WEBVTT

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on November 10th YouTube announced that whether this impacts you negatively or

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not the dislike counter was going away the stated purpose of this change was to

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reduce dislike attacks a kind of targeted harassment that YouTube

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confirmed disproportionately affects smaller channels it's a valid problem

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and a noble goal to be sure you'll just have to forgive me for doubting that

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that was Google's entire motivation like the are you okay book that they left on

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my bed at a summit their public concern for Creator mental health brings a

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little Hollow to someone who has lived inside the machine for as long as I have

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not because I cynically believe that they are too heartless to care but

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rather because they cannot care the

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platform fends off competitors like twitch and Tick Tock by frantically

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serving his viewers that's you as many hours of satisfying content as possible

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regardless of the Creator's feelings about it and the cold hard truth is that

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no machine learning algorithm is capable of caring about your sadness or mine I

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don't blame them for any of this I mean all they did was build the wheel when we

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choose to run on it but the road that I travel is littered with dead and dying

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internet Superstars and as sure as the sun sets each day I will join them at

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some point maybe soon and YouTube's wheel is going to keep on turning

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without me I promise so if removing dislike counters is

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unlikely to change this ruthless meritocracy that uncaringly churns

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through its stars like professional sports and

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what was the actual point of any of this and what can we do about it well step

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one is to get our dislike counter back and I'm going to show you guys how after

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I show you my sponsor thanks to jackery for sponsoring this video their Explorer

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1500 power station provides a huge 1500

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watt hour capacity support for up to seven devices charging simultaneously

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and it takes four hours to go from zero to eighty percent battery get 10 off

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with code Linus Tech tips at the link below restoring the YouTube dislike

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counter takes less than 30 seconds head to return YouTube dislike.com install

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click your browser icon and add it you

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can also manually look it up in the Chrome web store if it doesn't work just

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uninstall the extension and try again according to Dimitri the Project Lead

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there are some bugs in the Chrome developers manifest V3 that make it

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randomly fail about five percent of the time once that's done voila your dislike

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counter might take a second to load in but it's back the incredible speed with

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which the open source Community identifies and wreck defies problems

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like this never ceases to amaze me I mean huge props to the dozens of

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contributors and donors who are keeping the dream alive but as cool as it is on

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the surface this project raises a lot of

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questions for me which is why I made this video starting with is it even

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accurate well immediately following Google's announcement it was extremely accurate

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because the workaround was a relatively simple one you see the YouTube app and

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the website had been updated to hide the dislike counter but the YouTube API

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which allows developers to access key stats on the back end was still

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reporting true dislike counts so creating an extension that would just

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pull that data and then automatically inject it once your page loaded was

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simple enough but then on December 13th

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API access to dislikes went dark so how

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does it work now the bad news is it involves a fair bit

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of guesswork Dimitri who goes by anarios on GitHub pulled as much data as

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possible in the time between YouTube's announcement and the API cut off true

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stats for about 250 million videos but

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while that's going to allow you to smugly affirm how right you were that

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YouTube Rewind sucked it is far from a complete picture and it only allows the

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extension to show historical data for videos that were uploaded prior to the

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cutoff good news is that YouTube already uses a

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lot of guesswork in its analytics anyway so no loss there and the project is

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poised to become a lot more accurate and useful in the short to mid term first up

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thanks to the efforts of a digital Heritage preservation group called archive team Dimitri is working on

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integrating the metadata from a whopping 4.56 billion videos it's going to take

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some time since that's 69 terabytes of

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data to ingest nice but once that's complete extension users will have

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accurate historical counters restored for nearly every video on the site that

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is pretty incredible like this new hoodie on hiltetstore.com

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but what about new videos that's where you come in by using the extension

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you're going to be contributing your own likes and dislikes which can then be

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compared against publicly available views and light counts to extrapolate a

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probable dislike value in theory then the more people install the extension

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and interact with videos the more accurate it'll become

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unfortunately this raises some serious privacy concerns your YouTube viewing

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behavior is extremely valuable particularly to advertisers and while

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there's an argument to be made that once you've given your data to Google Pandora's Box is kind of open anyway

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I don't wish to promote that attitude thankfully as Dimitri lays out in this

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document addressing privacy concerns the project code is mostly publicly

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available and open source and it appears as though he is collecting nothing more

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than what's required to log dislikes and prevent the same kind of spam behavior

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that contributed to Google's removal of the counter in the first place

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or at least that's what he's collecting from viewers one of the ways the project

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could really get to the next level is a commitment from YouTubers both large and

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small to share their own true stats to

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help the extension validate its own guesswork but this gets pretty hairy

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pretty quickly while I could use oauth

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to Grant access to my own stats even with the limited scope of YouTube

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analytics read only which can be configured to exclude Revenue numbers

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there's some really sensitive data in

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there and it's not the kind of thing that we give away willy-nilly even if

