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.
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?
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.
So hence why the whole feature is pRoBlEmAtIc and must be removed :p
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?
> 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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynG4j-BsRhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBpYZnmPz3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16p2PcPgB5M
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).
The inability to downvote substantially alters what is said/ranked highly, I think.
Just tested. It makes a post to
/youtubei/v1/comment/perform_comment_action
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.
...hence the ads? How would competitors be immune to the need to pay the bills?
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?
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.
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.
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.
courtesy of youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwcJNsoY50E
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.
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.
The YouTube community usually doesn't take downvotes as "not interested", but rather as an explicit expression of "this is crap".
Use report button
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.
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.
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!)
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.
There was plugins that showed it when browsing and it made such a difference.
Oh, that's still happening. It never stopped.
Likes (and dislikes) are needed mostly for viewers who might want to feel helpful.
Dislike mobs do more harm. They probably ignore dislikes already.
1. Videos which promise to show something that never actually appears
2. Very short videos which are difficult to not watch in their entirety
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure YouTube consulted with their biggest customers and partners before removing a functionality that increases engagement
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.
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...
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.
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.
[0]: https://phzoe.com/2021/01/27/white-house-youtube-dislike-man...
All that article shows is that the votes are manipulated by users too, there's no signal in down vote brigading like that
It's certainly possible that Youtube is acting in a political manner and is preferentially deleting real dislikes, but this post hardly proves that.
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.
81m.org tracked other channels. Different behavior.
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.
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.
But I guess that happens anyway.
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).
And don't forget the Wadsworth Constant :)
https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/the-wadsworth-const...
I'm pretty sure comments on DIY videos are more indicative of quality than downvote count
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f2D0GxCuBo
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/JoeBiden/videosif 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
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.
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.
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.
Most of the time I found it useless, I don't mind at all it gets removed.
Comments on YouTube are bad enough. If you want to tell a video creator their work sucks, comments still work fine.
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.