9 ms·
The YouTube like button glows when you say "smash that like button" [video]
- ydnaclementine 2y agoI have never once hit that bell
- ars 2y agoYou've never found a single content creator that put out stuff you liked so much you wanted to see everything they did? Not a single one? Do you prefer TV instead?
- pino82 2y agoIf it's just about keeping a link to a handful of content creators, and you aren't a multiple-hours-per-day yt addict, there is already a nice solution for that, which universally works for all web resources and is well supported by all browsers under the sun. I'm sure thay's not ideal (e.g. not for Google trying to understand you better) for the addicts, but for the other ones, this can be the perfect solution.
- nickthegreek 2y agoI never use the bell. I just subscribe and go through my subscribed list to watch videos, and for some I add to my rss reader.
- skeaker 2y agoAt that point you may as well still hit the bell, even if only to further boost your preferred creators.
- rcxdude 2y agoRSS works much better, and youtube still supports it despite hiding it well
- Cordiali 2y agoI've never used a YouTube account, I've always just used the site as-is. For a (very few) accounts, that I want to know when they release a new video, I just add them to my RSS feed reader.
- sph 2y agoI have only once, for KRAZAM. I need to balance all the time spent on this site reading about using Kubernetes at scale, AI changing the world and how to bring more value to my employer with their videos. https://youtu.be/ia8Q51ouA_s?si=U3WbLvRlV04fjo4J https://youtu.be/ia8Q51ouA_s?si=U3WbLvRlV04fjo4J
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoIf you type "awesome" the progress bar strobes and changes color.
- seydor 2y agoI wish they used something more than that stupid minimalist icon theme. I have again and again smashed the button only to unlike a video
- ziml77 2y agoI don't understand how... You always have two thumbs there which means you can contrast the state of being just an outline with the state of being filled in.
- seydor 2y agoAnd yet the "join" button is filled in without being joined. Let alone, the icons on the video player which have their own varied little philosophies
- ziml77 2y agoHuh... somehow I noticed that but it never really registered with me that it's inconsistent because I've never wanted to join a channel.
- lxgr 2y agoIt happens to me all the time. I can’t explain it either, but my hypothesis is me interpreting the highlighted “like” button as the encouraged action out of the two?
- ziml77 2y agoThat makes sense now that the other reply pointed out the Join button being filled in. The like and dislike buttons are internally consistent but the entirety of the buttons down there are not consistent.
- xyst 2y agoJust a YT developer Easter egg. It’s become such a cliche phrase on that platform in an effort to pump creator stats. I think there’s a similar effect for the subscribe button. But I don’t remember which phrase triggers it
- yellow_lead 2y agoWhy does it only work for some videos?
- sholladay 2y agoIt is probably AI with suboptimal training, despite the massive dataset available to them. It might even just be conventional speech-to-text, which can struggle with accents and poor acoustics, etc.
- sltkr 2y agoYouTube already generates transcripts of uploaded videos (though not super accurate ones). A simple and straightforward implementation would just pattern match in the transcript text. No need for fancy AI, on top of whatever technology powers the transcription feature.
- hagbard_c 2y agoIt will be the STT they use for their automatic captioning so it should be as accurate as whatever that produces. It would be the height of inefficiency to do a separate STT run over the entire audio just for this gimmick.
- aimazon 2y agoNot all videos have transcripts.
- sircastor 2y agoI noticed a few weeks ago that when people said "subscribe" the subscribe button had a little light show that was kind of cool. From a technical perspective I like the attention mechanism and that it's automated.
- fennecfoxy 2y agoI wonder if it triggers when someone says "un...subscribe".
- reify 2y ago[flagged]
- dishsoap 2y agoThis has been happening for at least a year, probably more. I always assumed it was something the creator had to manually mark, never considered that it might be automatic.
- HenryBemis 2y agoMy TV's YT app is useless and buggy. It doesn't have automatically generated & automatically translated subtitles. The YT app on my mi-box does. So it wouldn't be impossible to have the VTT prescan the audio and "if VTT has the phrase so-and-so then display animation lalala.gif" (I use the VTT on my Firefox, I use IDM to download the auto-generated English language scripts for lengthy videos). I remember listening to Chomsky saying that he prefers to read the transcripts than listening/watching speeches.
- dylan604 2y agowhy would these auto generated subs be the apps purview? wouldn't it be YT platform doing all of this work and providing a CC button if the data is available. i can't imagine this being done in real time and not just some post process that is run against new content at time up upload processing.
- HenryBemis 2y agoIt could as well be done the few secs after one uploads to the time it becomes available, and the same applies to all translations (to all languages). It is one of those things I don't care (at all) to know how it is technically set up :)
- amiga386 2y ago> Button doesn't glow when when you say "SLAP like NOW" > Davie504 in pieces
- andxor 2y agoUnderappreciated comment.
- vijucat 2y agoWhat about if I say, "Please don't smash that like button" or "Smash that like button if you're an idiot"? Just wondering if it is based on transcript-grepping or does it even consider sentence semantics? (I know, overkill. Please don't implement that, YT engineers. You've heard of "boiling the ocean to make a cup of tea", right?)
