Testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count | Hacker News Reader

Testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count

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445 pointsJerry2478 comments

This seems rather user-hostile. The downvote count is useful for identifying videos that aren't what they claim to be. And how about DIY videos that give terrible advice? A big downvote ratio will get most people's attention in a way that critical comments may not.

I agree that removing public dislikes is a pretty bad idea, but it's not that important of a tool in fighting misleading videos. I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with misleading thumbnails/titles, and what stopped the glut was not dislikes, but rather Youtube's use of watch time as an important metric.

Fair point, but I think downvotes have been useful to me relatively recently. Fake videos may not show up in recommendation feeds, but they still appear in search results don't they? (And if you're searching for something relatively obscure, you can realistically hit the bottom of the barrel, rather than only seeing the more highly rated results.)

>Fake videos may not show up in recommendation feeds, but they still appear in search results don't they?

Use report button

I would for anything truly extreme (like some horrible shock footage in the middle of a supposedly innocent video). But I don't know if all of these videos actually violate any rules; often they are of the kind <title: THING YOU'RE LOOKING FOR>, where the content is actually someone talking about the thing I'm looking for.

edit: Or another relatively common type, not necessarily fake or even strictly misleading, just cynically low-quality: a video made by pulling some text content from the web, feeding it through a speech synthesiser, and playing that over over the top of some 'relevant' images.

When you are reporting a video there is "Spam or misleading" option but then again you are left with YouTube algorithm deciding whether video is really "spam or misleading" or it is malicious report.

For the past couple of months I was regularly reporting group of spammers spamming links in comment sections but to this day I still see them running amok.

Given its Google, I assume those get forwarded to /dev/null

From a YT standpoint, if I am looking for "interview of HenryBemis" and there are 10 likes and 1000 dislikes, it means that this is probably NOT the video, but someone commenting on the video (e.g. I wanted to see the Oprah-Harry-Meghan video).

If YT removes the dislikes from the public eye, I will either have to scroll ahead, OR watch 5-10mins waiting for the thing to start, then go and try some other video.

YT increases user engagement (I have already watched 10mins of one video and now heading for the next.. and the next.. and the next..). So, for YT this is a win-win.. it's the user that gets tricked.

Bravo YT, well played (not!)

> if I am looking for "interview of HenryBemis" and there are 10 likes and 1000 dislikes, it means that this is probably NOT the video, but someone commenting on the video

This is the sort of thing I had in mind. Some of it is complete junk and some is probably interesting to some people, but the titles are sufficiently misleading to attract an eye-catching number of downvotes. I can't remember exactly when I last came across this kind of content, but it was definitely quite recently, so I don't think youtube has stamped it out.

You see this very frequently in DIY how-to videos. There's usually about ~30-60 seconds of very helpful instructional content, buried somewhere towards the end of an 11 minute video of rambling and common knowledge. I suspect largely because the monetization gets better if your video is longer than 10 mins...

The reason downvotes didn't solve that issue was because you couldn't see the ratio until after you had clicked.

There was plugins that showed it when browsing and it made such a difference.

> I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with misleading thumbnails/titles

Oh, that's still happening. It never stopped.

If the problem still exists, it's way less noticeable than it was in 2010.

Oh if you're going back that far, then yes, it definitely still exists, though I don't doubt it used to be a lot worse. (I phrased my first response carefully in case there had been changes in, say, the past few months that I hadn't fully noticed.)

It's still absolutely rampant for some types of search terms. For example, try searching for "electronic projects", "crafts", or "life hacks" in an incognito window. The vast majority of the results for all of those search terms have misleading thumbnails and/or descriptions.

Dislikes are good not just for identifying bad videos, but also good videos. You can see it in the like/dislike ratio. The higher the better, videos with ratio around >98-99% have very high probability of being good etc

Comparison of likes to views works well enough. Actually, they don't even need likes, they can understand good and bad videos just by analysing how long viewers spent viewing the video.

Likes (and dislikes) are needed mostly for viewers who might want to feel helpful.

View time isn't adequate if a video isn't obviously bad until the very end though.

Good videos which end terribly are exceptionally rare.

Dislike mobs do more harm. They probably ignore dislikes already.

> Good videos which end terribly are exceptionally rare.

1. Videos which promise to show something that never actually appears

2. Very short videos which are difficult to not watch in their entirety

I don't need "them" to analyse it, I want it for myself.

Beyond the debate on whether or not downvotes are useful as a tool, I think about the higher-level implications of a change like this.

One of the most powerful media platforms in the entire world can institute a change like this under everyone's watch, and none of us have any recourse.

A couple of programmers in their two-week sprint can fiddle around with some Javascript and push it out to the masses, and suddenly large swathes of the historical record are gone forever. (If you consider downvotes to be historical, that is.)

Imagine if someone could white out a section of a book and apply the changes instantaneously to every printed copy of that book in existence.

I think about the implications of being able to look back on human history, and how that historical narrative is increasingly in the control of technology companies and a relatively small amount of people who decide to change that narrative for everyone else. I remember many chronological videos that specifically call out the dislike ratios of some YouTube videos as evidence of the negative backlash certain companies or individuals have received. With no dislikes, that point can no longer be made. That information is lost.

During a live recording of a Japanese entertainment group I watched, whose videos will be preserved on physical discs and be watched by thousands for decades to come, they announced on camera that, in the span of their two-hour performance, they had reached trending status on Twitter. All they had to mention was the word "trend," and the audience responded with enthusiasm. The influence of Dorsey's creation has permeated so many of our lives, including the people who, ten years ago, would never have cared about what bizzare-sounding technologies like Ruby on Rails would eventually enable them to obtain: a universally understood, instantaneous signal of approval.

I believe that the record of who we were and what we did will be important for us to be able to look back on, as it has been for centuries. But it seems that, in the coming decades, that will not always be up to us to decide - just a couple of people in the engagement bureau who decided for us that the alternative was better.

> Imagine if someone could white out a section of a book and apply the changes instantaneously to every printed copy of that book in existence.

Considering a fifteen year old YouTube video can resurface and the millions of votes can change the vote-ratio, digital media isn't necessarily the same as a permanent historical record.

Totally agree with you on this. We're reaching a point where the services some private companies provide are becoming too important to remain private, or at least, being served in a monopolistic fashion where the user has basically no power.

The content creators are also users. The announcement emphasizes that they're doing this to help improve the content creator experience.

Now that I think of it, Twitter doesn't have downvotes and I've never struggled to tell a bad tweet from its ratio.

A bad tweet is obvious because it's easy to digest.

Unfortunately, the 'dislike' signal on a YouTube video doesn't tell me if it's because an expert disagrees with its content, or because the creator is being brigaded, or because the downvoters disagree with their politics (related or unrelated).

The comments are a better signal, but looking through them requires reading... YouTube comments.

I'm not sure bad videos are any harder to digest than bad tweets. Maybe a bit more time consuming?

Yes, if I am trying to fix my dishwasher and I see a video with a high dislike ratio I will move on because at best it's probably a time waster and at worst dangerous.

My options now would be to spend a minute or two watching it or reading the comments (engagement!), which may not exist on some niche videos you run across for things like this. This adds up when browsing. Don't forget creators can disable comments too.

Just pick the video with a lot of upvotes that has a good title card and is early on in the search results.

I'm pretty sure this is how you teach YouTube that you like clickbait.

But I guess that happens anyway.

> My options now would be to spend a minute or two watching it or reading the comments

Fully agreed with you on everything you said here, but that specific line I quoted sounds a bit optimistic to me.

You would only waste a minute or two if the video author decided to actually start his video "for real" from the very beginning, instead of spending the first few minutes on his entire life story (that is not even related to the video content) and asking people to like and subscribe. It became so commonplace, these days I instantly start liking videos just for not wasting the first few minutes on things completely irrelevant to the actual content (which would be somewhat fine for entertainment videos, but definitely not for things like DYI tutorials and lessons).

For instructional videos I usually click through to skim before fully committing, especially if they waffle at the start. It works easier on desktop than mobile though.

And don't forget the Wadsworth Constant :)

https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/the-wadsworth-const...

I'm not sure if it still works, but you used to be able to append something like '&wadsworth' to the end of youtube links and it would act like a timestamp link 30% of the way through the video.

I think it was &wadsworth=1 and no they removed the fun :(

I think that YouTube algorithms are so smart right now that YouTube doesn't need dislike button anymore it can simply rank bad videos so low that you don't even know they exist.

Edit: YouTube algorithms are so smart* I was exaggerating using hyperbole(figure of speech) in order to imply strong impression and feeling that YouTube algorithms are good enough for YouTube to afford dismissing dislike button.

Instagram is doing fine with likes only so I don't see a reason why YouTube wouldn't. Go to comment section to say what is wrong with the video you are watching or use report button if the video is violating TOS.

Companies are only interested in user behavior that increases engagement. Everything else is on the chopping block.

s/engagement/addiction/

Downvotes increase engagement. Otherwise they wouldn't have been put there in the first place.

No, the real issue here is too many of the "right" things are getting downvoted. So when The White House, Disney or the Academy disable downvotes on part or all of their videos but other wide swaths of videos don't need to disable downvotes, the contrast causes them to stick out like a sore thumb.

It calls attention (also known as engagement) - but not the kind of attention those who run social media companies want. Attention that is counter to the desired narratives is unacceptable. So here we go with the lame excuses that are all the sudden relevant when they weren't when the like/dislike stuff was instated decades ago?

Give me a break.

You are all over this thread claiming that the White House is explicitly pressuring Google to remove this feature of the site. Do you have supporting evidence, or did you just make this up? It seems more like you have a narrative and agenda to push.

The White House is just the last one whose videos dislikes are being made fun of and shared in memes

I'm sure YouTube consulted with their biggest customers and partners before removing a functionality that increases engagement

Yeah the only reason The White House YouTube channel receives views right now is because Trump used it to to campaign and it became fairly popular amongst his supporters. It's main audience is still his supporters because most people don't really watch The White House on YouTube.

Where in the comment do they claim “the White House is explicitly pressuring Google to remove this feature”?

I didn't say anyone, let alone the White House is pressuring them to remove anything. Why would the WH have to pressure them? I have zero doubt that Google is pushing this themselves.

What I firmly believe, based on statements by the companies and the employees that work for them as well as their actions (over the past five years in particular) is they have a particular agenda to push and if you aren't on the right side of their messaging they intend to suppress it by any means possible.

The revolving door and growing ties between Google and segments of government strongly suggests a constant flow of information and the creation of incentives in a way that create a common understanding across both. Meaning, you might not need to "tell" anyone to do anything in particular. Your ties create common interest and once two groups, here relatively fluid groups with fuzzy boundaries, share a common interest, no explicit coordination is necessary.

Yep. I think this is the sort of thing that could potentially backfire on them, though. Engagement through addiction sadly seems to be a bottomless goldmine, but engagement through deception can leave people dissatisfied and ripe for poaching by a competitor. If hiding downvotes does cause people to watch more bad and misleadingly-titled content, that could be profitable in the short term but dangerous in the medium-long term.

I don't know if these large tech companies act on normal incentives. They're almost post-modern corporations.

I don't think anyone truly understands their decision making process. It's above even the leadership. Scott Alexander mentioned this in a post this week:

> Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-antifragile-diver...

In this particular case, the company is interested in more content production. Who are disincentivized by downvotes.

Totally agree. I notice I find comment sections of sites that allow downvotes (e.g. HN, Reddit) much easier to navigate and filter than sites like Facebook and Twitter that only allow upvotes. Only allowing upvoting gives you similar dynamics to partisan primaries in the US - the most polarizing content filters to the top instead of sinking to the bottom.

HN doesn't really allow downvotes though. At least not unless you've reached a million karma points (from my understanding).

It does. I don't know what the threshold is, but it's not too high. I believe it's 500, but I might be wrong.

I became able to downvote after reaching 500 karma. The minimum requirement might have changed to 1000 since then, I forget.

Even after reaching that karma amount, you are only able to downvote comments within a day of their posting. After a day, only upvotes are possible.

Your first mistake was thinking that you are the user they care about serving :p

Oh I know, I am pretty cynical and not exactly outraged here. But although they don't care about what's good for us, they do care about what will keep us on the platform. And if it gets harder to find good stuff and filter out the dross, that could conceivably have negative consequences for YouTube in the long run.

They hate us. The little guy. No criticism allowed

I'm not outraged - I'm amused. The ultimate admission the only way they can spread their messaging is through force, not honest competition of ideas. How superior.

Nothing proves you have a worthy argument better than outright hiding from dissent.

Again, they don't care if you stay on the platform. If they did, they wouldn't touch it. The disagreement buttons were added in the first place because they increase and maintain engagement. After a few decades it's now all the sudden a problem?

Ha! The real problem is their desired narratives are being soundly rejected and it's embarrassing. So here we are.

> Again, they don't care if you stay on the platform.

Why not? Even if you're right that they care more about propaganda than money, what's the point of propagandising to an empty room?

If logic were involved we wouldn't be having a discussion about removing dislikes in the first place, no? :)

Come on, I'm trying not to dismiss your perspective just because it sounds a bit conspiratorial, but this is not convincing. Are you saying the YouTube execs (or whoever is leaning on them) are just acting emotionally with no strategy?

There is absolutely a strategy - there is a particular point of view they favor, and anything counter to it is removed.

Dislikes are embarrassing to, for lack of better terminology, their pet causes. Simply disabling them on certain videos or channels calls even more attention to them - so why not just remove them entirely.

The only thing surprising to me is that it took them this long.

It doesn't need to be that dislikes are embarrassing to their pet causes. There were a few instances where business partners would, e.g., post an ad campaign that got so many dislikes the dislike ratio entered the news cycle. I'm sure google gets pressure from their business/ad partners when that goes down.

Wouldn't business partners be a trivial subset of their pet causes? It's not just a political set.

