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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."
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.