Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Gets a Vuvuzela Button (Seriously)
teh31337one writes "YouTube always has had a way with pranks. Some time in the last hour, the world's largest video portal activated a new button on some videos that looks like a tiny soccer ball. Clicking it will activate an endless, incredibly annoying sound that sounds vaguely like a swarm of insects. Or, for anyone who has been watching the World Cup, like the dreaded vuvuzela — an instrument commonly played in South Africa at football (soccer) games. South Africa is, of course, the host country for this year's World Cup, and fans watching the games have been subjected to the vuvuzela's mindless drone for hours on end. The noise is so annoying that television networks have taken measures to filter it out, and guides have popped up showing viewers how to block it from their TV sets and computers. I'm not seeing the button show up on all videos, but it is definitely appearing on some clips that aren't soccer-related."
...on ANY website?
Oh come on, April Fools Day' is the Internet at its most amusing just for stuff like this. You know it's only a temporary change.
Adblock Plus takes care of these, haven't seen one ever on my desktop/laptops.
Your assumption regarding the rating system of youtube is wrong. The like/dislike system was adopted as a consequence of the rating habits of youtube users not in an attempt to mimic facebook. The majority of the videos on youtube were either 1* or 5* with mostly nothing in between.
The like/dislike mechanism is an evolution of a system that is trying to adapt itself to its user base.
You can read more about this on the official youtube blog - http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-ratings.html
Cheers.
Vuvuzela's are South African culture, if you dont like it, dont what any of the games, we couldnt care less what you did.
No, the vuvuzela is not part of South African culture. It's a freaking Mexican horn, and wasn't even available in South Africa until 2001, when some crappy plastic company started churning the god-awful things out down there.
It's no more part of their culture than OS X is.
What reasons would that be, as opposed to those to call handegg boring? ;)
(In terms of sports, I’m a shooter (online) and rally (offline) guy, so if you think I care about “sides” here, it’s all in your head.)
I'm sure you've heard them before, but let's see how much of my still bad karma I can burn into oblivion answering honestly:
The games are long and boring.
The goal nets are too small.
They don't score enough points (prolly due to the net's small size).
The transitions are obvious.
The players are wimps.
The refs are blind.
The fans riot violently; often causing mass destruction.
Now add vuvuzelas!
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
Those triompet in their form at footbal match are only commercialized recently. The traditional one don't even have that form or noise.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Also, it's youtube. You know what's more annoying than websites all mimicking each other? 99.9% of the content on youtube, that's what.
The vuvuleza sound is actually quite an improvement. For instance, this morning one of my friends had sent me a link which turned out to be two minutes of a video of a rabbit, not doing anything. The buzzing sound gave it an ominous tone which was highly amusing, like the bunny was very very slowly moving toward a swarm of evil robotic bees.
The top youtube videos, what you might expect to be the cream of the crop, are even worse: "Justin Bieber LOVES Chinese Guy!" I can't imagine a horrible buzzing noise degrading the quality of that one. A bunch of clips from the world cup, most having already been taken down, a buzzing noise would at least be something. "Seattle Cop Punches Woman - Raw Footage " didn't have the option, a buzzing noise masking the incoherent shouting would have been nice.
It really failed to improve "Super Mario Beatbox" though.