Making the dislike count private across YouTube
support.google.com
support.google.com
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29177460, but we merged that thread hither)
I'm a small time creator (~13.5k subs) and don't care at all about upvotes or downvotes being public. There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that. Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects.
-Millions of views, 99% liked
-Videos without ridiculous view counts, where the like/dislike ratio actually helps
-Brigaded with dislikes
Many creators use Youtube for different purposes. Youtube does a big injustice because they don't fairly separate content based on the type of entity that's posting content enough (i.e. an indie music producer versus a big industry music company or indie vlogger living in their parent's house versus a well funded TV news channel).
This implies there are more competing creators than total viewers.
I still do it for the passion, not much profit has ever been there... har.
I promise not to give a thumb down XD
always interested to check out other's work :)
Sure friend, fair warning though, I'll probably delete this in a day or so to avoid an ID trail of people that might scan my posts later on... The Internet can be vengeful a times even if I am not so. :P
Yes. People downvote based on their expectation. So you can have content that you would probably find bad that has a lot of upvotes because it has a niche that likes it, and my sense is that the excursions in dislike ratio are more often driven by distribution channel or brigading than the intrinsic value of the content.
> Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects.
Doesn't this directly contradict your experience as a creator? But if it was true, wouldn't it be a good thing that creators no longer feel as much pressure to conform to fan expectations, eg in pursuit of bigger opportunities/audiences?
Let's not be stupid about this. The only people benefitting from this change are the shady ones.
I'm not sold on that idea personally. The videos I create are based on what I'm doing in my day to day as a developer or if someone comments with a video suggestion since that's almost always in my wheel house of video topics which I greatly appreciate when this happens. I don't really make videos with intent to optimize for views / upvotes or get upset when a video gets a few downvotes. Lots of them have 100% upvote ratios and almost all have 95%+.
YouTube does let video creators disable voting but whenever I see that on any video I almost always think the channel owner is trying to do something nefarious. Maybe they're trying to avoid transparency by hiding downvotes or they are super self conscious about making videos and my internal bias suggests the video will be worse quality when compared to others. That's not always the case but it's true more often than not, at least for my own subjective take on video preference (mainly tech and hardware, no news).
I always strive for maximum transparency and let the results figure themselves out naturally.
In the end, this is mainly a huge downgrade for consumers of videos. It sounds like the algorithm will still take downvotes into account and video creators can still see the downvotes. It's the viewers who can no longer use this as a metric to quickly gauge a video's quality. In a world with so many amazing videos to watch, losing this quick filter hurts a bit.
Brave browser also blocks ads.
Then you should definitely use Vanced. It eliminates sponsored parts within videos, which are not removed even if you pay for youtube red.
It'd be really nice to have a way to say spread say $10 a month among the channels I watch, with maybe some options to weight towards smaller channels too.
https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/youtube-partner-progra...
I actually forgot that YouTube had rolled out the Join button. You get 70% of the revenue of the Channel Membership (join button). YouTube gets 30%.
Still seeing downvotes in my country, but if they remove this imo important metric, I’ll have to cancel my subscription.
This is exactly why the internet is in the situation where it is - nobody wants to pay for stuff so they have to monetise tracking and advertising.
This is just as oblivious as the "nobody wants to work" rhetoric that's currently popular. It ignores the fact that a lot of products wouldn't be used, and content wouldn't be consumed, if they weren't free.
No, the reason people wouldn't use Facebook if they had to pay for it isn't because they're cheapskates, it's because Facebook isn't offering a product that's actually worth paying for.
Netlfix et al. show that people are willing to pay for things on the internet if they're actually worth spending money on.
Besides, even when you pay for things on the internet, most companies will still show you ads and track you.
This is why I said we are on Hacker News. People here should probably value their time more than 15$/month if they spend nontrivial amount of time watching YT, yet still refuse to pay, freeloading is a common thing unfortunately.
However, every time someone reads it I am also paid 2 pennies by a dude that wants to tell people about his new book.
People were fine with that, so I also found another guy to pay me 2 pennies to talk about the book he wrote as well.
A negligibly small fraction of those people have started wearing earplugs. How unfair!
So I found a third guy to pay me 2 pennies to talk about the book he wrote as well, and more people started wearing earplugs! What the heck!?!
Imagine going back and mentioning that this would also be a way for the company (Google) to snoop on your conversations and censor dissenting thougth.
A free way to stream any video sounds nice, but it doesn't once you mention the fact that it actually limits the type of content you are able to enjoy.
We should be trying to build a better infrastructure for FOSS video streaming instead of trying to rationalize shitty business models.
I don't think the innocence of the people who don't know the difference between proprietary and free software should be the thing we attack here, specially since the company in question has gone through great efforts before to restrain the spread of the FSF.
All the grifters, charlatans, anti-fact, political blowhard, fake, plastic, garbage that litters the whole site from left to right to non-political.
I hope the service fails, frankly.
This is a broad assumption, what makes you think everybody on this site can afford £12 a month for something they can get completely for free with uBlock Origin and YouTube Vanced?
That's simply not true.
Not everything is worth my money and Google can kiss my ass.
* Breaking Points (10/mo) * 3 substacks (5/mo each) * ProtonMail (5/mo) * StandardNotes (10/mo) * netflix * hulu * prime * boomerang * shudder * disney+ * hbomax * sometimes pandora
This is on top of the fact I buy about 20 records a year and roughly average about 20 dvds/blurays a year and about 10 books a year.
I dont care if Google doesn't get some money.
I was already using google music, and then youtube music family (which sort of sucks at least in terms of app development), so this was more an incremental add-on.
just use your forward skip button ffs
Its the non-skipable 1 minute adds on youtube on my TV (where addblocker does not work) that make my happy to have YouTube premium.
Then if they keep making decisions you don’t like, do you stay subscribed?
The term of art is ‘increase engagement’.
They're committed to recommendation and such.
Yes, but you're not someone YouTube is trying to protect.
edit: :^)
- videos with >95% like ratios
- political videos that have obviously been brigaded
Assuming most normies don’t have great engagement rates with the like/dislike button based on view count, this change is doing the vast majority a service.
I do miss the Netflix of years gone past.
That's your belief but you have no evidence to prove this. And even if true, why does the entirety of content of YouTube need to be punished for the undesired behavioral patterns that YouTube has cultivated on controversial videos they've pushed on everyone?
Not giving users this information and removing like dislike counts just makes it so that a small number of people at YouTube have even more ability to control what is pushed on that site. With this change users have even less ability to check the validity of a video; validity means different things to different users here. People who stay at YouTube will just have to deal with the fact that they will have videos pushed to their screen for reasons that are hidden to them, that they don't have the ability to check out anything other people think about the video, and can't even signal that there is something wrong to them about the video (sure, they could comment, but any comment can be deleted by the video author and there is the fear of losing your Google account, which can include their email contact to everyone and authentication information also, which can have huge consequences for their ordinary life).
Why is this a bad thing exactly?
Smells a lot like democracy and a platform worth of people telling the creator they aren't welcome.
Maybe YouTube doesn't like that but that doesn't make them right.
Sometimes the users are right, it's their platform to. Going against them just drives them away further.
With the hostile actions of YouTube over the last couple of years YouTube is asking for disruption.
Exactly. And what drives engagement more than enraging political content? Of course they're going to shove politics in your face even if you've never watched a single one before.
The example you make is fantastic, because if such a video had 4 times more dislikes you know you’ll probably not find anything useful there, generally confirmed by skimming comments fast as “ this is a 1997 model “, etc.
It seems unlikely that giving someone more information makes something worthless.
You must be pretty deep inside the bubble of the topic, as also the bubble of the content-creator, to be able to evaluate the value of the rating. And that makes it worthless, because most people can't be that deep and follow everything. And the people who are, are more likely re-enforcing their own ignorance.
The Ratio is one of those tools which are making sense when they are fresh, but become corrupted over time, making it useless after a while.
There's plenty of clickbait videos that have horrible like to dislike ratios and you can save yourself time by seeing the dislike bar. This is just removing an important piece of functionality and making the site less functional and less user friendly.
Yes, elections suck, but that's their purpose. Mankind is not able to act smart on scale, but there is the interesting effect that we will act sane enough on scale. Elections usually aim to utilize this balance, because all other known solutions are sucking even more.
And not to forget, in a healthy working democracy, you can't game elections like you can do it with (dis)likes. With online-services, it's relative easy to get thousands of alt or hacked accounts, which you can use to manipulate the numbers as you like.
> There's plenty of clickbait videos that have horrible like to dislike ratios and you can save yourself time by seeing the dislike bar.
How do you know? How many of those horrible videos are you actually watching yourself to confirm their quality? And on how many of them does your own bias comes into play?
Can't have anyone being critical bc the very nature of that is contrary to consumption or promotion
"Normie" just means "ordinary", "average", or "uninitiated". It usually means someone with very conventional political or cultural views but it can also mean "someone who isn't part of a subculture or group" ie developers talking about laptops might say "normies don't usually need more than 8GB of memory but some development tasks require more to be comfortable". Other times it's used in a more derogatory sense to imply that someone is a bit too credulous towards the establishment of the day ie "normies think that corruption and inequality only exist in developing countries".
You summarized why Youtube is doing it. Sure harassment is one aspect of it, but this drives up the clicks for Youtube and therefore the ad revenue. I'd be curious to see if people get overly annoyed by how many unworthy videos they watch and thereby reducing overall engagement.
A popular streaming service inflates the ratings of the content offered on its service to the point that I'm hesitant to use it that much.
I really don't understand this move... this will seriously limit our ability to filter bad content. I hope that they'll provide an alternative.
I think that is entirely the point.
Something I liked could be as trivial as an enjoyment of said content or a dislike because of it's presentation, or liking content that was presented in poor tastes yet recognizing it's comedic value.
That's not to say I don't recognize that the like-dislike ratio can also be gamed however.
Yes! No! Garbage!
System would recommend you the content based on your adjustable levels of tolerance for adversarial views, contoversy and tolerance for garbage.
