Hacker News Reader

Comment by gtk40 | Hacker News Reader

It seems obvious there would be plenty of "legitimate" dislikes coming, as probably a lot of people who followed this YouTube channel in the past 4 years were Trump supporters, and now the channel features Biden. Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition.

View on HN

> It seems obvious there would be plenty of "legitimate" dislikes coming, as probably a lot of people who followed this YouTube channel in the past 4 years were Trump supporters, and now the channel features Biden. Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition.

I don't know about YouTube, but I've read that the 2017 transition and the 2021 transitions were different on Twitter:

2017: Obama's institutional twitter accounts (e.g. @POTUS) were archived, but Trump inherited the followers in his new @POTUS account.

2021: Trump's @POTUS was archived, but Biden's new @POTUS didn't inherit Trump's (and Obama's) followers. He had to start from scratch.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/technology/biden-white-ho...

> Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition.

Presumably you could unsubscribe. Which is not the case with instagram. If you followed the White House account, or you decide to follow the archived account for Trump, you are periodically made to follow the current White House account for Biden. Even if you block the user, it will unblock and re-follow you.

> Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition.

I'd be surprised if it hadn't. The bigger question is whether YouTube manipulated the dislikes back then, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com