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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works well for me.

The only explanation for getting rid of dislike count that makes sense to me is to make big brands happy as their videos can't be made to look bad with a high dislike count and they can't be "dislike bombed" for things that may be unrelated to the content (eg the recent Activision-Blizzard scandals).

Why? Because in every other way (and every way for the viewer), this makes Youtube worse. So it's a hell of a price to pay to appease big corporate interests. That's why I have such a hard time comprehending this move.

It definitely changes how people use the dislike button since there's no feedback for it. Maybe that too was by design? It's true that people are generally terrible at using dislikes and downvote buttons. Ieally it would be a quality indicator but really it's just used for "I don't like what you're saying", "I don't like you" or "I don't like something about you". And that's probably not a great signal.

Side note: for anyone with such functionality, it would probably greatly improve the overall user experience to identify these low-indicator downvoters and shadowban them. Don't take away the downvote UI. Just make it do absolutely nothing as in it shows them they downvoted / disliked but just don't count it for anything. These people are toxic.

Anyway, I actually hope to see more low-quality generated content on Youtube as it's probably going to be the only thing that causes this decision to be reversed.

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

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

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

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

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

TikTok is the thing.

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

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

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

For many years I thought Youtube content "voting" was helpful for both Google (they get to know what commercial goods and services I might be interested in) and for users (the information could potentially be used for improving video recommendations). As far as I can tell the latter has never been the case; Youtube won't recommend me anything I care to watch, often recommends videos I have watched and disliked, and is utterly unable to identify my interests despite thousands of likes and dislikes.

I figured Google would come to their senses and use this valuable information eventually. When Youtube instead announced that they won't ever care about my preferences for video content I was disappointed but not surprised. Since the voting can now only benefit Google themselves I decided to cease participating. I used a content blocker to hide the likes and buttons to make sure I don't slip up.

I wish I could boycott Youtube entirely but I am not quite ready to leave the platform because it still offers some educational and entertainment content useful to me.

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

Let's all take a moment to reflect on how much worse we (the software developers) have made this by building (essentially automated spam) tools like https://www.synthesia.io/ For example, their "Lays Messi" ad campaign had 650 million video variations available in 8 languages....

I predict that in a year, the majority of internet videos will not only be random stock 4K videos, but they will be overlay-ed with AI avatars gesturing to AI voice synthesis generated off GPT-3 text.

You'll be able to search for any topic and find pretty videos talking about it. But listening to it will rot your brain, because you're hearing the equivalent of lottery numbers.

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

You can click either of these:

- Not Interested.

- Don't recommend channel.

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

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

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

After that my YT homepage got lot better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YouTube is still useful. It's a giant repository of videos that get indexed by search engines.

The way to use it is:

1) know what you want to watch beforehand

2) search using a different engine like DDG

3) use yt-dl to grab the video and watch offline

The mistake would be to "log in" to the actual site, and click on the "recommended" rubbish and all that algorithmic cruft to manipulate, data-mine your soul and mislead you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bookmark your subscription page and accept that your discovery process will have to not rely on YT's algorithms. They are not designed for your expedience. Also turn off auto play.

A big part of their algorithm is keeping you on the site longer. It does this by showing you many low quality suggestions (because most people will sift through and consume them) before getting to the higher quality videos. Then, just before you were about to leave, they show something likely to keep you there. After being rewarded with a good video people often stick around hoping that they'll find another similar quality video. It hardly matters if this is a learned behavior or a hand crafted algorithm.

They are not interested in learning what videos you like. They're interested learning what will keep you there longer. If this is a learned behavior then pretty much the only way to train the algorithm is to tune out more often.

This is not a system that favors quality content. It favors ad views. This is an ad network. Even if you pay to hide the ads, you still get treated this way. Even if you pay for it, content creators still get treated like shit if they don't produce ad friendly content. Ads are the boss, not you.

I have, in my subscription list, creators that I watch 100% of their content without exception going back years. If left to YT suggestions I'll see that content weeks after release. You must use the subscription page to see content in a timely manor. This is demonstratively so.

My subscription page grows pretty much because I'm tipped off about good content from sources off YouTube or callouts/collaborations from creators I follow.

I don't know how much longer we'll have the subscription page since it directly subverts the malgorithm. You may need to rely on an external tool soon. Remember, you're not the boss despite "you" being in the branding.

Also, even good creators are resorting to click bait in a "if you can't beat them" bid. Yes, the algorithm is having a negative impact on quality. There's not much you can do to fix it. The best you can hope to do is side step the permanent problem. Look me up next year before you call my pessimism misplaced.