I even considered supporting mixed vote by placing a dot in Yes! No! Garbage! triangle. Basically two axes, agreement and quality, with range of possible agreements narrowing down to zero as quality goes down.
How many times I looked for guidance on YouTube on some software, or cooking recipe or some rare clip, just to find out it was not what I was looking for by the dislikes?
Now I’ll have to watch ”fix your xxx with this easy trick” at 2x speed to know it was crap.
Both Google and rights holders don't care. The more of the video you sit through, the more ads they get to shove in your face. It's a win-win situation for both parties.
I'm using Ublock + Umatrix and still seeing a huge surge in ads across all videos.
Youtube is also injecting pre-rolls at the beginning of content I've uploaded to a new youtube channel that is not monetized (I have no interest in putting ads in front of my content)...so I have zero interest in supporting their ad empire.
What are ads? Ublock Origin on Firefox on PC, here.
>There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that.
My point exactly. So if I get what you say, most of your videos have a fairly inconsequential amount of downvotes, and those that do are not because they're poor quality but rather because it's been disliked by people who weren't your target audience.
If that's your experience as a content creator how can you, as a viewer, consider the like/dislike ratio a good indication of the quality of the content?
Removing it makes paid content so much more attractive for starters...
I am almost laughing as I'm writing this, but reality is moving towards 1984 much quicker that I ever imagined.
The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video. Which obviously is the point. Damn Google got really evil real fast.
Or the video just isn't what the clickbait title says.
I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk.
Ans quite frankly, things being brigaded probably means it's a political hot take, that's even boring when you agree, and just stupid when you don't. If you remove those from the downvoted video list, you're probably left with only a few actually insightful and useful videos.
This is why I stopped using YouTube a few years ago and heavily prefer text+image tutorials to videos nowadays. YouTube is pushing longer videos, because they show you more ads in the middle of them and creators are also rewarded with more money for longer videos + they can insert their "sponsor messages" a.k.a. even more ads.
Nothing says “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever” like removing the 'dislike' count from YouTube videos.
They neither removed nor disabled the dislike button.
And even then, saying they didn't disable the button is only arguably true. The button no longer performs its primary function.
I'm not the one moving the goalpost—it started as "reality is moving towards 1984", then "they removed the ability to give negative feedback", and now it's "they removed the ability to see the negative feedback that others gave." That's a significant change.
> saying they didn't disable the button is only arguably true. The button no longer performs its primary function
I'm more sympathetic to this argument—that the primary purpose of the "dislike" button isn't to give the creator negative feedback, but as a "rating" system, with the only 2 possible ratings "+1" and "-1". The problem with that is that, "they changed the rating system" doesn't seem to merit all of the comparisons to 1984. And "more like 1984" vs. "less like 1984" seems a silly way to evaluate rating systems.
Edit: actually, the rating system changed from "+1", "-1", "no vote", to "+1", "no vote"—since you can see the # of views, then you can determine roughly how many "no votes" there are.
The basic problem is whether a downvote on a cat juggling video means "this is a bad example of juggling cats" or does it mean "I don't like cat juggling"? On YouTube, it's much more likely to mean the latter, but it's the former that's actually useful.
What are those interests that the vast majority of people here share?
I dislike a fair percentage of the topics posted here regularly, or have no interest in them, and I suspect that's not uncommon. A survey on that subject would be fascinating.
That's the difference I think
What makes you say that? Why is the person that doesn't like cat juggling even clicking on the video?
further, YouTube only said the dislike count is private so the moderation still happens
Further, they're a form of violence against the poster. Not sure what other word to use to be told in a single click "You Suck!". It is or arguably can be a form of bullying.
[clarification: I suspect you agree and do not mean to imply otherwise, though I do not know]
Care to link to that policy? I was always of the impression that short low-quality comments that don’t further the discussion are prime examples of acceptable downvote targets here. Disagreeing with a constructively expressed idea is best done by expressing your own argument in a reply.
Amen to that. Not how it always works around here though.
Your point before that part was something I could engage with, but if you really see any form of disagreement as "violence" or a "form of bullying" then I don't understand how you can even function online.
You suck.
HN and some subreddits avoid becoming tools of disinformation because they are managed by dedicated moderators who remove posts, comments, and participants who are acting in bad faith. (Facebook does not do this.)
BTW, I should have known that if I questioned the value of public downvotes on a thread of downvoting enthusiasts that I would... get downvoted.
Youtube is borderline stupid right now for most channels that don't have organic growth... what they should do is re-open monetization and live streaming to everyone as its creating its own hell hole if you ask me with the 9 minutes of smash the like button and 1 minute of content we're seeing on every channel that isn't organically growing or making money through other means.
Here is a great example:
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC7qMMY6UJHpNakTDMz6vVXQ
Auto mechanic basically documenting repairs as they come into the shop.
He is doing it for a few reasons:
1. His own protection. Publishing them is smart
2. Share his experiences
3. Promote doing this work in an exemplary way.
Rather than get a simple how to with a lot of the usual fluff, viewers are getting a story, almost like being an intern of sorts.
I look forward to the problem of the day and have already found myself handling some repair and service work I do differently and better.
I did not think this was content I watch on YouTube, but apparently it is.
Like the new Nintendo Switch Online Expansion pack video.
There's a huge community, that instantly dislikes the video.
There are tons of non-controversial topics for which like/dislike is extremely valuable.
Actually, I don't see the like/dislike on my android TV box, and for that reason, I don't even watch new content on it.
Just have a brief preview and if i'm interested, i'll watch it.
Not necessarily. There are other cases where consumers could use dislike as form of brand boycott
For example if you wanted to watch a video on how to setup WSL 2 on Windows 10 and you see one by Microsoft has 100000 dislikes however it's amazing video that doesn't help you.
Strongly agree. For example in HN itself if someone poses a fact-based positive opinion about China, it is down-voted whenever Americans are online and voting (does not happen when Europeans are online).
So dislike/down-vote has 0 value. In fact, majority of the comments in this thread are against Youtube, which tells me that Youtube has made the correct decision.
That's the problem. You had a tool to judge a video was worth watching without having to watching the ads.
Now you have to watch ads to find out if the video is crap. This is a very good thing. for Google
That said, it does not affect me much as I use YouTube exclusively for music. I used it for other videos as well, but Google is making YouTube a worse platform day by day.
For example, I like fixing stuff and use Youtube for unfamiliar items. Often videos with a high number of dislikes are Spam (usually a bot reading text from some website), Videos where the person handwaves through the steps, videos where the fix is improper, or videos where the creator spends more time monetizing than working through the problem.
I'm really gonna miss this feature.
Downvotes are a massive indicator if a chosen video is inaccurate.
Not discounting what you said. Just found it amusing :)
I do this on stackoverflow. I wouldn't be surprised if this is what happened here as well.
So, if I were to look up how to say "ramen", I might not know if it's supposed to be ra-MEN or RA-men, but I'd know it's wrong if they say it like "r-amen".
Here's a classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXmv8quf_xM
Currently rated 3.7k likes, 15k dislikes. It's so good.
Make a video on a taboo topic. During the first wave you end up with tribal zealot commenting and liking with low/medium viewership.
This pushes the video in the mainstream which causes more views but smaller likes counts. The top comments increase with flamewars in the comments.
Without the dislike the popularity could be negative.
- videos with >95% likes
- mostly political videos that have obviously been brigaded
imo this is a reasonable change
At least when you search for a video topic, you are likely to get a wide range in quality. Regularly surfaced content has a variable amount of dislikes, and almost always the dislike count is signal and not noise.
I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube. I wonder if something like that would be viable, maybe with the addition of a like dislike bar.
In most other websites and contexts anyway, like/dislike is used to share your taste with the algorithm or to the author, and neither of those are disrupted here. The only thing that is disrupted is the tribal action using the dislike button as a way of publicly and anonymously showing hatred towards content.
https://www.polygon.com/2019/12/6/20998648/2019-youtube-rewi...
It was "EA pride and accomplishment" bad. A brainless self glorifying marketing piece that didn't spend a second to even acknowledge all the issues many channels suffered under.
> Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on YouTube?
The worst video on YouTube probably doesn't get actively promoted by Google or carry the weight of being made by Google.
What made the 2018 Rewind any worse than the Rewinds of previous years?
* 2017 music + people doing fun/weird things
* 2018 constant commentary, including mentions on how good youtube/they are and how many good things they did with some music in between. Lead by non other than the man who made it all possible, Mr. Youtube himself: Will Smith.
That last part was sarcasm. There are breakdowns by people more into youtube culture that can point out in detail which inclusions didn't make sense, why music videos from 2016 seem misplaced in a 2018 rewind and how many high profile content creators youtube passed over in order to create the specific public image it wanted to present.
It's funny you refer to Reddit because that's also historically well known for pile-on behavior. Why do you think features such as "hiding vote count for the first few hours" exist? It's been shown that the very first few votes you get can result in the same comment either being downvoted to hell or upvoted.
So if the EA accident was your reasoning for why having dislikes is a good idea, then you really just proved my point, as that too was mostly a meme and perfect proof of pile-on behavior.
Apparently you seem to be in agreement with the group piling on that the contents of the post were bad, otherwise why call it an accident?
> as that too was mostly a meme and perfect proof of pile-on behavior.
So you are saying if it hadn't been a meme most gamers would have up voted a post saying they should feel good from having to spend more on an already full price game?
It has the most downvotes but it definitely doesn't have the worst ratio. The many likes and many dislikes don't suggest "worst video", and it's not the worst video, so all's good there.
It was an effective form of harmless electronic civil disobedience, a simple and albeit entertaining but still meaningful message of solidarity from the masses to a corporate entity.
If something like that ever took off, it would devastate independent publishers and a huge part of Internet culture by draining interactions out of websites. Google tried it before, and fortunately it failed. I think it's one of the worst possible things that could happen to the Web.
Hacker News isn't a content site, but is mainly created for commenting. It is less political than the news sites which removed comments. It can also handle the moderation more easily than news sites partly because it has a very strong ugliness and usability filter.
