Right after they announced they're doubling the required watch time to turn on monetisation, it's clear what they want - more volume, less quality. Slop, slop, slop.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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When I was a kid I would refresh my video to increase the view count. I thought this was implemented to prevent that.
Well that's a great incentive for clickbait content - cause now it won't matter if you can keep people watching after you've reeled them in.
You'd think this would be against YouTube's own best interest, considering they want to keep you watching, and people don't often like watching that kind of clickbait-farm slop...
Or maybe I and the people I know are in the minority, and a lot of people just watch it whether they like it or not, which would be disappointing to hear.
I mostly watch videos from channels I'm already subscribed to, but recently a few shows I watch have dropped new seasons and I was looking for recaps on YouTube. It was nothing but AI slop channel after AI slop channel. I would click off as fast as possible to not give them the view, but I guess they will all count going forward. It really sucks because we can't opt out of these channels and many of them don't even admit to being AI anyway.
I have no idea how this change is good for them. I totally agree that it seems like it'll encourage low quality content. After a few of those videos I can't imagine most people sticking around for another, but what do I know. I'm sure they have more accurate stats than I do.
Didn't see it in the article, but I wonder if on desktop at least will it count if you hover and "preview" the video before clicking on it? Hopefully not, then we can see if it is slop or not, though that will be 1 more annoying thing to do
I'm not super well versed, but my understanding was that watching the preview for more than X seconds already counted as a view. At least it was like that a while back after they were introduced.
Also be careful because these ai channels are sneaky and will use generic pictures or stills but the script and voice are all AI.
Dammit!!! At least they don't get the ad revenue from me. Yeah, that asian guy with glasses hasn't been in the thumb for a while now, but soon as I click on the vid, BOOM!, there he is
this is definitely against their interests, unless they just plan on having people watch ads everytime they open a video, watch that video for like 1 second and go to next and watch more ads. There is no depth of depravity i wont put past corporation executives, so that feels very plausible how they think and how detached they are from humans.
It could even be prelude to some other even more horrible, like they start gatekeeping actually decent stuff with premium aggressively.
We should really start archiving the good content of youtube more, just in case.. I would too, but i dont have that much extra harddrive space and i dont have energy enough to start learning to build a personal storage system that is secure and fault resistant.
Now we have view inflation on top of losing the dislike button and the UI consistently getting worse.
Rewarding clickbait, let’s goo
Calling it now..
"YouTube will now count views only when an ad has been played in full".
Will come sooner than you think.
They already do that, sort of. The last I heard, people watching with an ad-blocker also blocked the mechanism that incremented the watch counter. This may or may not have been deliberate. The interesting thing is that the video appears in people's Watch History ad-blocker or not, so there was always an easy fix sitting in plain sight.
They told creators about the watch count problem along with at least one other secret thing that they said they weren't allowed to talk about. Charlie / Cr1TiKaL / penguinz0 said as much as he could about it a few months back.
I think the secret thing was probably "we're working on a way to get those view counts back, but don't tell anyone because we want to discourage people from using ad-blockers and if you tell them they're costing people views, it might convince them to turn it off."
Assuming true, that's all now out of the window because they've "fixed" the problem.
I expect another fierce attack on ad-blockers in Q4.
It makes it easier for advertisers because all views on the internet are equally inflated I guess but it also destroys 2 decades of internet history in that views played a huge role in Youtube culture and they will soon become meaningless with this update. Getting a million or a billion views on anything won‘t matter at all anymore.
But yeah Facebook, Xitter and TikTok have been doing it for years so it makes sense when you compete with them.
Oh like the chinese bot farms aren't going to take advantage of this to push slop content to the top. Wonder what they are charging for 1 sec views...
I wonder if the algorithm counts views the same though.
time to learn Japanese or Chinese and use nikoniko or bilibili
I used to rip the video I liked from YouTube and upload them to Odysee, I should start again...
Yeah makes sense for them... Good I don't consume that crap.
K