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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Why do people use the return dislikes extensions? It's not going to be accurate in any way since YouTube no longer makes that data available. So whatever source they're using, its bullshit.
I don't think it's completely true to say it's not accurate in any way. You can still get a rough estimate based on the proportion of likes to dislikes coming from people with the extension installed, then extrapolate that out based on the public number of likes provided by YouTube.
Of course it's not going to be anything more than a ballpark number, but being able to tell the difference between "almost nobody is disliking this" and "like half of viewers are disliking this" is super useful information. If nothing else it serves as a third party keeping a dislike count for users who installed the extension. They're not claiming to access the real YouTube data, so I think it's unnecessarily dismissive of what it does to call it bullshit.
You don't think there could be some kind of selection bias built in? That maybe the kind of people that go through the effort to install an extension like that may tend to vote a certain way on certain videos? What makes you think that the sample would be representative of the collective whole of YouTube users in any way whatsoever?
People using an alternative to YouTube are already a very specific minority, and the percentage of those using a plugin on a specific client is even rarer. I wouldn't go so far to call it a ballpark. Or even a rational source.
I would agree with you that the data would be highly suspect. It wouldn't reflect reality at all and should really not be considered.
On the other hand, YouTube likes and dislikes have been a tool for ages, and they were manipulated. It was never more than a silly toy. It was never accurate data to begin with.
It seems to be quite good at estimating dislike count, controversial videos have appropriate like/dislike ratios and historic dislike counts are preserved.
That has been my experience as well.
Not saying it is perfect but it does seem to be somewhat accurate.
Well it's more correct than not having anything, and the sources are the data from before they removed them + the users with the extension disliking the video