What a silly conspiracy theory. If the wanted to hide embarrassing downvotes on certain videos, they'd just remove those downvotes, not the entire feature.

They do that too

So why would they remove the feature if it worked better manipulated?

When it's only the same kinds of content that has to have special treatment, that special treatment still calls unwanted attention.

So hence why the whole feature is pRoBlEmAtIc and must be removed :p

People won't leave that easily. Nobody compares to YouTube. Facebook had no way of voicing disapproval for a long time and membership still increased. They are testing various options which might mean they're weighting the relative benefits and damage. And besides, they may be in a position where they have no choice if propaganda is more important than money.

facebook still has no way to voice disapproval.

They have like, love, care, haha, wow, sad, angry

Angry != disapprove because in the context of the other "emotions" it does not distinguish between disliking the post itself, or what it's referencing. If you post "Candidate X did Y" are you angry because the candidate did Y or because your friend posted something anti candidate X?

> The ultimate admission the only way they can spread their messaging is through force, not honest competition of ideas. How superior.

> Nothing proves you have a worthy argument better than outright hiding from dissent.

I don't know the general trends across YouTube or why they would do this. Certainly, they've also been silencing views they and certain influential groups advising them don't like, and I've seen videos put out by connected establishment and moneyed milieu downvoted into oblivion. But value and truth are not determined through popular vote. It might coincide, or it might not.

So the only way I can understand your comment is to suppose that downvoting of "preferred" YouTube content has gotten so severe that the company wishes to prevent the communication of exactly how much disapproval there really is for the "official narrative" (while potentially keeping track of it themselves) because once someone knows he's not alone in his disapproval, he might just have more confidence to resist or leave a comment that spreads a message unfavorable to them. So yes, dislikes might increase engagement, but it might not be the kind of engagement they want to facilitate.

> downvoting of "preferred" YouTube content has gotten so severe that the company wishes to prevent the communication of exactly how much disapproval there really is for the "official narrative"

This is exact reason. Go to you tube home page and every day there is bar of "official sources" news on coronavirus (clips from news stations). Here are first four for this day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USE5USAodiI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4kqSV1p3T8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmOL9ek7Tys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DpzcMZPTqA

Noticing here, each and every has more dislike than like.

There is a political angle as well. Official Whitehouse videos have been getting 10x the downvotes as upvotes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynG4j-BsRhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBpYZnmPz3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16p2PcPgB5M

To be clear, they aren't removing the button, or a way for users to register their dislike or track that they already disliked a video (I assume), just the count of how many other people disliked it. As a matter of engagement, I'm not sure how much that statistic brings to the table. I agree it might make filtering out crap content somewhat harder, but I'm not sure how good it ever was for that. It might be that the vast majority of the time it indicated anything to the viewer it indicated that some campaign was underway, which generally is counterproductive as a viewer.

Personally, I upvote if I liked something, and I don't indicate anything if I didn't find it all that interesting or useful. Rarely if ever have I disliked something that youtube has recommended to me. The few times I have it's probably been because of some outside source noting it because it's objectionable. How useful of a signal is that to youtube or the creator? In that case it indicates what people that don't care about their content and aren't likely to watch any more of it think. That seems a poor source of feedback (and if we're talking about hat being useful to indicate to them that they shouldn't have done whatever they did, that's obviously served already by many other mechanisms, including comments).

Personally, I have frequently wished that the downvote button on youtube _comments_ wasn’t fake. (Last I heard, it currently doesn’t even send a packet to any servers when you click it. It used to, until google+ iirc [edit: see correction/update provided by voussoir in the reply. Turns out it does now. Thanks for the update/correction.])

The inability to downvote substantially alters what is said/ranked highly, I think.

> Last I heard, it currently doesn’t even send a packet to any servers when you click it.

Just tested. It makes a post to

  /youtubei/v1/comment/perform_comment_action

with a parameter ?key and a payload containing "actions" both of which are long alphanumeric strings.

Oh! Thanks! I'm glad to hear that this has changed.

what narratives are being rejected?

A while back they significantly increased the number of ads and also now show YouTube premium popups constantly. I would imagine it's had very little if any negative impact. Google knows YouTube is the only game in town.

For now, but if they keep treating users like shit, it creates a bigger and bigger opportunity for competition to pop in. You might be thinking it's super hard for someone like you or I to create a YouTube competitor. That's probably true, but what about Amazon or Netflix? Can you imagine if Netflix had a YouTube-like platform where, if you're a subscriber, you get no ads?

That's a good point. Who really knows, but possibly Google just doesn't see that coming, or at least not any time soon. A true competitor to YouTube would really do consumers and creators a lot of good though.

Seems like it should be a market inevitability. There are just so many things wrong with YouTube. The main obstacle is the bandwidth cost, and that's not an issue for any major tech company.

I think Facebook could actually properly compete with YouTube if they wanted, it's just that their insistence that you have to be logged in to access content makes it much less appealing as a platform, because you can't just link people to videos easily.

>The main obstacle is the bandwidth cost

...hence the ads? How would competitors be immune to the need to pay the bills?

Netflix charges a monthly price. They could have an open YouTube-like service (no subscription required) which adds value to their offering, and tries to bring people into a paying Netflix subscription.

It's not just the ads that are the problem with YouTube. It's also the way they can just demonetize anything that doesn't please advertisers, and the way their recommendation algorithm works. They don't even show me a lot of the videos from people I subscribed to on the app's homepage. Wtf?

This is unlikely, because youtube has one thing that no other platform does, creators. How many youtubers would actually be willing to post on another website, let alone exclusively? How many fans would actually follow them? For already risk averse youtubers this is unlikely.

Many, actually. There are quite a few active alternatives now, such as Nebula for science YouTubers and Odyssey. Last I heard Linus Sebastian was working on an alternative as well.

It seems that most content creators are quite worried about the way YouTube handles (de-)monitization and copyright strikes. Many CCs are also streamers and use YT only as a side channel. Sure, YT still has a large footprint, but it's not as solid as it used to be.

There are, but generally for specific interests, and not nearly enough to challenge youtube's market domination. Without something dramatic youtube effectively has monopoly control of supply and demand.

Yeah you seriously have to decline YouTube premium popup basically every session. So its not surprising to get that thing multiple times a day.

They probably think that dislikes aren't actually a good signal for whether or not a video is relevant to a uer.

Crappy videos could automatically be filtered out of their search and recommendations because people abandon them early. They may have determined that's enough to help user's find what they need.

It also helps the issue of dislike brigading since you won't be able to "dislike" a video at all.

Not sure if that's the right move or not but I don't think it's necessarily a bad one.

> they do care about what will keep us on the platform

Yes they do. Watching 2 useless DIY videos and then a 3rd DIY video that finally helped you out, just kept you on the platform 3x longer than if you had filtered out the badly rated one and watched the helpful video first.

Checkmate. YouTube/Google/Alphabet Wins! 3x the ads. 3x the money. 3x the evil. Do not pass go, Google collects your $200. Time to hide the dislike counts... case closed.

.. combined with the idea that there's much of an alternative. If the content creators I like are there...

In the short run they can get away with ~anything. In the long run though, anything that upsets users makes the rise of a true competitor marginally more likely.

Can you clarify this for me? I have always assumed that since I’m the one watching the video I’m their customer/user?

The vast majority of YouTube users don’t meet the definition of “customer” — that would be their advertisers.

You are not paying, right? So you are the product. You are targeted with ads tailored to your viewing pattern; your data is what creates value.

I am actually paying to get rid of advertisements, not to get rid of useful features. This will just get me to stick with my channel subscriptions, as the recommendations are already often better and better scams.

Cable television subscribers originally payed to get rid of ads. Then the channels realized they could get you to pay and watch ads. You will be monetized in every way possible.

Unfortunately even then Google doesn't view you as the customer in any substantial way. Advertisers have been, and continue to be, who they want to keep happy. The reality is that, in aggregate, most users are willing to take a fair amount of abuse as long as it's free.

It would have been an interesting experiment to show dislikes for premium users and see how many people pay for those feature, but I think that would have been too controversial compared to the ads that are accepted practice already.

Perhaps, but this is the last Google product I still use. If they break YouTube like they did search, chrome, cellphones, and email, I guess I am off to find something else which must hurt their bottom line eventually.

The cold reality is that most users won't care.

sorry, couldn't help myself.

courtesy of youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwcJNsoY50E

>"If they break YouTube like they did search ..."

I'm curious what you mean by search being broken? Do you mean the quality of search results or something with search functionality. I ask because lately I've found the quality of certain search results to be increasingly disappointing. I'm not sure if that corresponds to some known change they've made recently though.

Nebula seems like an obvious alternative

It's only for a handful of channels though.

Right, according to the tweet this is done based on feedback from creators.

Yeah it's mainly to discourage dislike trains.

Something something pay for it something something you are the product.

I guess Tron wasn’t clear enough, it should have been “fight for the end user.”

That's still the advertiser, isn't it?

The phrase is defined as “a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product.” When YouTube was created, it was intended to show videos to users. There were no ads yet. So the intention is for the viewers to be the users.

As long as it's still 2006.

The core intention of YouTube is to have a platform to advertise on. Without the viewers, the advertisers would have no interest in the platform. If there were no advertisers, that would not sway the viewers from having interest in the platform. The ads are there as a means to the end, it’s not the end itself.

If there were no advertisers, they would not be able to pay the expenses required to deliver something that meets user's expectations, and they would lose interest.

Not necessarily. There are other models that could work for YouTube, like the subscription model, and they could always go back to YouTube being an unprofitable arm of Alphabet like it was.

YouTube premium never shows me adds, and downvotes have reliably gotten the AI to stop suggesting a musician or autoplaying a song that I don't like, regardless of their rough membership in a genre I otherwise want to hear.

It makes me feel guilty to downvote someone or their work who's probably a good person, but it's the only reliable way to tune the AI. I get a lot of enjoyment out of music on youtube premium, but would stop using the service if they started airing ads on the pay service, or began serving music in such a way that I couldn't tune the suggestions and automatic play queues.

When you see the suggestion you can select "not interested" instead.

Which does nothing, of course.

For me, on youtube premium, "not interested" has massive, immediate effects on what is shown in my feed. Try it and see.

The tweet is clear that you can still downvote videos to tune the algorithm. Dislikes just won't be shown.

Perhaps they should let paying members see counts.

Surprisingly, that would be the tipping point that would get me to pay. Dislike ratio is very useful to avoid wasting time.

That's what YouTube wants eh

Just going to stop using Youtube at some point.

I guess this might be the reason they're getting rid of the downvote functionality.

The YouTube community usually doesn't take downvotes as "not interested", but rather as an explicit expression of "this is crap".

Seems like an opportunity to create a browser extension to have crowd sourced upvote/downvotes kind of like Reddit masstagger. Wonder if there is a way to ensure that upvote/downvotes are not tampered with on the server side.

Ping the guy from https://web.sponsor.ajay.app/ maybe he likes or dislikes the idea ;)

it's called the Gab plugin or "Gab.com Share Extension"

Are people really using votes like that? You putting your trust in deciding quality in a vote count? There's so much wrong with that.

It’s the worst solution except for every other we’ve ever tried.

There's plenty of other ways of figuring out if something is good. When you go to a restaurant do you just look at the star rating? Or do you read reviews, look at the menu, ask ppl etc

There aren't plenty of ways of quickly figuring out if a video is bad.

It's clear that people is this discussion are focused on different types of videos, and the varied responses to the removal of downvotes reflect this. I'm focused on board game videos, which are the only videos I watch. A large number of downvotes on a board game video indicate that the video includes major rules mistakes. So when I see many downvotes, I simply play another video. I'm not going to bother performing a thorough investigation of the quality of one board game video that has a lot of downvotes.

noisy signal is better than no signal, which in turn is better than manipulated signal. at least with this change they won't be deleting[0] dislikes anymore.

[0]: https://phzoe.com/2021/01/27/white-house-youtube-dislike-man...

I would say votes aren't a signal at all. You can be voted in either direction for anything. You don't know who's voting or why.

All that article shows is that the votes are manipulated by users too, there's no signal in down vote brigading like that

How could votes not be a signal? That would only be true if everyone used a stochastic generator to choose up or down.

You have no idea why people are voting (or even if they are people). Even just based off quality, what does that mean, the content is good? The production quality is good? Maybe it's getting downvoted because the creator said something on Twitter, unrelated to the video. The only thing it could possibly signal is attention it's getting and even that would be iffy

This is a misleading "experiment". Why were only White House channel videos looked at? If you wanted to show that there was targeted dislike manipulation, you would also need to do this analysis on other popular videos, preferably right-leaning political ones. This could simply be an algorithm that detects bot behavior which gets applied broadly, in which case they are not changing any "real" signal.

It's certainly possible that Youtube is acting in a political manner and is preferentially deleting real dislikes, but this post hardly proves that.

50000 people would show up to a Trump rally. 15 journalists to a Biden rally. Engaged dislikers are not "bots". And the left has plenty of resources to have their own like-"bots". No, the truth is very simple. There's at least 50000 Trump supporters that will downvote Biden's white house. Even more because ... no travel required.

> Engaged dislikers are not "bots".

I didn't make that claim.

My main point is that the article suggests that this manipulation is selective, and while Youtube might indeed be selectively manipulating White House videos, the methodology used doesn't show that.

Here's a simple question which should be easy to answer, if you've actually approached this in an impartial way: does Youtube also remove likes or dislikes from other videos in a similar way? If the answer is "yes", then the conclusion becomes much less politically interesting.

PS, I think you're overestimating the amount of people who care about White House channel videos. E.g. the press briefing from 3/29/21 has less than 34,000 views. I guess some of the Trump rally attendees forgot to show up to their downvote party.

My working theory was that since Biden asked youtube to remove dislikes and a google engineer confirmed this, then it actually happened.

