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Comment by Hammershaft | Hacker News Reader

You think Youtube is removing dislikes because of white house vids that average out less than ~25000 views each?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Why would the viewcount be relevant to this?

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.

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