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

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

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

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

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

[1] for example:

3Blue1Brown

Beyond The Press

CGP Grey

Captain Disillusion

Cody’s Lab

Computerphile

EEVblog

EVNautilus

Electroboom

Engineering with Rosie

Evan and Katelyn

Everyday Astronaut

Half as Interesting

Huygens Optics

Jay Foreman

Kurzgesagt

Lockpicking Lawyer

Louis Rossman

Mark Rober

Matt Parker

NileBlue

NileRed

Numberphile

Periodic Videos

Physics Girl

PolyMatter

Practical Engineering

Real Engineering

Real Science

RealLifeLore

Simone Giertz

Skill Up

SmarterEveryDay

Stand-up Maths

SteveMould

Strange Parts

StuffMadeHere

Summer Rayne Oakes

Technology Connections

Tom Scott

Two Minute Papers

Veritasium

Vihart

Vsauce

Wendover Productions

Yeah also it just so happens that when I scroll through my feed, I pass by videos I have already seen or where I actively decided NOT to watch them beause they were prompted to me already 20 times or so and I still won't click it. It's to the point where I hit the "I dont wanna see this" button on a video because youtube keeps pushing VERY hard to make me see certain videos. Recommendations are trash. I used to find videos I like to watch within seconds but nowadays its just endless repetetive scrolling and nothing of interest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Before: +1000 / -600 (What the heck?)
    After:  +400 (Looks good, isn't it?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a marked improvement on the previous situation.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s why I like the following better:

* Total vote: 1,320,097 count

* downvotes: 49.6% percentage

instead of separate up and down votes by raw count.

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

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

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

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

I use this https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ . But from another comment it looks like these addons use their own database... It has helped me so far.

Apart from this if you want to turn off recommended videos and comments and hide your front page from displaying anything except the search bar, you can use the following filters on ublock origin. I have enabled/disabled according to my needs. I've included the source comment as well if you want to explore more.

I've noticed that I now only search what I need and that helps with my productivity.

  # https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21026069

  # this is for blocking home page thumbnails videos
  youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype='home']

  youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer
  youtube.com##app-drawer
  youtube.com##ytd-item-section-renderer.ytd-comments

  # side hamburger menu all details
  #youtube.com##ytd-guide-renderer

  # side home/subscription etc icons
  youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer

  youtube.com##ytd-topbar-menu-button-renderer
  youtube.com###buttons.ytd-masthead

  # hamburger menu
  #youtube.com##yt-icon-button

  youtube.com##.ytp-endscreen-content

  # https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506515

  #    youtube.com##.ytp-suggestions
  #    youtube.com##.ytp-pause-overlay
  #    youtube.com##.videowall-endscreen
  #    youtube.com###related
  #    youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"]

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

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

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

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

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

Three dot menu button > Don't Recommend Channel

That's all it takes on Android and desktop Firefox browser.

I've been on Youtube since 2006 and never needed to use the Dislike button. Just zap 'em with "Don't Recommend" and you'll never see it again.

I don't think it should be a surprise that as Youtube hired more and more experienced hands from cable and broadcast TV that it would progressively become more and more like TV.

People complain about the manipulative algorithms. But they don't exist in a vacuum, they are the results of some execs deciding to manipulate people. And the way those decisions are made is the same way traditional TV made during all those years.

Then you hire the same execs, to please the same wall street analysts, but now you can use technology to enable the most perverted wet dreams of those TV executives, and you get what you get nowadays on youtube.

It is not different from what the greater web has become once we hired all the advertising people to control and direct our web experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

Sites like these has officially ruined YouTube for us:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

our society became dumb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel like every recommendation engine has tanked in 2022 along with a matching upswing in ads.

Audible is aggressively recommending an audiobook I already bought and listened to, it's even in their "your year so far" list because I listened to it in January. Their 2-for-1, annual, special offer emails are coming 2-3 a week now.

My Facebook timeline is full of crappy "Suggested for you" entries. I doom scrolled last night and counted; I was "suggested" the Dilbert group 10 times. And ads ... so many ads. Ads and suggestions take up 66% of my feed; I get an ad, a suggestion and something from friends or family in equal proportions.

I watched ONE reality TV show on Netflix, The Final Table, and now the Banner show is "Crazy Delicious" and the Top Picks list is entirely reality TV shows on baking, cooking, chocolate sculpting. Where did the sci-fi go? Oh right, my continue watching bar ...

Twitter was CONSTANTLY suggesting/promoting NFT/coin/web3 scams, I've blocked every single one of them. Luckily that dried up very recently ... for some reason. Now my feed is full of promoted ISP ads ... for some reason. As with Facebook, my feed is swamped with ads now.

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

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

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

Banning downvotes is like banning shortselling.

