Hacker News Reader

Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

Companies are only interested in user behavior that increases engagement. Everything else is on the chopping block.

Downvotes increase engagement. Otherwise they wouldn't have been put there in the first place.

No, the real issue here is too many of the "right" things are getting downvoted. So when The White House, Disney or the Academy disable downvotes on part or all of their videos but other wide swaths of videos don't need to disable downvotes, the contrast causes them to stick out like a sore thumb.

It calls attention (also known as engagement) - but not the kind of attention those who run social media companies want. Attention that is counter to the desired narratives is unacceptable. So here we go with the lame excuses that are all the sudden relevant when they weren't when the like/dislike stuff was instated decades ago?

Give me a break.

You are all over this thread claiming that the White House is explicitly pressuring Google to remove this feature of the site. Do you have supporting evidence, or did you just make this up? It seems more like you have a narrative and agenda to push.

The White House is just the last one whose videos dislikes are being made fun of and shared in memes

I'm sure YouTube consulted with their biggest customers and partners before removing a functionality that increases engagement

Yeah the only reason The White House YouTube channel receives views right now is because Trump used it to to campaign and it became fairly popular amongst his supporters. It's main audience is still his supporters because most people don't really watch The White House on YouTube.

Where in the comment do they claim “the White House is explicitly pressuring Google to remove this feature”?

I didn't say anyone, let alone the White House is pressuring them to remove anything. Why would the WH have to pressure them? I have zero doubt that Google is pushing this themselves.

What I firmly believe, based on statements by the companies and the employees that work for them as well as their actions (over the past five years in particular) is they have a particular agenda to push and if you aren't on the right side of their messaging they intend to suppress it by any means possible.

The revolving door and growing ties between Google and segments of government strongly suggests a constant flow of information and the creation of incentives in a way that create a common understanding across both. Meaning, you might not need to "tell" anyone to do anything in particular. Your ties create common interest and once two groups, here relatively fluid groups with fuzzy boundaries, share a common interest, no explicit coordination is necessary.

Yep. I think this is the sort of thing that could potentially backfire on them, though. Engagement through addiction sadly seems to be a bottomless goldmine, but engagement through deception can leave people dissatisfied and ripe for poaching by a competitor. If hiding downvotes does cause people to watch more bad and misleadingly-titled content, that could be profitable in the short term but dangerous in the medium-long term.

Totally agree. I notice I find comment sections of sites that allow downvotes (e.g. HN, Reddit) much easier to navigate and filter than sites like Facebook and Twitter that only allow upvotes. Only allowing upvoting gives you similar dynamics to partisan primaries in the US - the most polarizing content filters to the top instead of sinking to the bottom.

HN doesn't really allow downvotes though. At least not unless you've reached a million karma points (from my understanding).

It does. I don't know what the threshold is, but it's not too high. I believe it's 500, but I might be wrong.

I became able to downvote after reaching 500 karma. The minimum requirement might have changed to 1000 since then, I forget.

Even after reaching that karma amount, you are only able to downvote comments within a day of their posting. After a day, only upvotes are possible.

I don't know if these large tech companies act on normal incentives. They're almost post-modern corporations.

I don't think anyone truly understands their decision making process. It's above even the leadership. Scott Alexander mentioned this in a post this week:

> Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-antifragile-diver...

In this particular case, the company is interested in more content production. Who are disincentivized by downvotes.

s/engagement/addiction/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com