Hypothesis is such a tool: https://web.hypothes.is/
Take a news site, an article about, say, Trump becomming President. Comments are likely to range from "I can't satnd the guy" though to "I'm so happy he got in". They aren't going to add much of any value to the conversation.
I am seeing more attempts now of people attempting to be "clever" in their comments and start dropping 'facts' taken from various places. Again, interesting at best but at worst it doesn't add anything.
Votes are perhaps less contentious but what are they really saying? I like the article because it is factually correct or I dislike the article because Trump is President?
Slowly? I havent seen comment on majority of new sites for years.
On the other hand: I'm not shocked, majority of stuff written there was basically trash.
What is the average person going to do now that they have a dopamine response addiction to instant feedback and immediate knowledge at their fingertips? Read a book? Go for a walk where they're not constantly scouting for a situation where they can take a picture and receive happy brain chemicals from thousands of people?
Clearly a flawed conclusion. For the result of their experiment they deduced what they wanted it to say. Because we can easily say that the effect is not "dislike attacking" but other effects:
- shy people more afraid to give their opinion not knowing that others have done the same.
- the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it.
Imagine if you were voting for something but no one will give you the result of the votation.
Also, strangely they did not do the same experiment with the "like" button to see if there was not a "like attack".
So when I see something like that, I'm thinking that they are now in the dominant position where they don't have to care about their users anymore...
> the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it
That was exactly the point. They didn't want the attack mobs seeing the fruits of their labor, making it feel useless, making fewer people mob.
Maybe Youtube can somehow incorporate the dislikes into "Likely to enjoy" score similar to how its set up on Google maps. It's pretty accurate from my experience.
A radical approach in the similar vein would be to just turn off half your infra and add a ton of latency to YouTube. That would similarly solve the "dislike attacking behavior" altogether at the cost of having your existing users hate your product, with the added bonus of server cost savings.
- Site is usable.
- Site updates to significantly less usable version but keeps the old version around.
- They keep breaking things about the old version.
- "Oh no one uses the old version anymore, let's EOL it to save resources."
"We removed the dislike button. This resulted in a reduction in dislikes, people are happier."
They made a specific action less rewarding, so that (obviously) resulted in the action being done less often.
It would happen exactly the same if they did this for the "like" button.
you know how when you navigate google drive on the web you have to double-click. like, what, a website, where you double click links to navigate? the internal study that justified that was 12 people; 6 of whom either immediately tried to double click (2 IIRC) or eventually tried to double click (4 IIRC). so, 50% didn't shit a brick when they were presented with a broken website interaction, so it was greenlit.
source: I was at google when this happened and I argued with the pm's when this happened.
Single click to navigate in a file manager is what got us those laughably inefficient interfaces where you have check boxes beside every item and no reasonable way to multi-select.
Maybe those 6 people immediately double clicked because it's the only non-stupid way of doing it?
are you familiar with google drive?
confusingly enough, in the google docs "browser", which is some limited interface to some subset of google drive, a single click is all that's needed to open a doc. but in google drive, opening the same doc takes two clicks.
> and no reasonable way to multi-select.
fwiw, I have absolutely no problem multi-selecting in google photos; another google-joint with single-click to open/interact/etc.
> Maybe those 6 people immediately double clicked
as I said, only two people immediately double clicked.
The opening paragraph seems to equate these "dislike attacks" with "creator harassment" but I'm not seeing any data on dislike constituting a form of harassment.
Don't get me wrong, creators suffer a LOT of online harassment. I'm just very unconvinced dislike buttons are a primary tool of harassers.
At the time of the check I just did, that video currently has 227 upvotes and over 56,000 downvotes, making it the worst ratio’ed video on YouTube I have ever seen.
That incident may have played a role in this decision.
> gets downvoted
> removes downvote button
Youtube Rewind 2018: most disliked video on Youtube history
Youtube Rewind 2019: top 10 of most disliked videos
Youtube in 2020: no Rewind video
Youtube in 2021: you know what? we are just gonna remove dislikes
Just unfortunely she won in contest that YT sponsored, or maybe I'm naive?
I'll just assume every video has as many, if not more, dislikes and will turn to other sources for finding quality content (if at all).
And they might as well get rid of the comments section too cause that's where people will voice their opinions.. but maybe that's part of the plan.
Anyway, I've been a paying premium member since the beginning but the second I stop seeing dislike counts is the second I find other things to do with my time. Sad, because I really enjoy surfing YouTube.
If someone tells you there's an election in some province of a country that you know nothing about, and they tell you there were two candidates A and B, and they tell you that candidate A received 17,652 votes, do you not need to know the total number of votes cast in order to assess the election results? I always thought you did.
I can probably count the number of times I've come across a comments section on YouTube that hasn't been a dumpster fire of idiocy on two hands (and I'm being generous).
I'm guessing you don't listen to much music on YouTube then? The great comments honestly at least double the enjoyment. E.g https://youtu.be/q4xKvHANqjk
I see a lot of positive comments for my favorite creators too. Would hate to get rid of the encouragement.
The game?
For example "Baumgartner Restoration" are decently popular at X00,000 views/video and comments are definitely civil, but it definitely doesn't target the typical youtube viewer. Game making tutorials in Godot are normally in the X,000-X0,000 range, which is "niche" for youtube, and they are normally not only civil but some times even contain useful tips!
Removing dislikes (hiding them being step one) seems to be one of the better ways to improve the quality of content and commentary. Just for the fact that it removes the ability of a single group to brigade any content/creator they dislike or disagree with.
It sort of does; comments go from black to grey to the point where its nearly invisible.
Hiding the dislike info on CNN seems important now.
Public trust in government is low.
Public trust in corporate media is low.
It's been policy to manufacture consent in the US for quite a while now.
Hard to say this move isn't more of the same, and it's equally hard to say it helps more than it hurts too.
It's manufactured consent and managed down dissent in action.
Personally I wonder if it is even possible to meet all the demands being placed on governments. The country is composed of such different groups pulling in opposite directions... something could snap at some point.
The US's own intelligence apparatus is pessimistic about the ability of the government to adapt to these changes in the next 20 years. Check out the IC's Global Trends 2040 report[1] to see what I'm talking about: a particularly salient quote is as follows:
"At the state level, the relationships between societies and their governments in every region are likely to face persistent strains and tensions because of a growing mismatch between what publics need and expect and what governments can and will deliver. Populations in every region are increasingly equipped with the tools, capacity, and incentive to agitate for their preferred social and political goals and to place more demands on their governments to find solutions. At the same time that populations are increasingly empowered and demanding more, governments are coming under greater pressure from new challenges and more limited resources. This widening gap portends more political volatility, erosion of democracy, and expanding roles for alternative providers of governance. Over time, these dynamics might open the door to more significant shifts in how people govern."
I think the key phrase here is "expanding roles for alternative providers of governance". It seems like these people expect parts of the government to wither away and for the free market to step in with solutions.
[1] https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/GlobalT...
First: Washington Economic Consensus --And this is both parties being aligned with and giving priority to the interests of people and corporations of significant means. (more money and more command of resources)
Second, and root cause of the first: Money in politics. We allow transactions here that are called bribes in many nations, and that's just getting started. John Oliver did a segment on fundraising some while back. New Congress people brought into a grim room with desks and phones and books of people willing to fund their re-election, given just a few minor commitments
To sum up: We have a priority problem, and ordinary people just are not a priority.
On that basis alone, hiding the data hurts more than it helps.
Look at the recent move to make auto manufacturers responsible for reducing drunk driving.
There is a growing trend to regulate through corporations. I am saying that.
I am also saying we should be questioning that trend.
Given that after Trump won in 2016, a video leaked of a Google meeting of higher-ups literally in tears that their side didn't win, I'm thinking it's this.
Now they are hiding downvotes. On the US "National News" YT channel, almost all of the promoted videos are downvoted.
I'm always amazed at the discrepancy between what's promoted in the MSM and where popular opinion is. Meanwhile top podcasters routinely trounce MSM viewership ratings.
Perhaps these are the death throes of a dying propaganda machine?
This is my thought as well.
Its funny how quickly we've gone from people trying to redefine censorship, i.e.: "it's not censorship if a corporation does it!", to just blatantly pathetic attempts to squash dissent like this latest move.
The propaganda machine is not dying at all!
It's running just fine, and will be well funded. You can count on that, even if the losses are sustained over a longer period of time.
And it's all about basic economic policy, and it's about the war machine. Ever increasing economic freedom using the miliary as a world police and defense system is very unpopular. People see it as unjust, unnecessary, and painfully expensive use of their hard work and tax dollars.
Back in the 70's as a grade school kid, we had a media week that I remember vividly. It was about bias in media and also understanding advertising as propaganda.
(I know, crazy to think about as a class room topic for young people today, right?)
We went through the various propaganda forms using ADS for context.
Plain Clothes
Bandwagon
Cherry picking
Etc...
We were required to find one AD for each form and explain how the propaganda is used to sell a product by advocating for it in what appears to be authoritative and favorable ways, but really is a lie, or at best, hiding of what would be obvious downsides.
In media, the idea of there always being bias was introduced, and I believe we had these weeks (and there were two, one for media, one for propaganda / ADS) in response to the controversial decision by President Reagan to repeal the fairness doctrine.
(That doctrine required equal time be given to opposing views and did not allow one point of view to dominate the broadcast and print media and this was seen as important to the concept of a public commons and a robust body politic.)
Yes, 8th grade discussions. Simplified from what I put here, but the core elements were definitely in the material. I was very interested and thought about this often as I grew up, but I digress.
The media part, this idea of their always being bias centered around the idea of objectivity and just how hard that is to actually do. It takes larger numbers of us, working together over a sustained time to be objective. A single person, or even small team however motivated and funded they may be will flat out have bias.
Secondly, that bias is?
OK!
Given how expensive and time consuming objective material is, the idea of us having to have it for the news and other public commons type discussions on policy, war, economics, and such does not make any sense.
So far so good, until some problems showed up, and those problems are:
Clarity - where fact and opinion are well differentiated and easy for the reader to discern
Honesty - where the bias of the piece is clear, authors disclose conflicts of interest
Side bar: A related thing is this concept of "always two sides to every story." and by including both sides the material is somehow more better!
