• banazir@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    10 hours ago

    You sweet summer child, back in my day YouTube had a five star rating system and video response functionality.

    • kboy101222@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      10 hours ago

      Gotta say, don’t miss video responses. It was nearly all irrelevant content and people trying to advertise their own channels

      • banazir@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        9 hours ago

        Perfectly true. It would’ve been nice, if it wasn’t so inherently abusable. We can’t have nice things.

        • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          9 hours ago

          Could imagine that working at the scale where PeerTube is currently at, where you can actually get to know folks and it’s not just about broadcasting to as many people as possible…

    • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      65
      ·
      edit-2
      14 hours ago

      And the video’s rating was plainly visible so you could use it to make the decision whether the video was even worth your click.

      The shovelware AI slop video channels wouldn’t be such a problem today if we still had that.

      • cRazi_man@europe.pub
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        13 hours ago

        Going straight to YouTube is like going straight to Imgur looking for good content. Should never be done. Places like Lemmy or friend chat groups refer me to good videos. Or my curated subscribed channels with quality content is the other way I watch youtube.

        Anyone going straight to YouTube.com looking for their algorithm and ratings system to tell them about shit content in advance is mistaken in their expectations.

        • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          edit-2
          11 hours ago

          Usually I go there looking for something specific and use the search bar.

          However, the search function in YouTube has also turned to absolute crap. It only lists a few results and then switches to random shit you didn’t ask for.

          A lot of the results are also often misleading titles leading to lazy videos that are a slideshow of impertinent pictures with a synthetized voice spewing inaccurate information. AI has made that even worse. The star rating system would have helped identify these crap videos before you click on them.

        • alpine_jim@piefed.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          11 hours ago

          extensive use of the “Don’t recommend this video > Tell us why > I don’t like this video” function, plus removing bad videos from my watch history after I stop watching, has got me a well-trained slop-free recommendations page with interesting new smallish channels.

          • feddylemmy@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            9 hours ago

            Yeah it can definitely be somewhat trained. Also the extention dearrow makes a big difference in the experience too.

    • sasquash@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      40
      ·
      13 hours ago

      and search results showed only videos related to your search. recommendations on the side were similar videos and not some unrelated bullshit. it was so much better.

      • cannedtuna@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        12 hours ago

        Honestly if someone remade an old YouTube alternative I think it would take off.

        It’s what I wish PeerTube was, but I’m not sure if that will ever take off sadly.

        Lack of advertising dollars is definitely an impediment to video platform alternatives…

        I remember a time when people just posted silly little shitty drawn videos just for the fun of it. Not saying creators shouldn’t be compensated for their hard work, I just feel like something was lost with the monetization of every little thing.

          • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            5 hours ago

            Maybe when the AI bubble bursts, people will buy up abandoned data centers for pennies on the dollar and repurpose them for a better Youtube alternative. And maybe Margot Robbie will see this comment and fall in love with me.

          • banazir@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            edit-2
            7 hours ago

            People really fail to understand what a truly colossal undertaking a site like YouTube is. It’s a technological wonder that they are able to process that much data and serve it so efficiently. Hate YouTube all you want, I do, but the engineers at Google are fucking magicians.

            • feddylemmy@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              9 hours ago

              Last I heard it was something on the order of 700 hours of video content uploaded per minute. Insane.

        • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          11 hours ago

          Which I really hate, because it means when you get into some specific interest, YouTube basically stops showing you anything else.

          Hey YouTube! Those interests I was into last week, last month, I’m still into them! Please don’t railroad me like that!

    • Zarobi@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      11 hours ago

      Makes me wonder if under the hood it’s still stored as stars or if they migrated their data. Is a 3 star or more rating displayed as thumbs up now? Is a thumbs up just a 5 star rating? When thumbs down existed was that just 1 star?

          • eurodyne@piefed.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            6 hours ago

            Only because Google actually worked as advertised (and only as advertised). Compared to what Google is now, that’s a matter of opinion.

            All things considered, I’ll take the Google of yesteryear over the Google of today. I’ll also take a more privative and much goofier/glitchier YouTube.

            Shit, I remember when having a Gmail account was a coveted thing that required an invite that people paid literally hundreds, even thousands of dollars for. I had five, and I sold one for $2k, and another for $4k. (These people were total twats). Decades later, I still use my fistname.lastname@gmail.com addy, while one is dead, and the other got married 2 months later and changed their name anyway. Idiots, lol. Weeks later, invite Scott bumped up to 50, then 250, then unlimited, then it got opened to the public.

            Being impatient is expensive.

            Grad school was a crazy time

  • Sandbar_Trekker@piefed.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    8 hours ago

    The dislikes were great at telling me quickly if a tutorial was good or not.

    Now you generally have to check the top comments to see if there’s something wrong about the tutorial, but then YouTube started hiding those comments below ads/recommendations.

    Now I just use GrayJay and I can quickly check comments for any video.

      • lugal@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        9 hours ago

        It’s more complicated than that. The button still exists even without the add-on and the back end factors it in and I think shows the creator, but doesn’t show it to the front end. So the add-on doesn’t have the real numbers but there still are real numbers

      • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        10 hours ago

        It’s a good enough approximation. Do you really need to know if the massively downvoted video had 357,923 downvotes or 357,924?

    • Björn@swg-empire.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      13 hours ago

      I had to get rid of it when it caused massive slowdowns for me. That’s probably fixed by now…

  • Dookieman12@piefed.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    13 hours ago

    We’re all being punished because Google’s feelings got hurt when we didn’t like the 2018 YouTube Rewind enough. That was the end of the dislike button and the YouTube Rewind altogether.

  • Pudutr0n@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    14 hours ago

    back in my day, you posted about your life in your geocities website! And you wrote the html on notepad and had to include an animated gif that told people to email you, cause that was the style at the time.

    • WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      6 hours ago

      Man, influencers and looksmaxxing idiots are gonna starve if that happens. How we will know the world is turning into a fucking clown show without it???