One way to look at it is as an opportunity for someone to come in with a third-party app that gives you a valuable YouTube feed.
Personally I don’t use the YT feed and never have. I just watch videos from channels I subscribe to
No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
331–340 of 498 posts
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#332People hate democracy because they hate losing. Eliminating the dislike button doesn't just kill the metric of how many people hated the content, it also kills the invisible metric of (willing) abstentions.
Now that it's gone, youtube can be much freer in how it serves content, because there's no hint to whether something's terrible or not other than watching it. Google can just serve the content that it likes for its own reasons (maybe the content resembles the content it sees itself focusing on in the future, maybe they're just getting more money for the ads.) Their only limit in suggesting shitty content is whether you'll leave the site, and with personalization all they need is a casino slot machine algo to reliably keep you from doing that.
Banning downvotes is like banning shortselling.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#333Let's all take a moment to reflect on how much worse we (the software developers) have made this by building (essentially automated spam) tools like https://www.synthesia.io/ For example, their "Lays Messi" ad campaign had 650 million video variations available in 8 languages.... I predict that in a year, the majority of internet videos will not only be random stock 4K videos, but they will be overlay-ed with AI avat…
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Space Ghost Coast to Coast is probably the best example of what this could end up as. Old animations recycled to match voice lines. Given advanced enough AI, the process could definitely be automated to turn a written script into a short video.
In my opinion, that is way too creative.
I expect the future of automatically generated content to look like a attractive + friendly + diverse + optimistic face which is utterly emotionless and inhuman, yet perfectly symmetric.
Here's a good Chinese example of an AI news anchor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZuffHPDAw
But there's still a world of difference between them, mainly w.r.t. head movements, body language, and eye expressions. For example, compare the AI avatar here: https://youtu.be/-2AIweN_Fmg?t=272
With the real person here: https://youtu.be/-2AIweN_Fmg?t=27
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#334I'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…
> 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube
Yeah I mean there's no way that's even close to accurate. You think there are only a billion videos on YouTube?
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#335The only explanation for getting rid of dislike count that makes sense to me is to make big brands happy as their videos can't be made to look bad with a high dislike count and they can't be "dislike bombed" for things that may be unrelated to the content (eg the recent Activision-Blizzard scandals). Why? Because in every other way (and every way for the viewer), this makes Youtube worse. So it's a hell of a price to…
I think you're very much overestimating how much big corporations care about Youtube dislikes. Unless if there is a massive conspiracy of advertisers unilaterally demanding Youtube remove its downvote count, which there is no evidence for, advertisers have no leverage against Google. What's far more likely is that visible downvotes are a signal for people to not watch a video, and Youtube wants people to watch more videos, so they watch more ads.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
I genuinely don’t understand why Google got it right with Circles, realizing we have different orthogonal interests… but all my YouTube subscriptions go in a giant pile, as if advanced math, news, and rap videos are fungible content. I want some ability to create sets of channels with a focus and only access that when I want to. I think the problem is that YouTube has always been a manipulative and exploitative platf…
On the mobile app, they show "pill buttons" for your detected interests across the top and you can click on them to filter those topics specifically. So they have put some nominal work into supporting orthogonal interests. The problem for me is that it just doesn't work very well. First, it's hidden deeply in the UI. Second, the topics are self-detected (poorly) and you have no way to edit them. Third, they seem to a…
The 1% smartest people in the userbase, who often are also relative ad resistant, aren't an audience YouTube (or any other large publisher) is going to cater to with active effort. At best they'll tolerate it benignly or as a reputation booster.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#337This is why I use YT logged out in a browser and NewPipe. NewPipe also has a much better UX with more customization than YT's own app. I also only ever use YT/NewPipe when I'm searching for something specific.
I've never got into YT as an entertainment platform, so I'm probably an outlier. If I'm watching something entertaining on there, it's because it was recommended outside the platform by a friend on social media or chat. I ignore everything recommended by the service. It's trash by default.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#338Dislikes are so toxic. I always felt that Reddit would be so much better if you can upvote what you like and simply ignore the rest. Wouldn't that work? The stuff that people like or find quality posts will rise, so logically the rest will be further down. So why do we need a downvote button? Imho downvote/dislike buttons on social sites simply validates toxic behaviour, as well as those behaviour from people that wo…
I suppose it depends on how the dislikes are used. If dislikes are not public info, but feed into the algorithm governing your content feed, that seems to be a very different use than what you are complaining about. (Though, how your complaining is in effect different from a dislike somewhat eludes me.)
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#339I deliberately cast a wide net on YouTube and I'm not coming across all of that sort of junk on a frequent enough basis for it to annoy me. The "algorithm" is pretty good in my book and tends to surface things I would genuinely find interesting, so I'm curious why it isn't for you. Do you use subscriptions a lot? I have over 1000 subs so YouTube really knows what I'm into which might help.
> I'm not coming across all of that sort of junk If you have 1000 subscriptions, your page must be completely full of junk that you’ll never watch? You can’t possibly be watching 1000 videos per week.
That's not the case, but I don't see your logic either.
There are far more than 1000 YouTube channels putting out good content. Far more than 10,000 perhaps. Why would I subscribe to a junk channel? I subscribe to topics or people I liked. Many put out a video or two a year. Some put out a video or two a day. I end up with perhaps about 100 videos a day to skim through the thumbnails/titles of, watch a handful.. happy days.
I'm confused why you'd think I'd watch every video in the first place. Do you follow every single link on HN or read every single tweet in your timeline? I mean, I don't.. and couldn't.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#340Question: do you generally use YouTube signed out? Asking because this doesn't resemble my experience at all. Just glancing at my YouTube main page I see people to whom I subscribe, other similar channels, and stuff I've watched without subscribing, like machining how-tos and stuff like that.