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"Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads

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Re: "Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads

#21
post #7

Update from the dev: > Unfortunately the extension requires quite a large database (~15TB) - and it costs money. > The ad\changelog was supposed to show only on browser restart - i.e. be much less intrusive > The idea behind paid features was also to cover the costs (since donations became smaller than the hosting costs). > I messed up with implementation though. > Sorry. I do feel for the developer, and I am not ant…

> the extension requires quite a large database (~15TB) Maybe I am missing something but how does a database which just needs to store video ID and a number become 15TB in size?

Also a user ID, which seems to be 36 base64 characters (can't have one user count for multiple votes).

Round up to 500 raw bytes per row (perhaps including time/ip and other random garbage, plus indexes), 3x replication/redundancy or something, for 6 million users each having voted on 500 videos, and you're at 6TB; still some ways off from 15TB, but not insurmountably far.

(votes/user is rather tricky to get; but, as a bit of random garbage statistics math: YT gets ~5B views/day and has ~3B users; 6M downloads of the extension means ~0.2% of users use it, so 10M extension-user views/day = 15B over 4 years, or 2.5K/user; assuming 20% vote rate (rather high but lets say extension users care more for voting and/or watch YT more than an average person), that's 500 votes/user)

Re: "Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads

#22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider it to be more valuable than a "stupid gimmick", even if more in message than in direct utility - it fights to retain peer-voting and crowdsourced evaluation on the quality of online information, which is something that seems to be dwindling away with each passing year.

I tried to make Twitter and Reddit more usable as they started to enshittify, but after a certain point I realized it was a fundamentally losing battle and gave them up altogether. Those sites were not one or two features away from becoming usable again, the rot was more comprehensive. Today in hindsight, I can see that moving on was the only way to go.

Correct, that's why I called it a stupid gimmick. You're trying to fight them on their turf, it'll consume your life and they will wipe you out in a second if they feel like it.

Re: "Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads

#23
post #14

You gotta be a bit short sighted to imagine that the kind of people that would download an extension would accept ads. On the other hand, you also have to be a bit short sighted to be installed gargabage like "an extension so you can downvote" lol.

You can downvote youtube videos without the extension, the extension just shows how many people downvoted a video since youtube took that visibility away a few years ago. It does help when there are shitty video recommendations and can ignore videos that have a bad ratio

bad ratio can be caused by a lot of things

Re: "Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads

#24
post #7

Update from the dev: > Unfortunately the extension requires quite a large database (~15TB) - and it costs money. > The ad\changelog was supposed to show only on browser restart - i.e. be much less intrusive > The idea behind paid features was also to cover the costs (since donations became smaller than the hosting costs). > I messed up with implementation though. > Sorry. I do feel for the developer, and I am not ant…

I don't feel for the developer. If donations is smaller than hosting costs, just stop putting time into it. It's a stupid gimmick anyway.

15TB smells of incompetence. Putting ads, even more. Fucking up the ad displaying logic as he says: even more...

Re: "Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads

#25
post #23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can downvote youtube videos without the extension, the extension just shows how many people downvoted a video since youtube took that visibility away a few years ago. It does help when there are shitty video recommendations and can ignore videos that have a bad ratio

bad ratio can be caused by a lot of things

Still useful

Re: "Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads

#26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bad ratio can be caused by a lot of things

Still useful

I'm skeptical that it's of any use considering it's only going to be installed by people who specifically want to dislike. It seems more likely that the like/dislike ratio is going to be heavily skewed towards dislikes just by the stated purpose of the plugin and who it appeals to.

Re: "Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads

#27
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the extension requires quite a large database (~15TB) Maybe I am missing something but how does a database which just needs to store video ID and a number become 15TB in size?

The way the plugin works (in my simplified understanding) is that it guesses how many dislikes there are based on the like/dislike ratio of the people that have the plugin installed. So if 100 people that have the plugin installed and there is a 90/10 like/dislike ratio, and the actual video has 1000 likes, it will say that there are 100 dislikes. Youtube not only took away the dislike UI, but stopped publicly giving…

It's not a representative sample so the dislikes it shows aren't accurate it's a bad estimate. I also heard some content creators that said they compared with real dislike numbers and it was way off.

Re: "Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads

#28

You gotta be a bit short sighted to imagine that the kind of people that would download an extension would accept ads. On the other hand, you also have to be a bit short sighted to be installed gargabage like "an extension so you can downvote" lol.

They won't "accept ads" but they also won't pay for the extension, so I think in practice this is a good way to tell users "you're costing me money, go away."

Re: "Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads

#29
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still useful

I'm skeptical that it's of any use considering it's only going to be installed by people who specifically want to dislike. It seems more likely that the like/dislike ratio is going to be heavily skewed towards dislikes just by the stated purpose of the plugin and who it appeals to.

I don't think the extension is installed by people that wanna dislike, rather by people that wanna see the dislike count. I used to have it since it's very useful to see if something like a tutorial is a scam.

Also if I remember correctly, the extension was created before youtube completely removed the count, and it scraped the actual value from youtube to add it to the db while the count still was available

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