Ok, I get it: the majority of users on Lemmy are browsing by “all”, which puts a lot of content on their feeds that they are not interested in. I’ve already got in many arguments to try to explain this is kind of absurd and everyone would be better off if they went to curate the communities they are interested in. But I also understand that this feels a bit like saying “you are holding it wrong”.
But can we at least agree to a guideline to not downvote things in communities you are not an active participant, or at least a subscriber? Using downvotes to express “I don’t like this”, “I don’t care about this”, or “I disagree with this” is harmful to the overall system. It’s not just because you don’t like a particular topic that you should vote it down, because it makes it harder for the people that do care about it to find the post.
Downvotes should be used as a way for us to collective filter out “bad” content, but what constitutes “bad” content is dependent on the context and values of the community. If you are not part of the community in question, then you are just using up/down votes as a way to amplify/silence the voice of majority/minority. By downvoting in communities you don’t participate, you end up harming the potential of smaller communities to grow, and everyone’s feed gets dominated only by the popular/lowest-common-denominator type of content.
Instead of downvoting, a better set of guidelines would be:
- If you don’t care about the post, leave it alone.
- If you don’t want to see content from a specific community, just block it.
- If the content is actual spam and/or not according to the rules of the community, report it.
Another thing: don’t forget that votes are public. Lemmy UI has a very handy feature for moderators that shows everyone who upvotes/downvotes any post or comment. I’m tired of posting content to different communities and be met of a pour of non-subscribers on the downvote side. Yeah, I think we should make some improvements in the software side to have a more flexible rule system for scoring downvotes, but until such a thing does not exist, I’m seriously considering creating a “Clueless Downvoters Wall of Shame” community to mention every user that I see downvoting without a strong reason for it.
If I can see it and I view it as bad content it’s getting downvoted. Especially since such content usually is inflammatory political post from niche politic subs that have no problem espousing their politics in a “either you agree with us 100% or you’re wrong/the enemy”. The rest of the time it’s weird fetish porn.
I browse by all because it’s a good way to see communities/content I wouldn’t otherwise see if I stuck to a curated community list. Not being part of the community doesn’t matter because I’m still seeing the content and still behaving consistent with using the downvote button to collectively filter it out.
I think a better option is these communities opting for the post not to get sent to all. Which won’t happen because a lot of previously mentioned post; the target isn’t the community who already likely agree with them, it’s everyone else. Better yet these communities could implement rules against post that are clearly inflammatory/flaming but then where would they grandstand?
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Yeah that does suck but unfortunately people using downvote as a disagree button was a problem on reddit despite the guidelines against doing so. So the same people would likely ignore OPs suggested guideline too. Again, I wouldn’t consider that bad content and not in the criteria for my prior post. Though it does make me wonder if lemmy has implemented vote fuzzing if it’s getting downvotes that quickly? Most likely people are just dicks though. My previous partner was a vegan so I am unfortunately familiar with people getting offended by them just existing.
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Fair, my point was not everyone downvoting things when they aren’t in a community is because they don’t like it. Good news, some instances have implemented “show upvotes only” so the displayed count is unaffected by downvotes. So you’ve already got a means/precedent to do so.
Sorry to hear that
Where are your mods? Mods can see obviously the comments but also downvotes and investigate repeat downvoters
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Hm, that may be the instance owners only, I know I have a “View Votes” option, but I’m an admin. Would be a good thing for mods if they don’t, I know my communities get a lot of trolling and I keep tabs on them.
Interesting, thanks for that and what you do to make the fediverse a success!
I really would like to migrate my communities to my own instance now that I understand how this all works. I think the big change of understanding is that no single instance is reddit replacement but that the communities are subreddit replacements and it would be better to have communities on small well maintained instances all federated with each other than having a massive instance like .world. I’m grateful for Ruud and his team for setting it all up and am not criticizing anyone, just how I understand the architecture to work best.
That’s exactly what I thought too, that’s why my instance is
poptalk.scrubbles.tech, on Reddit we had several communitise based around pop music and I figured rather than just spamming .world and .ml with them that it’d be better to have an instance around them (especially because of the trolling around these communities). Plus with federation then it’s just easier, if X defeds from Y I’m out of the drama because I can fed/defed from anyone I want.
