When you come across some videos on YouTube that are not to your liking, you must press the ‘not interested’ or ‘dislike’ button, right? But, weirdly, these types of videos that you dislike keep coming up to your page. Do you want to know why?
Mozilla researchers examine the data from over 20,000 YouTube viewers to determine the efficacy of “not interested,” “dislike,” “stop recommending channel,” and “remove from watch history” buttons for influencing video suggestions. Turns out, they don’t really do much to help with your preference issue.
More than half of the recommendations identical to the videos to which the viewer responded unfavourably would still be made. In other cases, the buttons wouldn’t even have any effect at all.
Research assistants analyzed data from more than 500 million recommended videos to produce more than 44,000 pairs of videos, each consisting of a “rejected” video and a video that was later recommended by YouTube. After that, researchers either manually evaluated each combination or used machine learning to determine if the suggested video was too similar to the one the user had previously rejected.
However, it was found that the “dislike” and “not interested” labels were only “marginally effective,” blocking 12% and 11% of negative recommendations, respectively. On the other hand, the “don’t recommend channel” and “remove from history” options were marginally more effective, averting 43% and 29% of bad recommendations, respectively.
Elena Hernandez, a spokesperson for YouTube, says that these actions are on purpose because the site doesn’t try to block all content related to a topic. But Hernandez also said the report was wrong because it didn’t take into account how YouTube’s controls work.
In addition, Hernandez says that the way Mozilla defines “similar” doesn’t take into account how YouTube’s recommendation system works. Hernandez says that the “not interested” button gets rid of a certain video, and the “don’t recommend channel” button stops the channel from being suggested in the future. The company says it doesn’t want to stop recommending all content related to a topic, opinion, or speaker.
Source: The Verge
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