No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me • Hacker News Board

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#191

Post by belter » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:56 AM UTC

alexb_ wrote: post #105

I've recently heard about this YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar. If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently, you've probably run into him. Because of the "no dislikes" change, he's everywhere now. And by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now th…

I see a Business opportunity for a new YouTube specific search engine, that will allow for discovery of new content but will filter all that crap:-)

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#192

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:57 AM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #160

I watch YouTube without logging in. The quality of recommendations I get is pretty good. I would say that I get very different recommendations on different browsers at different times so your mileage may vary.

1. Don't log in. Ever.

2. Search. YT search is ... reasonable. Not great, but it typically turns up what you want.

3. Incognito mode *ONLY*.

4. Invidious, if at all possible.

5. Watch, or more often, listen, through a third-party client. I generally "experience" YouTube via mpv. I'll cue up a list of URLs I'm interested in. This is the most effective and convenient way of curating a playlist I'm aware of. VLC can also play YT video directly. (Both support many, many, many other sites and formats, typically through yt-dlp or youtube-dl).

6. When using the YT client itself, disable comments and suggestions through a CSS manager, or uBlock Origin's "block element" feature.

Benefits:

- No ads

- No idiotic recommendations

- No tracking and pigeonholing

- No comments (excepting Invidious, though that offers the option of YT or Reddit comments should you prefer)

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#193

Post by baobabKoodaa » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:58 AM UTC

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #48

What I noticed is how sterile and sanitised the comments are. You don't see any negative comments anymore. Also if you search you will get random unrelated videos mixed with your results.

Youtube has been filling search results with random unrelated videos for years, and it seems to getting progressively worse. Now there are multiple different subsections of unrelated videos intermixed with actual search results and some of the results are hidden behind a tiny "show more" link.

Thanks, "growth hackers", for maximizing "engagement".

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#194

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:58 AM UTC

kgeist wrote: post #166

For me, Youtube ruined... ads. All ads for the past several months have been about Indian pop music, and I'm not even Indian. Something broke in their algorithm (I'm from Eastern Europe). Not that I really cared about ads, and if you think about it, I actually learned something new, there's some nice Indian music I wouldn't otherwise have learned about.

[deleted]

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#195

Post by ho_schi » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:59 AM UTC

Imgur is one of the last social media platforms which provides up- and downvotes. They've new owners and first the total counters for both disappeared on comments. Then on posts itself. Now there is only one counter with a calculated difference between up- and downvotes. You need to open a menu on every single post and comment to see the totals and figuring out if a post/comment is controversial.

    Before: +1000 / -600 (What the heck?)
    After:  +400 (Looks good, isn't it?)

Votes are not an elaborate critique but they can provide the posters and viewers a hint. Regarding elaborate critique, it usually hurts and is hard to accept. But I can learn from it! And again, votes are a hint. Regarding Stackoverflow, they did a good thing in limiting upvotes a little (prevents overuse without justification) and downvotes (hurts you're own reputation). This makes me think twice ;)

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#196

Post by cosmiccatnap » Tue, May 10, 2022, 12:00 PM UTC

This was not a decision made for usability or technical reasons. Sponsors...and YouTube suites were made that their videos could be brigaded with downvotes because it showed that people were critical of them. YouTube is primarily funded by sponsors since only a small percentage of people have YouTube red and that cost doesn't always cover even their use of the service so much like the adpocolypse if it causes sponsor loss it doesn't get to stay on the platform.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#197

Post by marcus_holmes » Tue, May 10, 2022, 12:00 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #124

Well, isn't this a product of the engagement-/advertisement-/"likes"-driven society online we've moved towards or incentivized thanks to technology? It doesn't matter that something was downvoted as useless or just plain factually incorrect by a certain number of people. If enough other people found it worth upvoting as entertaining or feel-good enough for the couple minutes of their time, that's more important to th…

I don't think it's "thanks to technology". It's thanks to a business mindset that makes everything about money, and a consumer mindset that is trained to get everything for free. The internet before it was commercialised ran on the same technology but had a complete different attitude, and didn't have these problems.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#198

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, May 10, 2022, 12:01 PM UTC

dan1234 wrote: post #135

130e13a wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where does the extension get the data from, though? it's not like they just have to remove a `display: none` somewhere.

The dislike count is still in the data returned by the YouTube API[0], so they're probably getting it from there. [0] https://developers.google.com/youtube/analytics/metrics#disl...

That's the analytics API. We already know they show dislikes to the channel owner. Isn't this the same thing?

And your other comment says "The dislike count is also still present in the [0] video API response." but the page says right there "Note: The statistics.dislikeCount property was made private as of December 13, 2021."

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#199

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, May 10, 2022, 12:02 PM UTC

danuker wrote: post #55

asddubs wrote: post #37

get the extension "BlockTube" and block any channel that does this. after a while your feed will get noticably better. People are saying not to click but IMO it doesn't work that well. I make a point of never clicking on any video title like that, and still kept getting flooded My favorite pattern is saying "THIS" and withholding what exactly the video is about - once I saw it used twice in a title and it just cracke…

> block any channel that does this Isn't there an endless supply of such channels? Or does YouTube notice your lack of engagement?

One of the characteristics of mass-market advertising / propaganda, is that it's Big Lie / Big Message dependent. That means that at any one time a relatively small list of channels is responsible for the majority of chum. Thank power laws / Zipf functions.

Of course, there's enough channel-churn that these do turn over relatively quickly, but that tends to be on the scale of weeks to months, not hours to days.

Once you've knocked off the major chum sites, legitimate channels start rising through the noise floor. The small-scale chum sites tend not to turn up in high rotation.

Channel-block should be an inherent function. Web search also desperately needs this at the domain level.

(I just ran into this looking up a hiking trail. First-listed site, which dominated my search results, splashes up a registration wall on following any links. Peakbagger, buried in the search results, does far better. I also had to block Pinterest, of course....)

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#200

Post by hbbio » Tue, May 10, 2022, 12:02 PM UTC

alexb_ wrote: post #105

I've recently heard about this YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar. If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently, you've probably run into him. Because of the "no dislikes" change, he's everywhere now. And by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now th…

Obviously, the guy is just ripping StackOverflow.

His "latest" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtqJq0OF8eA

Is a poorly generated copy/paste of: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1644...

Probably a tiny Python script. Google is prompt to ban other accounts, hope some Googlers around here can can do something...