81m.org tracked other channels. Different behavior.

agreed - but what this comes down to is YouTube sells ads and advertisers only pay for safe spaces. Advertisers do not want your commentary or your dislikes. YouTube is not a public forum, it is a publisher with editorial discretion.

That's pretty wild. The HN submission for this URL was "flagged". I wonder if dang would approve of a second attempt?

It's better to present your alternative hypothesis than engage in personal criticism.

Hrm - maybe this is deserving of some public health lawsuits for any anti-vaxxer videos that slip through their content filter and end up hitting trending.

Youtubers have mentioned that up/down votes seem to have very little effect on video surfacing so I think Youtube has already figured out that folks are heavily biased in up/down voting and removed it from any algorithmic uses.

I agree. I've seen a lot of YouTube videos that are basically a robotic automated voice-over on top of some stock footage. They're everywhere, and usually I can avoid getting tricked into watching them based on the dislike count. But the like count alone is not enough to figure that out since niche videos can have low like counts.

Google wants to maximize their watch time metrics. Users are less likely to watch a video with many dislikes. If the user watches a bad or unhelpful video, that just means the user will have to watch even more videos to find a good one. :)

Honestly, having dislike buttons always seemed _extremely_ user-hostile to me. You can get a lot of the same signals a "dislike" gives by just looking at the likes-to-views ratio, without introducing a method of negative feedback on what is often a largely creative endeavor that people put a lot of work into.

Comments on YouTube are bad enough. If you want to tell a video creator their work sucks, comments still work fine.

Look at the downvotes of this channel. Just pick any video since Jan. It's around 4:1 dislikes to likes. You can bet this is why they're doing it.

https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos

This seems like a pretty baseless conspiracy theory.

Similar to the Star Wars channel

It's actually much worse than 4:1. YouTube is often hiding upwards of 90% of the dislikes. Like another poster noted, you can see it on https://81m.org/ .

This is also prevalent on those very scripted SNL-type 'comedy' channels that always make it to the front page, or vaccine safety videos (YouTube keeps showing me these videos of black people taking/administering vaccines in a propagandized way because they think I'm an African-American antivaxxer?). What's strange is these channels will have millions of subs but very few views, always with about 6:1 downvote:upvote.

"A big downvote ratio will get most people's attention in a way that critical comments may not." I'm sorry but this is one of those things which absolutely needs citation. I can't remember the last time I looked at likes/dislikes to decide whether to watch a video. The thumbnails on the watch/rec page are what draw me in to watch a video, I don't bother looking at the number of likes/dislikes (or comments) until maybe after watching the video.

It's often an issue with how to and DIY videos. A big offender is Howcast. They have good search results because of their early presence on the platform but a lot of their videos are low quality by modern standards and not worth watching. Lots of high quality channels now producing dedicated content for whatever you were looking for but can be several videos down in lists.

or check the date

Yeah. The downvote count is extraordinarily important when looking at things like chain sawing how-to videos. So many people uploading unsafe practices. More benign but sharpening videos have the same thing. Some look good but show bad technique.

I've used a fair number of YouTube how-to videos and never thought to check the downvote count. If a video contains bad advice, there will be a well-upvoted comment explaining why it's wrong. That's a lot more informative than an opaque counter

The difference is that the video uploader can delete critical comments

I always assumed I was training it to show me things that I do like.

I disagree. Downvote just lets the mob bury shit they disagree with.

Well, this might be why. [0] That's a Biden video hosted by CNBC Television that currently has 571 upvotes and 1400 dislikes. There there is the Joe Biden channel, where almost all videos have at least 50% dislike count compared to upvotes, and a significant number have more dislikes that upvotes. [1]

  [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f2D0GxCuBo
  [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/JoeBiden/videos

Vote bombing long predates the Biden presidency.

This is not about vote bombing but a recent change made today. My comment shows one possibility, to hide that the videos of certain accounts have many dislikes. There are other accounts which are subject to vote bombing that have relatively constant levels per video of dislikes, so it doesn't appear in this case I mentioned that you drew a valid conclusion.

and that's a good reason to hide downvotes then

if the spin becomes "Biden wants it" without any proof, Biden videos will keep being downvoted only because those who oppose to him think he is censoring YouTube

But that's not what downvotes on YouTube should be used for

I am sure Biden as the President of the USA has the power to ask YouTube to reset the counters and call it a mistake, there would be no need to change the entire platform for everybody else

Keep in mind that downvotes will likely continue to be taken into consideration by recommendations and search. To be honest heavily downvoted videos don't usually show up much in my YouTube experience.

I'm pretty sure comments on DIY videos are more indicative of quality than downvote count

Regardless of direction, votes are also useful for misidentifying videos that are what they claim to be. Rare kudos to YT; thumbs-up for the anti-reductionists on this one.

Dislike is just way for some trigger-easy crowd to show how fragile they can be.

Most of the time I found it useless, I don't mind at all it gets removed.

This is Youtube's revenge for users not loving the Rewind 2018 video

The downvote count is useful for identifying videos that aren't what they claim to be.

Down votes only tell you someone decided to give a negative reaction. They don't tell you anything about why they did that. Using them as proxy evidence for your assumptions is dubious, especially on videos with small numbers of votes.

Often the reason why public dislike numbers are hidden is because people copy reactions - a visible count of down votes attracts more down votes. That doesn't tell you everyone who watched the video had rationally decided that the content is actually bad.

Have my downvote sir.

This proves my point. :)

Law of unintended consequences -- will we see more usage of the 'Report' button, now that there's no way to signal that "this video is BS"?

they don't care. this was done to prevent every official Joe Biden video getting 10x the number of dislikes as likes. go check any recent one

most of the votes (up and down) don't come from real people and do not represent real users' opinions and are casted for the most stupid reasons, like in DIY video example I am friend with the author or am friend of a competitor.

there is nothing more hostile to users than the fake information YouTube is providing

I would go as far as to remove the votes completely and sort the videos randomly

It's the same old story of HN downvotes

They happen randomly, sometimes users are targeted by bots that downvote everything they write and, most of all, if there is no way to know who downvoted you, the only way to survive it is to make a new account, because "moderators" don't care, their job is not to protect users, but to protect their employer.

Same goes for YouTube they are an ads company disguised as a UGC platform.

Advertisers and Premium subscribers are the real users.

Wanna really be user-friendly?

Show voters' ids!

We all know it will never happen.

as a proof of what I've written on the parent comment, I made the usual mistake yesterday: I commented on a thread about bitcoins writing that no, btc won't save the World and no, very few people got rich, btc are not making the general population rich.

Of course I received a couple downvotes, that rippled over my previous comments on completely unrelated topics, like this one, just because my other comments where more than 24 hours old and they couldn't be downvoted as per HN rules (the parent comment was already 15 hours old when received the only downvote - meaning nobody cared for it - at the same time of the btc thread that was fresh).

> You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own comment, and you cannot downvote 24 hours after the original comment was made.

If downvotes where ided, it would be obvious that the downvotes on the comments on this thread were just retaliation from the frustrated owners of bitcoins whose propaganda was being questioned.

The id doesn't have to be the real useranme, it could be a random id that identifies a user for a brief period of time (48 hours) so that other users could report the issue, knowing that it's not their paranoia, but a real thing.

I'm apparently not most people. I watch far more hours of YouTube every day than I'd like to admit, but I never even notice the like/dislike counts, let alone rely on them to provide any meaningful signal.

How else is the mainstream supposed to spin reality? Entertainment giants used to more easily create the illusion of consensus, but web platforms like YouTube completely mess with their power by showing downvotes.

Smells political alright.

The Biden admin disabled comments on all official The White House channel videos pretty quickly into their administration.

Most videos have a tremendously high dislike to like ratio, the most recent is 3.4K dislikes to 205 likes. I don't know who they expect to consume their Youtube content but it apparently isn't the establishment's voter base.

This is another brick in the wall that is Youtube that just fell out if you ask me. Content creators of all stripes are absolutely desperate for an alternative platform.

You think Youtube is removing dislikes because of white house vids that average out less than ~25000 views each?

It's one of the few ways that the online public square can still show visible discontent of what their government is doing in a way that is easily visible to all others.

Not just the white house. There's wholesale rejection that is embarrassing and counter to the messaging being pushed my the media and cultural elites.

Disney with the Gina Corano firing has been a huge source of continued embarrassment. Widespread rejection of woke takeovers of popular culture in general are problematic so no, I'm not surprised downvotes are getting remove universally. Much easier to hide reality when you pretend it doesn't exist.

Social media is a propaganda machine at this point. They don't give a crap about free expression. Too many plebs expressing their displeasure with propaganda can't be tolerated so here we go.

The late night talk-show clips which populated the front page (presumably due to artificial promotion) also had embarrassing view and dislike counts displayed to the viewer.

> I'm not surprised downvotes are getting remove universally. Much easier to hide reality when you pretend it doesn't exist

Reality is whatever one would like to believe. If you believe in dislikes as 'reality', then you would think most people in US would go rather die than doing so. I would not choose to have this dislike number fool me then, as I don't have need to remind that there are people who don't like you online.

What is not propaganda nowadays? If you have a twitter account, you are propaganda. Everyone is broadcasting some opinions here and there. As long as it is not removing dislikes just for some videos, this is a fair play, and nothing to do with free speech, whatever that means anyway.

It would be even easier to hide reality by... actually hiding reality. YouTube is closed-source, and they already use fuzzy numbering for dislike counts. They could’ve rigged it so that, instead of actually displaying the number of dislikes on the WH videos, they instead displayed the logarithm. How would you know?

The fact that they are removing the dislike count entirely instead shows me that the problem is not limited to a certain channel, or even a certain category. They are hiding that number on the entire website, because they are trying to solve a perceived problem that affects the entire website.

> They could’ve rigged it so that, instead of actually displaying the number of dislikes on the WH videos, they instead displayed the logarithm. How would you know?

a few people getting together and disliking something and not seeing the dislike grow at all would turn that into an embarrassment.

> They are hiding that number on the entire website, because they are trying to solve a perceived problem that affects the entire website.

I agree. Negativity, dissent and open conflict don't sell ads to corporations well. Since that's Youtube's primary (only?) goal, it makes sense to switch video likes/dislikes to the same mode that comment likes/dislikes went. You can only express agreement in public, disagreement or quality issues can only be stated privately.

> a few people getting together and disliking something and not seeing the dislike grow at all would turn that into an embarrassment

Not really. YouTube already fudges the like and dislike counters, based on their bot-detection algorithms, the eventually-consistent database that these counters are stored on, and stuff that’s already in place to defuse vote trains.

I think it's fair to say your take on politics is radically different to mine, and I don't think I'm very 'woke' as you put it. I certainly think Carano had to go, I don't need children idolizing someone who shares that kind of meme.

But -- is it a problem that you believe your viewpoint is widely supported, and I believe you are in the fringe minority, and vice versa? Should we be forced from our online/TV bubbles of choice? Obviously up/down votes are meaningless. Do we need regular referenda? Would online electronic voting work, or would everybody claim it was rigged?

Do you have a better explanation? I wouldn't say that's the entirety of their reasons but part of a bigger picture ideology they want on their platform.

Obviously, views aren't enough. There are multiple channels that get demonetized/de-platformed that have a lot of viewership but they don't fit in with the YouTube/Google agenda.

Why wouldn't you entertain this possibility? Both political parties have been very vocal about regulating or breaking up big tech. I think it's embarrassing to White House. Do you believe that Google would be above doing this for political reasons? Or do you Democrats would be above wanting to suppress this small dissent?

I think, in order to spend engineer time on something this tiny, there would need to be a really strong strategic justification. Big tech generally doesn't want their product teams doing something that only affects a few of their users.

White house video: 3.4K dislikes

YouTube Rewind 2018: 19 Million dislikes

I don't see any reason you'd attribute removing dislikes to the former rather than the latter.

Because the White House has more power than Will Smith to break up Google.

I'm not attributing to that, but I think the biggest threat Google is being broken up or regulated to death. And considering D control all branches of government, they're the party in power. So I don't think its unfathomable to think that a trillion dollar corporation would want to draw attention away from a small vocal minority of people that isn't happy with the president.

A lot of people think their particular political angle is of great importance to everyone else.

And have thin skin and zero tolerance for dissenting opinions. Hence the blanket removal of the disagree :p

They are removing dislikes because dislikes bring negativity to the YouTube space. Imagine what getting dislikes feels like when you have put your heart into a video. People expressing their disapproval without a qualifying comment is not constructive.

Dislikes are not meant to be constructive. They're meant to warn others that a video may not be worth watching.

I'm not sure why you're expecting your viewers to be your reviewers.

You're trolling, right? Just want to make sure, because you never know nowadays.

Then you can choose to disable public vote visibility. That's been available to uploaders for years. Of course, channels that produce good content generally don't do that, because their vote ratios are evidence of their quality.

Why would the viewcount be relevant to this?

To me this sounds like,

Right: Cancel culture is bad!

Youtube: You're right, so we are removing downvotes!

Right: NOOOOO!!! I want to downvote Biden videos and cancel him!

It is a little silly. YouTube was removing the downvotes manually as "spam" anyway. Removing the button is just easier for them. The view count is much more telling. It seems like they'd have to pay out more ad money to artificially pump those numbers, so they don't do that.

>Content creators of all stripes are absolutely desperate for an alternative platform.

I'm working on something like this. If you have features you think are must have, please list them.

Downvotes aren't cancel culture. Trollish at times, absolutely. Potentially useful for brigading activities? Yes.

I think it's disingenuous to conflate negative feedback of any kind with 'cancel culture' (an overly broad and imprecise term, to be fair).

The view count is much more telling.

