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YouTube is cracking down on clickbait
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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Return YouTube Dislikes still exists. The likes and dislikes of RYD users are stored in an external database, so Google cannot take them away.
Unless YouTube is using that data to not recommend crappy videos, then it's completely pointless. If YouTube was going to use that data, then they would, oh, I don't know, maybe still have a dislike button?
YouTube never did that anyway. YouTube recommends videos on user engagement. Thumb buttons in any direction are engagement. They have slightly hidden "don't recommend video/channel" options for that.
What RYD does is to show what others think.
The fact they never used that data in video recommendations is surprising, and if they started to factor it in would have probably helped make this less of an issue
So you never clicked dislike, just to get recommendations for the same channel / type of video over and over again? I thought everyone figured that out by now. These are the menu items that actually do the trick:
It's completely inaccurate though. It can show massive amounts of faux dislikes that don't actually exist. This has been confirmed with youtubers, who still see the dislike ratio on their backend.
I'd say the "actual" dislike numbers are completely inaccurate because what's the point of disliking a video in an environment where the dislikes don't count?
RYD extrapolates the like/dislike ratio as stored on their own server to the like numbers as displayed by YouTube. That's not secret information. They spell it out in their FAQ.
If anything, if you like more representative numbers, get more people to install RYD.
So a video getting like 80% dislikes in the addon, but like 90% likes in the backend, is an okay and totally not misleading metric to you? And I uninstalled the addon because of this.
When the only people hitting the dislike button are the people using the addon (because that's the only circumstance in which it counts), WTF else did you expect than for the dislike ratio with the addon to be higher?
If that's the only people using the addon, then they should adjust their extrapolation formula to account for the bias of their user base. Because like this it will only feed people's confirmation bias through literal disinformation, making content look heavily disliked even when it isn't.
Neither was the previous workaround which IIRC required some JavaScript trickery with the web player.
You wrote "there was a fix" which I assumed you meant one of those user scripts / browser extensions that let users access removed features for a while. Pretty sure this worked with downvotes for a while but not in an official capacity.