I used the like/dislike ratio to see if something is actually a good video about the topic I'm searching, or should I continue further. For example, if I search "volvo s40 MAF sensor replacement", I won't watch someone ramble 20 minutes about how volvos are good, and why they chose the car in white instead of blue color... I want someone who'll pop the hood and replace the sensor, and those videos will usually have a better like/dislike ratio compared to the random rambling videos. The ratio was the telling thing if a "how to" video was good. I'd rather watch a video that has only 100 likes, but 0 dislikes, than a video that has 1000 likes and 5000 dislikes. But now that's gone, R.I.P.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Same here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've only noticed the difference for a very specific set of technical help videos: how to open an X, how to fix a Y, how to pronounce Z. Now I just have to check the comments.

The YouTube recommendation algorithm also broke globally about 3 weeks ago. Most people have not noticed it yet, but I haven't asked a single person about it who has said that their recommendations are normal. They've suddenly been full of crappy compilations, conspiracy theory videos, and weird clickbait. Please comment if your YouTube recommendations did not go nuts around 3 weeks ago because I'd love to see whether or not this is a worldwide thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nice man! Move on with your life ;)

Another product that gets worse with every release.

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

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

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

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

I agree with everything you said, and so I started reading comments to judge if a video is good. But the comments are always positive, even when the video is terrible! Like, bad tutorial video, unoriginal pop science video, lame interview with a bored celebrity, the comments are still always positive. Once I saw a comment that said something like "This was a really cool video! <url dot-com>" and I realized the algorithm is suppressing negative comments and promoting positive ones based on words used.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The algorithm actually pushes me away from the site.

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

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

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

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

get the extension "BlockTube" and block any channel that does this. after a while your feed will get noticably better.

People are saying not to click but IMO it doesn't work that well. I make a point of never clicking on any video title like that, and still kept getting flooded

My favorite pattern is saying "THIS" and withholding what exactly the video is about - once I saw it used twice in a title and it just cracked me up. It was something like "Do THIS instead of THIS". I wish anyone a couple years from now trying to find a video made in the current times good luck.

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

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

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

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

I can't say I've noticed a difference. That being said 80+% of videos I watch are either from channels I subscribe to or something I've searched for. Also after I started getting more aggressive with using the Not Interested and Don't Recommend Channel buttons to flag videos on my recommendation page I feel it's actually gotten quite a bit better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dislikes are so toxic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It saddens me what will be lost if youtube continues on this route, 99% of the content is garbage, and the 1% good content is hardly monetizable, and there is 0.001% that content creators monetize with some form of sponsorship, but not so much from google's pov

You can see Dirac himself speak (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma7TSAq87lg), Feynman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk), Jung(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs3HK3pxVAY), Minsky, McCarthy, Ellul, Ram Dass, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Terence McKenna and Alan Watts and many many more people who greatly influenced our understanding and way of life

Youtube is quickly turning worse, just as google, with the flood of click baity content, and not only them, look at cnn.com or foxnews.com you will see every single article is with click bait title.

I dont think the issue is in the dislike button, I think they have to up their game to help you navigate the sea of garbage to find some islands of good content.

The reddit rule of 90/9/1% is no longer true (90% of community members are lurkers who read or observe, but don't contribute. 9% of community members edit or respond to content but don't create content of their own) now it seems we are more to 20/30/50% (my intuition), and the tooling and understanding used to decide what content to create and game the system has improved a lot. Like in video games, the way people play videogames now is fundamentally different than 5 years ago, now you are expected to minmax your character, items, gameplay etc because there are so many tools and guides out there to help you, but the same happens with content creation.

Its a different world now, and the algorithms have not caught up yet.

Really, this was the last straw? Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've noticed no difference at all.

Yes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I noticed is how sterile and sanitised the comments are. You don't see any negative comments anymore.

Also if you search you will get random unrelated videos mixed with your results.

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

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

YouTube actually works pretty well for me. Most of the time I get great suggestions and it feels like there's a lot of great content to watch (if only I had the time to actually watch everything).

I don't know the inner workings of YTs algorithms, but I believe it helps that I never watch the low quality drivel and have very focused topics that I subscribe to.

I also don't spend too much time on YouTube so every time I do check it out it seems like there's new content from several high quality channels.

The dislike button was fairly useless in the channels that I visit.

When I seldomly open the "trending" section by mistake, I am usually appalled.

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

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

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.

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

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

I always kept my watch history and search history off.

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

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

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

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

I never even look at my feed.

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

Small price to pay for evil politics.

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

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

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

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

Peertube and Odysee to the rescue!

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

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

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

I've recently heard about this YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar. If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently, you've probably run into him. Because of the "no dislikes" change, he's everywhere now.

And by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now they've probably uploaded a few videos in the past couple minutes. The videos are generated crap, ripped from tech forums. Normally you wouldn't see it anywhere due to dislikes being easy to spot, but now they pop up all the time in search results due to dislikes becoming a sort of "hidden feature".

Hiding dislikes = less people press dislike (no feedback) = low quality videos are much harder to get rid of in search results. It's really, really bad.

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

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

I dislike the removal of the dislike button.

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

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

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

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

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