I don't agree. Many quality videos have low-no view counts because they are not promoted in any way or the persons making the video don't know how to do self-promotion. Downvotes are a signal about the percentage of people who watched something and disliked it, albeit an unreliable signal that can be gamed.

If it were just about view counts, th rational thing would be to get rid of upvotes as well and just let people rely on view and subscription #s and/or read the comments. As it is this will just lead to people putting thumb-down emoji in comments or flagging posts on other platforms that contain YouTube links.

>Downvotes are a signal about the percentage of people who watched something and disliked it, albeit an unreliable signal that can be gamed.

I guess I just don't believe this. There's no gaming required. Youtube can and does adjust that number at will. It's not indicative of anything to me, anymore than a positive product review on Amazon is indicative of anything to me. Follower counts mean nothing. Likes mean nothing. I think most of us who write code here know the game is rigged in every way imaginable. Even if view counts went up, I wouldn't assume Biden is suddenly popular. I would simply assume Youtube decided to monetize the view count by selling them to creators for perceived clout or someone else did with bots, and I would probably be right. The angry voices on Twitter are there because that's Jack Dorsey's personal opinions and he amplifies them. If Jack was a Republican, it would be a non-stop Bible thump instead.

None of it is real to me. It's all imaginary numbers and GPT generated text blocks with thispersondoesnotexist.com profile pictures. I mean, it wasn't even a week ago where the media is running video with Biden's hand passing through reporter's microphones as he answered questions. Almost everything online and in the media is faked now.

>I mean, it wasn't even a week ago where the media is running video with Biden's hand passing through reporter's microphones as he answered questions. Almost everything online and in the media is faked now.

It was a large and fuzzy microphone down and to his right.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N2LH199

Alternate angle video (Note how low the two fuzzy mics are): https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/biden-unveiled...

And I'm not pointing this out in an "Ackshually..." way. You're right about manipulation of truth in media. The problem is, even the people who think they understand that and see through it are being manipulated.

I've found the best way to spot propaganda around an incident is by asking, "What's the most boring explanation?" That's usually the truth.

>The problem is, even the people who think they understand that and see through it are being manipulated.

Whether he's CGI Joe or not is just splitting hairs over the level of fake. The boring explanation is that the entire interaction was fake. The press had prepared questions that Biden knew. Biden had prepared answers the press knew. They're all just reading lines from a script. They might have even done more than one take to get it right. It is such a boring explanation that if I had incontrovertible proof of that being the case, the responses to it here would be something like, "Well of course it's fake! You really believed it was authentic? This is well documented in many presidencies. Look at FDR for example. Nothing burger."

An even simpler explanation is that Biden is reasonably knowledgeable and competent, based on his extensive experience. He seems to me like an intelligent person who is comfortable with technicalities but awkward at banter and small talk.

I can't tell whether you're motivated by skepticism of Biden or politics in general, but you seem irrationally fixated on this, and we're now far away from talking about Youtube.

The way I understand cancel culture it means removing someones ability to take care of themself. For instance, getting them fired.

The response to that is people downvoting companies they no longer agree with on platforms like youtube. So what does youtube do? By removing the ability to downvote, they further strengthen cancel culture because the ability to display dissent is further decreased.

YouTube was a free speech platform only as long as it took to establish dominance. Now it's just another corporate megaphone with an inconvenient independent creator problem they are slowly solving by making it an intolerable place to have dissenting opinions.

Can't question the election, can't question coronavirus. Big Google decides what is acceptable and keeps the rules and process vague, inscrutable, and opaque so they can selectively enforce them.

If you want a free speech platform you should advocate for a government funded competitor. You might think that the NSA would instantly prune comments but you'd be failing to see the 800 lbs gorilla which is the US GAO and FOIA requests that'd hamstring anything the intelligence branches tried to do (outside of, y'know, legitimate threats).

That's an interesting idea. I'm working on an alternative discussion site and have wondered why the Gov doesn't do more to foster competition rather than hold pointless hearings with the same 3 people over and over again.

Because that would interfere with their agenda of getting hired/getting their children hired by those same monopoly companies after leaving office

WH disabling comments on its videos is not against free speech. It's not about allowing you to shout about your issues wherever you want with everyone having to see it. Disabling comments on official communication is a good move whether it's gov or private company announcements.

They won't have to deal with some top upvoted comment with: incorrect summary, incorrect restatement of something, abuse at the account or others, etc. For official announcement there's thousands of places to discuss them on the internet and literally no upside to allowing that in the same visible space as the announcement itself.

(see for example https://youtu.be/lzTUQLbzYJA and try to find any comment which provides any valuable information and isn't just heckling, totally off topic, or just abusive - I found just 1 out of ~140 - why would anyone want that on an official announcement?)

Let’s cut the BS. It’s about not looking bad. Its that simple

That's absolutely what it's about. There's nothing to debate about that.

It's the same reason Trump wanted to be able to block people on Twitter. For the same reason he wasn't allowed to do that, the White House shouldn't be allowed to disable YouTube commenting. But hey, it's not like there's a double standard in favor of the Democrats and Biden.

Different case. From the Twitter ruling: "... utilizing Twitter's 'blocking' function to limit certain users' access to his social media account, which is otherwise open to the public at large, because he disagrees with their speech".

That is completely different from not enabling comments on an announcement video where they're not enabled to anyone, but also not restricting anyone from seeing the content.

I’m curious if Twitter would’ve allowed him to blanket disable comments. Not blocking specific individuals, but just not having any comments at all.

They have an option for that (technically, “only people you @mention,” but as long as you never @mention anyone, it won’t let them reply), but I don’t remember hearing anything one way or the other about him trying to do that.

I think it's more about make the commenters not look bad (in this case American people)

> Content creators of all stripes are absolutely desperate for an alternative platform

Peertube exists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

For certain values of exists. I would love to get off of YouTube completely, but until eg PeerTube actually gets a significant number of content creators to move over or upload in parallel, its going to be impossible to fight YT. It's a very chicken/egg problem.

Thankfully, YT keeps doing user-hostile things, slowly pushing more people into trying out alternatives.

You just need hosting. Then, you can embed the video in your own page like JonTron did with NormalBoots.

I know that’s a really esoteric example and I’m sorry.

I think this works very well for some use cases, but it misses out on one of the biggest value-adds of YouTube: discovery. YouTube allows you to find other related content; any competitor needs to provide something similar.

>I don't know who they expect to consume their Youtube content but it apparently isn't the establishment's voter base.

Who, honestly, gets their news from YouTube? If there's someone pushing an agenda it's all the people on this thread who are extremely concerned with the (low) like counts on some videos, which most people don't know exist in the first place. 3.4k votes is nothing. I searched "Bach" and "This week" and this video from two days ago has 1.3k likes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_sPYQj7uTU

3.4k likes is low for a YouTube video. WH videos don't get many views, either; view counts are in the tens of thousands, with a few poking up to around 200k. There's nobody even looking at the page to whom you could push a narrative, in theory.

This was my first thought as well. There have been several occasions (News content and Youtube Rewinds comes to mind) where youtube actively suppresses or promotes content in-line with it or its advertiser's interests, and hides anything with a countervailing sentiments. The like ratio in conjunction with the view count has always been a good signalling mechanism for the purposes of identifying these instances.

But that's the point! Yours and others' belief that down voting is a mean to register dissent. Since dissent is orthogonal to quality down votes no longer indicate lack of quality. Thus the metric becomes meaningless. In fact, if Google and other tech companies were to continue using down votes to measure quality, the end result would be strengthening the majority's echo chamber.

Suppose there is a YouTube channel about how a minority in a certain country is discriminated against. Given what we know about discrimination, it is very unlikely for the majority to believe that it is discriminating this minority. Thus you have dissent and the possibility of hordes of angry down voters "brigading" that channel. These brigades may even be organized or supported by country in question because it doesn't like the negative views the channel is conveying.

> dissent is orthogonal to quality

If you said 2 + 2 = 5, I would disagree. This is a trivial example of dissent completely entangled with quality.

I agree. How else are we to measure the subjectivity of “quality” if not by approval or disapproval of people?

> Suppose there is a YouTube channel about how a minority in a certain country is discriminated against. Given what we know about discrimination, it is very unlikely for the majority to believe that it is discriminating this minority. Thus you have dissent and the possibility of hordes of angry down voters "brigading" that channel. These brigades may even be organized or supported by country in question because it doesn't like the negative views the channel is conveying.

This is not how things are in my country (US). People make and post those videos pretty frequently. They get high up-to-down ratios, just like the videos expressing skepticism. Videos that seem to be downvoted the most seem to be ones with extremely "bad takes." For example, when one of the SpaceX Starship test vehicles exploded on landing, some cable news channel described it as some sort of embarrassing failure, when the thing was very clearly an unexpected success. That got a pretty serious number of downvotes. Of the remainder of downvoted videos, the only ones that seem to be consistently brigaded by users are ones where a creator dares to express an unpopular opinion with his audience, or the ones that are just pure corporate shilling and/or propaganda. The former are extremely courageous; the latter deserve to be downvoted to hell.

The YouTube algorithm being what it is, YouTube is already showing you videos that it thinks you want to see and will engage with. Brigading is thus pretty rare on the platform.

> In fact, if Google and other tech companies were to continue using down votes to measure quality, the end result would be strengthening the majority's echo chamber.

"Mainstream" and "majority" are not the same thing. The content and tone of established media is dictated by a very small minority whose basic material interests diverge from those of normal people.

I guess the question is what's worse: a mob's echo chamber or a cabal's echo chamber? It's been the latter for most of print/broadcast media's history, and I don't think it's done us much good.

Back in the day there was a way to replay to a video with another video. It felt very democratic and subversive to the "consensus" you describe.

Let's look at it a different way. How often has youtube recommended to you a video that you felt the need to click dislike on? How often have you visited youtube from some link provided externally and felt the need to register your dislike (and how often was that link followed with the understanding you would probably be seeing something you found disagreeable)?

What is a dislike in these instances actually communicating to youtube and to creators? Youtube already probably wouldn't have suggested that to you, and the creator probably isn't making content for you. As a useful signal, dislike brigading is very low (and whatever usefulness it serves in communicating to the creator is already served by comments and external media).

In that context, I think removing the indicator of how many people have disliked the video (but not the ability to dislike) may serve a useful purpose.

Is anyone else feeling like it is getting weird? I cannot conceive how anyone thinks anything positive to google.

This seems deceptive more than anything else. If a content creator doesn't want their videos to be rated they can disable like/dislike ratings entirely. But to remove public dislikes across the entire site takes away a valuable indicator of video quality. Like/Dislike ratio can also express approval and disapproval for the subject itself, which is also valuable.

> But to remove public dislikes across the entire site takes away a valuable indicator of video quality.

Indeed. Which means you'd have to watch the ads (oh, right, there's also a video involved) to determine that the content was garbage.

If you can tell without watching a video that it's trash, you might not watch it - which is opposed to YouTube's goal of increasing total video hours watched. Or, at least, their short term goal of making sure people watch stuff (I suspect the long term effects of making people watch more low grade nonsense won't show up in this quarter's growth numbers, which means it's Someone Else's Problem - get promoted and go do something else, it's the Google Way).

Despite all the claims from Google and YouTube about how they're trying to promote certain content and reduce exposure to others, it's a reasonable bet that their algorithms still don't understand much of anything about a video beyond "Oh, hey, people who watch this video watch more related videos later, so the more people I show it to, the more those people will watch, which increases hours watched!"

So, presumably, "dislikes" interfered with people watching more video. Remove the dislikes, problem solved. At least for their definition of "problem" and "solved."

lol - YouTube and most social media is no longer for us plebs. It's all about pushing propaganda, and unfortunately plebs mass rejecting politically motivated BS is too problematic.

Instead of trying to engage/change minds it's just easier to pretend "problems" like people having the temerity to call BS don't exist. Double plus good.

Even "pushing propaganda" is a bit higher minded than social media seems to be.

It's all about the money. ALL about the money. How do social companies make money? They sell ads.

How do you make more money selling ads? Either you show more ads (increase ad density, or increase eyeball-time-on-platform), or you make more money per ad (I used to see plenty of scam sites - new Kobota tractor for $1500, free shipping, domain registered last week - and far as I can tell, Facebook only cared that their credit card number was good).

More eyeball-time-on-platform requires "engaging" users more - weaponizing psychology, notifications, and A/B testing against them.

Facebook's guiding principles are simple: "What's Good For Zuck is Good For Zuck." The rest are no different.

Don't believe message is more important than ads? Even though everyone is locked down sheltering in place due to COVID pro sports and Hollywood award show ratings are abysmal. If they were all about chasing the almighty dollar there would have been messaging changes well before now.

BTW - there is no better driver of traffic (engagement) to something than a good like/dislike war. This has zero to do with money or they wouldn't be touching it.

> Like/Dislike ratio can also express approval and disapproval for the subject itself, which is also valuable.

No it is not. It only causes unnecessary frustration for content creators. Some of them may give up instead of trying again.

And for viewers, their recommender is likely already good enough to recommend good videos ignoring dislikes signal.

It's because of what happens when the White House forgets to disable comments and dislikes.

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/359823/former...

It's because of Ghostbusters (2016). It just took this long for everyone else to catch up and realize that, "it can happen to you".

We were all supposed to love that movie because it has four women in it! Turns out a shit movie is a shit movie no matter how many SNL alums you throw at it.

>We were all supposed to love that movie because it has four women in it

I see this sarcastic quipping a couple orders of magnitude more often than I see the attitude it is skewering in regards to that movie (not that that attitude didn't exist). I think part of that is the normal overreaction to anything "SJW", but I think the bigger contribution might be because, after the incredible degree of hatred the black actress got, the reasonable backlash to that enhanced the perceived magnitude of the different-but-adjacent attitude you're criticizing.

