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Comment by Flankk | Hacker News Reader

There's already extensions to bring back the dislikes. Last I heard they're removing them from the YouTube API in three months. And yes, I don't post things here because I don't want to get hacked. Lots of big brains here.

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You could create like a 3rd party like dislike service... That sends two requests one to YT and one to your 3p service that stores the count in a redis key value store with the id of the video and the count.

Unless you get 95% of people to use such an extension, it will be mostly useless. And if somebody succeeded in getting 95% of people to use their extension, they would sell it to the highest bidder in a heartbeat, as has happened many times before. YouTube is dead, it's time to create something new.

Today I learned that any statistic created using <95% of the population is invalid

Or a subset of people that are like-minded, whose votes you value more than the general youtube population en mass.

I kind of agree... we need a new YT

why only kind of, do you have apprehensions?

I think you are overestimating how many people care about the dislike count. Of course there's a bunch of people who are loud but I doubt most regular users care.

the ratio will stay though

with a like and ratio number you can reverse-calculate the amount of dislikes

Isn't there a population shift, though? The users who will install an extension for this have different tastes than the users who won't, so you can't assume the like-dislike ratio for the population who will matches the population who won't.

Moreover, it will be easier to brigade (or shill). If a video has 1M upvotes in YouTube and 1K upvotes in the site, then with 1K enthusiast you can tilt the count. (And for obscure videos with 100 or 1000 less upvotes in YT, it will be easier.)

If not many people use it, there will be much less incentive to shill

But maybe the signal is even better in the subpopulation

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