• SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        I am not referring to a like to dislike ration, I am referring to a dislike to view ratio. YouTube should bury those from recommendations.

      • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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        4 days ago

        And actual scams with 300+ upvotes. Not just copied comments that get edited layer, but entire chains directing people to whatsapp numbers.

        • spacecadet@lemm.ee
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          4 days ago

          I’d still take scam comments over “who is still listening in 2024?!” For a super popular song that came out in 2023 or for a timeless classic like Michael Jackson’s thriller

  • protist@mander.xyz
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    5 days ago

    YouTube says the policy will combat “egregious” clickbait that misleads viewers, with a particular focus on videos related to “breaking news” or “current events.” The company’s examples of egregious clickbait include a video with the title “the president resigned!” that doesn’t actually address a resignation or a “top political news” thumbnail attached to a video with no news content.

    This is only going to target garbage-level content. You can still expect the same clickbait-style titles and thumbnails from established creators

    • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 days ago

      YouTube will never “crack down” on these guys. They are their money-makes and can do whatever the fuck the want. Clickbait on huge channels is YouTube’s bread and butter, even if people just click to comment that the creator sucks, that’s still engagement and means there is more money in the ad bids.

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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        5 days ago

        YouTube is the one pushing them to clickbait. Their metrics are designed such that if you don’t bait clicks a huge percentage of the time you’re shown, you won’t even show up in the feeds of your actual subscribers.

      • Dran@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        I think you’ve correctly identified their self-interest over altruism, but you’ve misidentified the internal value of discouraging clickbait. YouTube is a treasure trove for building training datasets, and its value increases when metadata like thumbnails, descriptions, titles, and tags can be trusted.

        It’s the AI gold rush; notice how this coincides with options to limit or disable third-party training but not first-party training? It coincides but is definitely not a coincidence.

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Yeah, this is not even really targeting clickbait, more like putting restrictions on openly malicious content.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      I’ll be even more cynical than that: I think this policy will be abused to suppress legitimate news/current events videos with a POV the oligarchs doesn’t approve of (e.g. pro-Palestinian, pro-Adjuster, etc.).

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      This will address extreme and obvious falsehoods but I still encounter clickbait of the more pedestrian kind everywhere I go. “You’re using your table saw WRONG” or “the 1 table saw trick 99% of people don’t know” etc.

      I consider this clickbait: it creates a false sense of urgency and doesn’t convey any information in itself. What is this one trick? Oh I already knew that one, but I had to watch the video to realize that.

      It wastes a lot of time and makes things harder to search for. And often these clickbait headlines are not in the video headline where YT can easily scan them, but in the thumbnail graphic in huge letters, where it’s probably harder to automate any moderation for.

      I pay for YT premium but this aspect of the experience still feels ad-like and cheap.

    • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      I’ve noticed these super annoying news flashes that say like Beyonce fleeing US and shit like that. Super long videos too and they’re all trash. Makes it hard to get real news on it

      • OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca
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        5 days ago

        Makes it hard to get real news on it

        Well there’s your problem. Why the fuck are you trying to get news on Youtube?!

  • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub
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    4 days ago

    So, they created an algorithm that will only reward clickbait and completely ignore honest titles and thumbnails, then complain about their platform being one giant clickbait? Huh…

  • _sideffect@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Yeah sure they will. They’ll target small creators, but keep shit heads like the scammer Paul, the fake philanthropist Beast, and others

  • penquin@lemm.ee
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    5 days ago

    The fix was there, but they removed it. The dislike button. Fucking unbelievable how stupid these companies are.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      The fix was there, but they removed it.

      Return YouTube Dislikes still exists. The likes and dislikes of RYD users are stored in an external database, so Google cannot take them away.

      • Null User Object@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        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?

        • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          Unless YouTube is using that data to not recommend crappy videos, then it’s completely pointless.

          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.

          • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            4 days ago

            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

            • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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              4 days ago

              The fact they never used that data in video recommendations is surprising

              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:

      • penquin@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        This is not official and not many people (relatively speaking) know about it. My wife, for example, still uses the official YouTube app on her iPhone with all of its ads and garbage.

        • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          This is not official

          Neither was the previous workaround which IIRC required some JavaScript trickery with the web player.

          • penquin@lemm.ee
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            4 days ago

            What are you talking about??? The previous WAS MADE BY GOOGLE. 😂
            Edit: it wasn’t a workaround, it was a feature built into the YouTube app that is made by Google. I can’t believe I have to explain this. Lol

            • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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              4 days ago

              it wasn’t a workaround, it was a feature built into the YouTube app that is made by Google. I can’t believe I have to explain this. Lol

              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.

              • penquin@lemm.ee
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                4 days ago

                Ok. I see where the confusion lies. My bad. It was just me being sarcastic that those dumb asses created an unnecessary problem and now they’re trying fucking fix it. They could just bring back the dislike button. Sorry

    • RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world
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      I heard Facebook is spent tons of money to combat election misinformation in 2016 and 2020 and I heard the same story again in 2024. The problem is solved right?

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Smells like PR copy parading as news, what click bait was actually removed vs what they said they would? What’s the criteria to qualify as click bait?

    • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      YouTube says the policy will combat “egregious” clickbait that misleads viewers, with a particular focus on videos related to “breaking news” or “current events.” The company’s examples of egregious clickbait include a video with the title “the president resigned!” that doesn’t actually address a resignation or a “top political news” thumbnail attached to a video with no news content.

      sounds like anything that says it’s one thing but does a whole different thing

      Sadly it’s only in India atm, and doesn’t result in a strike(yet) so I doubt many are going to care.

  • 7rokhym@lemmy.ca
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    YouTube ruined Christmas. I can’t stand my relatives anymore, they watch every conspiracy clip and now they are a thousand miles down the rabbit hole and I can’t handle them for more than a few days a year. I hate evil Google or alphabet, or whatever they call themselves.

  • Konomi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    4 days ago

    YouTube is clickbait. This is like them saying they’re going to crack down on their own advertising model.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      Web architecture was flawed.

      They went the simple fast way in times when changing a few completely incompatible realizations while looking for the working one was fine. People still used not just Apple and IBM PCs, but also Amiga and various kinds of Unix. Web reading via e-mail was a popular service. Many different technologies to get some connectivity to the big world. FIDO and so on.

      So it probably seemed intuitive that when it becomes problematic, people will think of something better and stop using the flawed thing.

      Except that assumption relied on fragmentation and incompatibility and variability, things that useful idiots for corporations were vilifying in late 90s and 00s, and managed to kill around late 00s.

      So. Engagement-driven model is pretty similar to casinos. It’s profitable and anti-customer. What allows it in the Web - lack of separation between connectivity, storage and identities.

      One can say it differently - the Web application layer should be higher than it is. IP and DNS can identify a site, that is, a computer or a cluster or something united. But they shouldn’t identify a website. Quite obviously. A website shouldn’t go down for the sole reason of some computer somewhere being shut down.

      It also simply makes sense for the Web to work as some kind of a version control system - it just came into existence before those became the norm for things, well, requiring version control.

      I don’t want to write yet another time what everyone will find by themselves in that direction of thought. In short, WWW was an experiment at networked hypertext systems, similar to Gopher, but nicer. It was intended for nice cool library things. It wasn’t intended as the “information superhighway”. Another system actually was - Usenet. Usenet lacks that flaw of the Web.

      Except Usenet is morally obsolete. Some new kind of it, with cryptographic identities of users and of groups, some sort of “websites” represented by sequence of update messages in the same group (here’s version control), and probably something like realtime group chats, would be cool.

  • Bogasse@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    Like, we will be able to make negative feedback about a video again? Oh no nevermind it’s just bs again…

  • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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    4 days ago

    What the hell is wrong with the people here? Actual positive news for a while and what does Lemmy have to say? Complaining and cynicism. No wonder you’re so miserable all the time.

    • LogicalDrivel@sopuli.xyz
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      4 days ago

      For years, every update YouTube has had has made the platform worse. I think its valid to doubt this will improve anything. That being said, I agree with you. Lemmy as a whole needs to calm down a bit and stop being so damn negative about everything.

    • essteeyou@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      I haven’t seen any of the usual self-righteous “I only use self-hosted video services” comments in here yet though.