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No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

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Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#361
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…

> If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently

This tidbit is the biggest news on the page for me. I had no idea people used YouTube this way. It sounds excruciating, though don’t knock it till you’ve tried it I suppose.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#362
A bit off topic, but has anyone noticed the “watch later” button design constantly changing? It flip flops between being a small circular button in the top right corner, to being a long rectangle button below the video that only shows up if you hover your mouse over the thumbnail. It seems to change randomly, somewhere between every day and both designs co-existing on the same page. It’s bizarre.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#363
It is surprising how bad YouTube is at discovering new content. No advanced search, no categories, no labels, nothing. Title and a thumbnail are your only two guides.

Also, long series are hard to keep track of. Like if you want to watch WW2 week by week, you have to manually find and choose the next video in the series.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#364

On another note, forcing all videos under 1-minute to be YouTube shorts is a horrible idea. My dog recently passed away, and I started uploading short clips of him to share with my grieving family. Now anytime I watch a clip of my dog, it's followed automatically by a short of some influencer I've never heard of toting some new hot meme.

if you're on PC then this userscript is great to bring back the standard player for shorts

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/439993-youtube-shorts-redi...

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#365
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dead Internet Theory is becoming more and more true all the time.

No, it really isn't, that's just a crack conspiracy theory that took off because people no longer have the capacity to judge reality by any metrics besides cynicism and memeability. There really are billions of actual people using the internet all the time.

All models are wrong, but some are useful. The value of a theory is how accurately it allows you to predict future observations.

If AI-driven recommendation systems and a trend towards centralizing all discourse on giant social media platforms produces a result indistinguishable from the Dead Internet Theory, then the theory is a useful way of thinking about and engaging with the internet.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#366
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss. Don't know if you knew this, you can use RSS to get feeds of the channels you want without subscribing or even having a Google account. Good in-browser add-on for following, organizing etc. of RSS feeds: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader…

I use the RSS feeds with Elfeed for Emacs which allows me to search, filter, and modify feed entries as they are fetched. Additionally, you can use an https://invidious.io instance - which also provides RSS feeds - to avoid sharing any personally identifiable info to YouTube. I've setup elfeed to provide a keystroke to watch the videos ad-free using mpv. All together, this is a much more privacy and attention respect…

Interesting! That's the first project written in Crystal I've encountered in the wild.

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a "don't recommend channel" option if you click the 3 dots button on a video. I use this liberally for all sorts of reasons and it makes my recommendations much better.

I have done it a lot for around a year, but i think than the block list is very limited, because after a will the same "blocked" channels come back again in the list. I have now stopped to use this fake feature. I am sure of it because i regularly block official news or music channels, but they appear again anyway after a wile. It's the same for the "not interested" feature. I have stop to tell them, when asked, why…

The "don't recommend channel" feature works fine for me, but I have probably blocked only a few hundred channels.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#368
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's true, but it's hard, you only need to click once on a clickbait video out of curiosity and you'll be flooded with garbage until you reset your whole youtube history. I switched to individious/piped and newpipe since for a more quiet youtube experience.

You need to be very aggressive against this, dislike and don't recommend every bit of garbage you see otherwise you will be flooded with it

Hum... Maybe you didn't notice all the frenezy, but you can't dislike something anymore.

I'm not a very active user, but I think there is no positive "don't show me stuff like this again" action you can do anymore.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#369
post #335
post #184

The 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 v…

> 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.

I think you are also overestimating how much people look at downvotes. Most people click, watch and move on if it's not good. Have you ever seen a Tiktok user?

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#370
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss. Don't know if you knew this, you can use RSS to get feeds of the channels you want without subscribing or even having a Google account. Good in-browser add-on for following, organizing etc. of RSS feeds: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader…

I use the RSS feeds with Elfeed for Emacs which allows me to search, filter, and modify feed entries as they are fetched. Additionally, you can use an https://invidious.io instance - which also provides RSS feeds - to avoid sharing any personally identifiable info to YouTube. I've setup elfeed to provide a keystroke to watch the videos ad-free using mpv. All together, this is a much more privacy and attention respect…

The feedbro extension can also filter with a bunch of criteria, set off by configurable triggers and a decent set of actions.
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