It's not.
Fact is, there are the hard facts, who, what, where, when, why and how type stuff, and there is opinion as to what those facts might mean.
Sky is blue, many say it's orange, heads up debate tonight at 11! We report, you decide!
End side bar.
Back to the media and advertising weeks of education. Regarding media bias, we were required to find news media, written from different points of view, and to determine whether the stated bias, or point of view, is accurate.
To prep us for this activity, they gave us news paper clippings, magazine articles and mentioned broadcast media, radio and news programs we could watch as time permits and they highlighted various points of view as examples.
The big ones was labor / populist vs big business and State vs Local government.
What stuck with me was this statement from our teacher at the time:
"There is less from the labor point of view today and many expect that to continue." Was something along those lines anyway. I do not recall exactly, but I do recall the idea of labor being sidelined in the discussion and wondering why that is happening when so many do labor.
Today, we get almost zero news and commentary from big, corporate media written from the labor / populist point of view. Everything is business or state point of view framing. Nearly everything! I have watched it decline, until pretty much gone, and then the Internet happened!
One last thing to say on all this:
Big media branding is not accurate. FOX won in court asserting it's right to force journalists to lie and misrepresent. For profit news is not fair, does not serve the public interest, and frankly does not inform people very well at all!
Is there any wonder it's unpopular and widely disliked?
Similar dynamics are in play for government.
When people produce and deliver news and commentary from the labor / populist point of view, and it is at all reputable, the ratings flat out crush big media all day long.
When policy is floated out there to address basic issues seeing clear majority support are then walked back, mixed in with obscure, unpopular policy, disapproval spikes in a day almost.
These moves are almost laughable, if they were not so serious in nature.
We are moving into increasingly tough, authoritarian and potentially expensive, high risk times, in my view.
And back to my original point:
The machine is not dying at all!
Dissent is widespread yet seemingly appearing to be tepid and it's difficult for ordinary people to get an accurate view. In particular, minority, contrarian views are amplified consistently whether they have merit or not. A great example is the talking heads, where an otherwise obvious thing is literally debated into being questionable! All it takes is a few, or even two talking heads, one rational and one full bat shit put on repeat for a few weeks in a row and suddenly, "many say..." is a thing!
For decades now, long overdue policy has somehow failed in an amazing number of ways, leading people to believe our government is packed chock full of idiots, when the fact is more grim: those people are being paid to do what they are doing far more than they are simply bat shit, or wrong somehow. They understand what they are doing.
So no.
The machine is not dying, in my view. What we are seeing is a far more overt, aggressive move toward authoritarianism and fascism as clear evidence of it's ongoing success requiring more be done because having more people worse off every year tends to add right up.
They did what?
Oh, this song? Okay that's video rather than videos which makes a big difference. Not great, agreed.
Do you think like/dislikes on YouTube represent popular opinion?
If so, you are profoundly deluded.
No, a tiny representation of excess idle time YouTube arrow clickers demonstrates nothing. We have seen many times throughout this very discussion that loads of people have gained the confused, self-destructive notion that it is a proxy for the public at large.
Mask mandates and vaccine mandates are supported by a majority to heavy majority of Americans (obviously varying by area, but over the country). What do you think the representation is on YouTube videos discussing the same? Now as homework, contemplate why that is.
Compare these statistics with the narrative promoted by the MSM sources featured on YT's "National News" channel.
Yes, those who downvote self-select as those who are willing to downvote. I find it illustrative that you need to dismiss them as, "excess idle time YouTube arrow clickers". Couldn't the same be said for the time you spent writing your comment here? Does your characterization of their idle time make their opinion less valid?
>profoundly deluded...
Perhaps instead of trying to dismiss this dissent as part of an echo-chamber, you might look in the mirror and ask if your perception of these issues is governed by your own echo-chamber?
It is a bit rich to step into this discussion on these terms. The topic is the MSM echo-chamber and how it is out of touch with a large portion of viewers. Removing downvotes is perceived as a defense of this failing paradigm.
> Perhaps instead of trying to dismiss this dissent as part of an echo-chamber, you might look in the mirror and ask if your perception of these issues is governed by your own echo-chamber?
Throughout this thread there are a small number of people declaring that likes/dislikes lets you detect "propaganda", "misinformation", or demonstrates "public opinion". This is laughably, ridiculous untrue. Any actual poll has perilously little in common with the ratios seen on YouTube.
Perhaps you could make the case that votes should follow the lines of the poll. That's a bit besides the point isn't it? The point is that coverage has become so egregiously out-of-touch that these downvotes are common.
I can understand and appreciate how someone who might agree with a large swath of the MSM propaganda bubble would have a hard time understanding this. This is of course, the purpose of propaganda.
Even if we think scientific fact changes based upon polling, "MSM" videos on YouTube aren't 55% positive, they're often < 5% positive. Because some people truly believe that clicking a little arrow on YouTube, or disagreeing with a "narrative", changes reality. A tiny minority, and ultimately the total engagement level is a rounding error generally, but throughout this discussion we've seen people take that tiny, self-selecting group and hold it as universal truth.
The narrative promoted by YT and the MSM isn't accepted by around 50% of the US. Pick any contentious issue you feel is settled and take an honest look at the dissenting views. Consider any malign incentives of the claim you support. If you're not capable of this, then check your tooling.
Regardless of your attempts to lay claim to "objective truths" or "reality", there's a narrative surrounding these issues. Taking subjective perception and describing it as "reality" as you have above is going to be problematic. These are basic concepts that need to be dealt with before you can examine the natural world or media narratives.
>"The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best." Thomas Sowell
Perhaps these videos are downvoted because viewers find them to be egregious deceptions?
It is fine to imply that there should be a 50/50 split in YT votes, but this ignores the disgust factor. It also ignores how engaged proponents of these views may or may not be. A simple explanation might be that the level of disgust of the dissenters exceeds the halfhearted engagement of the proponents. Which again, is besides the point.
You speak of delusion before claiming an exclusive license on "reality", but at the same time you wish to discount the evidence before your very eyes, the vocal dissent here and elsewhere. That's your prerogative. You're free to believe what you will, but don't expect to sell others on it. Trying to dismiss dissent as delusion exceeds these concepts. Of course you are free to believe what you will, just as others are free to dissent. Again, a basic issue of logic.
https://www.axios.com/media-trust-crisis-2bf0ec1c-00c0-4901-...
Those people having an opinion is not the problem.
Neither is people disliking videos.
"The problem" boils down to corporate media having to actually compete on a non broadcast medium.
How something is presented matters.
Who presents it matters.
Whether comments are allowed matters.
Doing the work to understand why there are more dislikes than expected is a good answer to "the problem."
This is what new media savvy entities do, and guess what? They do not have dislike problems.
Old media is rooted in the broadcast mentality. They do not take feedback and they expect to be an authority.
And for decades now, they have abused all of that.
No comments, hiding dislikes is more of the same abuse and is not helpful.
This will fundamentally change what I use YouTube for. If I can't determine the quality of a video without having to waste time watching it, I will just look somewhere else.
It's good for Google. That's all that matters. More crap videos will be clicked and more ads will be watched before the content starts and the user can judge wheather or not to watch.
More ads watched. That's the only consideration.
> You can still dislike videos to further personalize and tune your recommendations.
I think that basing recommendations on a single dimension is flawed in its own right.
And I would say that all but two had either a misleading title or a misleading thumbnail. These are things directly related to my interests: self defense, computer security, lockpicking, spaceflight, physics, automobiles. But other than the young man talking about SpaceX (Marcus House) and the Lock Picking Lawyer, every single video had either a title that misrepresented or completely lied about the content, or a very attractive thumbnail that was barely tangentially associated with the content.
People are going to game it. They are going to cheat.
Especially when the platform itself allows it. But hey! “Small creators!”, right?
Which means my videos can finally stop being brigaded by those damn round earthers! Spread the truth!
"Hey, Reddit did this thing. We're a little like Reddit; should we do the thing?"
"I dunno... AB test it."
AB test shows net effect is fewer dislikes, much like Reddit saw
"Cool; let's roll it out."
ah yes, google looking out for the little folks...
someday, a technical solution like not allowing downvotes until a channel gets so many views or subscribers may be feasible, but until then, this will have to suffice
Probably told Susan that they'd stop advertising and start suing unless they did this.
Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.
I think that unintentionally removes down votes on obviously bad videos that people do not waste much time watching.
For instance, an hour-long video claiming to be what you're looking for, but actually consisting of a still image and a URL to a scam/spam site.
I've seen dislike attacks happen. And if it takes a non-trivial procedure to make them count, people will document that procedure. For instance, hypothetically:
"Alright everybody, here's the link. Remember, mute the tab right away but don't mute the video itself; wait 2 minutes (the timer that starts when you click the link will go green to let you know), then click the dislike button."
I've seen much more complex instructions offered as part of gaming a poll, as well as sites built to help semi-automate or simplify the process.
The key distinction that would be useful for YouTube to measure: did you encounter the video and then dislike it, or did you visit a video you were referred to for the sole purpose of disliking it? I don't think hiding dislike counts serves that purpose, though.
[1]: https://81m.org/
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20211023061808/https://81m.org/
Say for example I used a batch of 100 HN accounts to mass downvote your comment. After a while an hourly job runs that looks at all those votes in aggregate and determines they were coordinated (for simplicity sake they all came from the same IP) and removes them. You'd see a large shift in the net score of your comment all of the sudden. This isn't HN manipulating anything, it is them doing their job to prevent abuse on the platform.
Steam (a video game store) does this already. They categorize reviews as either being recent (made in the last 30 days) or all-time. If a game has excellent all-time reviews, but mixed recent reviews, then you can suspect something has recently upset the playerbase.
It is low signal all the way through, and relegating likes and dislikes to a signal for recommendations is wise.
The steam review graph is a fantastically useful tool for users with a huge SNR and I don't understand why you think otherwise.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-09-25-total-war-rome...
