Back in my day you only watched YouTube videos for tutorials on how to do stuff.
back in my day it was kinda easy to find interesting content
gvid.tv has a downvote button. And it actually does something useful.
I miss being able to tell people they suck with just one click
I’ve never blocked as many channels as now after they removed the dislike button on the shorts section.
Ah, I remember when you paused and the whole video was buffering. You could have multiple tabs open and watch the video when it was done. No matter what kind of connection you had, you could simply wait for the video to finish downloading in the background and watch it without problems.
No ads, a 5-star rating system, 100% buffering, and mostly enthusiasts posting, no profit-driven incentives. We didn’t know how good we had it.
I hate the way YouTube now gives millions of dollars to people exploiting children watching videos - be it slop factories or ‘influencer’ preying on their insecurities.
In a just society YouTube would have been destroyed as a pseudo-monopoly ages ago.
I watched so much illegally uploaded anime on old YouTube/Dailymotion… those were the days
What pushed me to use revanced some years ago.
It still does.
Not in shorts anymore.
All I want these days is a “Don’t show me any fucking AI slop” setting and a button to report AI slop.
Tidal has a no-AI button, if it helps. They’ve just introduced it. That’s music taken care of, I guess. It’s something.
YouTube is letting people mark their videos as AI or not AI and I assume doing nothing with it? I think I’ve stumbled upon an AI video or two on YouTube but I didn’t see any labels?
EDIT: Oh, fuck, are they just asking us to label our videos “non-AI” so they don’t train their own AI on AI slop? Fuck.
Then turn the button into some kind of cookie-clicker type game, because it will be being used a lot!
Back in my day, memes weren’t Ai “enhanced” and Bart didn’t have a vagina for an ear.
Hey man, they’re raggin’ on your vaginear!
What is going on with that vaginear anyway? And the random grass rectangle.
new darwinism dropped: survive of the vaginear-en-ist
Back in my day, YouTube had a 5-star rating system
I haven’t experienced those days…
And the video’s rating was plainly visible so you could use it to make the decision whether the video was even worth your click.
The shovelware AI slop video channels wouldn’t be such a problem today if we still had that.
I never get those because I never watch them.
Going straight to YouTube is like going straight to Imgur looking for good content. Should never be done. Places like Lemmy or friend chat groups refer me to good videos. Or my curated subscribed channels with quality content is the other way I watch youtube.
Anyone going straight to YouTube.com looking for their algorithm and ratings system to tell them about shit content in advance is mistaken in their expectations.
extensive use of the “Don’t recommend this video > Tell us why > I don’t like this video” function, plus removing bad videos from my watch history after I stop watching, has got me a well-trained slop-free recommendations page with interesting new smallish channels.
Yeah it can definitely be somewhat trained. Also the extention dearrow makes a big difference in the experience too.
Usually I go there looking for something specific and use the search bar.
However, the search function in YouTube has also turned to absolute crap. It only lists a few results and then switches to random shit you didn’t ask for.
A lot of the results are also often misleading titles leading to lazy videos that are a slideshow of impertinent pictures with a synthetized voice spewing inaccurate information. AI has made that even worse. The star rating system would have helped identify these crap videos before you click on them.
Or good channel you know mention other channel.
and search results showed only videos related to your search. recommendations on the side were similar videos and not some unrelated bullshit. it was so much better.
Honestly if someone remade an old YouTube alternative I think it would take off.
It’s what I wish PeerTube was, but I’m not sure if that will ever take off sadly.
Lack of advertising dollars is definitely an impediment to video platform alternatives…
I remember a time when people just posted silly little shitty drawn videos just for the fun of it. Not saying creators shouldn’t be compensated for their hard work, I just feel like something was lost with the monetization of every little thing.
The trouble is hosting that much video content and the bandwidth to feed viewers.
People really fail to understand what a truly colossal undertaking a site like YouTube is. It’s a technological wonder that they are able to process that much data and serve it so efficiently. Hate YouTube all you want, I do, but the engineers at Google are fucking magicians.
Last I heard it was something on the order of 700 hours of video content uploaded per minute. Insane.
Maybe when the AI bubble bursts, people will buy up abandoned data centers for pennies on the dollar and repurpose them for a better Youtube alternative. And maybe Margot Robbie will see this comment and fall in love with me.
Recommendations on the side today are related to everything you’ve watched in like the last week or so.
