Back in my day, YouTube had a 5-star rating system
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
The trouble is hosting that much video content and the bandwidth to feed viewers.
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.
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google is absolute worst
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Back in my day, memes weren't Ai "enhanced" and Bart didn't have a vagina for an ear.
What is going on with that vaginear anyway? And the random grass rectangle.
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Hey man, they're raggin' on your vaginear!
You sweet summer child, back in my day YouTube had a five star rating system and video response functionality.
Gotta say, don't miss video responses. It was nearly all irrelevant content and people trying to advertise their own channels
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no one uses the return YouTube dislikes browser extension?
I don’t want my watchlist stored on a random third party server
What's the point, if the downvotes aren't counted by the YT backend?
To save you time avoiding a bad instructional video.
It's a good enough approximation. Do you really need to know if the massively downvoted video had 357,923 downvotes or 357,924?
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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.
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It still does, it just doesn't show numbers because YouTube is a coward.
No the API is dead. The extension everyone is using calculates their own dislike number by inferring from the extension users who disliked the video
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All I want these days is a "Don't show me any fucking AI slop" setting and a button to report AI slop.
Tidal has a no-AI button, if it helps. They've just introduced it. That's music taken care of, I guess. It's something.
YouTube is letting people mark their videos as AI or not AI and I assume doing nothing with it? I think I've stumbled upon an AI video or two on YouTube but I didn't see any labels?
EDIT: Oh, fuck, are they just asking us to label our videos "non-AI" so they don't train their own AI on AI slop? Fuck.
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Ah, I remember when you paused and the whole video was buffering. You could have multiple tabs open and watch the video when it was done. No matter what kind of connection you had, you could simply wait for the video to finish downloading in the background and watch it without problems.
No ads, a 5-star rating system, 100% buffering, and mostly enthusiasts posting, no profit-driven incentives. We didn't know how good we had it.
I hate the way YouTube now gives millions of dollars to people exploiting children watching videos - be it slop factories or 'influencer' preying on their insecurities.
In a just society YouTube would have been destroyed as a pseudo-monopoly ages ago.
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Back in my day, you could customize your YouTube profile and PM anyone on the platform
And this meme wasn't AI upscaled
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.
It still does.
I've never blocked as many channels as now after they removed the dislike button on the shorts section.
I miss being able to tell people they suck with just one click
What pushed me to use revanced some years ago.
Return youtube dislike extension.
It still has for me.
Yes, but actually no.
2 things:
- Dislike button itself not "wired' to any visible/meaningful count and only seen by video author (which is funny, cause whole point of hiding dislike count was promoted as "beneficial to mental health of channel owners")
- If you using youtube dislikes — it replaces that button with it's own, counts presses on its own and uses own logic to show "approximate" amount of dislikes on video: it's not like it knows real count, what I'm trying to say
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I seem to recall that people found that the like and dislike buttons equally improved the video’s visibility in the algorithm, causing many youtubers to genuinely suggest disliking the video as their call to action.
That's more of an issue with their algorithm. The thing I think most people here (myself included) miss is that they used to let you know the rating on videos before you clicked them so you could see whether a given video was decent or not and therefore whether or not you should bother with some clickbait BS or not
i remember spending two hours making sure the background of my youtibe profile theme tiled correctly.
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