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i think anyone can query it, but it may not be in the interface.
From what I’ve been told it’s only query-able from the db and not from the API
I think a better option is these communities opting for the post not to get sent to all.
Is this even an option? If it is, it must be fairly hidden. I’ve certainly never been prompted to not send a post to /all when creating a post.
I also don’t think this is a good solution, as it would further stifle the growth of small communities.
I put some examples on another comment: I’m talking about the most inane, sports-related posts.
Also, if you think that your policing is going to help the other communities you think are “bad”, then why not just block the posters or the whole community and solve the problem once and for all?
I don’t view inane content as bad. So that rules me out for that case.
Me using functionality of a website in its intended fashion isn’t “policing”. I usually do that afterwards if it’s bad enough but usually a sub has to have a pattern of doing it before I filter it. I know sport subs that were just match/race titled would cop downvotes on reddit, which again sounds like an issues better addressed by the community it’s being posted too.
Look, I’m upvoting you here because you are at least trying to have an open conversation about the post. I don’t even necessarily agree with you, but I don’t think your post is something that should be silenced or pushed away from view of other people.
On the other hand, you:
- downvoted this post
- started your argument based on an incorrect assumption.
- accepted that some people end up misusing the voting system
- did not retract your downvote
Do you see the problem here?
I appreciate the first part of your comment and the overall candour. However:
- Which post? Because I only downvoted the OP because you essentially imply all people downvoting content In communities they aren’t in are doing so because they just don’t like it. I’m asserting people sometimes do with reason, like the flaming I mention. Also the OP isn’t really asking a question(imo), it’s stating your views with the question in the title as a means to do so. The rest, even you disagreeing with me I have not.
- What assumption? My initial reply is explaining why people may downvote content when they aren’t in the community in cases outside the ones you’ve provided.
- I don’t see how this is worth mentioning that I accept the reality that people don’t use vote mechanisms as they’re intended? Edit: if this is in regards my sports post on reddit remark that was me essentially saying “yeah sometime people don’t use it correctly which sucks” not “deal with it”. Though again said communities could avoid it by not allowing post that are just match titles etc.
- Why would I when my issues with the OP still stand? Edit 2:
- Definitely not advocating for downvoting content you just don’t like. For me content I don’t like doesn’t means it’s inherently “bad”. Bad for me means inflammatory, trolling, rule breaking, low effort etc.
- The one vote against OP is offset by my upvotes of your other comments and engagement with the post; and is likely weighing it up more than down at this point.
So you are downvoting because you disagree with something, or because you don’t like how I phrased it.
You really don’t see that is exactly (part of) the problem I am describing?
My point is: the votes on a post are not a poll. Downvoting the post does not work as a way to signal you object to the content. By downvoting my post, you are just trying to silence this conversation down and make it harder to reach other people that might be interested in it.
I mean if you want me to be specific then unfortunately I can do so. It’s more than I just disagree with you. It’s that I think your reasoning in the OP is very flawed and misrepresents the situation you are attempting to portray. Which felt dishonest initially but given your attempts to engage people who disagree I now assume misguided, sorry to say. Also I think people stating their views under the pretence of a question should be discouraged due to proximity behaviours like concern trolling (not implying that’s what you’ve been doing, just an example). Lastly, I super strongly oppose being shown content on a site like this that I can’t interact with. For your case it may make sense but I can super easily see it being abused by the cases in my example; where people can grandstand shitty politics(again as an example) but then the onus is on me for some reason to not engage with said content.
I’m a proposing a guideline, not a law. I don’t want to forbid you from doing anything. I’m just saying “hey, Lemmy doesn’t have any type of recommendation engine based on your voting history, so maybe consider the context of the community where the post is coming from before voting on whatever it is?”
If you think that you are gaining anything by voting “shitty politics”, ok. You do you. But when there are people saying “our non-english community has a bunch of downvotes from english-speaking people”, and you understand that this might be an issue, perhaps it would be a nice gesture if you voted this up to help this message reach others?
