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Sunday, 31 March 2019

I think YouTube might have just deprecated the "Not Interested" function.


In the past, I never had an issue with being bombarded with recommended videos I didn't want. In fact, I considered YouTube's "recommended" tab to be one of its stronger points, and the "Not Interested" button was one of my favorite features - if I ever happened to get something I wasn't interested in, I'd just hit the handy little button and it'd remove it from my sidebar, with a little message popping up saying something along the lines of "Got it. We'll tune your recommendations." Then, in the space where the video used to be, there'd be options saying "Undo" and "Tell us why", and if you hit "Tell us why", you'd get a host of options allowing you to more specifically tell the algorithm what exactly about the content you didn't like, giving it more information with which to tweak recommendations. I got a strange sense of satisfaction from tuning YouTube's algorithm and getting only relevant/interesting videos in my recommendations and homepage. It used to be that for every twenty or so videos I watched, I'd only get one recommendation I had to prune. That "Not Interested" button was super handy, and seemed to do a great job, in my experience, of getting the algorithm to crop out whole swathes of videos you weren't interested in.Then, this morning, I watched a random Mario Maker video for the first time ever. I don't like Mario Maker. Like, I really don't like it. But I happened to enjoy this one video as a one-time thing for the novelty of it, and because the guy playing was super cute. I dropped a like on the video and moved on. Since then, literally three out of every four of the top recommended videos in my sidebar have consistently been Mario Maker videos. I have hit "Not Interested" on every single one of these recommendations. And yet, video after video, I kept and keep getting recommended a constant stream of Mario Maker content (again, LITERALLY three of four in my recommended tab, repeatedly and consistently across every single video I watch, without fail), despite repeatedly marking the videos as irrelevant and never clicking on any of them. In the past, usually I'd only have to mark a particular game, channel, creator, etc as "Not Interested" once or twice at most before YouTube would stop recommending the thing to me altogether. Three times, or, god forbid, four, and the algorithm would definitely get the message 100% of the time and stop recommending me whatever it was I didn't want. But I've now watched ten videos back-to-back where 70% of my recommendations were Mario Maker, and each time, I've culled ALL of them with the "Not Interested" button. This appears to have had quite literally no effect.Interestingly enough, now, when you hit "Not Interested", the popup message doesn't mention anything about tweaking your feed or recommendations. It just says "Video removed." And that's it. There's also no option for "Undo" or "Tell us why". Which tells me that YouTube no longer cares to understand why you don't want to see that video, nor does it care to try tweaking its algorithm according to your feedback. So it seems like now, all the "Not Interested" button does is just remove that one video from that one screen, that one version of your recommendations tab, effectively hiding it from view until you reload the page or navigate to a new one, at which point the same video will immediately be recommended to you again, because it would seem the information "this user is not interested in this piece of content" is no longer being passed through to the algorithm - it's literally the same as just hitting F12 and using Inspect Element to delete the thumbnail from view locally. YouTube now no longer appears to care whether you aren't interested in a thing - like with non-chronologically-ordered subscription boxes and putting recommended vids on the homepage rather than subs, Google has decided they know what you want better than you do.TL;DR The "Not Interested" button has now received the same treatment as the dislike button. It does literally nothing. It's a placebo - it temporarily removes a given video from your sight, but the information does NOT affect your recommendations as a whole, nor is the information passed on to the algorithm, and you'll consequently continue getting the same recommendations from the same creators and circles regardless of how many times you click "Not Interested". Google has decided that your opinion on what you want to see has less validity than what their algorithms think you'll watch.P.S. Completely unrelated to absolutely anything, but speaking of Google's algorithms being absolutely FUCKED and having zero clue what its users actually like and want to see, to the point of being outright intrusive with the amount of unwanted bullshit they push on you, earlier today, I did a reverse image search on this image of a monster design from my favorite Pokemon ripoff hoping to find a higher-resolution version of it, and Google's best guess was "action figure". Well, whatever, I thought, removing the image from the search bar (by pressing the "X" pictured here) in preparation to make a direct search for "Scarazook" without the image. Well, when you remove the image like that by clicking that X, Google automatically re-searches for the search terms entered, in this case "action figure", this time without the image to assist. And, well...What the fuck, Google.What. The. Fuck.I asked some friends over discord to do me a favor and just quickly google "action figure" and show me the results. None of them got anything weird or lewd like this - they all just got regular old Marvel, superhero, and G.I. Joe shit like you would expect. So... Apparently these are my personalized search results. Apparently... This is who Google thinks I am. I've frankly never been more insulted in my life, LOL. I literally don't even know why Google thinks I would be interested in this shit. I've never looked at figurines in my life, nor do I look at anime girls, nor do I look at anime porn (not outside of incognito, anyways >u>;;), nor do I look at any type of weird, perverted, lewd shit (out... outside of incognito at least... BUT EVEN THEN it's nothing like this...), and yet for some reason, this shit is all I see when I google "action figures". My best guess for why google is showing me this stuff is that 1) I've recently been going to Rakuten a lot to look at this sexy, steamy, naughty, downright depraved and perverted RAM deal, which somewhat (but doesn't fully) explain(s) the second search result (LOL stereotyping much??? Isn't Rakuten just Japanese Amazon??? The ONLY thing I ever looked at on there was RAM and tech stuff anyways, so what the ever-loving fuck, Google???), and that I recently binged the second season of Mob Psycho 100 on kissanime (it's really, really good, go watch it), which was the first anime I've watched in years, but even then, that's completely clean and doesn't at all show an inclination toward wanting to buy big tiddy anime girls, IN THREEEEE DEEEEEE. That's just... YIKES, Google. Yikes.(For the... Ehem... Cultured folk among you, the links to the product pages that were shafted on me are here and here respectively. The images and descriptions are fucking hilarious. One of them has a disclaimer that the character featured is, and I quote, "Age: 18 years old". And for some reason, they're hundreds of dollars... Seriously, what kind of idiot pays for this crap? Also, NSFW obviously, don't click and then complain about the lewdness. Also also, check out the "related items"/"customers who viewed this also bought" sections on both product pages - they're also fucking hilarious. Apparently this is an entire market of depraved fucked-in-the-head bullshittery. And Google thinks that's who I am... Fuck me.) via /r/youtube
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