Back in my day, YouTube had a 5-star rating system
and search results showed only videos related to your search. recommendations on the side were similar videos and not some unrelated bullshit. it was so much better.
Recommendations on the side today are related to everything you’ve watched in like the last week or so.
Which I really hate, because it means when you get into some specific interest, YouTube basically stops showing you anything else.
Hey YouTube! Those interests I was into last week, last month, I’m still into them! Please don’t railroad me like that!
Honestly if someone remade an old YouTube alternative I think it would take off.
It’s what I wish PeerTube was, but I’m not sure if that will ever take off sadly.
Lack of advertising dollars is definitely an impediment to video platform alternatives…
I remember a time when people just posted silly little shitty drawn videos just for the fun of it. Not saying creators shouldn’t be compensated for their hard work, I just feel like something was lost with the monetization of every little thing.
The trouble is hosting that much video content and the bandwidth to feed viewers.
People really fail to understand what a colossal undertaking a site like YouTube really is. It’s a technological wonder that they are able to process that much data and serve it so efficiently. Hate YouTube all you want, I do, but the engineers at Google are fucking magicians.
Last I heard it was something on the order of 700 hours of video content uploaded per minute. Insane.
Maybe when the AI bubble bursts, people will buy up abandoned data centers for pennies on the dollar and repurpose them for a better Youtube alternative. And maybe Margot Robbie will see this comment and fall in love with me.
Makes me wonder if under the hood it’s still stored as stars or if they migrated their data. Is a 3 star or more rating displayed as thumbs up now? Is a thumbs up just a 5 star rating? When thumbs down existed was that just 1 star?
google is absolute worst
Back in my day, there were alternatives to Google
And they were all worse
Only because Google actually worked as advertised (and only as advertised). Compared to what Google is now, that’s a matter of opinion.
All things considered, I’ll take the Google of yesteryear over the Google of today. I’ll also take a more privative and much goofier/glitchier YouTube.
Shit, I remember when having a Gmail account was a coveted thing that required an invite that people paid literally hundreds, even thousands of dollars for. I had five, and I sold one for $2k, and another for $4k. (These people were total twats). Decades later, I still use my [email protected] addy, while one is dead, and the other got married 2 months later and changed their name anyway. Idiots, lol. Weeks later, invite Scott bumped up to 50, then 250, then unlimited, then it got opened to the public.
Being impatient is expensive.
Grad school was a crazy time
And the video’s rating was plainly visible so you could use it to make the decision whether the video was even worth your click.
The shovelware AI slop video channels wouldn’t be such a problem today if we still had that.
Going straight to YouTube is like going straight to Imgur looking for good content. Should never be done. Places like Lemmy or friend chat groups refer me to good videos. Or my curated subscribed channels with quality content is the other way I watch youtube.
Anyone going straight to YouTube.com looking for their algorithm and ratings system to tell them about shit content in advance is mistaken in their expectations.
extensive use of the “Don’t recommend this video > Tell us why > I don’t like this video” function, plus removing bad videos from my watch history after I stop watching, has got me a well-trained slop-free recommendations page with interesting new smallish channels.
Yeah it can definitely be somewhat trained. Also the extention dearrow makes a big difference in the experience too.
Usually I go there looking for something specific and use the search bar.
However, the search function in YouTube has also turned to absolute crap. It only lists a few results and then switches to random shit you didn’t ask for.
A lot of the results are also often misleading titles leading to lazy videos that are a slideshow of impertinent pictures with a synthetized voice spewing inaccurate information. AI has made that even worse. The star rating system would have helped identify these crap videos before you click on them.
back in my day, you posted about your life in your geocities website! And you wrote the html on notepad and had to include an animated gif that told people to email you, cause that was the style at the time.
Also, you tied an onion to your belt.
If you had Office you could use Microsoft Office FrontPage
Some people still do on Neocities
nowai
Yahweh
I wrote HTML in EDIT, but my first webserver ran on an OpenVMS Alpha workstation.
Eh, back when GeoCities was still a thing, most people were too busy actually having a life to regularly post about it online. Since this was before smartphones, updating a social media profile was a lot more complicated and time-consuming.
Having an active social media profile back then was often a red flag that a person was more “talk” than “walk“.
idk I’ve always been a weirdo
Unironically, that’s usually what most geocities pages were about
Exactly.
It still has for me.
Yes, but actually no.
2 things:
- Dislike button itself not "wired’ to any visible/meaningful count and only seen by video author (which is funny, cause whole point of hiding dislike count was promoted as “beneficial to mental health of channel owners”)
- If you using youtube dislikes — it replaces that button with it’s own, counts presses on its own and uses own logic to show “approximate” amount of dislikes on video: it’s not like it knows real count, what I’m trying to say
It still does, it just doesn’t show numbers because YouTube is a coward.
No the API is dead. The extension everyone is using calculates their own dislike number by inferring from the extension users who disliked the video
But the button is still there.
