Comment on YSK: YouTube views went down since mid-August because they no longer count views of not logged in users

JelleWho@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• kbal@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I did some youtubing last week and saw three people claiming that three different theories were already proven.

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• victorz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I find it crazy that the client would call an API endpoint to register a view. Then we could just call that end point in a script to arbitrarily inflate the view count, can we not? How do they prevent this exploit? Wouldn’t it be better if the server registered the view after a certain amount of the video was delivered?

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  • TheOctonaut@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Why is that crazy?

    You don’t want to register a view just because the backend sent a 200 response for the video.

    You want to register a view when the video has loaded, it has begun to play, and quite likely after some arbitrary percentage of the video.

    This is all front end information. How much of the video was made available to the front end to play isn’t really relevant.

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    • victorz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Alright, not “crazy”, but this doesn’t explain how they combat exploiting this by just calling the end point.

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  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    That’s more or less how it works, but that’s still an additional call. If Google is not tying it directly into segment download requests, then it could potentially be blocked without disrupting playback.

    I have no insight into the inner workings. If I download a video with yt-dlp, does it increase the view count? If not, then it’s a broken system, yeah?

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    • victorz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      If I download a video with yt-dlp, does it increase the view count? If not, then it’s a broken system, yeah?

      I’m very curious to know how they register a view, yeah. The only true measurement is the video reaching someone’s retina or ears, to measure attention, which is impossible at a large scale as of yet. 🥲

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  • scintilla@crust.piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    They’ve been using AI to detect things like that for a long time. (AI in general not LLMs as far as I know.

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