The “not interested” feature also does not have much of an impact on the recommended videos.
A recent Mozilla study has shown that feedback tools such as the YouTube dislike button and “not interested” feature do not have much – if any – impact on the video recommendations a user receives on their homepage.
Mozilla recently published their findings that the feedback tools barely work at all.
Though the feedback tools might provide creators with some added information about what their audiences like, in terms of the recommendation algorithm, the YouTube dislike button and “not interested” feature don’t seem to do very much at all.
The Mozilla study was conducted based on crowdsourced data from more than 20,000 of the video platform’s users. The findings showed that the controls don’t make users feel as though they are in any real control over the recommendations shown to them on their homepages.
According to the study’s findings, only 12 percent of unwanted video recommendations were stopped due to the use of the thumbs down option. Similarly, the “not interested” feature stopped only 11 percent of unwanted recommendations, despite the fact that users specifically indicated that they did not find them interesting.
Unlike the YouTube dislike button, there are other platform tools that do appear to work.
The “don’t recommend channel” option and the “remove from watch history” feature appeared to have a far better result in terms of stopping unwanted video recommendations on a user’s homepage. They were able to block 43 percent and 29 percent of unwanted recommendations respectively, according to the research.
Mozilla used its RegretsReporter browser plugin for collecting responses. The plugin makes it possible for users to disable certain forms of video recommendation. The analysis was conducted on more than 500 million videos. It used a combination of assessments by way of machine learning and research assistants to spot the “bad recommendations” for videos, which were deemed to be suggestions similar to those that the user had already rejected by way of uses by the study participants of the YouTube dislike button, or the “not interested”, “remove from watch history”, or “don’t recommend channel” features.
