Gee, A Button Does Not Work? Does It Have Something to Do with Ads?
October 11, 2022
YouTube’s Interactive Rating Buttons Do Not Work
Oh, YouTube! What mistakes will are being made on the video-hosting platform now? According to The Verge, YouTube’s newest changes to its likes and dislikes features do not work: Dislike YouTube runs on a series of complex algorithms that rely on user feedback. The feedback tells the algorithms whether or not a user enjoys suggested content. As the algorithms are supposed to learn what videos users like and curate individualized content.
It is not working.
Mozilla researchers discovered that the YouTube buttons “dislike,” “not interested,” “stop recommending channel,” and “remove from watch history” do not remove the unwanted videos. Users are still plagued with more than half of the videos they do not want to see. Mozilla researchers collected their data with volunteer help:
“Mozilla researchers enlisted volunteers who used the foundation’s RegretsReporter, a browser extension that overlays a general “stop recommending” button to YouTube videos viewed by participants. On the back end, users were randomly assigned a group, so different signals were sent to YouTube each time they clicked the button placed by Mozilla — dislike, not interested, don’t recommend channel, remove from history, and a control group for whom no feedback was sent to the platform.
Using data collected from over 500 million recommended videos, research assistants created over 44,000 pairs of videos — one “rejected” video, plus a video subsequently recommended by YouTube. Researchers then assessed pairs themselves or used machine learning to decide whether the recommendation was too similar to the video a user rejected.”
It turns out that the “dislike” and “not interested” buttons were “marginally effective” at preventing 12% of poor recommendations. The “don’t recommend channel” and “remove from history” buttons were slightly better at 43% and 29% respectively.
Elena Hernandez, a YouTube spokesperson, explained that these buttons are not meant to block all content about a topic. Hernandez criticized the Mozilla team’s report, because it was not taken into consideration that the buttons are designed to not create echo chambers nor how the algorithms work. She did state, however, that YouTube welcomes academic research and that is why YouTube expanded its Data API through the YouTube Researcher Program.
TikTok and Instagram have similar feedback tools and user response is similar to what the Mozilla researchers found out about YouTube. Google, YouTube’s parent company, and the other video platforms are not interested in keeping users happy. They want to keep users engaged and continue clicking on the platform. It is a known Internet fact that when people are upset they are glued to the screen more. Are YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram purposely frustrating users?
Whitney Grace, October 11, 2022
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[…] directly let one decide what content is served up? The YouTube “dislike” feature is but an illusion. A way to specify ‘do not show this video to me again’ would be nice. But that would […]