It still does.
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.
I a just society YouTube would have been destroyed as a pseudo-monopoly ages ago.
Uh, it very clearly has a dislike button still?
Maybe it’s time for a cool refreshing glass of turnip juice.
All I want these days is a “Don’t show me any fucking AI slop” setting and a button to report AI slop.
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
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…
Back in my day, YouTube had a 5-star rating system
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
The dislikes were great at telling me quickly if a tutorial was good or not.
Now you generally have to check the top comments to see if there’s something wrong about the tutorial, but then YouTube started hiding those comments below ads/recommendations.
Now I just use GrayJay and I can quickly check comments for any video.
Back in my day, you could customize your YouTube profile and PM anyone on the platform
no one uses the return YouTube dislikes browser extension?
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?
It’s a good enough approximation. Do you really need to know if the massively downvoted video had 357,923 downvotes or 357,924?
To save you time avoiding a bad instructional video.
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
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…
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.
And this meme wasn’t AI upscaled
back in my day, you posted about your life in your geocities website! And you wrote the html on notepad and had to include an animated gif that told people to email you, cause that was the style at the time.
Also, you tied an onion to your belt.
Some people still do on Neocities
nowai
Yahweh
Eh, back when GeoCities was still a thing, most people were too busy actually having a life to regularly post about it online. Since this was before smartphones, updating a social media profile was a lot more complicated and time-consuming.
Having an active social media profile back then was often a red flag that a person was more “talk” than “walk“.
idk I’ve always been a weirdo
Unironically, that’s usually what most geocities pages were about
Exactly.
If you had Office you could use Microsoft Office FrontPage
I wrote HTML in EDIT, but my first webserver ran on an OpenVMS Alpha workstation.
We’re all being punished because Google’s feelings got hurt when we didn’t like the 2018 YouTube Rewind enough. That was the end of the dislike button and the YouTube Rewind altogether.
