- So long as they give their sole custom to Google/Youtube and don't support other platforms in any way, even though it's trivial to upload an mp4 onto another platform and set the title and description same as yt, I don't feel too bad being in a tiny fraction of a minority that doesn't want to have a Google account in order to 'smash' the like button. There's no least evil to be picked here, no market forces at play, it's using google or bust. On the whole, I feel alright not supporting that choice, though part of me also feels as you do of course.
- It's also not as though you're upvoting/liking videos other than theirs, so they won't rank lower because you didn't support them.
- I'm sure the folks at google figured out that watching a video is already a sign of the content being interesting. When using the official (web) player, it clearly uses this to generate recommendations (to many people's frustration)
- You can always share videos with friends or on Mastodon etc. where appropriate, that draws more eyeballs than a passive thumbs up button anyway and thus helps the creator more
> It's also not as though you're upvoting/liking videos other than theirs, so they won't rank lower because you didn't support them.
The math doesn't work like that—if you can't Like any videos, then all of the videos you watch have an infinitesimally smaller Liked ratio and count than they would if you could. Any given video isn't competing with all the other videos you watch, it's competing with all the other videos anywhere on the site.
- It's also not as though you're upvoting/liking videos other than theirs, so they won't rank lower because you didn't support them.
- I'm sure the folks at google figured out that watching a video is already a sign of the content being interesting. When using the official (web) player, it clearly uses this to generate recommendations (to many people's frustration)
- You can always share videos with friends or on Mastodon etc. where appropriate, that draws more eyeballs than a passive thumbs up button anyway and thus helps the creator more