> Youtube has one of the worst user experiences out there
A bold statement, considering it’s the #1 video website in the world.
(Sub-quoted text)
> The ads are incessant, the up next related videos are horrible inaccurate, autoplay is a major pain, and for the last time NO I don’t want to sign up for youtube premium
The author doesn’t want ads but then doesn’t want to pay anything? How would anyone expect a video site to stream 4K video for free then?
YouTube Premium is a product I wish existed for many other social media sites like Facebook. It’s really an excellent option for heavy YouTube users (and includes a music service) and the author shouldn’t dismiss it.
Autoplay can be easily turned off in settings, that’s like YouTube 101.
Relevant videos are often quite within the wheelhouse of your history. And you don’t have to watch them, turn off autoplay and use your subscriptions tab or just search for what you want. They’re recommendations not mandatory entertainment.
> One part that really stands out is how bad is recommendation engine is, and one of the main reasons is so bad is that is the user cannot chose what their recommendations are based on
Yeah and? Is this a problem? Can you choose what’s in a newspaper or what comes back when you type something in a search engine?
Smashing the dislike button is not really a solution and it’s no wonder that YouTube is ignoring that input. The author watched the entire video to the end perhaps even in full screen and then hit dislike, YouTube’s algorithm actually knows they’re just lying because they have that information about your browser behavior.
> The author doesn’t want ads but then doesn’t want to pay anything? How would anyone expect a video site to stream 4K video for free then?
This, I think, speaks to the true tragedy of our freemium internet culture: users expect all services to be free of cost, free of nuisance, and heavily moderated and curated.
Google and Facebook have come to dominate because they offer the best, or least worse, offerings in this regard; and their monopolistic role and ability to run services at a heavy loss has prevented meaningful competition.
> Yeah and? Is this a problem? Can you choose what’s in a newspaper or what comes back when you type something in a search engine?
Isn't YouTube, with all their analytical data, supposed to be smarter and more tailored for me than a fucking print newspaper? Is that really where the bar is?
> Smashing the dislike button is not really a solution and it’s no wonder that YouTube is ignoring that input. The author watched the entire video to the end perhaps even in full screen and then hit dislike, YouTube’s algorithm actually knows they’re just lying because they have that information about your browser behavior.
Second, if I watch a video, and choose to thumb it down, who are they to assume I actually want to watch more of that content, when I've specifically said I don't. This is just another case of a company thinking they're smarter than the users of the product.
> Yeah and? Is this a problem? Can you choose what’s in a newspaper or what comes back when you type something in a search engine?
Isn't YouTube, with all their analytical data, supposed to be smarter and more tailored for me than a print newspaper? Is that really where the bar is?
> Smashing the dislike button is not really a solution and it’s no wonder that YouTube is ignoring that input. The author watched the entire video to the end perhaps even in full screen and then hit dislike, YouTube’s algorithm actually knows they’re just lying because they have that information about your browser behavior.
If I watch a video, and choose to thumb it down, who are they to assume I actually want to watch more of that content, when I've specifically said I don't. This is just another case of a company thinking they're smarter than the users of the product.
> The author doesn’t want ads but then doesn’t want to pay anything? How would anyone expect a video site to stream 4K video for free then?
I guess I expected free/cheap hosting to scale enough for video by now. Little geocities sites used to only have a a banner ad and many others had free web hosting with their ISP or purchased some web space. We never evolved a video equivalent of this, probably mostly because youtube exists and could take billions in losses for years. There are distributed alternatives but I don't think any of them are quite like cgi-bin for video.
Streaming video is freakin' expensive. You have to pay upfront to transcode the video into many formats and bitrates, or pay more per stream to do it in real-time. Also pay for storage for all the video formats, and video takes a ton of bandwidth when you're paying by the gigabyte. (You could maybe run a video site with the quality and device-compatibility of a early-90's video site for free.)
> A bold statement, considering it’s the #1 video website in the world.
Have you considered is the #1 number in the world despite its UI not thanks to it? Maybe more to do with the net effect of people uploading videos since 2006 more than being the best out of the competition.
>Yeah and? Is this a problem? Can you choose what’s in a newspaper or what comes back when you type something in a search engine?
Comparing a digital personalized experience like twitter/fb/yt offers with a newspaper may be not that apt.
Youtube and Google Now have turned into weird "interest-related" ghettos. I've completely stopped using Google Now and I only use Youtube via direct link (how does the most popular video platform have by far the worst discoverability? Would it kill them to add categorization and browsability?)
A good example: I liked "Azealia Banks - 212" on Youtube. Then, I got some random article about some crazy thing she did on Google Now and clicked. Now, there's some article about her in my feed literally every single day. I see how it happens, but it's annoying and makes me hate the product.
Exactly, this article was born when I searched for one video about dumbell exercising and clicked one single video, since then I have clicked more than 50 "I'm not interested" and "Don't recommend from this channel" but YouTube still recommends a lot of exercising videos despite only have seen a single one, the tastes extrapolation YT does is just plain ridiculous and if this is the best "machine learning" at google can do its extremely disappointing.
