Ask HN: Costs for a YT-dislike button browser plugin? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Costs for a YT-dislike button browser plugin?

6 pointskleiba10 comments

I'm considering the development of a simple browser plugin that would reinstate the "dislike" button on youtube videos as far as its informativeness for viewers is concerned: You'd be able to click (the plugin's) dislike button and see the count just like before, but of course that information would not go into YT's ranking.

This requires some backend functionality, mostly a database that maps URLs to counts (+ plus the server code to make that work). I expect this to be costly. But how much would you estimate for this?

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Cost would scale with use, but I wouldn't expect this to be costly unless you had many users. Most of the videos would presumably have no data and that doesn't cost anything to store and not very much to query.

You plan on keeping track of your own counter for each unique video id?

What gives you the impression this would be costly? It should fit easily in a FaunaDB free plan, with Netlify or Vercel (also free) for serverless functions if you need logic.

how about counting “I dislike this” comments on every video. and maybe a dislike button to post same thing as a comment to video. Its better to keep dislike count data with the video itself than scattered around different youtube dislike apps/addons/plugins

Please do it for arbitrary URLs :)

Spiteful

Yes it is Spiteful of Google to shove the like button down our throats and remove any traces of healthy discourse from the platform.

The dislike button never represented healthy discourse. At its very best, it was a coarse indication that neither suggested nor invited further clarity. Good riddance.

Yeah, an echo chamber is much better. They should get rid of red lights too. They don't really offer any further clarity. Let's just have only green lights (no light at all means stop, of course) /s

> At its very best, it was a coarse indication that neither suggested nor invited further clarity.

The same could be said about Likes, viewcount and comments.

IMO user-based metrics are a good thing (even if they can be gamed), the more the better.

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