Afaik it’s only for the YT-Studio backend, so creators can see the dislikes but there is no public access to that data
did you not read the comment?
But the button is still there…
I meant that while the button is still there the Data is only available for the uploader via the Studio backend. The public API is dead, wich I omitted in the original comment for simplicity
And ops post is about the button being removed. Which is false.
How is:
the Data is only available for the uploader via the Studio backend.
different from:
it just doesn’t show numbers because YouTube is a coward.
?
You were more technical than the top level comment and framed it as a disagreement.
Because the second can implies the data is still available but not displayed. I wanted to specify that the data isn’t available (for the public). I don’t disagree with the top per se but wanted to clear up the ambiguity
How is this different from the comment you disagreed with?
They already removed it from Shorts. Give it a little time and it will be gone from the rest of the videos.
Not like you need another reason to not watch shorts.
I don’t understand why the dislike button is important. Do you feel like you’ve lost agency over the algorithm? Or do you value the opportunity to publicly disapprove?
Perhaps you trust that a like/dislike ratio is correlated to video quality.
For my part, like, share, and subscribe are just different buttons in the Skinner box that is algorithmic entertainment. “Engagement” is free labor for to improve algorithms and train “AI”.
The opportunity to publicly disapprove is a weird way to write warning others that this content is shit/false/malicious etc.
When I search the internet on how to do something I often prefer to read how it is done. In this day and age with google, reddit, Facebook and discord hiding guides behind walled gardens you have to sign up for. Also dont get me started on asking AI step by step directions on how to do something. Often times the only half descent guides are on YouTube but the number of shit clickbait guides makes finding the one you need a giant pain. The number of completely silent videos I’ve watched thinking I’ll see how to do the thing I want is to damb high.
With dislikes I can instantly see not worth my time.
Edit as an example: My I suggest looking up how to replace the headlight bulb in your car if you own one. Bonus points if its made after 2020.
youtubers can delete negative comments. they couldn’t delete dislikes
I’d like to give more feedback for the algorithm. The long press and selecting that you dislike this video feels like overkill.
yes, the first one.
It’s astonishing that you believe you ever had any agency, but thanks for being honest.
You must understand that your engagement may improve your suggestions but the ultimate beneficiary is a trillion dollar company. The creators have a chance to be compensated for adding value to the platform, but you’re working for, I don’t know, vibes?
it’s worse than that, i am a paying customer. i am a triple-a corpo stooge who goes through life without a single thought in my head other than media consumption, leaving not a single spare thought to the late-stage capitalistic oligopoly hellhole we find ourself in and which will inevitably kill us. i would never even think of researching unions, protests, or a proletariat uprising because i’m too busy keeping up with fucking… ice road truckers and whatever.
there, does that fill my ego-stroking quota for today? then fuck off with that shit, you’re just stating the obvious as if it’s revolutionary insight and derailing the conversation.
I seem to recall that people found that the like and dislike buttons equally improved the video’s visibility in the algorithm, causing many youtubers to genuinely suggest disliking the video as their call to action.
That’s more of an issue with their algorithm. The thing I think most people here (myself included) miss is that they used to let you know the rating on videos before you clicked them so you could see whether a given video was decent or not and therefore whether or not you should bother with some clickbait BS or not
We’re all being punished because Google’s feelings got hurt when we didn’t like the 2018 YouTube Rewind enough. That was the end of the dislike button and the YouTube Rewind altogether.
no one uses the return YouTube dislikes browser extension?
What’s the point, if the downvotes aren’t counted by the YT backend?
It’s more complicated than that. The button still exists even without the add-on and the back end factors it in and I think shows the creator, but doesn’t show it to the front end. So the add-on doesn’t have the real numbers but there still are real numbers
yeah the only thing you see with the add-on is the stats for the people who have the add-on, which ideally would statistically approximate the actual data but we all know that it’s not even close.
It’s a good enough approximation. Do you really need to know if the massively downvoted video had 357,923 downvotes or 357,924?
To save you time avoiding a bad instructional video.
I had to get rid of it when it caused massive slowdowns for me. That’s probably fixed by now…
I don’t want my watchlist stored on a random third party server
There are dozens of us
Return youtube dislike extension.
i remember spending two hours making sure the background of my youtibe profile theme tiled correctly.
It still does and you can see the usual like:dislike ratio as normal with SmartTube and other similar and far better, feature-rich applications for YT content.
Does it actually do anything though or is or placebo
Back in my day YouTube Shorts had a thumbs up button
Back in my day you could block channels that spammed you with bullshit or shit video clips overlayed super loud music.
And this meme wasn’t AI upscaled
Now you will like everything
I thnk google being ad company - they do it to increase number of videos advertizers willing to pay for.
advertisers avoid “negative” contentwhichc ofc sucks for actual users
Back in my day, you could customize your YouTube profile and PM anyone on the platform