- Axsuul 2y agoIt should still highlight it to clarify which button they're referring to
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- arder 2y agoIf I were youtube I'd be concerned about the opposite. The whole point of youtube is you have all these different creators doing different things in different ways and youtube has stepped and said "No, don't do it your way, say our exact phrase and we'll help you". The downstream impact of that is Youtube's thumb on the scale is going to drive everyone to one particularly unconvincing phrase.
- boneitis 2y agoI can't be the only one who finds this and the subscribe animations distracting, to put it politely. I'm sure many here would love to make use of some uBlock Origin rulesets to disable them?
- system2 2y agoI wouldn't bother dealing with it. But you can use something like StyleBot or Tampermonkey to override the css: Before Animation: <yt-smartimation class="smartimation smartimation--experiment-enabled smartimation--enable-masking"> While Animation: <yt-smartimation class="smartimation smartimation--experiment-enabled smartimation--active-border smartimation--active-background smartimation--enable-masking">
- Lockal 2y agoThese parts are marked as "Interaction Reminder" in SponsorBlock, which allows you to skip it - see https://wiki.sponsor.ajay.app/w/Guidelines#Interaction_Reminder_(Subscribe) https://wiki.sponsor.ajay.app/w/Guidelines#Interaction_Remin...
- KennyBlanken 2y agoThey pour money into engineering and hardware resources into stuff like this but still claim that DMCA abuse (by media companies, blackmailers, griefers, and reputation management activity) is an unsolvable problem? Yet...they can't hire more staff, implement databases to track malicious/unreliable DMCA submitters, and falsely-targeted creators for whom complaints are likely BS, and implement AI-powered tools to assist with all of this?
- theshrike79 2y agoThere is no incentive for them. Example: Over here there is a huge problem with rented e-scooters being left wherever. Every scooter company asks you to take a photo of the parking. NOBODY ever checks those. I did a quick test with GPT-4 and it could tell me if a scooter was parked in a considerate way about 90% of the time (10 photos, some with multiple scooters). Could they implement this in an afternoon? Yes. Will they? No. Because it'd be used to penalise their own customers.
- zimpenfish 2y ago> Every scooter company asks you to take a photo of the parking. NOBODY ever checks those. Only a semi-scooter company but Lime, at least in London, do sometimes check the photos because I once got dinged for "incorrect parking" (wrongly, mind, it was parked identically to the Santander bikes a few metres away and thus incapable of inconveniencing anyone.)
- slg 2y agoI know this is just a fun little easter egg, but features like this seems a little risky to me. It calls attention to the fact that Youtube isn't just serving me videos neutrally, it knows what is being said in those videos at the exact moment it is said. It highlights how much Google analyses the content of its videos in a way that more neutral features like automatic transcripts don't and in turn how much that can teach Google about me based on the videos I watch. It isn't that I didn't know Google had this ability, but foregrounding it underlines Google's Big Brother nature in a way that makes me want to use Youtube less and not more.
- gruez 2y ago> It calls attention to the fact that Youtube isn't just serving me videos neutrally, it knows what is being said in those videos at the exact moment it is said. It highlights how much Google analyses the content of its videos in a way that more neutral features like automatic transcripts don't and in turn how much that can teach Google about me based on the videos I watch. How else do you think the "up next" and "recommended videos for you" feature works? Did you think they were serving up relevant videos purely out of chance? If anything a dumb rule like "highlight the subscribe button if the transcript mentions it" is much more benign then a recommendation engine that can somehow always serve you a relevant video.
- queuebert 2y agoThe simplest recommender would use videos that were commonly watched afterwards by other people.
- Minor49er 2y agoThat would be fun to exploit. Just get a few hundred accounts, have them watch a Mr. Beast video followed by a video you want to boost, and watch the numbers grow
- xboxnolifes 2y agoNot sure even a few thousand accounts would make a dent in a Mr beast video count. Recommendation would go toward the 1 million accounts who watch another Mr beast video after.
- iwishiknewlisp 2y agoI never noticed this, is it just when they say "smash this like button" or just the term "like button"?
- vizzier 2y agoUnsure on the specific phrases, but it has been happening for a while. Subscribe highlights with certain phrases too.
- sprobertson 2y agoIt might just be the word "like" said with a certain affect, I've seen it glow in the wrong context a few times.
- kklisura 2y agoAll that AI CapEx: for a button to glow! WOW. ROI will be off the charts!
- stnmtn 2y agoI think this is more like a developer was bored one afternoon and implemented this for fun, and then everyone else thought it was fun enough to put into the main codebase.
- brokensegue 2y agoThey've been autogenerating captions for years
- cjs_ac 2y agoGiven that YouTube uses the like and subscribe buttons as inputs for its recommendation algorithm, doesn't this feature just aid and abet content creators in gaming YouTube's system?
- skybrian 2y agoMany entertainers on YouTube do that routinely. It seems way too late to start worrying about it. I’m wondering what an unbiased survey would even look like.
