Likes from logged in views do count, the like to view ratio is higher due to that.
A German YouTuber tested it with an unlisted video, I can’t find it as of now but I do find a lot of deleted videos in my liked ones…
Basic theory as of the time of the video is that they want to go against bot views. Short views did not decline, only long form video, and of those the people with mostly desktop views are hit the most.
Edit: found it!
Wasn’t it already proven to be an ad-blocker update? I though thet blocked the url that counts the views. So no views are counted
I did some youtubing last week and saw three people claiming that three different theories were already proven.
I find it crazy that the client would call an API endpoint to register a view. Then we could just call that end point in a script to arbitrarily inflate the view count, can we not? How do they prevent this exploit? Wouldn’t it be better if the server registered the view after a certain amount of the video was delivered?