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Comment by argvargc | Hacker News Reader

There's a site tracking these, some of the stats on older videos with high views are crazy (down the page):

Thanks for that! I'm glad to see a few people here who can tell something's going on.

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.

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.)

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..

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