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.
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.
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
Oh, that's still happening. It never stopped.
There was plugins that showed it when browsing and it made such a difference.