A new study by the Mozilla Foundation suggests that users who click the dislike button below a YouTube video are wasting their time.
The study used data from 22,722 users who installed the Mozilla RegretsReporter browser extension and were tracked between December 2021 and June 2022. The researchers analyzed more than half a billion YouTube recommendations that were made after users clicked on one of YouTube’s negative feedback tools – Dislike or Don’t Recommend Channel.
Different input buttons had different effects on the likelihood of similar content being recommended in the future. According to Mozilla, clicking the “Don’t Recommend” button will hide 43% of unwanted recommendations, while clicking the “Dislike” button will stop only 12%.
“We’ve found that YouTube’s controls don’t really seem to be sufficient to prevent unwanted recommendations,” says Becca Rix, Senior Research Fellow at Mozilla.
Mozilla’s investigation was triggered by an increase in YouTube’s public comments about the recommendation system. “They talked a lot about metrics like time well spent or user satisfaction, but not watch time,” Rix says. “While working on the YouTube report, we heard from people that they do not feel they have control over the situation.”
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YouTube reaction
YouTube claims that their systems work as they should. It’s just that users and researchers don’t get the idea of how negative reactions actually work.
“Mozilla’s report doesn’t take into account how our systems actually work,” YouTube spokeswoman Elena Hernandez said. “Our controls do not filter out entire topics or points of view, as this can have negative consequences for viewers, such as creating echo chambers.”
Confusion over the intended and actual functionality of user input is a key theme in the second part of the Mozilla study: a follow-up survey of about one-tenth of those who installed the RegretsReporter extension and participated in the study. Those spoken to at Mozilla mostly said that blocking specific videos or channels was valuable to them, but they hoped that YouTube’s algorithms would evaluate reactions more broadly.
YouTube is ‘removing’ dislikes – they will no longer appear below videos for viewers
Source: Wired
