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Comment by Covzire | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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?

>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.

> 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.

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.

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