Perhaps it’s because they think there are too many of them in the all feed?
This is a guess, I don’t use the all feeds so I haven’t seen any of them.
Perhaps it’s because they think there are too many of them in the all feed?
That’s not the fault of the all feed. That’s the fault of the user for either not subscribinng to communities they are interested in or not blocking communities they are disinterested in.
Either people browse by all because there is not enough content in the communities to follow, or there is already “too many” of the things that they don’t want to follow on all, and they should start curating their feed by browsing their subscribed communities.
Which is it? You can not have it both ways.
You are trying to enforce rationality on inherently irrational humans. It’s not going to work.
It’s even worse, because I’m not enforcing anything. I can not enforce it. I am saying “The current way of doing things seems bad. How about trying something different?” and instead of trying to take a look, people are responding by doing exactly the bad things that they deny to exist.
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And I downvote anyone who reads any post and assumes malicious intent and tries to grandstand before looking for common ground.
This is not about telling people what they should vote on, it’s about trying to make the system work better for everyone.
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The only fool that I am suffering is you. Lucky for me, I can solve that right away…
You seem fun.
I usually see a lot of people downvoting posts in a language they don’t speak, presumably because they don’t care.
I would suggest those people to select their languages in their settings so that they don’t see this kind of content.
Now that is just lazy, doesn’t even fix the problem when you could just filter it and never see that sub again.
Definitely
The language settings do not work. Some hugely high percentage of comments and posts have an “undetermined” language because Lemmy doesn’t force you to choose a language when submitting something. And then there is federated content from programs that don’t even have a language setting.
If you block “undetermined”, you block almost all content, and then there’s no point in even being here.
What we might need is code to identify the language of a comment and assigning it automatically while allowing it to be changed if it makes a mistake. I imagine it would annoy multilingual people having to switch their configured language every time they make a comment, so just make it automatic by using a language model. That’s the kind of thing a language model would be really good at.
Until we have something like that, the language settings are useless.
You can configure languages per community, every post in that community will automatically be tagged in that language.
Example: https://feddit.de/post/9930318?scrollToComments=true. All of the comments are tagged, and this hasn’t been done manually by users.
The Undetermined point you are bringing is valid for some communities which are not configured, but most of them are.
Ah, I did not know that. Must be a lot of mods that don’t know that either because I see foreign language communities all the time.
Never hesitate to politely ask them to do so, some of them are indeed not aware!
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !thenetherlands@feddit.nl, !france@jlai.lu, !chilepedalea@feddit.cl
I confirm it, we have lot issue with it.
On the software side, I think the language setting shouldn’t hidden in setting. I would move it in the filter bar along side “local, all, moderator view…”
I was sorta with you until the “Clueless Downvoters Wall of Shame” bit at the end.
You can ask people to try and think about their voting behavior, but that’s just a bit weird and obsessive.
Users do users because humans do humans. The only way to change how humans use the software is by changing the software. Trying to instead change the humans is sure to fail.
Yeah, maybe a big ignore community button could do.
There is such a thing as “culture” as well. Agree that the software can make it easier or harder to tips the scales one way or another, but it’s not like people are unable of learning something just because it’s not the default setting.
Until there is a proper hide feature voting is the only way to hide a post across apps and the web-ui.
Remember fake internet points don’t matter.
Yeah, hiding the post would be good.
But like I said in the post… It’s not about “internet points”, it’s about visibility of “minority” and niche content getting completely eclipsed by the majority.
As the Fediverse grows and more people come with their own niche interests, there will be more and more smaller groups. If the people on the majority side thinks it’s fine to downvote because “they don’t care about that”, then it stands to reason that every minority will be outnumbered and then the whole system becomes a popularity contest, only “common denominator” topics will get enough traction. This makes the whole system super bland and boring for everyone.
Very good point.
Isn’t that what the scaled sorting in v0.19 is supposed to fix?
It is supposed to, but it isn’t working. Niche communities are still outnumbered by posts from more active ones and people in the larger instances see content from smaller communities and use the voting system like they are training some algorithm.
