Research shows YouTube’s dislike button is almost useless

news hardware Study Shows YouTube Dislike Button Is Almost Useless

To start this article, we propose a small scenario Don’t sting bugs. “Wow, this video really sucks. I click the “I don’t like” button (or “I’m not interested”) so that YouTube knows about these types of videos and no longer recommends them to me. » If you’re an avid YouTube user, you probably think you’re helping the recommendation system improve, right? Well it actually doesn’t seem to be the case

as a Mozilla study found.

The “dislike” button: a simple decorative element?

Does the dislike button even work? They wanted to answer that question Mozilla – by using your Firefox browser, among other things. To answer that question, she therefore conducted a study which lasted several months and brought together a large amount of data. To help them with this analysis, they used the services of the extension Regrets reporters what allowed themAnalyze the results of more than 20,000 users on a total of 50 million YouTube videos.

According to Mozilla, this button is (almost) useless. Here is their conclusion: “YouTube continues to recommend videos that people have made clear they don’t want to see anymore, including those with images of war and gruesome horror clips.”

. 62.3% of participants indicated that these reviews had little or no impact on service recommendations. One of the participants even stated that this control “didn’t change anything”. He explains : “Sometimes I’ve reported misleading things or spam and the next day they came back… even if you block certain sources, they eventually come back.”.

YouTube: a sorting that finally makes everything happen

Still according to Mozilla, Videos you don’t like always show up 9 times out of 10. Their data shows that the dislike button only prevents 11% of spam recommendations. So it makes sense (and worrying) that YouTube would recommend similar content to you, even if you don’t like something.

. The influence of this feature is therefore minimal, but should help to define the preferences of the user more precisely.

For Mozilla, YouTube can completely solve this problem by giving users control over their recommendations.. The research team’s suggestions include making YouTube controls more proactive, giving users the power to design their own experience, and giving developers better access to the YouTube user interface, YouTube programming (API), and other tools .

As you might expect, YouTube is aware of this error and even has an explanation. Elena Hernandez, the platform’s spokeswoman, said recently The edge that the deletion of these recommendations “might create echo chambers” (Curls). Despite this, the platform officials appreciated Mozilla’s efforts, although according to them this report “does not take into account the actual operation of the systems”.