Live data from Hacker News

The YouTube like button glows when you say "smash that like button" [video]

youtube.com

11–20 of 147 posts

Re: The YouTube like button glows when you say "smash that like button" [video]

#11
What about if I say, "Please don't smash that like button" or "Smash that like button if you're an idiot"? Just wondering if it is based on transcript-grepping or does it even consider sentence semantics? (I know, overkill. Please don't implement that, YT engineers. You've heard of "boiling the ocean to make a cup of tea", right?)

Re: The YouTube like button glows when you say "smash that like button" [video]

#12
post #4

Just a YT developer Easter egg. It’s become such a cliche phrase on that platform in an effort to pump creator stats. I think there’s a similar effect for the subscribe button. But I don’t remember which phrase triggers it

Why does it only work for some videos?

Not all videos have transcripts.

Re: The YouTube like button glows when you say "smash that like button" [video]

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it only work for some videos?

It is probably AI with suboptimal training, despite the massive dataset available to them. It might even just be conventional speech-to-text, which can struggle with accents and poor acoustics, etc.

YouTube already generates transcripts of uploaded videos (though not super accurate ones). A simple and straightforward implementation would just pattern match in the transcript text.

No need for fancy AI, on top of whatever technology powers the transcription feature.

Re: The YouTube like button glows when you say "smash that like button" [video]

#15
They pour money into engineering and hardware resources into stuff like this but still claim that DMCA abuse (by media companies, blackmailers, griefers, and reputation management activity) is an unsolvable problem?

Yet...they can't hire more staff, implement databases to track malicious/unreliable DMCA submitters, and falsely-targeted creators for whom complaints are likely BS, and implement AI-powered tools to assist with all of this?

Re: The YouTube like button glows when you say "smash that like button" [video]

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it only work for some videos?

It is probably AI with suboptimal training, despite the massive dataset available to them. It might even just be conventional speech-to-text, which can struggle with accents and poor acoustics, etc.

It will be the STT they use for their automatic captioning so it should be as accurate as whatever that produces. It would be the height of inefficiency to do a separate STT run over the entire audio just for this gimmick.

Re: The YouTube like button glows when you say "smash that like button" [video]

#18
I know this is just a fun little easter egg, but features like this seems a little risky to me. It calls attention to the fact that Youtube isn't just serving me videos neutrally, it knows what is being said in those videos at the exact moment it is said. It highlights how much Google analyses the content of its videos in a way that more neutral features like automatic transcripts don't and in turn how much that can teach Google about me based on the videos I watch. It isn't that I didn't know Google had this ability, but foregrounding it underlines Google's Big Brother nature in a way that makes me want to use Youtube less and not more.

Re: The YouTube like button glows when you say "smash that like button" [video]

#19
post #9

This has been happening for at least a year, probably more. I always assumed it was something the creator had to manually mark, never considered that it might be automatic.

My TV's YT app is useless and buggy. It doesn't have automatically generated & automatically translated subtitles. The YT app on my mi-box does. So it wouldn't be impossible to have the VTT prescan the audio and "if VTT has the phrase so-and-so then display animation lalala.gif"

(I use the VTT on my Firefox, I use IDM to download the auto-generated English language scripts for lengthy videos).

I remember listening to Chomsky saying that he prefers to read the transcripts than listening/watching speeches.

Re: The YouTube like button glows when you say "smash that like button" [video]

#20

They pour money into engineering and hardware resources into stuff like this but still claim that DMCA abuse (by media companies, blackmailers, griefers, and reputation management activity) is an unsolvable problem? Yet...they can't hire more staff, implement databases to track malicious/unreliable DMCA submitters, and falsely-targeted creators for whom complaints are likely BS, and implement AI-powered tools to assi…

There is no incentive for them.

Example: Over here there is a huge problem with rented e-scooters being left wherever.

Every scooter company asks you to take a photo of the parking. NOBODY ever checks those.

I did a quick test with GPT-4 and it could tell me if a scooter was parked in a considerate way about 90% of the time (10 photos, some with multiple scooters).

Could they implement this in an afternoon? Yes. Will they? No. Because it'd be used to penalise their own customers.

Post reply on HN