"Total War: Rome 2 has suffered a Steam review bombing run over women characters and a recent update - but it turns out the game is working as intended.
"Creative Assembly's PC strategy game, which came out in 2013, saw hundreds of new negative Steam reviews this week over the frequency with which women generals show up in the game and related claims about historical accuracy."
and another one:
https://www.techspot.com/news/91212-life-strange-true-colors...
"The reason behind the Chinese users' anger is the inclusion of a symbol banned in their country. On the main street of the game's Haven Springs setting is a shop called Treasures of Tibet, which displays a Tibetan flag prominently outside the store."
Valve has come out on more than one occasion to let customers and studios know that they are constantly working to mitigate brigading.
EDIT: While not the norm, as you were alluding, gamer toxicity and brigading can also be relatively mainstream. A popular website among such circles is
https://www.oneangrygamer.net/
Reading the posts and comments can be quite revolting.
Really though, my main point I actually care about making is that the steam review system is far superior to a simple like/dislike system which YT implements.
At the bottom of your first article:
> Meanwhile, Total War: Rome 2 has an "overwhelmingly negative" recent reviews rating, with a "mostly positive" overall rating.
Ahh, so it seems the steam rating system is working! Even though these games got "brigaded", users are still able to see the overall and historical ratings to get a better picture of what's going on.
This actually lets you see the rating before the brigade started. And if the game is actually good, the brigaded ratings will amount to a blip amongst the other reviews. Case in point, here is the current steam page for R:TW2, with "very positive " overall rating: https://store.steampowered.com/app/214950/Total_War_ROME_II_...
-- Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean that it didn't happen. My personal experience of using steam since its inception (HL2 launch on Steam, 2004), so roughly 17 years, is that I've come across this on a more than a few occasions. I tend to collect digital goods in a hoarding method, so I'm up to over 3700+ games in my library and I check a lot of them out when I can, even if I have no time to really play them anymore. The firs thing I read?
REVIEWS!
As mentioned - this is not the norm, and I agree with your general premise, but please don't dismiss what actually happened and what I witnessed (no, I don't have screenshots because I wasn't documenting it happening in real time when it occurred). The examples I brought up were illustrative of some gamers' groupthink mentality (including oneangrygamer.net, which has in mid-2021 disabled comments because they were ridiculously toxic - misogynistic, sexist, homophobic and racist)
Also - I'm not OP, FYI. I was backing OP's point.
I can't be bothered to respond to the rest of your post, unfortunately, because it comes across as vapidly dismissive.
Look up GamerGate if you'd like more information on brigading and misogynistic groupthink among related sub-communities.
What you are thinking of is metacritic where anyone can post, it is very prone to brigading, but steam reviews isn't.
Long-time Netflix subscribers might be having déjà vu right now. Old Netflix had a ratings system, and users could filter content by average rating and see the top-rated movies and shows. Netflix later replaced that system with a recommendation engine. Not only does the recommendation engine not get my taste right, but it sure seems to recommend to me a lot of Netflix Originals.
That’s literally not the case anywhere though. Maybe China’s social credit system, maybe, but even then I think you start with a presumed “innocence”.
I can’t think of any system of rights that are afforded after evidence merit and not birth. That’s not what rights are.
Not going to ask you what full rights means, as it implies you consider rights a gift from a government and not restrictions on a government.
Privileges are features that may be taken for granted as rights but are not enumerated protections. You have no right to drive, it’s a privilege that we all agree is handy.
I don’t think you are playing with semantics, but this is not a difficult concept.
GP makes a completely baseless claim that you don’t have “full rights” until someone says you do. They are talking about privledges.
Keep the actual buttons, as they signal to YouTube what you do and do not want to see in future, but the actual counts only have use to the creator... and even then a simple ratio or percentage alongside the video in the Creator Studio is enough; there's no need for actuall numbers.
What's not been mentioned is that YouTube add a small % of fake clicks to the like/dislike buttons, and also hide the real counts for a while, if there's a rush on clicks (to dissuade click-bandwagoning).
I honestly don't know if it's a generational thing or overall cultural shift, but it feels like negativity (at least in the workplace is where I've seen this) is either less tolerated or less shared. There's a bias towards being positive about everything, even for things that aren't... great. It feels like self censorship, and this isn't even for things that are political, just subjective.
Hiding dislikes is something Brands want.
That's the word. It isn't really "likes" in the sense that we normally think of it. It's ticks on the relationship of "engagement" to "dollars".
IIRC, Facebook was pretty upfront about this being why they didn't implement a "dislike" button; the information wasn't valuable to them.
I constantly got heavily downvoted slideshow + text-to-speech autogenerated garbage videos that were ranked above good videos on search results
A good intermediate solution would be to only record downvotes that come with a comment.
Typically administrators respond by making it harder for the contributors rather than taking risk of poorer quality for the users, to contribute you have to become effectively professional and abide by institutional rules you may not agree with. Distributed editing tools only solves part of the problem and cannot not solve how to keep generating professional quality content without paying.
Strong moderation is what differentiates SO from Quora, I rather live with SO style rules as a contributor than suffer poor Quora type content quality as a user.
[1] I am cognizant of outdated version problems you raised, my anecdotal experience is in general the quality of answers that are present for a reader has not dropped massively in last 10 years.
My code throughput have reduced a lot in recent years with changing roles and I prefer reading the actual documentation, I am no longer solving a immediate/specific problem. Even then I still click search hits on SO few times a week, and most times after clicking through a few questions I can find what I need.
Your(others) experience will vary from my mine of course, but I don't see anyone attempting a better model or better content short of source documentation .
As the mix of us who knew early versions of Google and Stack overflow gets diluted year by year by new users who don't know how well these systems used to work this will become less and less of a problem for them so they can sleep well at work.
Until someone disrupts them. I'm happy to say it feels we are getting close to that moment now ;-)
At some point I wanted to have a high score to see if it would affect my daily rate (it didn't) or if I could use it somehow (same as having tons of stars on GitHub - another useless errand).
I started replying to a bunch of questions and the sheer stupidity of most of them made me realise I wasn't ready for that. Most of the content on SO is not great. There are definitely few gems in there and I certainly enjoyed "the <center> cannot hold", but most of the times the docs are better.
On a side note. I never understood people that copy code from Stack Overflow. I can understand people who are not familiar with a programming language - but surely if you're a minimum proficient it would be faster to just write what you need to do or look for a library to do it?
Encouraging them to write their own solution or even a critique/comment is not necessarily better.
You can also down vote questions not only answers, a question could be poor but it does not mean I can come up with a better one.
Common issues I come across are very vague statements without an actual question, very broad advisory /opinionated questions, very specific solve this bug in my day job/code , no examples/illustrations added, or a big log or code dump - i.e. no effort to separate out the actual problem statement, do my homework kind of questions, typically there will already be comments asking for improvements without much impact.
I wouldn't down-vote a question that I don't fully understand ( I guess that is true for most users too), at the same time I want to make sure bad content is not encouraged. It is just internet points for both users, nothing to fret about.
and way more spam, no thanks.
You as a user should watch the video no matter what and then rate the creator, not skip it if you see a large amount of dislikes.
Dislikes on YouTube and similar platforms don't have any cost or barrier to entry.
The same is simply not true of YouTube or any other kind of social media upvote/downvote system - anyone can sign up for an account, and their votes immediately count and have equal weighting.
The same is not true of Stack Exchange or HN, where you have to put a lot of effort in with a community to be able to downvote something.
I don't think this is true for YouTube - you need a Google account, and you can't create a Google account without verifying your phone number. (Unless you can create numerous accounts with one phone number? But that seems like an easy loophole to close.)
I've argued against it in the past (since it's very important context to any reader) but to no avail. An upvote and a downvote rarely cancel each other out. They have different units and shouldn't be summed together. A score of 25 could mean the answer is perfect but has only seen moderate traffic, or incredibly dangerous but has seen high traffic.
Here's a good list of controversial answers on SO: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/466/most-.... They would mostly look like great answers from the net score.
Stories can only be flagged, which as I understand can lead to bans/losing the privilege if it's abused.
Same. It feels like a passive-aggressive elitism, and not simply an anti-abuse feature.
Given the site we're on, I don't have a problem as much with the elitism (I'm not the target demographic, after all -I'm older and not working in tech) as much as with the "passive-aggressive" part of the rhetoric behind withholding downvote capability.
A fake trailer can for example be spotted by the number of negative votes. If the negative votes concept is gone, using a low number of positive votes as indicator is less effective.
When you put dislike button, you are adding a degree of freedom in expressing an intent for the user. It is upto you, how you use this information. Most systems fail in this task and then they just remove the degree of freedom as their solution.
It's part of a trend towards fake, cloying, passive-aggressive forced positivity across the whole industry. It's a California thing.
Time was, if you didn't like a bit of code, you could say so. Nowadays, you have to wrap criticism in right zillion levels of disingenuous praise before you can even start getting to the point -- and the you get fake "thank you for the excellent feedback!!!!1!!" typed with gritted teeth and fantasies of backstabbing later on.
I've always found the in-your-face New York style more genuine, more honest, more efficient, and ultimately, kinder and more respectful.
While if it's a video of a political debate I would expect there to be a ton of dislikes by default, so I suppose it wouldn't matter much in that scenario.
And in howto/explanation-videos, if dislikes aren't shown, there's no signal for people telling them whether or not it's a good explanation.
I suppose you could devise a dislike count yourself by calculating the likes/views ratio. But why... people are deliberately putting their content up publicly for display and as such are opening themselves up for scrutiny/criticism/dislikes. It can't be all praise and hugs and kisses. That's how we treat children.
I sometimes look for obscure how-to's, and I get garbage videos not even answering the question. If YouTube can get rid of all that garbage, then not having a dislike button is fine.
The problem with Youtube as I see it is that these comments never rise to the top. It's always compliments and ass-kissing and high-fives that make it there.
Twitter tends to gravitate towards the opposite.
It's all fascinating though.
That's because they have engineered their comment system in a way that comments the AI perceives as negative are shadow-banned or buried deep down so people don't get a chance to read them.