> the incredible degree of hatred the black actress got

I really don't recall Leslie Jones receiving as much backlash as certain outlets purported. Part of that is because that, for these outlets (common offenders including Slate and its ilk), any amount of backlash or derision, or frankly, anything less than glowing praise is "racism". And now that the word "racism" is starting to lose power, they've moved on to "white supremacy", but that's another topic...

I think you could be on to something, but the bulk of the backlash was because they butchered an absolute classic comedy that millions of people grew up watching (I myself have probably seen it over 50 times, my Mom said I watched it over and over as a kid).

It's probably hard for any of us to know the actual ratios, because only a filtered version of what's out there penetrates our bubbles.

I think with hot-button topics like this there's usually a race-to-the-bottom spiral of reaction and counter-reaction, with each side being fed the dumbest or most offensive arguments from the other side and reacting to them; then the other side sees a (likewise filtered for stupidity or outrageousness) selection of the responses and reacts to them, and so on.

Everyone is constantly escalating in response to the extreme fringe on the other side, while seeing a more representative sample of views from their own side -- which they are probably biased toward interpreting charitably, as well as no-true-Scotsmanning away the worst examples. So we're all constantly baffled by why the weirdos on the other side are overreacting so hard.

Exactly. This is why I phrase observations from my own point of view and avoid implying a broad category like Republican/liberal/etc when I criticize some opinion that has a significant presence in my visible universe.

> I really don't recall Leslie Jones receiving as much backlash as certain outlets purported.

> Today in awful news, Leslie Jones’s personal website has been taken down after being targeted by a vicious hack. Hackers infiltrated the site with what appeared to be naked photos of the comedian, as well as images of her passport and driver’s license, private photos of her with various celebrities, and a photo of dead gorilla (and meme that refuses to die) Harambe. ... Last month, the comedian’s Twitter account was inundated with racist and sexist hate speech associated with her role in Paul Feig’s inexplicably controversial all-female Ghostbusters reboot, and Twitter pledged to reform their harassment policies in response.

https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/a-timeline-of-leslie-joness-h...

You can find screenshots of the trolls' tweets here: https://splinternews.com/how-a-racist-sexist-hate-mob-forced...

"Ok I have been called Apes, sent pics of their asses, even got a pic with semen on my face. I'm trying to figure out what human means. I'm out"

https://www.popbuzz.com/life/news/leslie-jones-racist-tweets...

I don't care if it was headlined by four white dudes - the "dialog" was crap, the plot was a lazy rehash of the original with zero lack of comedic timing or skill.

Neither gender or race has anything to do with it being a lazy, uninspired and un-funny movie - but people are sure as hell desperate to use that as a shield from criticism :p

They wanted the overreaction, this entire controversy was nothing more but a marketing trick. Sony was deleting top comments with constructive critique from their YouTube video and leaving up only the abusive ones so it would appear as if people hated this movie only because they're sexist or whatever. And that worked, deciding to see or not to see this movie was pretty much a political statement.

There's a site tracking these, some of the stats on older videos with high views are crazy (down the page):

https://81m.org

It's interesting to compare this to the Trump Whitehouse Archive: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCITMedGC5PA-zMrLTH5-kg

Almost the exact inverse like/dislike ratio.

Biden received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, AND they should skew much younger than Trump voters. So why is it that the Biden White House channel struggles so much with likes vs dislikes?

YouTube transferred all the Trump's WH subs to Biden's WH - while Trump's WH had started with zero.

Very stupid idea and apparently requested by the Biden admin. Now you have millions of Trump subs just disliking every video.

Oh well that explains it. I'm surprised they didn't see that coming.

This actually makes the most sense, although I'm p sure dislikes are not counted if you dont watch the video at least partially. But maybe the dislikers actually watch the Biden videos - who knows.

Probably because Biden supporters are less 'online' and there aren't that many dedicated supporters of his (as in there are more people who simply think biden is better than the alternative than actually liking him). Contrasted to a personality like Trump who amassed an online dedicated cult following, in which they would literally try to decipher every word he said for hidden messages from the God emperor himself.

In the same way that Twitter seems to be full of anti-capitalist anarchist communists, demographics of the real world turn out to be a lot different than social media makes it seem.

Thanks for that! I'm glad to see a few people here who can tell something's going on.

Woah - that is surprising. I wonder what the cause of the dislikes is on these videos? Is it targeted or just no overlap from Biden supporters and YouTube? Or they're not happy with Biden. Very telling that YouTube are moving to remove the dislikes though..

Looks like trolling to me. There's 95% dislike rate even for a mundane "paycheck protection bill".

How is it trolling?? The bill mentioned is a $484B expense!! It is not "mundane" at all. It is reasonable that a lot of taxpayers would be upset by the insane spending on inefficient government health programs.

It is NOT trolling. I made the site. You can easily verify my data.

- The hard way: Use YouTube's API to track the stats on one of the videos. Compare to my data, and the two will line up.

- The medium-hard way: Over the course of a day or so, simply compare the official likes/dislikes that you see on youtube.com to my stats at 81m.org. You will see that my stats line up with the official numbers.

It might be hard to believe at first, but I guarantee you that if you look into it, you will see that YouTube is deleting dislikes. There are tons of random threads about this on Twitter that are totally independent of my site 81m.org.

(edit: add newline between list items)

I think he meant the dislikes were trolling, not your website.

As another commenter mentioned, Biden inherited all of Trump's followers. Enough of them probably just downvote everything Biden posts, which one might call a very mild form of trolling.

I suppose that could be considered a very mild form of trolling.

I guess the theory is that Trump's followers are force-joined into subscribing to the Biden White House's videos. So then they react by downvoting every unsolicited video that pops into their streams. And the response is to delete their downvotes? So I guess the message to them is, "You really must look at what the Biden White House has to say. Oh, but you're not allowed to express your opinion about it."

Actually, you are allowed to click "dislike" and to feel like you expressed your opinion about each video, but later we will delete your opinion when you look away.

It is not trolling, and you can verify that fact.

I made the site in question (81m .org). My inspiration was the work of Zoe Phin (whose name is phzoe on HN), who noticed that YouTube was deleting dislikes and decided to write some scripts and build some charts.

I replicated her approach and automated it further. The result is 81m .org.

If you want to validate my data, it is easy to do:

- Trivial way: For some video, check the official YouTube likes/dislikes/views numbers from time to time, and compare them to the numbers I display. You will see that they line up.

- Harder way: Get a YouTube API key, query `http s:// youtube.googleapis .com/youtube/v3/videos?part=statistics&id=<VIDEO_ID_HERE>&key=<API_KEY_HERE>`, and log the likes/dislikes/views for one or more videos. Compare to my data, and you will see that the two datasets line up.

You can find more info at 81m .org/about

(Sorry for the " .org" and " .com" and other whitespace insertions above. I am worried HN will shadowban me if I post links.)

This is the correct answer to me. How coincidental, just as White House videos mostly receive dislikes.

“It’s important to note that at one point Vorhies leaked documents to the right-wing group Project Veritas, then became a committed anti-vaxxer (vaccine) and promoter of QAnon. Last year he laid out a plan to promote “Plandemic,” a pair of 2020 conspiracy theory videos produced by Mikki Willis that Wikipedia claims promote misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.” - the source is far from even dubious.

Or, as YouTube stated, they removed fraudulent votes which is highly likely on a White House video.

I'm disappointed by the fact that article uses "an ex googler made a tweet and twitter hasn't taken it down as misinformation" as evidence. I thought that sort of right-wing website didn't think twitter should be "the arbiters of truth"? And obviously that signal doesn't work in that direction.

Has anyone else been slowly watching YouTube turn into cable TV? When I search "Hong Kong protests" I just get a bunch of videos from CNN and Fox News, not that long ago a search like that would turn up first hand videos of people who were there. Now they are copying streaming services in making it harder to tell what is garbage and what is worth watching.

Yeah, slowly but surely YouTube is destroying itself. Which is very sad, because it's been an amazing resource. I'd love to see ByteDance do a YouTube competitor. (Or, dream of all dreams, see something distributed really take off.)

Sadly as long as google dominates search there is little chance that any other video site will get any traction since Google biases towards youtube and away from start up steaming sites.

Probably has to start w/ an app.

On Android...

good luck getting videos of the hong kong protests with a ByteDance YouTube!

Yes I agree with your observations. And I've also noticed an aggressive pop up add campaign from Google asking whether I want purchase Youtube Premium.

News networks have much better SEO than John Doe with a phone and 0 subscribers.

It's not even SEO. Youtube / Google personally partners with certain businesses and injects them into seemingly organic video feeds. For example, there is an invite only advertisement tier that you don't automatically get access to regardless of view or subscriber count.

Yes, just like they got rid of the "Discussions" search filter that used to show you results from forums (i.e. the content of individuals) - now every search topic is dominated by sales channels.

BoardReader.com aims to replace this, but IME attempts to search for exact phrases (multiple words in quotes) doesn't work well.

Title is misleading. YouTube is testing removing the ability for viewers to see the dislikes. Video owners can still see the dislikes.

I am skeptical about this design change fixing the stated concern, which is creator "well-being". If good faith creators can still see the dislike count, they will still feel miserable. Anyway, if you are putting yourself out there, other people taking a dump on you is part of the deal, because other people... you know, exist. If creator well-being is a concern, Google should focus on preventing or minimising actual harassment campaigns instead of these minimal design changes.

The design change also assumes that all creators are good faith actors whose well-being ought to be managed, which is impossibly idealistic. If there is a way for bad faith actors to benefit at the cost of good faith actors, they will exploit that, and the good faith actors will lose ground over the long term.

It also ignores that dislikes can be given for many reasons, hiding valuable screening information from the viewer. It should not be up to Google to hide this info and finesse their recommendation engine behind the scenes to serve relevant videos. Google would optimize for views, not the content in the video.

Submitted title was "YouTube to Remove Dislikes". We've replaced it with a substring of the tweet.

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think the wellbeing play is more about preventing dislike-bombing than about protecting creator egos. Dislike-bombing is coordinated mass action against a video or creator, not by the usual audience of that creator, but by herds of non-watchers seeking to shame the creator publicly via a bad dislike count. That sort of stampede-like behavior doesn't seem like a healthy community dynamic.

It sounds reasonable to imagine that dislike-bomb participants will lose the public shaming motivation if the dislike count is no longer visible; they also will lose the ability to practically organize eg by setting up goals ("10k dislikes and I'll give away xyz").

Creators still retain dislikes as a signal of quality from their audience. Viewers lose dislike count but it's also already taken into account into the recommendation algorithms that drive most consumption on YouTube so maybe not a whole lot is lost; besides in the only place where dislike count is shown, comments are already visible (and those may be negative too).

It's quickly getting to the point where being exposed to youtube at all just opens you up to a ton of intentional manipulation from an organization who's entire product is manipulating people for pay.

It's probably best to completely avoid all of it.

There's entirely too much good stuff on YouTube to ignore. I learn so much there, all for free.

But what are the opportunity costs of learning stuff on YouTube, especially if you're watching hours of content?

There is good stuff in there - don't get me wrong. It's just that the good stuff you want to find is often quite hidden, and I've on occasion spent more time trying to find some video that actually shows a tricky part of some bit of equipment maintenance than it would take to just do things the slow way (think "If you know the exact sequence of steps, you can slip the alternator out this hole between the engine and suspension - or you can just unbolt the exhaust and lower the alternator out that way" sort of tasks - if it takes longer to find a video with the steps clearly displayed than to just drop the exhaust, you've taken longer).

I've also found that YouTube leads to a very poor, surface understanding of most issues - and this isn't the fault of YouTube specifically, it's just a limit of video. If I want to learn about a new topic, I'll typically try to find three or so books on it and read those. A single book can have biases and misunderstandings, but by the time you've read a few, it's usually clear enough what the consensus is. Does it take more time than an hour or two video? Certainly. But I also get a far, far better understanding of the material (which, if it's an area I care to learn about, is probably useful) than I would through videos. Plus, I use an awful lot less data in the process.

I'm perfectly happy to be called a curmudgeon or such with regards to my preferences for text and images over video, and there may be part of it that's true - but I've weighed video versus the alternatives, and outside entertainment (which there's certainly some value in), I find video coming up wanting.

Also, books don't keep (buy this!) interrupting the content (buy that!) to feed me ads for (vote for this person because their opponent eats babies!) whatever happens to (watch this movie!) be paying the best rates (check out this new online bank and stock trading app!) at the moment.

I feel like I often have time saved on almost exactly the situation you described. Changing the alternator on our Honda CR-V, there's a method to remove the fan and fan support and pull the alternator out the front of the car and top instead of doing a lot more disassembly on the front of the engine (side of the car) and draining the coolant. I wouldn't have thought to do it that way if I hadn't been in the habit of watching 2 or 3 videos of new-to-me car repairs.

I find myself watching zero mass-market television and a lot more YouTube (tech, electronics, machining, mostly) and think it a lot better value for entertainment time spent than TV ever was. (Sure, it's not as dense as reading a technical book, but after a day of work, I'm more up for the casual experience.)

I consider YouTube a tool. It gives me, as you pointed out, surface level knowledge. Once I'm armed with that, I can go dig deeper and find the books or resources I need to gain expert-level knowledge.

> I'm perfectly happy to be called a curmudgeon or such with regards to my preferences for text and images over video, and there may be part of it that's true - but I've weighed video versus the alternatives, and outside entertainment (which there's certainly some value in), I find video coming up wanting.

I agree with your preference for books, but I am going to add a caveat: the quality of books varies considerably, with a good video being better than a mediocre book.

That was not much of a problem when I lived in a big city. It was easy to walk into a bookstore or library to pick out something of value. Living in a small city limits the options. Buying online means buying sight unseen. In the worse case, ratings can be misleading. In the best case, recommendations are likely coming from someone with different needs. YouTube avoids the problem since there is no financial risk involved in making a choice, and decent quality content isn't too hard to find.

