Your YouTube recommendations are perpetually infested with videos that don’t interest you? It’s not that surprising, according to a study by the Mozilla Foundation. The publisher of the Firefox browser conducted a survey of 22,000 participants to find out how YouTube’s algorithms reacted to signals provided by users (red thumbs, deleting history, hiding a channel, etc.). And let’s write it straight up, it’s not glorious.
A red thumb effective at only 12%
Thanks to the open source RegretsReporter tool installed on the machines of several thousand volunteers, Mozilla was able to assess the effectiveness of the tools offered by YouTube to model its experience. Results, “YouTube’s usage controls do not effectively prevent ‘unwanted’ recommendations”, indicates the foundation. Nevertheless, there are plenty of ways to tell the platform that a type of video is not of interest, but regardless of the method used, “YouTube controls are ineffective”admits Mozilla.
Choosing the option Do not recommend the channel allows in 43% of cases to get rid of “bad” recommendations (videos from the same channel or similar in theme). Deleting the history is effective in 29% of cases, while indicating that one is not “not interested” by a video only prevents 11% of bad recommendations. The dislike button, better known as the red thumb, is not much more useful with an efficiency around 12%. None of these mechanisms will really allow you to get rid of irrelevant content.
Spams that keep coming back
“Sometimes I would flag videos as spam or misleading content, and the next day they would reappear. I felt like the more negative feedback I provided to the suggestions, the more nonsense the amount increased. Even by blocking certain channels, they ended up reappearing”, testifies a user. Other testimonials illustrate the ingenuity of some Internet users to avoid seeing irrelevant recommendations appear in their feed. Some log out of YouTube or engage a VPN before watching a video (lest similar content invade their feed forever), while others avoid clicking or hovering over certain videos to improve the situation.
Mozilla’s study dives into the mysteries of YouTube to illustrate the problem. Watch a named video once Grandma Ate Cookie Dough Once A Week, Here’s What Happened To Her Bones subscribes you for the next few months to videos of the same type, for example A Man Drank The Contents Of A Lava Lamp By Mistake, Here’s What Happened To His Kidneys. And this happens even though the first video has been deleted from the watch history. “It always ends up coming back. The algorithm seems incapable of keeping information in memory for very long”protested a person interviewed by Mozilla.
Anyone who’s ever tried to ban certain channels from their YouTube recommendations faces this dilemma, but Mozilla’s numbers help glue some statistical reality to that impression. This study comes right at a time when the algorithms of the Internet giants are being scrutinized very closely, especially in Europe with the DSA. While waiting for this text to change things, you can also sign the petition put online by Mozilla to send a signal of discontent to YouTube.