They used to, and they currently do too, but the current one isn’t meant to be an alternative to the like/dislike button like this portrays.
It’s most often in your feed, where occasionally it’ll show a video to you, then give you a tiny light blue box beneath it saying “how good of a recommendation is this” or something along those lines, then you rate it so they can both make the algorithm better overall, and fine-tune yours even if you don’t want to watch the video. (e.g. I might say “5 stars, this is a good recommendation,” but never watch it just because I don’t have the time. YouTube knows I like that topic now, just that I might not watch videos that are that long.)
Youtube had a star rating system for videos?
I’m sorry 🗿
Here’s what a video page looked like back in 2003:
I have my doubts a video could’ve had 14M views in 2003.
Especially since it was launched in 2005.
I meant 2005. That was my bad.
Evolution of dance, the most watched video of 2005 on the site, had over 20 million views by 2006.
It looks like an edited screenshot, like “What if the Nixon-Kenny debate happened now?”
The old YT player was perfect and nobody will convince me otherwise.
I think that 2026 is doing okay.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/d7886499-5a38-4fc6-bf28-d350d836e6d5.png
But will your setup open the pod bay doors?
<starts playing Weird Al’s “Good Old Days”>
It’s kind of amazing how long people have been putting up with youtube, compared to other social media + SM adjacent sites.
Eons ago, yes. It initially bothered me when they replaced it with thumbs up/down since I couldn’t rank things with nuance.
They used to, and they currently do too, but the current one isn’t meant to be an alternative to the like/dislike button like this portrays.
It’s most often in your feed, where occasionally it’ll show a video to you, then give you a tiny light blue box beneath it saying “how good of a recommendation is this” or something along those lines, then you rate it so they can both make the algorithm better overall, and fine-tune yours even if you don’t want to watch the video. (e.g. I might say “5 stars, this is a good recommendation,” but never watch it just because I don’t have the time. YouTube knows I like that topic now, just that I might not watch videos that are that long.)
Early on yeah, they replaced it with the thumbs up/down system since most star ratings were 1 or 5.