Why is everybody pretending the recommendation system is designed to show you what you want to see, rather than to maximise ad revenue?
Individual videos don’t pay to be in the recommended feed. There’s no opportunity to see an ad except when you watch a video. YouTube has a perfectly balanced incentive to show you more content you’ll watch.
Where is the exclusive choice between (what the user wants to watch) and (what makes more money)? The only thing I can imagine is that they would down-rank videos not cached in your region.
What you want to see is not necessarily the same as what you will end up watching. Just because you dislike a video doesn't mean you wouldn't watch it.
Or put another way, you can tell YouTube what you want (to be perceived socially as wanting) to see, but the algorithm knows what you actually want to see.
By definition, clicking on a a dislike button means you watched at least part of the video. It’s a signal that “I started watching this and it wasn’t a good match”.
That should send the message that it’s appealing from the title/thumbnail but a bad video. I don’t think the “socially be seen as wanting” plays too much here… because starting to watch already. You already sent a different signal.
Except the algorithm doesn't know what I actually want to see. Nobody but YouTube knows what I tell YouTube I like or dislike, so there's not even a theoretical pressure to lie about by wants in order to present an appearance to others.
There's a very philosophical debate hidden between the words in that sentence.
But since Youtube sees dislike as a signal to boost a video, it spreads content-views to things that people don't like, but feel compelled to interact with in (what I assume is) the "Not now, I'm busy - someone is being wrong on the internet" kind of way.
You can say, that is what people _actually_ want, since that is what they end up spending time on. You can point to popular subreddits like r/idiotsincars or r/makesmybloodboil and say "see! people love being enraged", and I think it is a valid view on defining "want", though not one I subscribe to.
I think this is not what people want, and promoting this kind of behaviour will in the mid to long term scare off users. My understanding of Tik-Tok is that they promote a style of feel-good content, rather than rage-inducing content and they are beating both Facebook and Youtube, who've been promoting dislikes.
I just don’t see YT having the same feedback loops as other places. You can stay on without being directly typing in comments like on fb or twitter.
I personally never see rage-inducing content on YouTube (nor other sites), nor do i see it on my partners, friends, parents accounts. I’m sure it’s there, but I think that people who get it are training their recommendations to show it, not being forced it. I get way more rageful content on TikTok ironically, which has a way weaker “dislike” signal and a stronger propensity to show you new things.
To the point, I understand the incentive someone like fb has to show content people don’t like but still engage with, but I’m not sure that the incentive exists in YouTube. Furthermore I think we discredit companies (who are made up of sentient and capable people) to recognize short term vs long term value and the importance of reputation.
I reject the notion that there’s someone in San Bruno pitching that they use the dislike button to show more of that video instead of a negative quality signal. No one I know in Silicon Valley who works in tech would make such a suggestion, and they’re no different than the YouTube team on a fundamental level.
But it doesn't show me what I want to see so I watch like 30 seconds total and look for something else
I'll go to watch one thing and leave. All the recommended stuff is just straight up garbage.