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nigrioid

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

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

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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 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.

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.

“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.

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