• 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

      • 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.

  • 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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      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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        5 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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      5 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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      5 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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      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?!

        • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
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          Mainly just stick to law and crime network haha. I wanna watch it tho, aint nobody wanna read about Diddy ha

  • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub
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    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…

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

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      5 days ago

      Top talent who made careers on clickbait will not be harmed

      Pedophiles on set, no problem

      Scamming people, no problem

      Advertising and selling spoiled food, no problem

      Say suicide, demonetized 🤡

      • Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 days ago

        Youtube will age restrict songs in my playlist with a word “fuck” in title but won’t do anything about unrestricted animated gore on a channel of a studio that does kid animations that I’ve reported long ago. 🙃

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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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      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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        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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          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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            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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              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:

      • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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        It’s completely inaccurate though. It can show massive amounts of faux dislikes that don’t actually exist. This has been confirmed with youtubers, who still see the dislike ratio on their backend.

        • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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          It’s completely inaccurate though. It can show massive amounts of faux dislikes that don’t actually exist. This has been confirmed with youtubers, who still see the dislike ratio on their backend.

          I’d say the “actual” dislike numbers are completely inaccurate because what’s the point of disliking a video in an environment where the dislikes don’t count?

          RYD extrapolates the like/dislike ratio as stored on their own server to the like numbers as displayed by YouTube. That’s not secret information. They spell it out in their FAQ.

          If anything, if you like more representative numbers, get more people to install RYD.

          • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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            5 days ago

            So a video getting like 80% dislikes in the addon, but like 90% likes in the backend, is an okay and totally not misleading metric to you? And I uninstalled the addon because of this.

            • grue@lemmy.world
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              When the only people hitting the dislike button are the people using the addon (because that’s the only circumstance in which it counts), WTF else did you expect than for the dislike ratio with the addon to be higher?

              • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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                If that’s the only people using the addon, then they should adjust their extrapolation formula to account for the bias of their user base. Because like this it will only feed people’s confirmation bias through literal disinformation, making content look heavily disliked even when it isn’t.

      • penquin@lemm.ee
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        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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          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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            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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              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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                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

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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    From what I’ve gathered from various big time 'tubers I’ve watched for years now, as they slowly trickle tidbits of info about what it’s like working as a YouTuber, and what tools and tips Google gives them to assist: Google/YouTube is the one that recommended using the types of thumbnails commonly employed by uploaders, along with a ton of other things that are ubequitous to the platform (such as the phrase “like, subscribe and ring that bell!”).

    • Toribor@corndog.social
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      YouTube also decided that every video should be ten minutes long and made the algorithm recommend videos of that length so everyone had to start making their videos ten minutes long even if it made no sense to do so.

  • dan@upvote.au
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    5 days ago

    Shout out to DeArrow, from the same developer as SponsorBlock. It replaces video titles and thumbnails with community-provided non-clickbait versions. Available as a browser extension, and is also built-in to several third-party YouTube apps, such as SmartTube.

    • dax@feddit.org
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      I feel a bit conflicted about that, do I want that extension to hide the terrible clickbaity titles and thumbnails? For me that’s a good reason to not watch these videos in the first place

      • Syntha@sh.itjust.works
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        YouTube basically completely stopped recommending me those videos years ago because it learned I never click on them.

      • smokebuddy [he/him]@lemmy.today
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        I just saw a video posted here about how Tyler Oliveria is a liar and his content is bogus, but when youtube kept pushing that garbage at me the over the top AI thumbnails were enough to tip off it was going to be shit, and I had blocked him months ago lol

    • 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?

  • Konomi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    YouTube is clickbait. This is like them saying they’re going to crack down on their own advertising model.

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      Youtube literally tell their wagies they need to make click but like this ugly ass thumbnails with up-close mug shots.

      I am not sure what data they have to support it but I don’t click these thumbnails but mrbeastade a career off them lol

    • 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.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.world
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    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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      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.

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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.