YouTube Gets a Vuvuzela Button (Seriously) 305
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."
Or how about... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Annoying... (Score:5, Informative)
Warning! Sensible Recommendation Ahead! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:dreaded? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Annoying... (Score:5, Informative)
Adblock Plus takes care of these, haven't seen one ever on my desktop/laptops.
American Handegg (Score:2, Informative)
Foot + ball = Football
Hand + egg = Handegg [thecollegevoice.org]
Re:dreaded? (Score:4, Informative)
Bollocks. You can get a tune out of a vuvuzela, too [bbc.co.uk]. Don't know if that video is visible for non-UK viewers, so here's a clip of it on YouTube [youtube.com].
I don't know how to play a keyboard, and if I bang the keys and make a racket, does that mean it's no longer a keyboard?
Re:Annoying... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [blogspot.com]
Cheers.
Re:I tried watching... (Score:4, Informative)
Here in America, we Americans don't put apostrophes in "American's" unless it's possessive. i.e. "Scientific American's in-depth article on electronic Vuvezeula noise filtering". It's possible apostrophe rules are different where you live, such as England or South Africa, but I doubt it :)
http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif [angryflower.com]
Untrue (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:So... (Score:3, Informative)
Manchester Untied owe the banks around £2.2 Billion (a million million, not a US thousand million).
That's just plain silly. It's the US-style billions (10^9) that Man U owe. Nobody in Britain uses the word "billion" to mean 10^12 these days.
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
What reasons would that be, as opposed to those to call handegg [wordpress.com] 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!
A cultural tradition dating 9 years ago (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For the americans (Score:3, Informative)
What people think of as "American" beer (Budweiser, Miller) are actually not American at all; the last major American brewery (AB) sold out to foreigners a couple of years ago. Sam Adams and the other REAL American beers (St Pauly Girl and Rolling Rock are good American lagers) are indeed good beer.
So anybody dissing American beer are ignorant. Bud Light and Miller Lite are NOT American; they're brewed by foreign owned breweries.
Re:Annoying... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Annoying... (Score:3, Informative)
Turn on HTML5 mode, install flashblock and you won't see any ads on YT videos. The ones that do have ads are forced to use flash.