on November 10th YouTube announced that whether this impacts you negatively or
not the dislike counter was going away the stated purpose of this change was to
reduce dislike attacks a kind of targeted harassment that YouTube
confirmed disproportionately affects smaller channels it's a valid problem
and a noble goal to be sure you'll just have to forgive me for doubting that
that was Google's entire motivation like the are you okay book that they left on
my bed at a summit their public concern for Creator mental health brings a
little Hollow to someone who has lived inside the machine for as long as I have
not because I cynically believe that they are too heartless to care but
rather because they cannot care the
platform fends off competitors like twitch and Tick Tock by frantically
serving his viewers that's you as many hours of satisfying content as possible
regardless of the Creator's feelings about it and the cold hard truth is that
no machine learning algorithm is capable of caring about your sadness or mine I
don't blame them for any of this I mean all they did was build the wheel when we
choose to run on it but the road that I travel is littered with dead and dying
internet Superstars and as sure as the sun sets each day I will join them at
some point maybe soon and YouTube's wheel is going to keep on turning
without me I promise so if removing dislike counters is
unlikely to change this ruthless meritocracy that uncaringly churns
through its stars like professional sports and
what was the actual point of any of this and what can we do about it well step
one is to get our dislike counter back and I'm going to show you guys how after
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with code Linus Tech tips at the link below restoring the YouTube dislike
counter takes less than 30 seconds head to return YouTube dislike.com install
click your browser icon and add it you
can also manually look it up in the Chrome web store if it doesn't work just
uninstall the extension and try again according to Dimitri the Project Lead
there are some bugs in the Chrome developers manifest V3 that make it
randomly fail about five percent of the time once that's done voila your dislike
counter might take a second to load in but it's back the incredible speed with
which the open source Community identifies and wreck defies problems
like this never ceases to amaze me I mean huge props to the dozens of
contributors and donors who are keeping the dream alive but as cool as it is on
the surface this project raises a lot of
questions for me which is why I made this video starting with is it even
accurate well immediately following Google's announcement it was extremely accurate
because the workaround was a relatively simple one you see the YouTube app and
the website had been updated to hide the dislike counter but the YouTube API
which allows developers to access key stats on the back end was still
reporting true dislike counts so creating an extension that would just
pull that data and then automatically inject it once your page loaded was
simple enough but then on December 13th
API access to dislikes went dark so how
does it work now the bad news is it involves a fair bit
of guesswork Dimitri who goes by anarios on GitHub pulled as much data as
possible in the time between YouTube's announcement and the API cut off true
stats for about 250 million videos but
while that's going to allow you to smugly affirm how right you were that
YouTube Rewind sucked it is far from a complete picture and it only allows the
extension to show historical data for videos that were uploaded prior to the
cutoff good news is that YouTube already uses a
lot of guesswork in its analytics anyway so no loss there and the project is
poised to become a lot more accurate and useful in the short to mid term first up
thanks to the efforts of a digital Heritage preservation group called archive team Dimitri is working on
integrating the metadata from a whopping 4.56 billion videos it's going to take
some time since that's 69 terabytes of
data to ingest nice but once that's complete extension users will have
accurate historical counters restored for nearly every video on the site that
is pretty incredible like this new hoodie on hiltetstore.com
but what about new videos that's where you come in by using the extension
you're going to be contributing your own likes and dislikes which can then be
compared against publicly available views and light counts to extrapolate a
probable dislike value in theory then the more people install the extension
and interact with videos the more accurate it'll become
unfortunately this raises some serious privacy concerns your YouTube viewing
behavior is extremely valuable particularly to advertisers and while
there's an argument to be made that once you've given your data to Google Pandora's Box is kind of open anyway
I don't wish to promote that attitude thankfully as Dimitri lays out in this
document addressing privacy concerns the project code is mostly publicly
available and open source and it appears as though he is collecting nothing more
than what's required to log dislikes and prevent the same kind of spam behavior
that contributed to Google's removal of the counter in the first place
or at least that's what he's collecting from viewers one of the ways the project
could really get to the next level is a commitment from YouTubers both large and
small to share their own true stats to
help the extension validate its own guesswork but this gets pretty hairy
pretty quickly while I could use oauth
to Grant access to my own stats even with the limited scope of YouTube
analytics read only which can be configured to exclude Revenue numbers
there's some really sensitive data in
there and it's not the kind of thing that we give away willy-nilly even if
someone that I've never met before offers a pinky promise not to misuse it
torn right because how complain about
the lack of accurate counters if I'm not willing to do my own part to ensure the
