# Has Tivo officially given up on thumbsup/down, or is it me?



## pbgalvin (Oct 7, 2019)

What I want to do:
Create a wishlist called "mystery" to grab mysteries known and unknown.
Thumbsdown on all the stuff that matches that I don't want.

Doesn't seem to work - records everything that matches, regardless of thumbsdowning shows.

Any thoughts, or did Tivo kill off one of their best features?
Thanks.


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

Are you on TE4? Thumbs have no impact on the new experience.


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## exdishguy (May 1, 2004)

pbgalvin said:


> Any thoughts, or did Tivo kill off one of their best features?
> Thanks.


They killed off one of their best features.


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## pbgalvin (Oct 7, 2019)

Wow, that's just pathetic.


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## yesno (Jun 27, 2003)

Thumbs are for Suggestions only.


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## pbgalvin (Oct 7, 2019)

So they are for a feature I don't use or care about and not available for a quite reasonable use case.
Who is the product manager that made that decision?


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## Mikeguy (Jul 28, 2005)

pbgalvin said:


> So they are for a feature I don't use or care about and not available for a quite reasonable use case.
> Who is the product manager that made that decision?


See (May 30, 2018):


Megamind said:


> David Shoop posted this on Facebook a little while ago
> 
> Previously, TiVo suggestions were based on TiVo thumb data, both implicit and explicit thumbs. When a show was recorded it received an implicit 1 thumb rating. When a user modified the thumb data explicitly by pressing the thumbs up 2x or 3x times that was then used to better correlate suggested recordings.
> 
> ...





TiVo_Ted said:


> Shoop has a TC login and does drop by sometimes. Don't throw him under the bus on this one though. We are in a transition period where we are combining our new, look-ahead predictive logic with the implicit/explicit thumbs data and we clearly don't have it right yet. It is completely wrong to assume that "we know better than you, your opinions don't matter any more, just trust social media." We have a high profile bug on this issue and are working on it diligently. I setup a new box to test things out and it recorded over 400 programs in just over 5 days. Nobody thinks that is the desired and/or expected behavior.
> 
> The old suggestions algorithm was very basic and relied heavily on collaborative filtering (i.e. people who liked this show also liked this other show). It also only updated ratings once per day because it is highly compute intensive and ran on the TiVo box. This means that you could thumbs-down a bunch of shows and we would keep recording them and suggesting them until the process ran again over night. The new mechanism is a web service which will be able to respond much more quickly to input from active thumbs users. It will also allow us to "tune" the algorithm quickly without needing to update the software on the box.


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## Sparky1234 (May 8, 2006)

pbgalvin said:


> What I want to do:
> Create a wishlist called "mystery" to grab mysteries known and unknown.
> Thumbsdown on all the stuff that matches that I don't want.
> 
> ...


Create wishlist then manually delete what you don't want.


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## pbgalvin (Oct 7, 2019)

Mikeguy said:


> See (May 30, 2018):


(I'm a computer scientist and software product manager myself.).
I know software is complicated and there are many aspects that go into decision making. But hard for me to imagine the decision path that lead to releasing a new release while disabling major, useful features.
Anyway, glad this apparently isn't a permanent change and there is hope for the future.
Seems to me that if a human is willing to give guidance, that is likely to be more accurate / useful than trying to get some machine learning to do the same.
I.e. give preference to what the user says (wish lists, thumbs up / down) vs. trying to guess what they want to watch via suggestions.
But hopefully tivo can get both aspects working.
One does wonder if there is a financial incentive for tivo recording given shows and if that's why suggestions are active but thumbs up/down are not...


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## pbgalvin (Oct 7, 2019)

Sparky1234 said:


> Create wishlist then manually delete what you don't want.


Yes, that's what I spend my spare time doing.
Or, I could press the thumbs down button and have tivo stop recording those shows, so I don't have to manually delete stuff....


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## krkaufman (Nov 25, 2003)

yesno said:


> Thumbs are for Suggestions only.


^^^ this ^^^

The OP seems to be confusing pre-TE4's thumbs-based Suggestions algorithm with Wishlist recordings. Thumbs ratings were never[1] an input to the Wishlist recordings filters - though I believe the thumbs buttons *are* used, in both TE3 & TE4, when looking to refine the scope of a Wishlist keyword.

[1] I'm very open to an education on this front.


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## krkaufman (Nov 25, 2003)

pbgalvin said:


> Anyway, glad this apparently isn't a permanent change and there is hope for the future.


Where's this hope coming from?

(Ah, perhaps because those quoted responses didn't include the news that the ability to rate shows using the thumbs buttons was entirely removed from TE4 a few updates ago. Maybe thumbs ratings will return in the future but, at present, the TE4 Suggestions algorithm doesn't use them.)


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## Mikeguy (Jul 28, 2005)

pbgalvin said:


> Anyway, glad this apparently isn't a permanent change and there is hope for the future.


You are a generous person: it's been somewhere in the neighborhood of a year-and-a-half, now. And if the issue is that big and obvious, how could the new feature have passed beta-testing to begin with and been issued?


