Dad?

Yep. Nebula has most of the creators and content with none of the bullshit. Same for dropout.

the channel can see its downvotes and clicking it registers as engagement

Wouldn't that be an argument for factoring it into recommendations, and not a reason to remove dislikes?

... OH WAIT, I made the mistake of thinking Google cares about providing a good user experience over pushing ads and an agenda, whoopsie!

Literally devolving into cable

the whole website is smelly dog ass excretions

voting counts as activity driving engagement IIRC. I upload videos once in a blue moon and I personally care about that ratio, but I don't know about other creators (like ones who actually are partnered and earn).

I still watch YouTube by subscribing to channels with RSS. I see what the people I follow upload. Nothing more, nothing less.

If I have to use YouTube, blocking shorts is a great feature.

I stopped using it recently when they had an update every other day and Firefox was requesting more permissions for me to accept.

I wasn’t sure why or what, so went to the comments to see. The way the dev was responding to people really put me off, though to their credit, they did go back and edit them to be more polite. It just threw me off though, so maybe everything is still fine but I probably won’t be using it again. :-/

"stop being so negative" It's like they hired cheerleaders and now it's just bubble heads in corporate... oh, wait.

They stopped showing the dislikes to force you to watch crappy videos.

Since the extension does not add it back but introduces an alternative they might as well return the button too.

A/B testing. Big tech like Google likes to roll out (often experimental) changes to a select number of random people and measure how their behavior changes compared to others that get the existing experience. In other words, you're a lab rat.

I've had this happen to me countless times, perhaps because I used to write lengthy and in-depth feedback (until I thought they should pay me for this and stopped).