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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

#431
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you assume the algorithm is working where I feel the opposite.

My words are not based on theory but actual practice: I had videos I didn't like on my YouTube homepage, and I didn't click them, and after a little while they went away. It's as simple as that. My Google News feed is the same way. Don't click the dislike button, rather don't watch the video at all. (Dislike means this video is bad not this topic is bad.) The videos on my homepage exactly match the videos I watch. Ex…

That’s not my experience though. They just keep showing up. Maybe they are embedded in articles I’ve viewed or something but I’ve never clicked on them intentionally.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#432
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…

> YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar > 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 they've probably uploaded a few videos in the past couple minutes. I thought that this must be an exaggeration but I just looked at the account and at this time the account has 20 videos posted in the last hour. I k…

As long as they get clicks, show ads, and compress adequately well, why?

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#433
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…

> Because in every other way (and every way for the viewer), this makes Youtube worse

It makes YouTube worse for the viewer, but YouTube doesn't have to care because they have a monopoly, so realistically speaking nobody will leave.

Thus they get to appease the brands/big channels with virtually no downside. Even better, the lack of a quality filter provided by dislikes mean people may have to trawl through more shit before they find what they want to watch, thus increasing engagement metrics.

This is the same reason most monopoly-level social media platforms take a relaxed stance on spam or malicious/illegal content (besides edge-cases which have legal or PR consequences) - the spam still drives (and itself counts as) engagement and the network effects are strong enough to overcome the annoyance and keep people on the platform anyway.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#434
post #284
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he’s disseminating and distributing solutions I don’t see the problem with it other than jealousy. It’s helpful and helps prevent information rot if a platform goes down.

For me at least the main problem isn't so much this person/channel, you can always tell YouTube to stop suggesting a channel. It's the people that now realise this is something YouTube allows (or at least doesn't seem to care about). For a similar issue there was a plague of "Reply girls" for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_girl

"Although many users would click the "dislike" button on the videos, this was interpreted by YouTube's algorithm as legitimate engagement, and the videos would be ranked more highly."

I literally facepalmed.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#435
post #281
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If he’s disseminating and distributing solutions I don’t see the problem with it other than jealousy. It’s helpful and helps prevent information rot if a platform goes down.

[deleted]

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#436
post #283

I feel like every recommendation engine has tanked in 2022 along with a matching upswing in ads. Audible is aggressively recommending an audiobook I already bought and listened to, it's even in their "your year so far" list because I listened to it in January. Their 2-for-1, annual, special offer emails are coming 2-3 a week now. My Facebook timeline is full of crappy "Suggested for you" entries. I doom scrolled last…

Having more and more ads sounds like an end of market cycle thing. Like when there are no more billions of untapped users, but you have to show revenue growth, so you crank up the ads to an unsustainable number and sneak towards the exit before it all comes tumbling down.

Growth for the sake of growth has a well-known biological equivalent: cancer, and its end-game is monopolizing all resources and killing the host (and thus itself).

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#437
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, the algorithm works very effectively at stealing my time. Bikini catwalks, scamming phone scammers, MMA fights, math entertainment, people who build cool shit. This is of course subjective, but I basically can't open youtube.com without wasting 10 minutes. If I ever get the idea of going to YouTube for a legit purpose (e.g. finding a conference talk, or listening to music), my brain's first response is "o…

> scamming phone scammers Mark Rober, I guess? No wonder the algorithm promotes him to heaven and beyond, the content he puts out is extremely well done.

I feel like his content is way too sensationalist. I much prefer Jim Browning when it comes to scammer payback.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#438
I miss the dislike button for one thing - the meta joke of the neutral response video from Futurama.

For years, it was always 50% likes and 50% dislikes. Since the dislike button no longer displays a number, the meta joke no longer displays. Sad days.

You can watch the 5 second video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#440

Let'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…

It seems as if they read the Dead Internet Theory and thought, "you know what, let's make that real"!
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