Which I really hate, because it means when you get into some specific interest, YouTube basically stops showing you anything else.
Hey YouTube! Those interests I was into last week, last month, I’m still into them! Please don’t railroad me like that!
You’ll watch that sponsored content and you’ll like it. Because you can’t dislike it.
google is absolute worst
Back in my day, there were alternatives to Google
And they were all worse
Only because Google actually worked as advertised (and only as advertised). Compared to what Google is now, that’s a matter of opinion.
All things considered, I’ll take the Google of yesteryear over the Google of today. I’ll also take a more privative and much goofier/glitchier YouTube.
Shit, I remember when having a Gmail account was a coveted thing that required an invite that people paid literally hundreds, even thousands of dollars for. I had five, and I sold one for $2k, and another for $4k. (These people were total twats). Decades later, I still use my fistname.lastname@gmail.com addy, while one is dead, and the other got married 2 months later and changed their name anyway. Idiots, lol. Weeks later, invite Scott bumped up to 50, then 250, then unlimited, then it got opened to the public.
Being impatient is expensive.
Grad school was a crazy time
Makes me wonder if under the hood it’s still stored as stars or if they migrated their data. Is a 3 star or more rating displayed as thumbs up now? Is a thumbs up just a 5 star rating? When thumbs down existed was that just 1 star?
You sweet summer child, back in my day YouTube had a five star rating system and video response functionality.
Gotta say, don’t miss video responses. It was nearly all irrelevant content and people trying to advertise their own channels
Perfectly true. It would’ve been nice, if it wasn’t so inherently abusable. We can’t have nice things.
Could imagine that working at the scale where PeerTube is currently at, where you can actually get to know folks and it’s not just about broadcasting to as many people as possible…
no one uses the return YouTube dislikes browser extension?
yeah it works good enough for people who knows what’s going on.
I don’t want my watchlist stored on a random third party server
What’s the point, if downvotes are no longer a factor in the YT backend?
To save you time avoiding a bad instructional video.
It’s a good enough approximation. Do you really need to know if the massively downvoted video had 357,923 downvotes or 357,924?
It’s more complicated than that. The button still exists even without the add-on and the back end factors it in and I think shows the creator, but doesn’t show it to the front end. So the add-on doesn’t have the real numbers but there still are real numbers
yeah the only thing you see with the add-on is the stats for the people who have the add-on, which ideally would statistically approximate the actual data but we all know that it’s not even close.
It is surprisingly close. I download a lot of videos with yt-dlp and have seen ratios where up to 20% of total likes being from Return YouTube Dislike users.
Like here’s a video with 188,573 likes in total of which 28,330 were submitted to the data base:
https://returnyoutubedislikeapi.com/votes?videoId=dtjb2OhEQcU
The users disliked 130 times which was extrapolated to 356. No idea how that formula works, I believe users with this plugin could be more likely to dislike videos than users without that plugin which may be factored in.
And they have data for older videos from before the button was disabled so those are accurate
There are dozens of us
I had to get rid of it when it caused massive slowdowns for me. That’s probably fixed by now…
It still does, it just doesn’t show numbers because YouTube is a coward.
No the API is dead. The extension everyone is using calculates their own dislike number by inferring from the extension users who disliked the video
But the button is still there.
Afaik it’s only for the YT-Studio backend, so creators can see the dislikes but there is no public access to that data
did you not read the comment?
But the button is still there…
I meant that while the button is still there the Data is only available for the uploader via the Studio backend. The public API is dead, wich I omitted in the original comment for simplicity
How is:
the Data is only available for the uploader via the Studio backend.
different from:
it just doesn’t show numbers because YouTube is a coward.
?
You were more technical than the top level comment and framed it as a disagreement.
Because the second can implies the data is still available but not displayed. I wanted to specify that the data isn’t available (for the public). I don’t disagree with the top per se but wanted to clear up the ambiguity
And ops post is about the button being removed. Which is false.
How is this different from the comment you disagreed with?
They already removed it from Shorts. Give it a little time and it will be gone from the rest of the videos.
Not like you need another reason to not watch shorts.
YouTube used to not have ads.
YouTube has ads?
#uBlock Origin
May I nicely suggest AdNauseam instead? It poisons the well of advertising.
yeh. pepperidge farms members. “broadcast yourself” my ass
Still doesn’t if use an ad blocker.
You’re supposed to use only fans to broadcast your ass fyi