Years ago I once watched 7 minutes of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on Netflix.
The last time I had Netflix it was still telling me that because I watched Sky Captain, it is recommending a bunch of stuff (that is similar to Sky Captain).
All I can think is, how about we pretend that never happened?
So, this isn't a problem unique to YouTube. This is a problem everywhere the computers are left to make recommendations for me.
I disagree, like many here I'm a programmer and is not that hard to fix this issue so I don't think computers here are to blame, is just managers making really bad choices about how recommendations should work.
> navigating the web remembering to click “dislike” on every video I don’t want recommendations from is hard, so I’m using this post to beg for someone at Alphabet/YouTube to give us viewers (prosumers?) a quick and easy way to undo what videos recommendations are base on, as shown in this little video I made:
(emphasis added)
I think the word "prosumer" encapsulates why she's wrong. Wikipedia defines it as
> This increase in participation has flourished following the increasing popularity of Web 2.0 technologies, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. This rise in user participation blurs the line between production and consumption activities, with the consumer becoming a prosumer.
This is wrong. Youtube is producing a product which she uses. The fact that she decides to give YouTube videos for internet points doesn't make her some special new category of economic actor that deserves special "pro" rights if she'll watch YouTube ads and give them videos irregardless.
So, this is strange. I've thought for a decade that the "pro" in "prosumer" came from "professional". I.e. they're people who want to buy industrial grade equipment for hobby use. I've never before seen it be used in a context where the root is obviously "producer" instead. But the Wikipedia article doesn't seem to even acknowledge the first definition.
It is weird. At first I thought she meant the same, and was going to say that calling yourself a pro consumer is silly if you aren't paying money. Dictionary built into Bing (accessed via Cortana) gave me the same definition you had. I'm not sure if the Wikipedia article is particularly good or up to date; it uses the term Web 2.0 seriously.
To me, the problem is how easy Youtube will increase your engagement with channels/topics and how difficult they make it to decrease engagement. The "not interested" dialogue is under the three dot menu, but "watch later" and add to playlist are immediately available when you are highlighting the video. On that same topic, when you watch one video on some one-off issue e.g. fixing a car issue, home improvement, YouTube will keep showing similar videos
The YouTube ui is a masterpiece of ui achievement when compared to the YouTube tv ui, including the awful recommendation engine and even including YouTube comments. At least it plays the video you click on. Can't say that much for YouTube tv and it costs an arm and a leg every month. Expecting Google to fix or create a decent ui or app experience even when it is in everyone's best interests is ridiculous. Now if only there was a place to watch the tennis channel on some service that plays the video I click on rather than the video it feels like playing, if it feels like playing at all, it would be wonderful. I'm certainly not naive enough to think Google will fix things, however, even if I pay them thousands of dollars, let alone if I'm not paying for their service. The author should be thankful YouTube works at all. Google doesn't give a fuck about their opinion. They don't give a fuck about their paid customers' opinion.
I always assumed that removing a video from your history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history meant you wouldn't get recommendations from it. I don't have proof of that though.
i don't have a google account, and i watch youtube mostly in private mode. that resets the recommendations every time. very useful when i want to watch a specific topic and not get distracted by recommendations for stuff i watched before.
firefox multi-account-tab-containers is another way to create separate "identities" that get a different set of recommendations each.
A lot of the times I don't only want YT to know that I'm not interested in this channel, but not interested in anything related to that one specific video YT used to guess that I wanted such videos on my recommendations.
> Youtube has one of the worst user experiences out there
A bold statement, considering it’s the #1 video website in the world.
(Sub-quoted text)
> The ads are incessant, the up next related videos are horrible inaccurate, autoplay is a major pain, and for the last time NO I don’t want to sign up for youtube premium
The author doesn’t want ads but then doesn’t want to pay anything? How would anyone expect a video site to stream 4K video for free then?
YouTube Premium is a product I wish existed for many other social media sites like Facebook. It’s really an excellent option for heavy YouTube users (and includes a music service) and the author shouldn’t dismiss it.
Autoplay can be easily turned off in settings, that’s like YouTube 101.
Relevant videos are often quite within the wheelhouse of your history. And you don’t have to watch them, turn off autoplay and use your subscriptions tab or just search for what you want. They’re recommendations not mandatory entertainment.
> One part that really stands out is how bad is recommendation engine is, and one of the main reasons is so bad is that is the user cannot chose what their recommendations are based on
Yeah and? Is this a problem? Can you choose what’s in a newspaper or what comes back when you type something in a search engine?
Smashing the dislike button is not really a solution and it’s no wonder that YouTube is ignoring that input. The author watched the entire video to the end perhaps even in full screen and then hit dislike, YouTube’s algorithm actually knows they’re just lying because they have that information about your browser behavior.