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## lujan (May 24, 2010)

I personally never used thumbs up or down and one of the first things I do after getting a new TiVo is to turn Off suggestions. I don't care either way whether they keep this or not.


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## krkaufman (Nov 25, 2003)

jrtroo said:


> Are you on TE4?


(still unanswered)


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## pbgalvin (Oct 7, 2019)

krkaufman said:


> (still unanswered)


I'm on the latest, so I presume so. Software version 21.9.2.v4-USC-11


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## Pokemon_Dad (Jan 19, 2008)

pbgalvin said:


> Anyway, glad this apparently isn't a permanent change and there is hope for the future.





krkaufman said:


> Where's this hope coming from?


"Hope is the thing with feathers." Emily Dickinson, after upgrading to TE4


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## Sparky1234 (May 8, 2006)

pbgalvin said:


> Yes, that's what I spend my spare time doing.
> Or, I could press the thumbs down button and have tivo stop recording those shows, so I don't have to manually delete stuff....


I get it. I too wish TiVo was more responsive.

TiVo is a company you hate to love!!!


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## krkaufman (Nov 25, 2003)

pbgalvin said:


> I'm on the latest, so I presume so. Software version 21.9.2.v4-USC-11


You presume correctly. 21.* == TE4.

And so you can't rate shows using thumbs, nor are thumbs ratings used as inputs to the TE4 Suggestions algorithm. Thumbs can be used to fine-tune Wishlist filters, but only as controls for setting Wishlist keywords as included, excluded or optional. (i.e. not as some secondary Suggestions-like overlay on Wishlist recording)


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## Wigohwt (Jun 9, 2019)

pbgalvin said:


> Yes, that's what I spend my spare time doing.
> ...manually delete stuff....


Save your spare time, you can use kmttg, it's a lot faster. I can imagine a keyword like "mystery" generates a ton of matches in the "To Do" list.


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## pbgalvin (Oct 7, 2019)

Wigohwt said:


> Save your spare time, you can use kmttg, it's a lot faster. I can imagine a keyword like "mystery" generates a ton of matches in the "To Do" list.


Didn't know about kmttg - will give it a look. Thanks!


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## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

krkaufman said:


> The OP seems to be confusing pre-TE4's thumbs-based Suggestions algorithm with Wishlist recordings. Thumbs ratings were never[1] an input to the Wishlist recordings filters - though I believe the thumbs buttons *are* used, in both TE3 & TE4, when looking to refine the scope of a Wishlist keyword.


+This. 

Scott


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## Johnny Dancing (Sep 3, 2000)

I was an early Tivo adopter about 20 years ago. I loved thumbs up and thumbs down. This is how I used this feature:

I would thumbs up every movie I liked (only paid channel movies). I would then go through suggestions over time and thumbs down any non paid channel movie that recorded and thumbs up movies it recorded. Eventually, in suggestions I would only have a bunch of movies. So when there was nothing recorded I wanted to view, I would go to Tivo suggestions and often find a good movie to watch.

Now in suggestions I have game shows, talk shows, bad reality shows, bad network shows... just random stuff that I have not control over. I think Tivo makes money putting certain programs in suggestions, hence the reasoning for them taking control of suggestions away from us users. Just my theory.

As far as I can tell now, the thumbs up and down buttons no longer do anything at all, as in the buttons are complete non functional.


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## JoeKustra (Dec 7, 2012)

Johnny Dancing said:


> As far as I can tell now, the thumbs up and down buttons no longer do anything at all, as in the buttons are complete non functional.


Still needed for possible harmful actions, like a restart.


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## GAViewer (Oct 18, 2007)

TE4 suggestions are useless to me. Last night I looked at the suggestions folder on the bolt and there wasn't a single one that I wanted to watch. Previously with our premier after I had carefully used the up and down arrows and I wasn't in mood to watch the items I had explicitly set to record there always was something in the suggestions to watch. Looks like I might as well turn suggestions off.


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## Mikeguy (Jul 28, 2005)

GAViewer said:


> TE4 suggestions are useless to me. Last night I looked at the suggestions folder on the bolt and there wasn't a single one that I wanted to watch. Previously with our premier after I had carefully used the up and down arrows and I wasn't in mood to watch the items I had explicitly set to record there always was something in the suggestions to watch. Looks like I might as well turn suggestions off.


You may as well (turn it off, that is): TiVo moved to a handy-dandy, AI logarithm approach for Suggestions in TE4, and it hasn't worked since day 1--why TiVo released it is, well, what it is (this is a family-friendly forum). TiVo said almost 2 years ago that it is aware of this issue and asked for patience, and said that it is working on a solution and that things will get better, and absolutely nothing has changed apart from, TiVo now seeming to think that the solution is just to deprecate the feature (heaven forbid that TiVo simply go back to the TE3 Suggestions solution, which still works, quite well I might add).*

* Sorry if I sound ticked off at this but, well, I am--it's the antithesis of what TiVo used to seem to be or aim for.


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