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someone that I've never met before offers a pinky promise not to misuse it

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torn right because how complain about

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the lack of accurate counters if I'm not willing to do my own part to ensure the

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restoration well maybe they can be good enough without my help let's take a look at a

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couple of my own videos that were published after the changeover here's

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one that was well received the ratio of likes to dislikes is actually very close

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when I compare the YouTube player page to my own stats

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meanwhile here's a sponsored showcase that didn't perform well for us at the

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time of writing this my browser extension reported 12 000 likes to 940

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dislikes a ratio of about 12.77 to 1

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while the true stats tell a slightly less favorable story putting us at 11.63

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to 1. so that's a bit farther off but

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still accurate enough to reflect the audience's general displeasure with that

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video it's possible though that extension users are over represented in

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our audience meaning that our videos might be more accurate than say for

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example a video on a makeup Channel our upside down build video for example had

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a whopping 2 000 votes from extension users out of 14 000 total though

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curiously I wasn't able to verify this one because I believe YouTube is doing

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some funky things with the counter after live streams so I would love for other

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creators particularly if you're from a different vertical to chime in in the

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comments with a couple of your own comparisons if you'd be willing for my

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site though it's looking pretty good so far which you might have realized

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doesn't help anyone that wants to use a mobile app for YouTube unless this is

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the straw that finally breaks my back and makes me install YouTube vanced yeah

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I went there Dimitri is currently in talks with that team to include his data

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and for those who haven't heard of it vanced is a side load only alternative

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YouTube app that among other things enables background playback and ad-free

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Playback without a premium subscription both things that hurt my livelihood as

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well as those of my employees and my fellow creators

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and advanced isn't my only unlikely Ally

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here one of the policies that served me very well in my life is to never take a

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deal where I don't understand what's in it for the other party Dimitri claims

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that the project started as a simple effort to restore the dislike counter

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for his own use presumably so he can quickly and easily filter out junk

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content that's fair enough that's a pretty big deal for anyone who's ever

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tried to find any kind of obscure DIY tutorial especially anything to do with

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software but by his own account he hasn't even had time to actually watch

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any YouTube video since this project began surely that's not sustainable and

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that's even ignoring the fact that running the infrastructure to support this extension is a non-trivial Endeavor

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that may not be able to rely on donors or a small patreon forever I see a

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sponsorship link from a VPN that I've never even heard of at the bottom of the

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page so it makes me wonder what's his end game

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here truthfully I don't know is getting

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my dislike counter back really worth violating my principles here promoting

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online content piracy groups and collaborating with parties whose

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motivations I don't fully understand I'm not sure yet

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what I do know is I sure as hell didn't choose this path YouTube chose it for me

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when instead of coming up with better ways for creators to moderate their

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communities they decided to just get away one of the few publicly available

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video quality markers that we still had left

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the only answer I've been able to get from YouTube is that going forward

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you're supposed to just use comments to gauge video quality or validity but it

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takes about 30 seconds in a YouTube comment section to figure out why that

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is not a silver bullet they're full of spam and misinformation and they are

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much easier for a malicious actor to control I see the benefit of this

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control four marginalized creators I truly do having a bunch of jerks come in

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storming from some hateful subreddit to dislike Brigade you is something that

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nobody should have to endure but I also do not believe I just do not

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believe that YouTube a multi-hundred

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billion dollar company or at least their parent company couldn't combat this

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through a combination of origin and user

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Behavior tracking and all kinds of other AI black magic that they have access to

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and if they really felt that these negative interactions weren't valuable

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all they had to do was remove the button altogether so if YouTube still thinks

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it's useful and it's still going to affect your video performance anyway and

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so far anecdotally it doesn't seem to have actually changed how many people

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are interacting with the button what purpose are we really serving here

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I mean I've seen every conspiracy theory Under the Sun YouTube wants to protect

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itself and its corporate Partners from embarrassment or the woke mob is running

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the show over there now blah blah blah blah blah but honestly the more likely

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one to me is the simplest explanation monkey see monkey do so many platforms

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are removing any way of negatively interacting with anything and YouTube

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seems like they just wanted to follow suit and probably the most frustrating

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thing about all of this is the dismissive way that Google has addressed

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the collateral damage here I mean I'm glad that creators can protect

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themselves from unwarranted attacks I really am but malicious actors can and

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will use these same tools to create fake

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positivity around their content and to moderate negative comments mark my words

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the number of kids that are gonna get fished with Robux scams is going to

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increase and making the internet safer for one vulnerable group while making it

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more dangerous for another is not a clear-cut win and some of the benefits

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of dislike counters like nuking misleading content and punishing

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creators who honestly really had it coming are going to be sorely missed at

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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

00:13:17.279 --> 00:13:23.720
was this mad is probably when they renamed USB again it's over on the tech

00:13:20.940 --> 00:13:23.720
quickie Channel though