(To give you an idea of what I mean: I live in a city of half a million people. The public library system's most advanced text on electronics is an old edition of the ARRL Handbook. The rest are projects books directed towards amateurs. Book sellers aren't much better since few want to stock technical titles. University libraries offer much better books, yet they are nearly impossible to borrow during the academic session.)

I don't really see YouTube as an alternative to books. Where video shines is in shorter instructional practical stuff. Sure, if I want to understand the underlying mechanism of something then I'll read-up on it but usually I don't need that kind of knowledge. I just want to watch someone do the task I'm about to do.

For anything IT related I usually dislike video guides as they're so slow to get to the point. But that's because I work in IT and don't need to be told that messing around with a disk partition could cause problems with my computer. With non-IT tasks I'm happy to be treated as a moron because I don't have anywhere near as much experience.

When you say "Use an awful lot less data" - is that still an issue most of the time? That's depressing.

> When you say "Use an awful lot less data" - is that still an issue most of the time? That's depressing.

I don't see a particular point in pulling down a few hundred megabytes that contains radically less actual useful content than a megabyte or two of compressed text and images. HN is particularly nice on that front, as the pages are tiny and gzip down to a rounding error (this reply page is a whopping 15kb of transfer). They don't load half a Windows 95 worth of tracking Javascript either.

Up until fairly recently, I had two rural WISP connections that mostly didn't meet rated speeds during the day, were borderline unusable during the evening (that Netflix can stream video tolerably on a lossy 1-2Mbit connection is quite impressive, the few times we tried it), and despite that have been working remotely full time on those connections.

I'd signed up for the Starlink beta some months back, and we have that as our secondary connection now (it's still exceedingly erratic - I'll go from 5Mbit to 150Mbit and back over the course of a minute and then it'll break my connections as there's no satellite overhead - but this is the point of a beta, and it's better than the 5/1 that mostly delivered about 3/0.5). I like it, but the power consumption on the dish is quite obscene. It idles a hair under 100W, and consumes 2.2kWh/day, per my measurements. I hope that improves over time.

It's not that I can't transfer a lot of data, it's just that I prefer not to when I can avoid it. And, there are, often enough, times when it simply won't work. Not a big deal, we live out here willingly, but, yes, it's still a thing. I keep a cheap cell plan too, because I just don't need to be streaming content on my phone.

> I don't see a particular point in pulling down a few hundred megabytes that contains radically less actual useful content than a megabyte or two of compressed text and images.

For everything from waspkeeping to bookbinding, there's nothing else that can come close to the same semantic bandwidth as video does.

I've spent far more than half an hour reading blog posts on bookbinding, and still had to work out almost all the details for myself in terms of how to actually do it - not that I haven't found useful information in those posts! One linked here not long ago clued me in to a couple of tools I'd never yet heard of, and that in particular has been incredibly useful - because of it, I'm a lot closer to producing perfect-bound books indistinguishable in quality from those made professionally. But half an hour spent watching Adventures in Bookbinding - actively watching, skimming and reviewing where necessary, not just passively staring - has served me better in terms of the sheer mechanical doing of making books than all the blogs I've read put together. IT is one thing - I'm a software engineer, I get what you're saying - but when it comes to work you do with your hands, there really is no substitute for the chance to watch over the shoulder of someone who's mastered the skill.

(I don't actually keep wasps, although I've given it serious thought - the problem is that you really need to habituate them to your presence starting with the foundress's emergence from diapause, and I don't have any way to know where polistid foundresses spend their winters. But I'd never even imagined doing it before I found videos made by people who do it, and have done it for years. There's something of worth in that, too.)

I can't stand video as casual content generally (e.g. news stories), but in terms of how-to information, a video is truly worth a million words at least. Compare watching five videos on doing a somewhat complex maintenance job on your truck compared to reading the Chiltons manual, and you get an idea.

>>I've also found that YouTube leads to a very poor, surface understanding of most issues - and this isn't the fault of YouTube specifically, it's just a limit of video.

Try watching TIK's BattleStorm Stalingrad series (link below). Exceptionally well-researched and the videos are information-dense. I own one of the books cited in his series, the 700-page "Armageddon in Stalingrad" by David Glantz. His video format communicates a fairly high understanding of the play of events, of the people involved, and other nuances, in less time than pouring over ALL of the source material would take. He mixes tactical/operational maps with dialogue bubbles of key commanders, tables of equipment readiness/casualties, quotes from people who fought there or from books, and lately he's been adding photos showing where on the battlefield they were taken. So a lot of it is book content (and many of the authors comment on his videos, praising his work), but he steps through the battle in almost real-time, and it provides a better view of scope, scale, and even decision-making by key leaders than digesting static maps in a book would. I would challenge the assertion that reading all of the books oneself would yield a significantly higher comprehension of the battle, and it certainly wouldn't be time-efficient to do so. Hence video as a communication medium is not inherently flawed. Like any other medium it is reliant upon exceptionally well-produced content. Most YT content isn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAfo5mse-ag&list=PLNSNgGzale...

I could not repair half the things I have learned to repair without Youtube. 100% worth having to look out for manipulative antifeatures, in my book.

I dont think thats true. If people stopped using youtube people would upload to other sites. Google hasnt taught you how to repair anything.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, because you are obviously right — just like the audience will go where the content is, the content creators will go where they can get an audience.

Probably downvoted because of that last sentence.

But that's actually a good insight: it isn't Google that has taught me anything, but people, who happened to use Google's properties to distribute knowledge. Any other service would be as good, if the people chose to use it.

I'm happy for the content in any form, but a bunch of things would be easier with a wall of text and a couple pictures I could scroll through.

Don't forget to like and subscribe and support me on patreon.

This is certainly true when I want to sit down and repair something. There are other times when I just want to see what's involved and how complicated something will be first, maybe have dinner at the same time. This sort of higher level overview is where I find youtube fits in well, same for programming related videos.

I wish there were more hybrid approaches, video with the accompanying wall of text.

My 5 year old often tells me to like and subscribe to his channel.

He doesn't have one.

What sort of stuff, and what alternatives have you tried?

If it's a vehicle, the Chilton's or Haynes (I'm sure there's a difference but I sure couldn't tell) manuals will cover just about anything you'd want to do.

If it's a piece of consumer electronics, iFixit usually has good teardown and repair guides (in the "annotated images and text" style) that cover a lot, though for some brands you can actually find factory repair manuals.

Home, property, etc, there exist plenty of books out there, and often enough, plenty of slightly bored retired people who have been doing whatever the task is forever, and who are happy to help someone learn the ropes.

So I buy the Haynes book for my car, wait for it to be shipped and delivered, then finally figure out how to do what I need to do. Then I put it away for 1-5 years until I need it again, and hope I don't forget where I put it.

Or you want me to build a friendship with a retired fridge repairman? I don't understand that one.

With youtube I get to watch a pro do it right in front of me for free instantly. There's nothing like it.

ifixit is good, though, I'll agree to that.

You buy them at the local auto parts store and put them either in the car somewhere or on the bookshelf of other auto repair books, of course. I didn't think twice about spending 20% of the purchase cost of a vehicle on the rebuild manual for it back when I drove stuff that needed a lot more work. I drove some cheap cars.

As far as stuff like fridges... you don't need a fridge repairman, just someone who has worked on a variety of things. For a while, while I was doing laptop repair work, I didn't really need manuals for the bulk of the stuff I was taking apart because it was just a laptop. They all came apart in a handful of ways, and as long as you keep close track of where the screws came from and got them back where they went, it wasn't a big deal to get some random laptop apart.

If you can find a YouTube repair of your particular product, and the video is well done, OK, I can see value in that. My experience has been that it's usually a lot of mumbling, terrible light, and weird camera angles that I can't map to anything actually on the product I'm trying to repair, so it's generally not a good use of time vs just going and working on it. Shoving your cell phone kinda sorta in the engine bay, pointing it at some shadows, and "mmfffs the bolt... ffssssh" because it's windy out... eh? Or just a 45 minute "teardown" of a simple product that hasn't had any of the random futzing around and reading the manual out loud edited out.

Maybe we just fix different things.

>the Chilton's or Haynes (I'm sure there's a difference but I sure couldn't tell) manuals will cover just about anything you'd want to do.

Chilton and Haynes both generally consist of vague instructions like "unscrew bolts and remove part x". They're good for identifying which components need to be removed for access, but they often offer very little in terms of where bolts are (sometimes there are pictures), or how to deal with problem areas (e.g. sometimes you need to wiggle or turn things a certain way).

Their limited instructions don't compare to watching someone actually do it and walk you through problem points simultaneously.

I replaced a 12V battery on my car this morning, thanks to a youtube vid. I didn't try any alternative sources, because the 2 minute video was perfect! And I didn't get sucked into any other vids or see any ads or anything.

My recent experience with iFixit was not great. I replaced a battery on a 2012 MacBook Pro Retina, and the tutorial included about 40 extraneous steps (that only mattered if you were using a certain, optional, glue removal goo -edit: and it was not referred to as optional, nor were alternatives offered. I used fishing line). I saw speculation that they intentionally made it seem more difficult so people would be more inclined to bring the laptop into a shop. It wasn't until I checked youtube, and saw a very similar procedure, that I realized the steps were unnecessary - via the comments! A few people noted that you could skip all the steps prior to 11 minutes in. And they were right.

snort a few videos blow Chilton's out of the water any day. Chilton's is often filled with inaccurate photos (approximating the model year you're interested in), have wonky angles that take some deciphering to figure out, my Chiltons were all B&W photos (maybe that's changed?) or line drawings, and the instructions can be pretty vague. A video is often literally looking over a mechanic's shoulder as he does the procedure and offers tips along the way. Cross reference these instructions with a few other videos, some forum posts, and you'll be in a much better spot than with Chiltons.

Source: decades of working on my vehicles with Chiltons manuals.

Newpipe -> disable comments, disable recommendations. I only see what I search for and I don't have to see the opinions of morons in the comments.

I stopped using youtube regularly a while back. It's still good for how-to videos, and niche searches. Useless for current events.

Agreed but youtube has some valuable content, e.g. if you're into chess, there are some irreplaceably good videos out there. The way I use them is via youtube-dl.

This is slightly off-topic but I wanted to say that the restriction on HN to not be able to downvote direct ancestors (and locking downvoting behind a karma threshold) seems to have served it very well. The restriction of direct ancestor downvotes in particular is a habit I really wish other sites (eyes reddit) would actually implement. It prevents the most common type of downvote the "You have attempted to shame me by trying to disagree with me and thus you must suffer" type.

If someone (companies included) is so sensitive to being down-voted perhaps the internet isn't for them. In the case of one campaign of which I'm aware, Lucasfilm and Disney has been hammered by Star Wars fans, down-voting their videos because they have no other way to send a message to Disney that the personnel actions of Kathleen Kennedy have thrown the plans for the Mandalorian -- and it's connected shows -- into delays and uncertainty. I'm pretty sure Disney (and their shareholders) are more upset by the fact that #CancelDisneyPlus is still trending on Twitter, something that actually costs them share value. That YouTube would do this further shows that their platform is for big companies and brand-safe content free from negative perceptions and not "You" like their name implies.

> they have no other way to send a message to Disney

Actually, the best and most effective way is to respond as consumers and vote with their dollars. Disney is a very profit centered and savvy company. If their profits on Star Wars and their streaming service drop off they will change their direction.

All signs point to people upset at Kathleen Kennedy as being a vocal minority. Disney is raking cash in on Star Wars and Lucasfilms in general and the population of Star Wars fans is growing. If #CancelDisneyPlus was a big deal then we'd see it in Disney's actual business moves, but it hasn't had an impact and downvoting on YouTube is probably similarly ineffective.

It doesn't look like they're removing dislikes at all, but rather hiding the count of dislikes from viewers of the video (in a test).

While technically true, showing the Like/Dislike count provided valuable information for viewers. Determining whether or not a video is worth my time will become a lot more difficult.

I'd argue that HN got better after they hid the karma (net of 1 + up - down) on a per-comment basis (even though I was initially opposed to the change at the time).

They can still use like/dislike metrics to decide which videos to offer you and in what sort order, so there's still some signal available.

That's the opposite change. HN hid likes, while keeping the dislikes visible.

HN still fades text if a comment is below a certain threshold.

IMO, HN's fade is worse than just showing the like/dislike ratio. I believe some users see a faded comment and subconsciously get a preference to hit the downvote before even fully reading a comment.

Imagine if Youtube automatically showed unpopular videos in a permanently faded mode; this would be even more user-hostile.

Just give the users the count or ratio, and let them interpret (or ignore) it.

Investing 30 seconds reading a comment vs 12 minutes on a video is not the same thing.

Let's not fool ourselves here. The disklike-horde storming critical but good quality videos because they don't like the message was just as normal as overhyped videos with crap quality. Those systems are broken and this doesn't change much. It just hides which horde likes the vid at the moment.

It would be interesting to know if there is an effect where users are more likely to dislike a video with a bad ratio. If the public perception of a like ratio influenced the viewer's opinion.

It really feels like a lot of people didn't even click through to the _tweet_, which is concise and direct as can be given the nature of Twitter as a platform.

I'll grant that the actual count is still helpful data for users but the title is wrong and it's clear a lot of people never bothering clicking through.

"Hey we're not removing your ability to speak, just your tongue!"

Too many embarassing cases of large numbers of downvotes on Youtube-produced videos?

(Edit: Boom, apparently this post was just flagged to page 2.)

I have a much sillier reason for disliking this change, which is that there is a charming part of YouTube culture where people attempt to explain a small number of downvotes on an otherwise popular video in a witty way.

For example, on a recent piece of Imperial propaganda [1] with 100K upvotes and 935 downvotes, we find the comment:

> 930 heretics and counting...

