Users up voting and down voting controls what’s get popular, by not being transparent about it YouTube can promote crap no one wants to see.

It is just another form of enshitification.

It’s unreliable from what I have read

The nerve!

How many stars is that equivalent to?

Can confirm this. I created a 5 Star system for my recipe app. Had the feature for a year, I didn’t use it once. I just couldn’t justify the difference between a 4 or 5 Star. Or 2 and 3 Star.

Switched to dislike, like, love buttons. Nice and discrete. Been using it for weeks now.

They stopped showing the number of thumbs down. They did not take away the thumbs down button.

While true, what’s the difference? Do we know that they use thumbs down in anything anymore?

Five star rating system was dumb because almost every rating was 1 or 5 stars. It was right to replace with a thumbs up/thumbs down system.

That assumes that the only use for ratings is for averaging the aggregate votes across all users. Nope. Sometimes for a specific user they like to be able to see the granularity of their own ratings for their own use. And even if it is a public aggregated thing the rating service can still treat all 1-2 stars as downvotes and 4-5 stars as upvotes while it’s easier to use the simpler algorithms, but to still store the more precise data for analyzing correlations at greater detail.

Big tech covered the world in trillion-parameter AI models and couldn’t even figure out what to do with 5-star ratings differently from upvotes/downvotes? It’s ridiculous.

Yeah it’s still better than FB which doesn’t even have a thumbs down. Fortunately I’m only on FB for my job, not being able to downvote makes me crazy.

This is only tangentially related (email links encoded with trackers) but when I ran the technology for a school, our district network security officers ran a web security literacy audit by sending out a fake phishing email. Obviously, I was supposed to tell my staff to not click on anything in the email, and then forward it to me, or the district network security officers.

So, I sent an email to my campus, telling them to not click their link, and simply forward their emails to me. I pretty quickly suspected that the email was part of an internal audit, which was all but confirmed by the fact that they used a Google ad campaign generator that was hosted on our district domain. I also confirmed that every email link had unique identifiers in them, including the recipient’s employee ID, which I found extra funny.

So, I then got to work clicking on everyone’s links. It went to a suspicious-looking login screen, similar to our portal, that then took us to a video about network security that was embedded on our district website, and then that forwarded to a Google Form in which we were supposed to fill out our names, and answer some questions based on the video. For the login screen, I rotated through the network security officers’ employee IDs, and used passwords such as “OopsiePoopsieSuchARiskyClicky1!”

When I saw the Google Form, I then created a Google Sheet with everyone’s links, and then split the users into a separate column that had a randomized order so that the user info was unlikely to align with the link. Then, I used that to submit incorrect user info on each form so that it wouldn’t match my collected email address, and the reported email tracker ID. I also used the sheet to match tracker IDs with incorrect employee IDs, and clicked all of those links. I did this from my phone, my Chromebook, and my MacBook. I also was traveling to NJ that weekend, so I did the same thing, only from my phone, a few times in NJ, and wherever my layover was.

I had such a hard time containing my laughter when I got a call on Monday from the lead network security officer. He explained how they were at first concerned that my campus was the only one where 100% of the recipients failed the security test. Not only did everyone seem to click their link, they did it multiple times. The security officers then checked if the page was loading properly, because they couldn’t figure out why people would keep following a phishing link. Then the security officers were really concerned that something went wrong with their collection methods, because every click came from the same few IP and MAC addresses; even worse, the user info from the Google forms didn’t align with the tracker IDs on their source Google Sheet. After that, they were really confused that everyone kept clicking their email links over the weekend, and that some of the recorded IP addresses were from out of state, but didn’t appear to be associated with a VPN. Finally, they looked at all the form submissions, and saw that over 98% of the form submissions all recorded the same logged in email address: mine.

So, they called my manager to ask why I would do such a thing, and my manager said, “that’s just what TheFartographer does.” So they called my department’s assistant director, who also explained, “that’s just what TheFartographer does.” Then, my department supervisor proactively called them to explain “that’s just what TheFartographer does.” During my call, I found out that I accounted for nearly 2000 submissions, which impressed me because we only had around 100-150 employees at my campus. We have around 30,000 employees throughout our district, so the network security team thought that around 7% of our users failed the security audit, but then found out that the number was closer to 1%. I was told that they eventually all had a good laugh about it, but then asked me to please never do that again.

and if you’re in a smaller organization, any details you provide for what you’re complaining about will instantly tell them exactly who you are

I love these, keeps the toxic people out of management in my company. We have a yearly employee survey and the toxic people always complain about everything and everyone. They think it’s anonymous even though you have to click a link that’s emailed to you then login to the survey with your employee ID and password. Yeah dipshit it’s anonymous even though you just gave them your ID to be able to take the survey.

Me, 5 stars across the board and no additional comments. Any issues I have I take up with my manager directly and he can handle it from there with the right people.

We had a system like that when I was a manager. It was anonymous but I could usually still tell who it was based off the writing style on the comments or the fact that they were complaining about things that they had already brought up to me. I didn’t retaliate against anyone though. Usually I agreed with them and they were complaining about things I had no control over

I can confirm these are definitely confidential. In so far as your name isn’t on it. My place shows us the best and the worst comments

However we can usually tell who said what and me and my manager play a game of who said what each time it comes around.

Depends on the system! Even for anonymous polls, you still need to have unique links to ensure that people don’t take it multiple times and bias the results. Even if it can track who has (not) answered the poll, it doesn’t mean that the answers are traced back to you!

If they want they still can track you though, so this is why we need tools that we can verify how they work, e.g. open source services, maybe hosted on a external trusted provider etc

That’s the fifth step.

Here’s what a video page looked like back in 2003:

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.

sure, and it does a whole lot of nothing

But you don’t get to see how many dislikes a video has