrator 4y ago
  The Dead Internet Theory is becoming more and more true all the time.
  - krapp 4y ago
    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.
    - wgd 4y ago
      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.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    I agree. I think the vast majority of people we speak to online are robots
  - robotnikman 4y ago

devoutsalsa 4y ago

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

ageitgey 4y ago
It's a good guess, but not in this case. I have a separate account that only I use.

dataengineer56 4y ago

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.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
That's what the Not Interested button is for.
- smaryjerry 4y ago
  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.
  - ars 4y ago
    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.
    - smaryjerry 4y ago
      I think you assume the algorithm is working where I feel the opposite.
      - ars 4y ago
        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.

alpaca128 4y 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.

polote 4y ago

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.

Oddstrider 4y ago

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!

padraigf 4y ago

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.

jjoonathan 4y ago
Did you put that video in your "watch later" list?

fer 4y ago

> 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.

arbitrage 4y ago

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.

washadjeffmad 4y ago

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.