- rft 2y agoI have noticed multiple YT content creators just casually mentioning things like "like and subscribe for the algorithm" and even "leave a comment for the algorithm", which people do, sometimes just saying "comment for the algorithm". One creator I remember did a "if you watched until the end comment 'boat'" or similar, which of course is again just baiting more comments. It also nudges recurring viewers who know that spiel to watch until the end, because they get to enjoy the dopamine from being one of the people who can comment the word. This increases watch time, which apparently is again one of the things the algorithm uses. Maybe I have just become more attentive to these things or they have become more prevalent, but I notice this blatant optimization for the Algorithm(tm) more and more. I guess this is the meta you need to play in order to stand out/make it in the torrent of content that is YT or social media in general. I also see this as an example of Goodhart's law as creators try to optimize for reach and thus likes etc. while the original intention of the YT Algorithm(tm) was (or should have been) to serve you content you will enjoy.
- SllX 2y agoJust yesterday I discovered a channel that asks for people who watched all the way to the end to replay the video at 0.25x speed to support the channel. I have zero clue if that would work and I’m not going to do that, but he makes good videos so I mean, if others want to do, it’s whatever I guess. I no longer care about crap like that, YouTube is essentially its own medium at this point.
- superjan 2y agoI have recently been wondering how it is possible that they can make features like that, and provide closed captions, but that they continue to insert ads halfway a speaker’s sentence.
- waveBidder 2y agoWell if that doesn't demonstrate their priorities I don't know what would.
- stnmtn 2y agoOne of the metrics I'm sure they want to avoid is a user clicking away. If they inserted ads only when a speaker has finished a thought, it would probably result in more click aways than ads where a user wants to hear how a sentence/thought ends.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sebastiennight 2y agoAs someone who runs a startup in the video market (and most of our users use our software for marketing purposes), I think it's pretty likely they might actually use the transcript... to insert ads halfway the speaker's sentence on purpose. The best calls to action inside a video take advantage of the Zeigarnik effect : once they're invested in the content, people really want to find out the
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoAny company that takes financial advantage of that should just fu
- seydor 2y agoMaybe it's meant to be annoying so you get Premium
- withinboredom 2y ago
- ziml77 2y agoI've only noticed this a couple of times, I guess because it needs to specifically be that phrase about "smashing" the button. The thing that I do see on every video that reminds me to hit the like button is seeing the counter move. I'm way more likely to see that and think "yeah I do like this video, I should hit this button" when I see the counter change than I am to have a similar reaction when explicitly told by the person in the video to do it.
- Ylpertnodi 2y agoNotice the 'like' button numbers are not level. Reminds me of vhs and cassette counters.
- satvikpendem 2y agoWell, yes, this has been going on for quite a while, perhaps even a year before this HN post. It's cool that this article references it, though, but it's definitely not the end of times, as some might proclaim, especially as it legitimately increases traction for those who want to subscribe (and those who might not, but might perhaps want to, which is all YouTube cares about).
- karaterobot 2y agoInvidious and FreeTube do not do this, so I hadn't noticed. Kind of a neat touch, although I wonder if they do any kind of analysis to figure out whether someone is using the phrase as a call to action, or if they're, you know, making fun of the speech patterns of annoying influencers.
- kerkeslager 2y agoUgh. If they can detect when people say that in videos, I'd prefer that they used it to penalize the video in the algorithm, rather than leaning into this irritating gaming of the system. I don't blame creators for doing this: creators have to say this to compete (this is an example of Moloch[1]). The point isn't to hurt creators who do this, it's to remove the incentive so that creators no longer have to do this. So I think the proper way to do this is to announce that videos that ask for likes or subscribes will be penalized, and only penalize videos that come out after the announcement. But, YouTube serves advertisers, not viewers, so they'll never do anything that benefits viewers but hurts advertisers. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- Lockal 2y agoThere is no "If they can". Both YouTube and TikTok are actively penalizing (effectively shadowbanning) videos after detecting words like rape/murder/suicide and content related to war crimes[1]. In some cases the exploiter side are governments, not advertisers. Content creators censor these words and it helps to some extent. [1] https://www.nrk.no/ostfold/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-war-in-ukraine-to-russian-users-1.15921522 https://www.nrk.no/ostfold/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-war-in...
- sam_goody 2y agoMy computer does not have a speaker (none built in, and none attached). I watched the clip a few times. Each time, as the button glowed in his video, the button also glowed below the video in the youtube UI. So, at first I thought that Google is parsing the text of the video being played, but is not listening to your mic. However, several comments both here and on YT imply that Google is ALSO listening to what you say on your mic. Which, frankly, is much more scary - though I cannot currently test.
- lxgr 2y agoAre you saying they are recording what viewers are saying? That would be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary proof. Other than that, why wouldn’t they know what’s being said in a video they host?
- maxglute 2y agoMeanwhile useful features like sleep timer only availalbe until sep if you're premium. Also had slightly better UI experiment last month.
- seydor 2y agoHas anyone tried the other buttons?
- dzonga 2y agosame as subscribe