I’m gunna down vote this
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A little before I started using Reddit, my mate who told me about it said upvoting was used as a means of promoting posts or replies that people may be interested in, not because you like or dislike a post or reply.
I think Facebook has changed that and I will admit I will thumbs up a post/reply because I like it, but I will also upvote posts I think other users may be interested in.
A little before I started using Reddit, my mate who told me about it said upvoting was used as a means of promoting posts or replies that people may be interested in, not because you like or dislike a post or reply.
Yeah in theory it was about promoting content that you felt was a “good link to share” and was “good content”. Not about your personal feelings on it. Never quite worked that way of course, but eh.
Yeah, it’s definitely shifted that way. I just use them both interchangeably.
I downvote and upvote whatever I wanna 🤷. Deal with it
I feel its a feature not a bug. It theoretically should filter the overall content to a more “average” viewpoint be the one that bubbles to the top this should mean that the more extreme views will be downvoted more and help solve the massive political divide that the existing echochambers have helped create.
Downvotes will always be used as a “i dont like this” and “i disagree with this” thats just what people gonna do when they have an emotional responce to somethibg they see. I recon its fine tho cos all people are going to dislike bad content but only specific groups will dislike other content. Might lead to some groups getting targetted but only the extremists like the nazis, communists, and vegans will be targeted and thats fine they are extremists.
The problem is the opposite of what you are describing: I’m seeing downvotes on content that is perfectly fine on sport-related instances, and people are downvoting it… why? Because they don’t care about it?
What is “extremist” in posts about football, American Football, basketball?
On Reddit, where downvotes are anonymous, my niche sub (20k members but far fewer active) would continually get someone who would come in and downvote every single comment in an entire post. The time that it started and stopped was fairly obvious too b/c like in a Help & Questions megathread with literally 1000 comments, all of the replies would have a baseline value below the starting one (i.e., they would show 0 rather than 1), up until it stopped after which point they would all start at 1. That’s a pretty clear indicator that they were subverting the rules of Reddit. As a moderator, I repeatedly complained to the Reddit admins, who did not seem to give a shit.
I even had screenshots of people on an associated discord server calling out for such brigading attempts. I offered them to the admins, who never took me up on that. It also happened in a much larger, I guess you could say parent sub of 200k members. Hundreds of thousands of people getting downvoted… b/c of one unhappy kid, or someone acting like it.
At least here in the Fediverse we have tools at our disposal that were not available on Reddit. e.g. if you were to block all of those people, I think they cannot vote against your future posts any more? Though it could also be due to a simple misunderstanding of how to use Fediverse tools. And for someone who made their own instance, you could literally adjust the rules - I would guess? - so as to only show the results of voting e.g. for accounts older than X days, or only by members of that community, or something. Though that would take significant effort, both up-front and then to stay in compliance with future Lemmy updates if it was not integrated into the main code, and it would only benefit members of your specific instance.
For someone who so rarely downvotes anything - I usually either just block a troll entirely or at least ignore someone who looks like they may be having a bad day yet feels the need to share that with the entire world - I might not be providing much perspective here! But I hope these thoughts at least were somewhat interesting.
I dont see a problem here wont effect the people who sub to sport and thus care cos if all the sports getting downvoted nobody is.
I don’t browse by all, I use “sort by scaled” and I still see content from the most popular communities first.
Scaled sort is busted allegedly and the big communities are dominating on all the sort options thats a real problem that needs fixing.
There is the technical issue, and there is the social/cultural issue. I really dislike the idea of just pushing blame to one side as a way justify a problematic behavior without external dependencies.
What do you think is harder:
- Implementing the recommendation engine that can sort and score things appropriately, and work well for people that are browsing by all vs subscriber only?
- Adopting/promoting the simple guidelines that I mentioned?
The first option puts at the mercy of someone else. The second is completely up to the people using it. Seems to me a lot easier to just take some responsibility for my own actions than waiting for the devs to do as I wish.
Its foss go ask chatgpt and submit a pull request.
This assumes that people who are interested in a community are subscribers, which isn’t always the case. Users like me who subscribe to RSS feeds for communities, for example. This also doesnt account for people who might create a new or alt account. Wouldn’t they have to resubscribe to every community just to get their votes counted?