In the 90's there was an add-on that allowed anyone to comment on any webpage: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~orit/utok.html
Although imagine having such a tool nowadays and opening cnn.com, it'd be like walking into a MAGA rally.
I agree, this "toxic positivity" can't be good for society in the long term. The continued drive towards stupidity and unquestioning, docile populations is going to slowly turn into a massive dystopia.
There is a red line between caring for the others, and what is nothing more than plain censorship via "toxic positivity".
If they actually believed in the rationale behind this change, they would get rid performance reviews for engineers at Youtube too.
They made some comments[1] before that change:
> Seems like when it comes to ratings it's pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference. Thus, the ratings system is primarily being used as a seal of approval, not as an editorial indicator of what the community thinks about a video. Rating a video joins favoriting and sharing as a way to tell the world that this is something you love.
> We're glad there are so many awesome videos on YouTube, but all of this begs the question: if the majority of videos are getting five stars, how useful is this system really? Would a thumbs up/thumbs down be more effective, or does favoriting do the trick of declaring your love for a video?
[1]https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/five-stars-dominate-rat...
Of course, there are other situations where ratings between 1 and 5 stars _are_ informative: think critic reviews of movies, video, etc. But I think most crowdsourced reviews have kind of converged organically to a like/dislike model.
It's like a secret communication channel were you don't have to listen to the paid raters at 5 or the angry mob shouting about how it didn't <something completely irrelevant> or how it arrive late because of customs.
In the same way I write a two star rating when I really dislike something so other smart people can easily find my message ;-)
2 = bad product
3 = average product
4 = good product
5 = bots from seller
Flag dissent as `misinformation`, remove comments, remove dislikes. Bit by bit, clamping down on the ability for the public to revolt.
I.e. If they say something false on purpose, they're likely to get sued out of existence. Whereas, some random guy can just say "oh, I was only joking, or this is just entertainment, or it's just freedom of speech man... YOU are responsible for checking my dis-info" after spreading lies on purpose.
Personally, for these reasons, I trust the mainstream news sources MUCH more than the random person on the internet that may or may not be trying to sell me some snakeoil on the side (e.g. Alex Jones).
Disclaimer: These are my own views, and not of my employer.
Only if they piss off the wrong "well-connected" billionaire. Otherwise, nah, never ever going to happen.
Google wants youtube to be all network and brands making content. ie. a future version of what TV is now. What actual people want is creator made videos(diy/review/podcast videos and everything else that make youtube wonderful).
This disconnect has been happening since google bought youtube and this recent change only reflects google wanting to hide backlash/or dislike from who it sees should rightfully be on youtube, brands/networks/corporations.
From the article:
> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks. Our experiment data confirmed that this behavior does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.
People who are just getting started on YouTube tend to have poor production quality and editing skills compared to established channels. That might have been acceptable in YouTube's early days when there were no standards, but now we're at a point where we've all seen thousands of videos on YouTube, and we all collectively expect high quality content.
Seems quite natural that smaller channels that are just getting started by people who are still learning will be disliked more often than large channels. Hardly a valid reason to eliminate the dislike button.
Somehow, despite this failure as an executive - a failure of the kind that got Vic Gundotra fired - she has not only not been fired but ended up running the site that beat her, where she has spent the last half decade trying to turn it back into Google Video.
In 2018 some TV executives with Disney ties founded Moonbug Entertainment, which proceeded to swallow up lots of the more popular channels. Sound familiar? Such as Little Baby Bum, Cocomelon and Blippi, the last two of which were $120 million. All excellent programming. This seems to be the way of the World.
My son also loves Vlad and Niki. They make cute, silly videos that gross millions of US dollars per month. There is serious money involved in this now.
> "<dislike number> of people <something funny related to the video>"
This video was remarkable for the fact that it maintained pretty much a perfectly equal number of likes and dislikes for years (rarely off by more than 1). It was a tacit agreement among viewers: if you saw a mismatched count, it was your duty to vote towards restoring the balance.
The two numbers are probably off by several hundred these days.
Edit: And it was corrected immediately. Refreshed and they were back to even.
While this may seem pretty cool and fun to you and me, in Youtube's view this is an "attack".
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Low quality garbage.
I don’t understand why a dislike brigade could be harmful but a like brigade couldn’t be (like propaganda and/or misinformation). They seem to have considered only the impact on creators, who are a small percentage of the population, and not the impact on susceptible viewers, who are much larger in number.
Likes or dislikes in isolation are pretty coarse metrics. Is it small, medium, big, or a huge number? Outside of that, it doesn't really matter.
The ratio, however, can be hugely misleading, and is most certainly one of the factors leading to ignorance bubbles. I just replied to another comment that held this ratio as a demonstration of "popular opinion", and this is a very common assumption.
It isn't popular opinion. It is the usually tiny, self-selecting group of individuals who seek out this information and then purposefully engage with it. The more engaged a bubble is, the more outsized this ratio will be.
Vaccination content is a great example. A heavy majority of the public is pro-vaccination, pro-mandates, pro-masking, etc. But they do it and go on with their life. They aren't watching videos and clicking little arrows hoping to change the world. Anti-vax people spend their days filling Facebook feeds, sharing memes, and clicking up and down arrows. So videos for the former tend to have terrible ratios, while the latter have great ratios. Despite being fringe beliefs. But then people come out of it deluded into thinking it's popular sentiment, and they're really just the "silent majority", etc.
What creator that wants to produce high quality content wouldn’t want to see how their videos are performing? Total lunacy. All this in response to “dislike attacks” which are likely extremely uncommon.
> it’s an important step to reduce behavior that aims to silence and harass creators
Can someone legitimately get behind the fact that pushing a button that says you dislike the content is silencing or harassing the creator? If they had targeted specific comments that would maybe make sense but literally by pushing a button this is the case?
Metrics would support that. A large number of humans speak less when they see their speech is unpopular.
This is a good thing. Some videos are bad.
People who make content in the public sphere should expect others to engage with it.
That's controversial. Determining correctness by popularity is one of the most common logical fallacies.
What isn't controversial is that allowing targeted harassment of creators is bad for YouTube.
If I call myself a baker and open up a bakery, my customers will either like my cakes, dislike my cakes, or not have a strong opinion either way. They will express their opinions in a variety of online and offline forums. Some of them might be cranks and trolls. Others might be discriminatory towards people who look like me. Those people are jerks, although it is sometimes hard to tell at first. It is even harder to have formal rules for fairly and efficiently filtering out the jerks.
But the point of having a public business is that you're putting yourself out there. If you don't want to get the feedback, maybe you should be able to disable the up/downvote feature on your videos, just like you can disable comments. And I completely get why some people disable comments on YouTube, for the same reason I get why some companies will want an active presence on Facebook and Twitter but not reddit.
But if you're going to take away up/downvotes site-wide, then YouTube's same rationale should apply to disabling comments site-wide. The harm that you can commit through paragraphs of text is so much more than you can in a single bit. Coordinated harassment campaigns can use comments to doxx, to spread misinformation, to send viruses and malware, and more.
And you know what, we need to get rid of elections too. That's just a single bit you flip for a candidate or an issue. If the concern isn't the harm of the downvote but the danger of compressing discussion into such a lossy format (like how people critique Twitter's character limits as to why it is a bad platform for nuanced discussion), then voting for elections seems to be just a problematic, right?
> The harm that you can commit through paragraphs of text is so much more than you can in a single bit.
That's whataboutism. It's an important topic as well, but not what's being discussed.
I'm not sure why you raise elections, but the premise ("if the concern isn't the harm of the downvote") is antithetical to the discussion (which is concerning the harm of targeted downvote campaigns).
Part of the toxic positivity movement recently has been to re-frame everything disagreeable as a personal attack against them, using words like "silence" and "invalidate" to manufacture outrage. It's concerning to see this terminology permeate into corporate lingo now too...
Surely the pendulum must start turning soon?
But in the reality, there are many smaller creators who is frequently being harassed by trolls (have you heard about those young Chinese patriots trolling over Korean and Japanese channels?) and one of their tool is the dislike button. And creators have been complaining about this for many years, so I would say in fact YT was super lazy on this particular issue, but at least better late than never...
And how does this really even address the issue at hand, won't they just move to the comments?
But, unfortunately, the system doesn't always work, and when it fails, it's usually because you're being actively targeted and the system isn't doing anything to stop it. So you're stuck between "leave the like bar visible, and nobody watches my videos because state actors are using bots to dislike my videos" and "hide the like bar, and nobody watches my videos because most people who hide their like bar are asshats." Either way, nobody watches your videos, and it doesn't necessarily mean your videos suck.
In other words, nobody hides the like bar unless they are either being massively downvoted, or they expect to be massively downvoted. Which means that a hidden like bar might as well be 100% red.
Why do you think that is the case? It's probably because the actual cases of people being dislike mobbed are *way* rarer than the case of people wanting to hide that their content is garbage.
But that doesn’t mean dislike mobbing doesn’t happen, or that it shouldn’t be addressed.
I personally suspect that this is a step toward removing the dislike button at all (which is an obvious way to eliminate this attack vector) but they're just not ready to remove the button due to some other factors.
So we're going to fix a UI fail by censoring dislikes on every video? How about just making the option more apparent as your posting a video? Why should everyone be deprived of a feature just because some people don't know another feature exists? This logic is baffling to me.
> I personally suspect that this is a step toward removing the dislike button at all (which is an obvious way to eliminate this attack vector) but they're just not ready to remove the button due to some other factors.
And now you just admitted you don't think it's just because people don't know that option exists. I honestly don't know what you're position is besides that whatever Google does must be right.
Of course, the option will still have a default setting even with that modification. That doesn't change anything. I'll say again; in an amortized platform level, only default option matters. Other "choice" won't make any dent. One counterfactual scenario: YT decided to make # of dislike visible only for creators who opts in and now 99.999% of videos don't show it. If you're 100% happy with that situation, then I can respect your opinion.
> Why should everyone be deprived of a feature just because some people don't know another feature exists?
