Because eventually there will be enough changes to the upstream Chromium codebase that the only way to keep these extensions working would be to stop following upstream, which would mean massively increased development costs.
Wouldn't it make more sense to install an extension that shows the dislike count again? https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ I've been using it since YouTube removed the dislikes and it's worked very well...
It's not _guessing_ per se. The dataset includes dislikes from before YouTube removed it from the API, from then onwards any dislikes in the interface while using the extension get sent to their backend and get registered. The numbers are _extrapolated_ (but not guessed) of course since not every YouTube will be using the extension. Take a look at the FAQ [0] where this is better explained.
I'm sorry, but the extension has a grand total of 14k users.
There are some 368 million DAILY active users on youtube.
It is making claims based on a dataset of roughly 0.0003% of the population of users.
It's a GUESS. A bad one at that, since the people who install that extension are absolutely not representative of the general youtube user.
If we expand it out to the 2.28 BILLION monthly active userbase... the data from the 14k users is basically meaningless.
---
Think of it this way - if you were seconds in the day, those extension users are 25 seconds. if I were to try to measure any sort of meaningful data in a day by using 25 seconds of data, I would likely be horribly, horribly wrong.
Ex: My water company billed me and it's bullshit, I've been carefully tracking usage data for 30 seconds after I wake up every day, and I never measure any usage! Why are they billing me?
Holy cow, I measured our water usage today and we used a whole gallon over the 25 seconds I measured!!! We're blowing through nearly 3000 gallons a day!
---
Both are horribly, horribly wrong estimates. A sample size that small is not very valuable.
Keep in mind that the type of people who are going to use this extension will also likely only view a specific domain of video content. While yes, it'll be a very small sample size on the whole, those users will still be representative of the broad strokes for that kind of content.
Like, let's say that the audience is specifically going to be interested in tech content (not too big of a stretch). With tech content, there's a couple of standout creators that are... at least somewhat universally interesting/viewed (ie. Tom Scott). As a result, you can fairly reliably conclude that any dislike count on those creators will be at least percentage-wise accurate enough. OTOH, let's say that this audience is not interested at all in "prank videos". (This is a personal bias - this is something I cannot stand myself.) As a result, those videos will have less registered data on the backend, and as a result the dislike counter for those extensions will be less accurate as a result, but for the audience that has this extension installed it won't matter.
Others have already pointed out that the extension has about half a million users already, but even if it was as low as you are suggesting, it can still be very useful in that specific criteria.
I don't think anyone is doing serious usage analysis on dislike/like counts with the data from this extension, people just like having a general idea on what the ratio is.
4,000,000+ users on chrome with 14k reviews. Maybe you are mistaking the review count for the user count?
Even if it were just 0.0003% that's still the same sampling rate as the average Gallup poll using 1000 people to represent the USA's 300,000,000+ population.
Where do you get 14k from? The chrome store says 4 million users and firefox says 400k. And an unknown amount of users using the many modded mobile youtube clients that have it builtin.
It's more valuable than having an invisible dislike count. If i found out one person with the extension (that I also use) disliked the video, that is infinitely more helpful than just having a blank dislike button with no statistics.
> Think of it this way - if you were seconds in the day, those extension users are 25 seconds. if I were to try to measure any sort of meaningful data in a day by using 25 seconds of data, I would likely be horribly, horribly wrong.
How many seconds (or fractions of) did you spend looking at the page? How could you have missed the actual download count if not for likely closing the tab as soon as you saw the review count, which was just to the left of it?
It doesn't matter how representative the data is of the wider userbase as long as as it accurately represents the opinions of the people who use the extension, since those are the only people who see the result. The sample size is only an issue insofar as most videos won't get any votes.
It's not a guess, it's much worse than a guess. It's inherently biased: it collects data from people who care downvote count to the extreme only. They care the count so much that they installed an extension specifically for it. Think about it.
It's not randomly sampled from the whole demographic. It's not SteamDB*.
It's not different from getting "the opinions of generic US people" from the comments below Biden/Trump's tweets.
* Technically SteamDB has a bias too: it samples from the players who made their profiles public only.
> the actual number doesn’t even reach 10% of what RYD displays. This isn’t just a slight miscalculation; it potentially changes the impression of the video itself
> there are also cases where the actual number of dislikes for a video on the channel are 5 times higher than what RYD estimates. Sometimes it’s too high and sometimes it’s too low
It did not. In one case it had the number of dislikes correct, but the other cases showed it out by up to 50% - and these were videos that had dislikes registered before youtube disappeared them.
Out of examples, only one was majorly off and these were from a channel with a very limited number of like / dislikes. In other examples the share of likes / dislikes was roughly not too much off.
The video linked is also a small YouTuber with not many views on their videos. Looking at the comparisons it actually gave a pretty close count. Sure it's not exact, but considering it's a small niche YouTuber it seems to be giving a fairly decent approximation. On even larger YouTube channels it's likely going to give you an even better sample of whether people like or dislike the video.
Return YouTube dislike is available as a toggle in setting with Yattee on iOS/macOS. The app is available on tvOS as well, it runs Piped or Invidious as the backend and filters out all the ads too. Very nice on the Apple TV.
Desktop Safari has extensions yet that plugin does not support it. At some point developing for anything but Chromium ceases to make sense since your potential users can just install Chrome, so who cares..
As a desktop Safari user: Safari theoretically has extensions. Apple made it painful and expensive for developers to publish, and so the ecosystem is in an abysmal state, with ultimately the users losing.
I'm torn between paying for extensions (that are free for other browsers) as a way to say "sincerely thank you" to those developers who bother, and absolutely not paying - to send a message, that this system sucks.
And then people say why is market share of Firefox decreasing.
If extension developers spend just a little time porting their extension, then they can point either way.
By forcing your customers to only support chrome, you are helping chrome build a monopoly overtye browser based internet where all extensions and work and play happens only on chrome.
Please do better.
And yes. I have an extension that is built for Firefox and chrome so I have some skin in the game
How would a one-way hash even work? They already have a database of views for a video by its ID. If they hash those beforehand that solves nothing. They have the actual ID for that hash - they have to, cause they need to provide you data on it.
It could work similar to how haveibeenpwned works - send a prefix of the video ID and respond with a list of all matching IDs with that prefix. The server only knows the list not the actual video. The client can pull the correct ID out of the list.
A lot of trust they don't keep a map from hash->id behind the scenes though for data they already have.
Hell, a YT ID is 11 characters in a base64 character set. While a lot of possibilities, I do think the entire domain can be precomputed for some amount of costs.
That's not a very honest way of phrasing whats happening there. Sure it "leaks" that you are retrieving this VideoID from this IP, but you make it sound like it's sending your youtube viewing history to some random website.
Either way, I'm fine with this type of "leak" of data, as it's fundamental to an open web and can't be easily solved without cryptographic/hashing hoops. What's next, you want anonymity from the server that you're requesting content from, really?