Users like me who subscribe to RSS feeds for communities, for example.
If you are using RSS, you are just lurking, then you wouldn’t get to vote.
Wouldn’t they have to resubscribe to every community just to get their votes counted?
Migrating accounts should not be difficult and there are already tools that can “port” your subscriptions.
If you are using RSS, you are just lurking, then you wouldn’t get to vote.
Sorry but the assumption that people using Lemmy RSS feeds are just lurking and not actively participating comes off as a little naive.
In fact, the whole post makes a lot of assumptions that I dont think are accurate, which makes it difficult to wrap my head around whether a solution is necessary or if this is really a problem to begin with.
the whole post makes a lot of assumptions
Ok, let’s talk about it then: I’ve noticed that almost every post that I make on any smaller communities that I’m trying to bootstrap is met with 2-3 downvotes after a few minutes.
Why is this happening?
- Is the content bad? No, I’m posting news links that are completely related to the topic of the community. Emacs tutorials on the emacs community, NFL news on the nfl community, basketball, TV shows on their shows, etc.
- Is it because the intended audience is not interested in the post? No, the people downvoting are not subscribers. Eventually, the (few) subscribers that are still around do vote it up.
- Is it because I’m violating some instance rule? No, because I’m posting the content in topic-specific instances. Except the Emacs community, all the others community are on the set of topic-specific instances I created.
- Is it a personal attack? No, the people downvoting are not the same. I’m just noticing that while the post will be downvoted by random people until it is “new” and likely to be in the “all” page.
So, the “lots of assumptions I’m making” can be summed up as: posts are getting downvoted by (a) non-subscribers (b) who browse by all and © think that downvoting is going to help with curating their feed.
difficult to wrap my head around whether a solution is necessary.
It’s not the end of the world, and it’s not a hugely complex problem. I was just hoping to get people aware that this “downvoting anything that is not interesting to me” behavior is learned from Reddit (and other Social media sites) and do not translate as well to a place that is so much smaller and has no filter bubble.
I’m not surprised that so many people are acting like I called their baby ugly or something. I know that most people take this learned behavior as the “natural way” of doing things, so I was expecting some pushback. I’m just finding a bit ironic that so many people did nothing but pile on my comments and downvote everything without any further thought.
With your great suggestion, i got an idea for lemmy software : why not activate vote only to subscribed community ? You haven’t subscribed, you can’t vote. But you can hide /filter the community.
The frontpage also need a rework because when you cross-post it flood thus people tend to downvote those posts. And lot other things.
Hi there, you seem to be getting a lot of pushpack on this, so I thought I’d just chime in that I agree with what you’ve written, and have noticed the same problems in the smaller niche communities that I frequent. I worry that this behaviour could be a limiting factor in the growth of niche communities, which Lemmy desperately needs more of.
Another thing: don’t forget that votes are public. Lemmy UI has a very handy feature for moderators that shows everyone who upvotes/downvotes any post or comment. I’m tired of posting content to different communities and be met of a pour of non-subscribers on the downvote side.
Do you think moderators could or should consider banning users whose only interaction with the community is downvoting posts? It would seem that the user isn’t interested in these posts anyway, and the result would be very similar to if the user had simply blocked the community to begin with.
Note that the votes are currently only public to admins, there was an issue to extend that to mods that are modding the specific community the upvote is in but not sure the status on that
edit: seems to have been merged in a day after 0.19.3 released so it would probably be in the next version
Votes are also public by viewing from kbin
that only shows downvotes made from kbin unless that changed
You’re probably right, I just checked my own lemmy.world profile there and I could see all upvotes made from lemmy, but downvotes didn’t appear at all. I’ve seen a lot of people say this and took it at face value I guess. Maybe it is possible with an account or something idk
Huh, interesting. Do you have link to the issue on GitHub?
I sincerely doubt it. The main reason might be that people actually think that they are “helping” by downvoting?
In their own eyes, such content actually should have their rankings lowered, yes? (most especially in the “those leopards surely won’t eat my face off” sense)
And tbh, isn’t that what a downvote button is meant for? So however sparingly we may choose to use it, can we really complain all that bitterly if others choose to use it more often?
