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.
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.
If you said 2 + 2 = 5, I would disagree. This is a trivial example of dissent completely entangled with quality.
"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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
YouTube Rewind 2018: 19 Million dislikes
I don't see any reason you'd attribute removing dislikes to the former rather than the latter.
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.
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.
I'm not sure why you're expecting your viewers to be your reviewers.
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.
Peertube exists
Thankfully, YT keeps doing user-hostile things, slowly pushing more people into trying out alternatives.
I know that’s a really esoteric example and I’m sorry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 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.
I think it's disingenuous to conflate negative feedback of any kind with 'cancel culture' (an overly broad and imprecise term, to be fair).
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.