Clicking 'Dislike' On YouTube Doesn't Really Change Your Suggestions, Study Finds

If you use YouTube's "dislike" and "not interested" buttons often in hopes of getting the right content to reach you, you might be wasting your time, a new study has found. Turns out, user recommendations remain unchanged even after you tell YouTube that you don't wish to see certain type of content again.

A new study by Mozilla used video recommendations data from over 20,000 YouTube users to find that options such as "not interested," "dislike," "stop recommending channel," and "remove from watch history" are pretty much ineffective in removing similar content from your future recommendations.

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Why YouTube keeps showing irrelevant videos

At their best performance, these buttons allow over half of the recommendations that are similar to the older videos to seep in. At their worst performance, the buttons did nothing to filter out unwanted content.

Researchers at Mozilla collected data from real videos and users through its tool called "RegretsReporter," a browser extension that worked as a "stop recommending" button for YouTube videos.

Also read: A YouTuber Turned His Toilet Into A Gaming PC To Elevate The Pooping Experience

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The data led to 44,000 pairs of videos, a "rejected" video, and a video recommended by YouTube later on, all of which were created from data collected from 500 million recommended videos. Then, machine learning was used to ascertain whether the recommendations were similar to the "rejected" video.

Turns out, "dislike" and "not interested" buttons were only "marginally effective" at limiting irrelevant recommendations - at 12% and 11% respectively. "Don't recommend channel" and "remove from history" worked more effectively - removing 43% and 29% of bad recommendations respectively.

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"YouTube should respect the feedback users share about their experience, treating them as meaningful signals about how people want to spend their time on the platform," researchers write.

A YouTube spokesperson told The Verge that that the report fails to account for YouTube's controls are designed.

What do you think about YouTube's recommendations? Let us know in the comments below. For more in the world of technology and science, keep reading Indiatimes.com.

References

Sato, M. (2022, September 20). YouTube¡¯s ¡®dislike¡¯ and ¡®not interested¡¯ buttons barely work, study finds. The Verge. Retrieved September 21, 2022, from https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23356434/youtube-dislike-not-interested-buttons-bad-recommendations-mozilla-report