A study conducted by Mozilla reveals more about how YouTube works.
And obviously, indicating that you are not interested in a content or disliking a video does not really change the user experience…
Mozilla takes a look at the YouTube user experience
Like a social network, YouTube allows its users to refine their experience, indicating in particular the content they like, but also the content that leaves them indifferent, or even bothers them. In this way, YouTube promises ever more precise recommendations. However, according to a recent study conducted by Mozilla, the indications left by users would not be very effective.
For example, using video recommendation data from over 20,000 YouTube users, Mozilla researchers found that buttons such as “Not Interested”, “Dislike”, “Stop Recommending Channel” and “Delete from Watching History” are generally ineffective in preventing a posteriori recommendation of similar content.
Recommendations that do what they want?
Thus, in the best case, the actions implemented by the user will allow the YouTube algorithm to pass almost half of the recommendations similar to what the user has declared not to want to see. In the worst case, the actions barely allowed any filtering at the level of recommendations of similar videos.
For its study, Mozilla asked volunteers to use an in-house extension, RegretsReporter, which aims to eliminate harmful YouTube recommendations. Mozilla was then responsible for compiling the data, through more than 500 million recommended videos.
Thus, the “Not interested” and “I don’t like” buttons prevented between 10 and 12% of bad recommendations. The “Do not recommend channel” and “Remove from history” buttons were more effective, removing 43% and 29% of bad recommendations.
According to Mozilla, however, this is still very insufficient. ” YouTube should respect user feedback about their experience, treating it as meaningful signals about how people want to spend their time on the platform », Explains in particular the company.
Source : The Verge
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