[snug]

Update from the dev:

> Unfortunately the extension requires quite a large database (~15TB) - and it costs money.

> The ad\changelog was supposed to show only on browser restart - i.e. be much less intrusive

> The idea behind paid features was also to cover the costs (since donations became smaller than the hosting costs).

> I messed up with implementation though.

> Sorry.

I do feel for the developer, and I am not anti asking for donations, and the full page pop up on browser restart I don't think is terrible, but it would have been better to maybe have a changelog and have a donation button. The ads injected directly into youtube make me lose a lot of trust

[busymom0]

> the extension requires quite a large database (~15TB)

Maybe I am missing something but how does a database which just needs to store video ID and a number become 15TB in size?

[dzaima]

Also a user ID, which seems to be 36 base64 characters (can't have one user count for multiple votes).

Round up to 500 raw bytes per row (perhaps including time/ip and other random garbage, plus indexes), 3x replication/redundancy or something, for 6 million users each having voted on 500 videos, and you're at 6TB; still some ways off from 15TB, but not insurmountably far.

(votes/user is rather tricky to get; but, as a bit of random garbage statistics math: YT gets ~5B views/day and has ~3B users; 6M downloads of the extension means ~0.2% of users use it, so 10M extension-user views/day = 15B over 4 years, or 2.5K/user; assuming 20% vote rate (rather high but lets say extension users care more for voting and/or watch YT more than an average person), that's 500 votes/user)

[snug]

The way the plugin works (in my simplified understanding) is that it guesses how many dislikes there are based on the like/dislike ratio of the people that have the plugin installed. So if 100 people that have the plugin installed and there is a 90/10 like/dislike ratio, and the actual video has 1000 likes, it will say that there are 100 dislikes. Youtube not only took away the dislike UI, but stopped publicly giving the number of dislikes even behind the API.

But even then, the database could not get that big, you'd only need a few simple tables, one that tracks every plugin users like/dislike on the video they stored it on, and then a table that does the aggregations. 15TB sounds crazy.

I'm not a youtuber so idk what content creators could see, but it would have been smarter for them to go after the content creators that have the plugin installed instead of youtube users, not sure why we would care about those kinds of analytics

[karmakaze]

It could keep track of each unique dislike. Then maybe the best we can do is use HyperLogLog (or HyperLogLog++ or HyperLogLogLog) per video id.

[ekjhgkejhgk]

I don't feel for the developer. If donations is smaller than hosting costs, just stop putting time into it. It's a stupid gimmick anyway.

[andromedaM31]

I consider it to be more valuable than a "stupid gimmick", even if more in message than in direct utility - it fights to retain peer-voting and crowdsourced evaluation on the quality of online information, which is something that seems to be dwindling away with each passing year.

[netsharc]

15TB smells of incompetence. Putting ads, even more. Fucking up the ad displaying logic as he says: even more...