restoration well maybe they can be good enough without my help let's take a look at a
couple of my own videos that were published after the changeover here's
one that was well received the ratio of likes to dislikes is actually very close
when I compare the YouTube player page to my own stats
meanwhile here's a sponsored showcase that didn't perform well for us at the
time of writing this my browser extension reported 12 000 likes to 940
dislikes a ratio of about 12.77 to 1
while the true stats tell a slightly less favorable story putting us at 11.63
to 1. so that's a bit farther off but
still accurate enough to reflect the audience's general displeasure with that
video it's possible though that extension users are over represented in
our audience meaning that our videos might be more accurate than say for
example a video on a makeup Channel our upside down build video for example had
a whopping 2 000 votes from extension users out of 14 000 total though
curiously I wasn't able to verify this one because I believe YouTube is doing
some funky things with the counter after live streams so I would love for other
creators particularly if you're from a different vertical to chime in in the
comments with a couple of your own comparisons if you'd be willing for my
site though it's looking pretty good so far which you might have realized
doesn't help anyone that wants to use a mobile app for YouTube unless this is
the straw that finally breaks my back and makes me install YouTube vanced yeah
I went there Dimitri is currently in talks with that team to include his data
and for those who haven't heard of it vanced is a side load only alternative
YouTube app that among other things enables background playback and ad-free
Playback without a premium subscription both things that hurt my livelihood as
well as those of my employees and my fellow creators
and advanced isn't my only unlikely Ally
here one of the policies that served me very well in my life is to never take a
deal where I don't understand what's in it for the other party Dimitri claims
that the project started as a simple effort to restore the dislike counter
for his own use presumably so he can quickly and easily filter out junk
content that's fair enough that's a pretty big deal for anyone who's ever
tried to find any kind of obscure DIY tutorial especially anything to do with
software but by his own account he hasn't even had time to actually watch
any YouTube video since this project began surely that's not sustainable and
that's even ignoring the fact that running the infrastructure to support this extension is a non-trivial Endeavor
that may not be able to rely on donors or a small patreon forever I see a
sponsorship link from a VPN that I've never even heard of at the bottom of the
page so it makes me wonder what's his end game
here truthfully I don't know is getting
my dislike counter back really worth violating my principles here promoting
online content piracy groups and collaborating with parties whose
motivations I don't fully understand I'm not sure yet
what I do know is I sure as hell didn't choose this path YouTube chose it for me
when instead of coming up with better ways for creators to moderate their
communities they decided to just get away one of the few publicly available
video quality markers that we still had left
the only answer I've been able to get from YouTube is that going forward
you're supposed to just use comments to gauge video quality or validity but it
takes about 30 seconds in a YouTube comment section to figure out why that
is not a silver bullet they're full of spam and misinformation and they are
much easier for a malicious actor to control I see the benefit of this
control four marginalized creators I truly do having a bunch of jerks come in
storming from some hateful subreddit to dislike Brigade you is something that
nobody should have to endure but I also do not believe I just do not
believe that YouTube a multi-hundred
billion dollar company or at least their parent company couldn't combat this
through a combination of origin and user
Behavior tracking and all kinds of other AI black magic that they have access to
and if they really felt that these negative interactions weren't valuable
all they had to do was remove the button altogether so if YouTube still thinks
it's useful and it's still going to affect your video performance anyway and
so far anecdotally it doesn't seem to have actually changed how many people
are interacting with the button what purpose are we really serving here
I mean I've seen every conspiracy theory Under the Sun YouTube wants to protect
itself and its corporate Partners from embarrassment or the woke mob is running
the show over there now blah blah blah blah blah but honestly the more likely
one to me is the simplest explanation monkey see monkey do so many platforms
are removing any way of negatively interacting with anything and YouTube
seems like they just wanted to follow suit and probably the most frustrating
thing about all of this is the dismissive way that Google has addressed
the collateral damage here I mean I'm glad that creators can protect
themselves from unwarranted attacks I really am but malicious actors can and
will use these same tools to create fake
positivity around their content and to moderate negative comments mark my words
the number of kids that are gonna get fished with Robux scams is going to
increase and making the internet safer for one vulnerable group while making it
more dangerous for another is not a clear-cut win and some of the benefits
of dislike counters like nuking misleading content and punishing
creators who honestly really had it coming are going to be sorely missed at
least by you maybe I'm going to be running the return YouTube dislikes
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below if you guys are looking for another video to watch maybe you could check out I don't know the last time I
was this mad is probably when they renamed USB again it's over on the tech
quickie Channel though