As someone who already follows these guidelines, I believe that most other people will never follow these guidelines. Far worse, even if >95% of the people across the Fediverse were to, that’s still an awful lot of downvotes, compared to the number of people that have heard of a brand-new sub that is trying to get up off the ground.
Lemmy is at best beta-version software - the apps I hear are amazing but Lemmy itself is still relatively undeveloped (most of the time lately whenever I try to up-vote something, I have to do it 2-3 times for it to “stick”, and getting comments to go through is also problematic, sometimes I have to cancel and try again, across multiple platforms and OSes including Android and Mac, Firefox and Chrome). We are desperate for a place that is not Reddit or X, but if we want something, we have to build it.
My suggestion: make downvotes public, not just to admins and mods but to everyone. Tbh I doubt very much that that would do the trick, but it is a thought to try to help people break out of that system of “I am anonymous so I can be as insensitive to the needs of others as I wish” mindset. i.e., if they thought that there might be consequences, then they might behave ever-so-slightly better? But ofc that would only reach the subset of people who actually cared.
In their own eyes, such content actually should have their rankings lowered, yes?
That’s the thing. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but going from “votes are used to signal what matters to the community” to “votes are used to signal what matters to me” was a monumental cultural shift that can probably correlate with the deterioration of social media.
Literally: yes, e.g. https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.
For-profit enterprises hijacked people’s various needs to increase their profits, so that they can haz moar profitz while they earn their profits, as they chase even more-er-est profits. It is the same reason why when you go to a website that you have literally never visited before, much less do not have an account on, they have an icon that looks precisely like a “notifications” button, with a badge saying that you have “messages” waiting to be reviewed. 🤮
At least when piracy websites have such things, they also offer to let you download an interesting item, whereas when you visit a legitimate “news” page that someone sends you a link to, they show like 2 sentences before fading out into a full-page blocking advertisement that lets you sign up to pay money in order to continue to read even more click-baity headlines followed by maybe some tiny amount of content, if you are lucky - and even that is most often like one tiny new fact that happened in the last couple of days or weeks but appearing only after 5 pages of knowledge that has been known for decades, or worse yet they just forgo the latter entirely and the entire article is only a paragraph or two.
I am saying: if the true goal of most news websites was truly to impart knowledge then they could have done so better in the 10-second read of the TITLE itself than all the lead-up to get you to come to that page, full of ads and tricks to get you to scroll down further to see more ads, all while wasting your time reading through something that absolutely was not worthwhile.
I am spoiled by such things as https://www.youtube.com/@crashcourse that essentially throw multiple whole entire college curricula at you - THOSE ads would be worthwhile to watch, for THAT content. That is like turning a firehose of knowledge onto yourself. But then other people want you to watch even more ads, in return for far less content.
Kurzgesagt is another example. Rather than simply downvote others or reply with a childish “your (sic) stoopid (sic)”, they instead add to the collective body of human knowledge and experiences by taking an ENORMOUSLY complex subject such as vaccine side-effects, and break them down into <10-20-minute videos that are watchable by the general public, see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU. THIS IS THE WAY, imho. But, they already do it, and other corpos want/need to make their own profits, hence they use “tricks” like Google SEOs to increase their own rankings while decreasing those of legitimate content such as these from Kurzgesagt or Crash Course.
So, whatever votes might have once meant, or should mean, then or now, at hand is what they are, for good or ill. Just exactly like how vaccine active disinformation exists, so it is no longer enough to cure a pandemic merely by doing all that hard work to create a vaccine - now you also have to work against the disinformation that exists.
And wrapping back to the matter at hand: while *I* might follow these guidelines, and *you* may do so as well, *most* people will not. The likes of Facebook have spoken, training those kids who have now grown up and moved on to other platforms but now others have followed in their wake, and this is the world that we live in now, for good or ill:-(.
You might also be interested in a reply I gave to another post entirely, so linking it here just in case it helps: https://startrek.website/comment/7601231.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/@crashcourse
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