This one isn't laugh-out-loud funny, maybe raises a grin. Others are better. But it's a tiny artform which will be lost from the world.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWnQedD4BlI

I remember a YouTube video of a local news reporter about to interview a teacher for making a eyes-closed backwards basketball shot from half court. The news reporter tries this and with amazing luck, makes the half court blindfolded backwards shot.

In the top comment of the video jokingly said, “the 2 dislikes are from the teacher and her husband”.

Ah, if we only were allowed to - gasp - have fun on the internet.

You still can have fun, but first drink verification can.

'member when reddit removed the visible downvote count back in 2014, that was really one of the end of something there https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/28hjga/reddi...

Just a random screenshot cause haven't found anything else in Google https://i.imgur.com/3y8W2mk.png

You could see if a comment was highly engaging despite at the bottom, say 200/210 (upvotes/downvotes). Nowdays you only see the + or - number and that's all, only pushing that "meta" narrative that most people want to see.

Ironically YouTube feels a lot like Reddit to me - nothing really changed there the past 5 years, no matter what happened on the business side.

Some of it is really weird. Like YouTube trying to get into streaming, but never actually implementing anything for it - no clips, no emotes really, but the weird "create a channel from your personal GMail account" thing is still there. It's like the people there were told nothing but a keyword.

but youtube isn't some vc cash cow that has to change every 2 weeks in order to get more moni from vcs

i'm very fine with youtube *just working*

Dislike button is a viable instrument of social pressure. About a year ago popular Russian rapper appeared in a government-funded propaganda-like video. After 1MM dislikes he addressed the public, said he was unaware of the real purpose of video and apologized. The video was eventually taken down.

I'd love if they just remove Likes as well, honestly. I've been using the 'Hide Likes' Chrome Extension for over a year now. I have to say, not seeing Likes or Dislikes on YouTube and other social media is a huge quality of life increase. There is a perceptible difference in reaction when you don't know how popular or unpopular something on the internet is.

> huge quality of life increase

Ah, the first world, and our struggles...

Ayayya. Loooong past time to break Google up. They're a disgusting propaganda machine bent on manipulating everyone into their weird ideologies. Amazon and the rest of these social media platforms that are working in coercion need the same treatment. They might as well all be owned by the same umbrella corporation at this point.

Youtube is trying to sit on two chairs: it needs dislikes to feed its ML algorithms, but it wants to keep users in the dark. I doubt users will bother to send likes and dislikes into the void, so youtube will have to give at least something back. I bet that the final solution will be to show users convincing fake data, so they would feel the urge to contribute by clicking that like it dislike button.

I still remember when you could rate videos on a scale of 1-5 (or was it 0-5?), and it showed the average rating from everyone who did. Then they made it a binary like/dislike, and now the trend continues to making it unary...

IMHO the "like/dislike" mentality is partly responsible for the divisive hostility of culture today. You either like something or not, you're with us or against us, there's no middle ground.

There’s been something wonky about YouTube downvotes for a little while now. If you go any children’s video (I have two toddlers so am accessing them all the time), downvotes often outstrip upvotes. The reasons are unclear, maybe competitive pressure from rival channels astroturfing the votes? Take a look at this[0] video from Sesame Street, 1.3m downvotes for a fairly decent educational video, vs 1.7m upvotes? How is that even justified? I can’t blame YouTube for removing a metric which looks like is being manipulated on a massive level. [0] https://youtu.be/783EsrHchXA

I used to wonder about the same thing then I saw my toddler accidentally hit the downvote button.

It's due to accidental clicks from toddlers.

What is going on in the comments to this article?

Why has this relatively minor youtube feature change dredged up such significant vitriol and conspiracy-adjacent rhetoric in the hacker news comments?

Skimming all the comments here I'm seeing lots of flaming and hand-wringing. I don't have any actual measures, but to me it feels like significantly more than normal even for an article about a high-profile site/company.

What bothers me is that the title is even a little misleading. They're removing the count of dislikes (which obviously has an impact) but the dislike feature itself is still there.

>What bothers me is that the title is even a little misleading.

This is the exact type of comment I'm talking about.

This does very little to contribute to discussion while simultaneously implying an undercurrent of conspiracy.

Why even bother pointing this out? It's extremely minor at most and the link is to twitter.com. It's not as if it would take long to read the link.

Just the second part of you comment: >They're removing the count of dislikes (which obviously has an impact) but the dislike feature itself is still there. would have sufficed.

Youtube is one of the most culturally significant websites on earth, and the like / dislike ratio on videos are a huge part of the experience there. I can’t believe you think it’s a “relatively minor” thing, do you never look up videos online?

A quick glance through my phone's screen time log shows that I average roughly 45 minutes per day on YouTube.

Maybe I'm an atypical user but I would not call the like/dislike ratio "a huge part of the experience". I personally never look at it.

It's supposedly about "creator well-being", which I basically read as creators get downvote brigaded and get upset. Which is simultaneously silly, and also will still happen because they're still going to show the dislike count to the creator. ???

I agree, I think the main point is to not show the dislike count to the viewer rather than hiding the information from the viewer and this was a convenient way to frame it... Though, trying to steelman it, this change may push the dislike count one click deeper in the interface. If only the creator knows, they are free from screenshots of the ratio being presented publically. It's still a stifling of the masses' ability to express and view negative review and dissent, definitely not worth it in my view, even if there are benefits to creator mental health.

The only thing I've seen Dislike count used for on videos I watch is to drive a snowclone about what hypothetical type of viewers would dislike this particular video, like say there's a video showing how to correctly position Protoss buildings to prevent a Reaper jumping into your base in the video game Starcraft 2 [an early game harassment which is annoying and could win if you defend it poorly], and the video has 12 dislikes, the snowclone comment might be "12 Reapers saw this video".

I have never seen a video which I thought "This is a bad video, nobody should watch this video" and had lots of dislikes. I don't think clicking that would even achieve its goal, clicking the dislike button is engagement and shows you cared about this content enough to do something.

So this change seems fine to me. Dislike will still exist, but now it won't cause a snowclone we didn't really need and it doesn't make numbers go up visibly.

I watch a lot of videos on home repair or construction topics ie “quick fix for broken PVC pipe” or “how to replace your RV water heater” and the like/dislike ratio is invaluable. The videos with high dislikes are either incomplete, incorrect, or have terrible audio rendering them useless. The videos with a high like ratio usually help me figure out how to do what I needed to do.

It seems to me the platforms that have the most trouble maintaining a grasp on reality are the ones that don’t allow down votes. Down votes are the cognitive immune system at work. Not that down votes are necessarily correct, but rather they provide increased resistance to propagation. Also you can hardly fix a problem by blinding yourself to it.

They're hiding the down-vote count, not removing them altogether.

Bad news for the citizens of the Neutral Planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qump1X6OrEc

It's strange, I upvote pretty much without a thought but I will consider a downvote, it has to be sincerely offensive, wrong or dangerous to get a downvote. To me at least a downvote tells an important story.

Down-votes aren't being removed though, so that's still possible (the count will only be visible to the video uploader, just like HN).

What's next, getting rid of comments? I use YouTube less and less these days, but I have to say that the dislike button tends to hold more utility than the great swathes of garbage comments. Not that I'm advocating for getting rid of comments, but I see plenty of disliking within them.

And YouTube becomes even more useless to me. The LAST remaining use I have for YouTube (since it ceased to be entertaining by demonetizing all of my favorite creators to the point where they need to shill VPNs and underwear every 2 minutes) is to find tutorials and guides on how to do things I want to learn to do. Too bad I won't know when a guide is giving me bad advice, because there won't be a crowdsourced like/dislike ratio. Guess I'll have to go to Udemy or something.

Seems to be a visibility-only change to a small cohort of users.

Tangentially, I've often wanted a third button, call it "disinterested".

This would just tell YouTube not to recommend more of the same for me, without adjusting the ratio of votes up or down.

There are many videos I don't actively dislike (I might not have any strong feelings) I just don't want YouTube to recommend more cats with laugh tracks after I click a some link in our #random Slack channel.

It's weird, because they actually have a "Not interested" option in the dropdown menu when you're browsing, but there's no way to click it for a video you're actually watching.

Youtube does have a somewhat-hidden "Not Interested" option - on the homepage, when looking at recommendations, under the three-dots kebab menu. It also has a "Don't recommend channel" option there too, which I aggressively use to remove content I don't want, like the compilation clip content farms.

It’s under the three dots icons at your overview page.

They kinda already did though. You don’t see likes/dislikes when you search for a video so you only use it’s popularity in order to decide to click on it.

It is interesting how YouTube seems to maintain the mainstream video moat. The only competitors that make any inroads are in sub-niches, like Twitch.

YouTube rode to the top by streaming petabytes of copyrighted material that would get anybody who tried to replicate their path destroyed by copyright strikes

This is actually true. I distinctly remember that about 50% of the videos I used to watch on YouTube made me think "better watch this before the copyright holder finds out it's here". Entire British TV shows, Japanese anime movies, stolen corporate training content, audiobooks, etc. Impossible to replicate the growth trajectory in a ContentID world.

As someone in the ad industry (not part of Google) this makes perfect sense. Youtube likely has video quality scores (like for Grammys, Academy, etc), where they're able to get the best bang for their buck when users watch such videos.

Disliking such videos will drive users away from these videos, and hurt their profits. They likely ran a test already and deemed it worthwhile.

@dang: Bad headline. Tweet says it will hide the number of dislikes, but you'll still be able to dislike a video.

Downvotes have been weirdly wonky and aggressive all over the internet for, say, a year or so.

Maybe we could work harder on the root causes and worry less about people "kicking the dog" all over the internet because life simply isn't working across the entire planet for various reasons.

/Random thought from a random internet stranger

Next, IMDB only allows ratings between 8-10.

I don't think they document it, beyond being a "weighted average", but as I understand things, they already do give one stars a very low weight, in addition to a weight of zero in some cases.

I think this is the appropriate analogy. Is a Hollywood movie studio being "harassed" if people give a movie negative reviews? No. Neither are youtube videos that get downvoted. And yet here we are. You will consume what the people who write the algorithm want you to, you will like it and you if you dont no one will know.

Rotten Tomatoes is already highly manipulated and editorialized. For example, the interpretation of whether a review was "fresh" or "rotten" is completely subjective and made by editors.

You can see the agenda pushing and manipulation on such films as Ghostbusters (2016).

With 8 not allowed, because it's become the new bad rating.

This is always always always a mistake. Social media _needs_ negative signals in order to self moderate, even if it's not much. Look at Facebook and Twitter for what happens when you don't: any kind of interaction is seen as positive, so both platforms amplify the most toxic and attention-seeking behaviors.

The dislike score is a relic of the past. A dislike is a measure of how bad google did at showing you content you expected.

Type in show boat videos and they show you a love boat video so you hit dislike. There was never anything wrong with the loveboat video, it was just shown to someone looking for something else.

A dislike is a signaling of my general satisfaction with all aspects of that video. Content is poor? Dislike! AI recommendation was poor? Dislike!! Too much advertising? Dislike!!!

Seeing 1k likes "hits different" from seeing 1k likes and 2k dislikes.

This is simply so google can exert more control over its platform and control the narrative.

Hate to be so cynical but watching what happened to reddit seeing some similarities here at youtube.

It’s almost like Google (and others) want to tell you which videos are good and should be watched and pretend to have user interaction.

TV 3.0

This is terrible and user hostile. How can I avoid bad content now? Why does YT care more about the feelings of a few super star creators than the user base?

I suspect that they're straight-up lying about it being "at the request of creators". I think they're just copying the Twitter model. Twitter became a powerhouse of pro-Trump fake news and single-handedly made qanon a thing. I guess YouTube wants in on that kind of cash flow.

I give 2 years before comments are entirely gone...

It seems that all types of user-interaction is getting prohibited...

They might as well, since they already got rid of comments on “kids videos,” and the distinction between kid and adult videos is more than a little arbitrary.

The title is incorrect. This is not about removing dislikes but about now showing the dislike count.

Okay it's seems like this is the time to create chanel of videos full of bad advice in them. Until Google start to determine whatever advice sounds bad to them so they can ban everyone based off this metric too.

This is the aseptic brand new world that is pushed by too powerful companies

No more critic, no more negativity, just kool aid and fake positivity as this is good for business when every one pretend to live in a fairy world...

Let's consider them as market forces. Likes are internet currency. In that context dislikes are a secondary currency that doesn't have a clear value. Dislikes tend to depend on the content and current cultural norms to determine why the dislike was added. Their value is not easily determined. For a controversial creator a dislike may actually be a badge of honor. For a DIY creator it's a major negative. Due to this apparent ambiguity in the value of dislikes and what they mean I don't find them worth while.

A form of social-signal bimetallism. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of likes!

Well, they might as well remove the like button too cause the rating system will be useless now.

Honestly, it seems like there's no easy win here. I think people for and against this both have good arguments. For example, getting rid of dislikes could mitigate the effects of synthetic brigading campaigns. On the other hand, keeping them could in certain cases give a better view of the organic reaction to a video. I don't spend every day trying to solve these problems so I don't have a strong opinion about what the right answer is.

Synthetic brigading is what exactly? Bands of synthetics downvoting videos to bring about downfall of humanity?

Or do people's opinions count less if they are organized?

Not sure if that was hyperbole, but since you ask, yeah I think it could actually bring about the downfall of humanity. For example, what if climate science videos were being significantly brigaded by bots controlled by oil companies? Might not be that far-fetched. If we fail to communicate effectively about issues like that, we could very well see the downfall of humanity. Even "organic" brigading by the anti-vaxx crowd on related videos seems like an existential threat.

>>>For example, what if climate science videos were being significantly brigaded by bots controlled by oil companies?

I think we need to separate the bot problem from the organic humans. BOTS should be the issue that is countered, regardless of whether they are upvoting or downvoting content. Humans expressing themselves is just grass-roots organizing.