It's not because some people don't know some feature exists. It's because the platform is the one who make the overall incentive structure for user behaviors. YT completely failed in this area and now they're trying to fix that. Of course you have your right to complain, but to me the trade-off seems obvious given that creators have been being harassed for years while you have a minor inconvenience.
> And now you just admitted you don't think it's just because people don't know that option exists
Where does this baffling logical jump come from? In many studies, dislike buttons have been proven to be a strong source of negative user behaviors, so it's a fairly natural conjecture that YT is trying to get rid of that button in the end state. And the fact that most users don't really know or care about the visible dislike # options simply refutes "but they had a choice and it's their choice!" argument. I don't know what you're trying to achieve by connecting two logically unrelated sentences. Isn't this a textbook example of straw man fallacy?
> I honestly don't know what you're position is besides that whatever Google does must be right.
Obviously this is something I would expect from HN comments, but outside of HN please don't make this kind of low level mockery on someone else you don't really know. It only makes you miserable, especially when you demonstratively don't understand my arguments.
> But in the reality, there are many smaller creators who is frequently being harassed by trolls (have you heard about those young Chinese patriots trolling over Korean and Japanese channels?) and one of their tool is the dislike button. And creators have been complaining about this for many years, so I would say in fact YT was super lazy on this particular issue, but at least better late than never...
That would be an escuse.
The solution to that problem is not changing that option for the whole platform
Make targeted changes but not just change everywhere.
Removing the ability to assess how other people think of all the videos is big
The forces that push a platform to the latter is there being a constant stream of outrage when platforms identify a brigade and delete their votes to avoid poising the the data. It's easier to just change the system to eliminate the problem entirely. This isn't really an isolated incident, even in the tech space people have been rallying for "removing comment sections" because they've been a cesspool since their inception. YouTube is one of the last platforms to make this change.
They'll notice if you complain about it, chide you for "sneering at the community"and imply that you're simply falling prey to some cognitive bias or prejudice.
> The shift seems pretty fast, to me.
I've seen it gradually picking up speed ever since Snowden and the death of Aaron Swartz. Trump and Biden's elections were inflection points as well, pointing to a large influx in alt-right and conspiratorial posters from 4chan and Reddit.
I'd strongly suggest getting a plugin or userscript that lets you block users, and start doing so aggressively. Confronting the problem, or even pointing it out, falls afoul of the guidelines (at the very least it isn't considered "substantive") and will only eventually get you filtered or banned.
I think after Trump and COVID proving out the real-world implications of post-truth politics, that approach to moderation looks increasingly naive.
People keep complaining about harassment at work. I guess the solution is to revoke the ability to file complaints.
The results of elections will now be hidden, because knowing one person got more votes than another might hurt the losing party's feelings.
User comment: DISLIKE
Other users click like button on comment a ton of times...
Next official move?
Making comments visible to subscribers and premium users only...
Google is going against basic human nature here and it's Orwellian as fuck.
Next unofficial move?
Censor comments containing, "DISLIKE" because the ones doing it will stand right out same as they did before and having them not stand out is what is being attempted here.
And?
Yeah, DISLIKE
Edit:
I realize this is part of a bigger trend and that is to avoid mass signaling of any kind.
The major players do not want large numbers of people communicating because those lead to large actions, which are expensive and risky from their point of view. While this is perfectly understandable, a functional society allows for these things and it bears those costs and risk because of the even greater costs and risks associated with clamping down on dissent like this.
It will, and the ones who allow it will stand out just as they do now by allowing comments when others do not. Fact is most creators actually delivering value stand to gain from both robust comments and feedback. It's just not a big deal.
In a more general sense, it's turning a comms medium into broadcast. In broadcast nobody really gives a fuck what ordinary viewers, listeners have to say. Their job is to eat ADS and shit CASH.
The trend is increased control through corporations and a reduced mass signal potential. This action is but one of many. Reddit modified r/All a while back to avoid mass signalling and or prioritize "authoritative" front page material.
Others have done similar things.
Twitter put features in for "authorities" to be marked in ways, verified users. Also, provided for broadcast only type posts, where comments are limited to a select few, or not at all allowed.
It's worth a deeper look back too:
Prior to the Internet, and prior to the actions of Reagan and Clinton to deregulate media, we had many independent publishers doing news, commentary (with fairness requirements on said commentary), and other works. No one was allowed to own a significant portion of all that, and the check and balance was all the peers questioning one another as well as the targets of their journalism.
Additionally, news was done as a public service, in the public interest, and that's what broadcast licenses were all about. They get a magic money machine in return for helping us all in a civic way by doing news.
After Reagan repealed the fairness doctrine, we got the likes of Rush Limbaugh.
Side bar: Limbaugh was an exemplary broadcaster. His unusual talent essentially unbridled by the lack of the fairness doctrine allowed for intoxicatingly good political talk. Just saying, his own skill was a factor in all this. End side bar.
After Clinton relaxed ownership rules, mega networks were born, and very quickly gobbled up a lot of news networks and also began doing news for profit, made possible by the larger network size as well as no need to be fair, or even accurate in news and or commentary.
Side bar: Fox won in court when challenged on it's right to force journalists to lie and or produce material they themselves do not believe in. This can and is a condition of employment. End side bar.
With the rise of the Internet came "new media" and the most striking quality was the population once again getting news and commentary produced from a labor, or populist point of view. This has naturally proven quite popular, and quite painful for big corporate media who is not used to having to deal with both feed back and competition not playing by the same rules it plays by.
Populists shot right to the top of the charts and captured younger media consumers, starting with a lot of Gen X and younger. Corporate media, big networks saw aging demographics, and the trend was clear.
They either need to find a way to compete, or new media was gonna have to be handicapped before it was too late!
And that's one trend, biasing mass signaling away from that which could challenge, or dissent from the establishment narrative.
Removing likes is straight up hiding the fact that big media being called authoritative, allowed to fact check without itself being fact checked to the same standards, or by those it has some authority over, is all very unpopular and not trusted very well at all and the demographics on that extend all the way up through old age today.
The young people don't even bother watching. Older people are questioning it all with increased frequency.
Putting it all on You Tube went like most of us thought it would: Yawn.
Bundling it with entertainment pulled the numbers up a little.
Modifying the recommendation algorithm pulled numbers up a bit more, while at the same time stunting the growth of new media in a painfully obvious way.
Still? No joy.
Now, hiding the data needed for the general public to understand those things along with increased censorship and rule changes intended to further hobble popular news and commentary that challenges the establishment is common and growing increasingly overt.
This brings us to present day "trends" and I hope a bit of context helps to understand what I am getting at here.
Tiktok pushed the passive user experience further, and youtube is following. The ideal is user launches app, the app takes care of everything else. Looking at the downvote count is just an extra thing the user can, might or should do. The trend is to reduce these. Youtube's being trendy.
I’m surprised they didn’t do this sooner to be honest, thought they’ve been letting news outlets turn them off for some time now.
And dislikes don't show you how controversial it is, or perhaps how general Youtube audience reacts to being exposed to something.
So that now if you want to make it known you have to leave a comment. And then some stats have to be done on the comments to understand the sentiment. On Youtube's shitty unforum, you have to do stats. Right.
They just sealed it, all of their likes, dislikes, comments etc.; all of Youtube's non-streaming aspects are demonstrably useless, not just "feel useless", but actually are it.
Time to support things like ogjre.com and reddit etc., for they provide what Youtube denies.
Community. Forums. Thought. Orientation and discrimination. What is good, and who would think that it is. What is objectionable, and for whom.
I guess the aggregate is better than just the upvotes but it still is not ideal as a post at +102/-101 is not the same as +2/-1.
You're making it hard for me to be against this change, haha.
"attacking behavior"? This tone is giving me some weird feelings.
Here is a constructive opinion: Add it as an optional feature. Let the publisher select "Display both like and dislike counts", "Display only like counts" and "Don't display both count". YouTube has already implemented the "Display both" and "Hide both" option in their "Studio"/video manage page, they just need to add a new one.
> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks.
How do they know that? I hate to be rude but what if people genuinely don't like the content? Of course maybe someone said upfront "I am dislike bombing this video with my 100 youtube accounts" but otherwise it's not clear to me how people are differentiating between an attack and a genuine expression of opinion (though an admittedly rather coarse one).
Upvote and Downvote are NOT the same thing as Like and Dislike.
I noticed that - unlike most other popular content - children's videos on YouTube almost always have roughly a 2:1 like to dislike ratio no matter what channel or type of content. Why? Where do all the dislikes come from?
Is it from kids mashing touch screens at random? Parents taking what small revenge they can at being subjected to the same songs on repeat thousands of times? Some shady underground power struggle between kids' content creators sabotaging each other?
I always assumed I would eventually find an answer, but now if dislike counts are going away I am unlikely to ever find out. I will probably have to carry this unanswered mystery with me for the rest of my life.
Thanks, YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxOuG8jMIgI
"Great to see YouTube finally protecting creators like Pepsi and Gillette"
"This is the most offensively dishonest thing you've posted even for your standard. Dislike counts were essential to spot scams, fake/bad tutorials, clickbaits and were especially important as a tool to fight back against horrible megacorporation announcements."
"To protect creators that suck, like politicians, big corporations that sponsor us, and astroturfed talentless on demand era hacks, we're preventing you from seeing how unpopular they are."
“We want everyone to have a voice, unless those voices are valid criticism or go against our agenda.”
"No one wants this other than the corporations who are getting shamed for putting out awful content that the public dislike. You are removing a key protection people have from scamming, dangerous or misleading content and are protecting no one. Stop hiding behind 'small creators mental health' like you think you're doing anything. We can all still see how many dislikes our video got. Our mental health is not protected in any fashion. The only thing you change is the public facing, and we know why you did this."
"When I was 12, my videos were dislike bombed. Not many liked them. Sure, it hurt, but I matured since then. I matured, because I was able to respond to the negative feedback my content was receiving. If not it, I would be falsely convinced of my perceived non-existant greatness. Dislikes are key to personal and content growth."
A far better solution would be allowing more metrics into downvotes. How many of the downvotes come from a Twitter or Reddit post? What's the age of the dislikers? The solution is more transparency, not the suppression of information.
