• Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
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    2 days ago

    Well that’s a great incentive for clickbait content - cause now it won’t matter if you can keep people watching after you’ve reeled them in.

    You’d think this would be against YouTube’s own best interest, considering they want to keep you watching, and people don’t often like watching that kind of clickbait-farm slop…

    Or maybe I and the people I know are in the minority, and a lot of people just watch it whether they like it or not, which would be disappointing to hear.

    • ThomasWilliams@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      What the other guy said.

      The counter for advertisements are based on the number of views, hence counting a video as soon as its playing as a view, they’ll be able to jam in more advertising.

    • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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      2 days ago

      this is definitely against their interests, unless they just plan on having people watch ads everytime they open a video, watch that video for like 1 second and go to next and watch more ads. There is no depth of depravity i wont put past corporation executives, so that feels very plausible how they think and how detached they are from humans.

      It could even be prelude to some other even more horrible, like they start gatekeeping actually decent stuff with premium aggressively.

      We should really start archiving the good content of youtube more, just in case… I would too, but i dont have that much extra harddrive space and i dont have energy enough to start learning to build a personal storage system that is secure and fault resistant.

    • WesternInfidels@feddit.online
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      2 days ago

      I think it just means that the raw view count was never very important to YouTube. That’s why they will have “engaged views” and “qualified watch hours” etc.

    • MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com
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      2 days ago

      I mostly watch videos from channels I’m already subscribed to, but recently a few shows I watch have dropped new seasons and I was looking for recaps on YouTube. It was nothing but AI slop channel after AI slop channel. I would click off as fast as possible to not give them the view, but I guess they will all count going forward. It really sucks because we can’t opt out of these channels and many of them don’t even admit to being AI anyway.

      I have no idea how this change is good for them. I totally agree that it seems like it’ll encourage low quality content. After a few of those videos I can’t imagine most people sticking around for another, but what do I know. I’m sure they have more accurate stats than I do.

      • lost_faith@lemmy.ca
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        2 days ago

        Didn’t see it in the article, but I wonder if on desktop at least will it count if you hover and “preview” the video before clicking on it? Hopefully not, then we can see if it is slop or not, though that will be 1 more annoying thing to do

        • MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com
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          2 days ago

          I’m not super well versed, but my understanding was that watching the preview for more than X seconds already counted as a view. At least it was like that a while back after they were introduced.

          Also be careful because these ai channels are sneaky and will use generic pictures or stills but the script and voice are all AI.

    • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      For those of us born before YouTube, we can just leave it.

      For those born in the last couple decades, legacy tv and movies are difficult to watch and are only consumed occasionally. It will never, ever occur to YouTube’s primary audience to stop watching.