> Or do people's opinions count less if they are organized?

Of course not, but the metric ceases to have meaning, so something important is lost.

Voting results being meaningful depends on a random sample of people who come across content, so that voters are approximately a random subset of viewers.

If voters organize, then they are no longer a random or representative subset, so the metric ceases to be representative of viewers as a whole, and becomes biased.

To put it simply...I use downvotes on YouTube to assess quality constantly.

The ratio is meaningful.

This is, of course, a customer-centric move for Youtube (of course keep in mind, you the Youtube viewer are the product, not the customer).

While many will complain and there had been some reasonable cases for dislike counts (they only remove the counts not the dislikes!) I think this kinda makes sense.

The large majority of "productive"/"fair" video engagement is pretty much independent of the dislike *counts*.

It still matters to be able to dislike as a feedback function but they are not removing this (for now at least.).

Users should just comment "dislike" (or some form of it) from here on out.

Or maybe people can rate videos on a 3rd party service.

And then they will disable the comments section and that's that.

Do people actually venture into the youtube comment section for useful comments?

On occasion if the video is small enough of niche enough the comment section will have some useful content, but the vast majority of comments under any video seem to be just weird vitriol that is only ever tangentially related to the video.

So we're back to just commenting sage on things we don't like?

The more things change...

I wonder how long it will take until the anti-?ism apologetics come out to justify this to headline-readers.

One of the things I really like about HN is that you can't see the moderation counts on other people's posts. If YT is going to kill dislike counts, they should also kill like counts.

They can still algorithmically bury things that are severely disliked, and promote things that are heavily liked. The video uploader, though, should be able to see the counts in order to get some feedback as to the quality of their videos.

Absolute numbers of likes/dislikes turns things into a popularity contest and fuels social media addiction. If you can only see the counts on your own content, you can't compare yourself to someone else and find yourself lacking (or vice versa).

What's going on in this comment section? It seems more like of a reddit thread than the usual thoughtful HN comments. Propaganda? Ghostbusters? Whitehouse? "They"? Are troll farms targeting HN now?

Seems like having the most disliked video in their own website did affect them

This does not seem to me like a move to "improve the user experience", but rather to hide the public opinion about certain topics, such as politics or consumer media. Others name examples here in this thread, such as Ghostbusters (2016) and their trailers and recent Biden administration videos on the White house channel.

I am curious __in a genuine way__ if someone who might consider themselves "woke left" (at the lack of a better word) here on HN who sees this as a positive development? (I.e., someone who views both aforementioned examples very positively)

Or actually, anyone regardless of political leaning for that matter?

Because personally I find it hard to construct even a simple argument for the viewpoint that hiding this information in any improves the website and/or society at large, with youtube being an important piece of infrastructure for the entire world right now. This instead would just seem like google continuing down their path of abandoning their "don't be evil" slogan.

Crunchy granola digital soyboy here: I can't think of any reason why this is a good idea since tools already exist to disable voting and comments for PR.

Heat, kitchen, etc.

It's the money; probably Hollywood. Maybe the Whitehouse? If it's perceived as staving off a SV antitrust breakup a little longer but that just doesn't seem "big" enough of a concession. So I'm back to money.

What I'm a little more concerned about is the conspiracy-minded posters on this site coming out of the woodwork on this article who are about 6 parens away from saying what they really mean.

Related - and maybe off-topic.

I have never participated in any change.org campaign for a similar reason: You cannot sign to oppose, so you end up with an extremely distorted view of a given matter.

But that's always how petitions have worked. Whoever created the petition is only interested in collecting signatures of people who agree with their proposal, so that they can bring it to legislators, authorities, etc. and say that 'this many people also want this'. Collecting signatures of people who disagree is counter-productive.

At least on comments, I'm not sure the dislike button actually did anything previously. The count didn't move when the dislike button was pressed.

Reading the comments here makes me realise that how people use the like and dislike buttons differs significantly.

It reminds me of the Uber approach to rating drivers - by Uber's metrics anything less than 5 stars indicates there was a problem with the ride.

There are riders who don't see it that way though, so for them, 3 stars is an average ride without problems.

I rarely look at likes and dislikes. For anything large, it's full of brigading.

Sure. It reveals which videos they are pushing on you despite the community of viewers recognizing them as being misleading, deceitful, or distasteful.

I've actually made the same choice, but in the context of a game and user generated levels: people can like and dislike a level, but only the like count is shown. It's based on the user feedback (they don't want to be demotivated/humiliated by a large dislike count). It's also the solution chosen by Super Mario Maker 2, a big influence on me.

Neither does this help the viewer, nor would this discourage targeted dislike-campaigns. Any layman user knows that the dislikes play a part in YouTube's recommendation algorithm. So, people who want to organize such campaigns are still going to do it because it helps them with their objectives. Only the messaging around the campaign is going to differ.

That title doesn't seem to be correct, they're just not showing the exact number to anyone but the creator.

Use better alternative platforms such as Odysee

Or if your fave content is only on Youtube, an alternative front-end such as Invidious

I guess Amy Schumer feels vindicated now.

I think social media companies underestimate the value of negative feedback.

Also ranking-wise is a very strong signal to have

They will continue to have this signal. Only it'll be hidden from the users.

Am I the only one that smells April Fools because the whole VW thing seemed so legit just the other day?

No... just me? K...

Removing downvotes seems a lot more legit than Volkwagon dumping decades of brand goodwill on a whim. Partly because a lot of us think of YouTube/Google as censorious/evil to begin with. But maybe they are trolling. 'Tis the season, and pranking people by playing on their pre-existing biases is the correct pattern.

Must be their first rodeo for a lot of other folks from what I can tell. Ain't my first. You can't trust shit coming up. The more, "controversial" the more, "it was just a prank bro". Happens every year.

That hadn't occurred to me and I initially felt foolish upon seeing your comment. But then I thought "What a brilliant way to test public reaction to tentative plans. If they love it, do it. If they hate it, go just kidding."

You mean exactly what VW did and everyone has seemingly forgotten already?

Yea... I remember when April Fools was actually funny. Like the wifi setup that ran through your toilets. That gave me a giggle back in the day. The PR stunt was to do a funny, absurd joke. Now it's just a marketing testing bed.

Damn clouds need to get off my lawn.

Like Twitter lists, you can always skip the recommendation algorithm through crafted subscription.

I really need to make my own youtube client which defaults to the subscriptions page and implements infinite pagination.

This is just like when they got rid of the star ratings. It annoyed me at the time, but it all makes sense. They want to take away tools that allow you to make your own click choices and doing so gives them more power to control what you ultimately click on.

5 stars to 0 stars first, then it was "like", ignore, or "dislike" and now it's going to be "like" or ignore. 5 options -> 3 options -> 2 options. I'm curious to see what comes in 5 years.

The cinic in me says the only reason for this is the shame from YouTube rewind fiasco.

Between showing:

-Likes/Dislikes

-Only likes

-Only dislikes

I'd rather have only dislikes to filter content producer that can work past negativity.

Wouldn't a more appropriate HN title be "remove public dislike count"?

I think the title should be revised to something like “removing public dislike counts”. The tweet shows the dislike feature isn’t removed, dislikes aren’t being deleted, and creators can still see exact dislike counts.

I'd be more for adding some kind of requirement for liking/disliking a video. I think that would be a decent way to get rid of shitty mass-dislikes from people who didn't even watch the video.

Can't creators already do this? I know I've noticed that the dislike ratio/count/whatever have been hidden on a number of videos I've seen over the years....

They should make a video about it before removing the dislikes

April Fools is starting a little earlier than normal.

Let's hope it's an early April 1st joke...

This is just a side effect of national politics. Federal courts rules that the public has a right to information.

https://knightcolumbia.org/documents/a07ecc2a26

Despite that, Youtube is trying to counter bad engagement. Several of Biden's content team's postings of youtube content have gotten tens of thousand of likes, but millions of dislikes resulting in a content "ratio". Downvoters have not been able to be discredited as bots or automated activity.

This isn't a general policy. It's a very specific damage control and political advocacy cloaked in a generic policy.

I actually think it's an interesting change and might make my youtube a bit better for me personally. Let's see how this goes.

Youtube has been displaying prominent banners on their homepage for the past several months promoting identity-politics centric content by token members. These videos were down voted to oblivion. The community clearly doesn't like their woke agenda (including I). Quickly the videos comments and ratings become disabled. I can't help but think this new feature to disable down votes is somehow a sinister way to take away the power of people to signal their disapproval of driving narratives.

Flagged. YouTube "to test out removing" dislikes. I thought HN had a tighter catch on titles like these...

Upvoted because this is important news.

YT should work on preventing targeted dislikes rather than taking away the likes counter - which is so, so useful.

That's rich, coming from a company that authored and uploaded the most downvoted video on their own platform

Isn’t the title misleading? They are not removing dislikes; they are testing UI without them. Huge difference.

Wrong, clickbaity title

A correct summary would be: "YouTube experiments with removing public dislike counts"

They should go the arrested development route and replace ‘up and down’ with ‘lion and crocodile’

I find dislikes a hostile form of conversation. If you want to discern if a DIY video gives legit advice, look at comment section. A good video will have something like “this totally works, thanks” with many likes.

If a video is misleading or fake, I think it should be reported and removed or marked as misleading and fake.

I see that my view is not popular, I’m open for debate.

You're seeing that your view is not popular and being open for debate; because of dislikes.

well, time for someone to build a third party dislike count and release browser extensions

Or for tiktok to start a competing video streaming site. Sure, if you go against the CCP, your video will be deleted and your account nuked, but you can still post those on YouTube. For everything else, tttube won't care who it offends in the US.

> For everything else, tttube won't care who it offends in the US.

That has not been the case for a good while.

I would expect a very different type of video content from a website that is phonetically similar to "Titty Tube"...

Maybe a YouTube content creator can chime in. I haven't seen any on this thread. ...

April Fools?

That's what I was thinking. It is April 1st in certain parts of the world.

I dislike this joke.

I think the platform just realized that Harry Mack has been uploading videos there.

Is this title accurate? Sounds more like their just testing this arrangement out.

that's fine, I'll just use the report button instead

Time to forget youtube. Most of it is drivel anyway.

I don't get the point of likes and dislikes on YouTube. In more than a decade of use, I have only in the last year or two used the like button and from my TV. Views matter - not likes.

I thought this was an April Fools joke at first.

New browser extension coming in in 3, 2, 1, ...

now innovation in the web is about removing so called innovations, let's iterate quickly and remove the rest..

i won’t mind not seeing all of the “how could six people dislike this video?!?!” comments.

doesn’t seem worth it though.

I suppose it's April 1 content.

I have an extension that shows the likes/dislikes under the video thumbnails. When I look at the news section of the main page, it's been very consistent for months that there's an overwhelming number of dislikes on any video about COVID. Same for things about Biden (but wasn't an issue on positive news about Trump). I wonder if this is why they're removing dislikes. Could be that the media has pressured them to.

you know this website has no down vote, twitter also has no dislike button

Hacker News has always had a down-vote button, but there's a minimum karma count to be able to use it.

Targeted dislike campaigns are clearly a thing. I'm glad they are doing this.

For what percentage of videos? 0.0001%? Seems like they're tossing out the baby with the bathwater, punishing everyone using YouTube in order to protect a very small number from criticism.

I've seen a bunch of what I would consider likely candidates. Obviously nobody has proof of any of this, but controversial subjects get storms of downvotes all the time.

Well, youtube is getting severely criticised for removing dislikes from Biden videos. I guess they have decided (correctly) to simply remove the options for dislikes altogether. Frankly, I think this is FAR more honest than removing dislikes.

Same here - you can' t down vote. IMHO this should be possible.

It's possible to downvote here if you have enough karma.

April fools.?

April Fools?

soon there will be no comments across the entire site, and content creators will have to pay to post videos

I was just thinking of the possibile impact had by not allowing/ hiding dislikes in creating the current, extremely tense climate on social networks. I wonder if allowing only positive feedback (which seemed to be meant, at least at the beginning, as a way to boost a mood of positive, pleasant interaction) is instead encouraging the expression of more and more extreme positions, since disagreement is effectively hidden. The popularity of a message doesn't imply that it's not at the same time divisive. You can get millions of hearts and likes, but you'll still be blind to how many people strongly disagree with it.

How much do you want to bet the Biden admin made this request of Google because many of his speeches had more dislikes than likes?

They've deleted a bunch of his dislikes in the past.

Something HN should totally do as well. There is a report link for inappropriate posts already. Dislike button doesn't serve any good purpose.

As a compromise they could display only the magnitude of likes and dislikes. There's no difference to me if something has 100 or 900 dislikes; 1.2M or 7.9M likes.

There seem to be an awful lot of accounts here pushing the narrative - which seems to have come out of nowhere - that this is some kind of conspiracy to hide the number of dislikes on the White House's official Youtube channel. I guess someone wants us to believe there's some deep popular dissent and resentment against the Biden administration that they desperately want to have covered up.

Sorry gentlemen, it's a reach. Crippling senility didn't stick, pedophilia didn't stick, whatever Hunter Biden's laptop was supposed to be didn't stick, and this... is getting kind of desperate. I know you're gearing up for 2024 but please, find some better memes. Quality over quantity.

Love it. The dislike, down arrow, and other such options just serve to give the mob an opportunity to bury things they don’t like. I wish HN would get rid of the downvote.

Case in point, this dissenting opinion. Proving the point

How about someone creates a network of users that are vetted in some way to basically be 'honest' actors and not bots, then they use a browser extension that lets you view and input likes and dislikes for content across the internet independently of what the site provides. Will stop bot-ing/gaming of system if it works. Also if network is small enough even a couple of plus votes could be enough for you to 'trust' that it has a genuine positive review from a reasonable person.

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