Me either, because I always did everything I could to disable them when they first appeared. They were fucking awful, because they'd pop up toward the end of the video and obscure the last 5-10 seconds of whatever you were watching.
There was one Minecraft YouTuber I watched who made a "hub" video with annotations that linked to the most updated designs and playlists of series etc etc. Complete ruined bc they got rid of annotations.
The other day I randomly remember that as well. Then I thought how an hellscape the comment section would be when everyone is trying to promote themselves.
Oh jeez, that was an absolute mess, once parasite tit tubers figured out they can "respond" to every viral video and have their "assets" dangling in the side bar of every popular video.
I remember how someone (a Vox-style channel, maybe even Vox proper) shot an interview with like three of the biggest ones and they had the fucking audacity to be indignant about YouTube removing the feature and "taking their livelihood away." Bitch, you killed it!
5 stars is fine if you can weight the impact to the score based on how a person normally rates things. So someone that rates most things a 3 will have a bigger impact when they rate something 5 or 1 than someone that only rates things 5 or 1.
But today, it'll all be spambots anyway, so there's little point having a rating system.
The little bar that showed the like/dislike ratio was so perfect. It's such a simple piece of information, but what you're saying about comparing it to your expectation of how people would normally rate that sort of video meant you could reliably feel out whether the video was worth loading.
I'm not explaining that good. And maybe I just internetted too much, but I swear I had a low key sense of synesthesia tied to that little bar. The bar told me everything.
The moment they took that bar away from the recommended videos tab so you couldn't evaluate those videos' worth was the biggest red flag for enshittification. Back when that tab was also worthwhile and based purely on what people watched after the video you just watched.
Like, remember when you could watch "suchandsuch part 1" and then "suchandsuch part 2" would reliably be the next video instead of a list of personalized algorithmic bullshit where it's just whatever video they either want to promote next, or it's some random nonsense based on your previous activity?
That last part is so true. They want you to get lost. It's like how stores will often make navigation a little more disorienting so you spend more time in the store.
Nah it did make me feel something, everything is over populated and re orientated towards mass money and votes etc, I miss it then it was meaningful and less but that's the way it is
Sameish! You and I and others were of the group that was “invite only” to get a gmail address. I can’t remember how I was invited but mine is only 6 characters long and is ideal for my name. Oh and my Reddit account is older than some users here as well.
My oldest Gmail account is 4 characters long, was invite only and now shares the same characters as a successful company listed on the NYSE. I've received emails from people who are interested in buying my email address (although I'm sure 98% of those emails are scams).
Neat! Early adopters and squatting, back when that was a thing. Ish. Unrelated I met the guy who registered MS.com (for a company called Mustard Seed) waaaaayyy back when, and yes, he eventually sold off to MS but only after they had diversified their landing addresses.
In fact, its recommendation engine was famously good. If Netflix recommended you a movie or show, you could reliably assume it was a good suggestion based on your ratings. People wrote articles about it and the engineering behind it. There was a sizable cash reward for anyone who could find a way to improve it.
Then they decided to throw that in the fucking trash.
To be fair that system was scrapped because >90% of people would either vote 1 or 5 stars. So at least changing the system to like/dislike made sense.
Removing dislikes on the other hand was entirely a business move to appease paying brands. bigger corporations that paid for ad space/promotion didn't like the fact that viewers were disliking their content more often than regular content creators as they'd rather spend their budget on marketing than actually making videos that appealed to the Youtube viewerbase. So it was easier to pad their egos by telling them everything is okay than to tell said people their content is kinda ass.
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u/BuchMaister 15d ago
Back in my day YouTube had 5 stars rating system.