I hope there's new solutions, like browser extensions, to fill in the gap. Centralized and unilateral decisions like this only further prove online liberty must fundamentally empower individuals.
It's an interesting position because the assumption YouTube would have to be making here to do this is that their viewers opinion of the content they're watching is either wrong, or irrelevant.
Also the only instances of dislike "harassment" and I am aware of has been because a content creator has been recently exposed for participating in some immoral activity such as a scam or sexual abuse.
The only other time I see content heavily downvote is when it's disagreeable in some way. For example, a lot of content from mainstream media outlets is often downvoted, presumably not because people have any particular desire to harass news organisations, but because their content is often largely disapproved of.
I must admit I've never seen a video get downvoted for no reason -- is this something anyone has observed on YouTube? The reason I ask is because I worry this move is more likely to be motivated by YouTube disagreeing with the viewers about what should and shouldn't be downvoted. For example, I very much doubt they care some white dude being "harassed" by the dislike button for expressing some racist ideas, but if a black women gets downvoted for expressing a controversial far-left political position that does seem to be viewed as more problematic and represented of "harassment" by silicon valley types these days.
However, I would not be surprised if this feature was accelerated after seeing twitch “hate raids” a few months ago. These definitely are a form of online harassment in my opinion. In YouTube’s competition with twitch they want to show they are a “safer” place for creators (whether someone believes this is up to them)
You can interpret these like and dislike interactions in two ways: in absolute terms or in personal terms. "Is this video good?" or "Is this video good for me right now?" We can debate what most users are trying to express* or if they are brigading, but it is mostly irrelevant. As soon as the platform stops showing everybody the same videos or at least random videos and it starts recommending specific videos to specific users then like/dislike interactions are a function of how well the algorithm is working, not some absolute measure of sentiment. Dislikes just indicate that the video was recommended to the wrong people. Netflix doesn't show the number of likes and dislikes and I haven't heard of anyone demanding that this change.
* The label "like" certainly suggests a personal judgment. On the other hand, the like/dislike placement and other feedback options suggest an absolute judgement. When I have (very rarely) used the dislike button it was more about a bad recommendation. Often the video wasn't bad in any absolute sense. In my experience I have to go looking for videos I truly dislike in some absolute sense. YouTube does occasionally ask me to rate a recommendation and there is a "Not Interested" option which are alternatives that are even more explicitly about recommendations. Unfortunately these are only offered before you even try to watch a video or if you are very intentional about returning to your recommendations feed and finding "Not Interested" in the three dots menu.
Previously if you were linked their videos it might have 1000 upvotes and 100,000 downvotes, and it would be obviously terrible. Now you just see 1000 upvotes and it would look like it has substantial support.
Google can and does remove videos they simply dislike by using nebulous policies against 'hate' or 'meanness' or similar. Removing dislike then, by and large, helps push those unpopular views that Google themselves approve of.
Does removing likes let them accomplish that? They can still remove videos that trigger them, but without a like count they can't push their ideology with the appearance of support.
I believe this is the actual reason why they will show upvotes but not downvotes, and as prediction I expect them to remove total views since that allows for estimating the viewer sentiment based on likes per view (or make it useless for estimation, for example replacing a count with big buckets like "thousands" or "millions").
I rarely watch videos, but when I do, it's complex technical material relating to a niche subject. A high dislike-to-like ratio is a clear indication that the content is inaccurate. Not offensive or boring or too long, just inaccurate. And because the content is complex, I can't just skim it and identify inaccuracies.
If I don't like a video, I hit dislike and will maybe even remove it from my watch history.
I suspect that most who are against this change are not heavy YouTube users.
Of course this would reduce the amount of ads and pages they would serve to users, so it's in their interest to do everything they can to prevent users from being warned of time-wasting content.
I think a lot of the behaviors companies exhibit like this are related to US stock markets and the fixation on quarterly earnings per share. So much executive compensation is stock/options that it's a wiser bet for execs to optimize for the short term. Planning for 5+ years is no longer reasonable from their perspective because even with the best intentions, unplanned events can ruin everything. They might as well do whatever they can to cash in as quickly as possible.
I don't see this changing for any reason. So what will happen is that every 5-10 years some upstart company will gain enough funding to replace the tired old leader, and then within 5-10 years it will become that same tired old leader.
There's a Venn diagram of audience and voters. Hard to know how large any of the three are, but apparently YouTube thinks the group of non-audience voters is large enough to take action against.
This is yet another nail in the coffin of Youtube, it's almost ready to go into the ground as Rumble and Odysee take off and Youtube slides into corporate/censorious irrelevance.
You WILL like the video
You WILL have absolutely no say over anything
> the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes.
Regardless the parent was talking about someone sharing more detailed criticism.
But from a less objective standpoint, it's just rude. Even if the rankings are purely cosmetic, why go out of your way to leave a dislike on one person's video if you wouldn't interact with it otherwise?
Also are we talking about global opinion? A lot of people outside of the western world aren't as big fans of LGBT for example, so if we want to make things more objective those videos should have even more downvotes and hateful messages. And if we're being consistent with what google currently does, these videos should be banned sometimes for hurting others (ex. religious) feelings. People are ok with downvotes and banning, but only if it panders to their current subjective moral fashions.
I agree, but as a user I am used to assuming a baseline of support for a video coming from the channel's subscribers. So even if the pie-in-the-sky random sampling is biased, I can usually account for that. What I would like to be able to assume is that likes and dislikes come from the "usual" traffic a video receives.
> Also are we talking about global opinion?
No. I think it can be assumed (like you said) that videos typically receive views from certain people. My point is more that brigades disrupt the helpfulness of ratings for viewers like myself. I think we should not offend the sensibilities of the homophobes in this world (lmao) by asking them to watch LGBT-friendly videos. Conversely, I think said homophobes should refrain from brigading such a video just because they dislike LGBT people.
I also will reiterate my claim that it is rude for the hypothetical homophobe to exercise targeted downvotes on LGBT videos.
As for myself, I'm not all too pleased with downvotes being straight up removed from Google (edit: YT). But acting like brigades are constructive and normal use of the platform is silly to me.
Edit: clarified some points
Isn't Google literally an AI company, and wouldn't this be entirely in their wheelhouse to work on?
They are keeping all the harmful implications and removing the only other use case, which is the quality signal to potential viewers (noisy as it is).
This is a fallacy known as "begging the question".
I've seen random harmless videos (bit of classical music for instance) with many dislikes.
Same with Facebook btw. They should never have added anything over a mere "Like".
It's a clunky, confusing UX that gave rise to the inevitable highly upvoted "Who in the world would dislike this?" threads on so many popular videos.
I mean read the text "dislike attacks", this reads deeply like some disgruntled femminist who's community keeps getting dislikes because they have extremely controversial opinions. The femminist/SJW community really dislikes democracy and want more censorship it's no joke they are called "Feminazis".
I deeply dislike this decision and I feel like there is some hidden money or power or intent behind this decision to undermine democracy, this is deeply concerning.
No worries, there are always alternatives.
So the opposition grows even more silent. Afraid to act because it might lead to negative repercussions and there is no scale of the dislike for a propaganda piece.
Not to be conspiratorial but after Facebook's reaction to propaganda from certain parties in countries that are not America. It feels like Youtube is bowing to pressure but hiding it behind a "helping small creator" facade.
Well, yes, that is their agenda. The web as it was was not nearly as friendly for those with money and power.
Now, authoritarian governments and scumbag celebrities will project power over us, just like in the real world.
There are secret whitelists so that influencers like Logan Paul can fully monetize commuting crimes on YouTube (like desecrating a corpse)[2].
Celebrities are permitted to engage in targeted harassment or fraud, and people that call them out are banned.[1]
And of course, governments can engage in all sorts of war crimes, and big tech will censor anyone that tries blowing the whistle[3].
Facebook is happy to censor anything for dictators, but perhaps they will soon go the extra mile and just report people directly to the secret police. They could have a nice dashboard that shows up for local death squads of anyone that questions the leader.
And frankly, this is the future most of us welcomed. We defended all of this because muh private platforms. We consented to letting these big tech platforms set the rules. We welcomed anyone with an incongruent opinion banned.
The internet used to be a domain where scumbag fatcats didn't control everything, and you had some chance of speaking truth to power.
It will only get worse. Find out Dupont is dumping toxic waste in your back yard? Just a word from their PR dept and all of your accounts will be banned. Think you can speak directly to the people? Your domain name will be seized, your Cloudflare account closed, and any app permitted on peoples devices will have to ban you if they don't want to be removed.
[1]: https://www.aroged.com/2021/10/09/whitelisted-streamers-foun... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42538495 [3]: https://www.engadget.com/facebook-turkey-emails-200407588.ht...
What they can do is make opposition videos and get their own support, it'll be just as useless but it wont be brigaded visibly by the massive dictatorial support.
yt doing this is essentially yt putting their thumb on the scale, telling you that their product is good, and hiding anyone saying it's not.
Generally, you must always have an outside party to review and judge a thing, not the thing itself.
Probably yt would try every trademark and copyright legal attack in the book to take down any such site, but it seems obvious that in common sense terms, the only possible way to have reviews of yt videos is for them to be provided by anyone other than any Alphabet property.
Yes, but gaining any sort of widespread traction would be really hard. The vast majority of YT viewers won’t have your chrome extension or whatever installed and without a critical mass of ratings on the long tail of low-view videos, people will lose interest fast.
Maybe if you seeded it with scraped vote counts now people would use it.
But if when you looked at 1-star reviews, and they were basically the junk ramblings of trolls then you might get a better signal of quality buy just ignoring them.
And this move is a clear signal also, of whose pocket Google are in.
Tutorial videos, especially, benefited from the like-dislike ratio, because if 200 people saw a video on setting up some software and 7 people liked it, but 30 people disliked it, it's pretty easy to know that that 10 minute tutorial video isn't worth watching, as it's pacing is slow, or inaccurate or missing major steps or whatever.
Neat.
I'm sure Youtube tries to down rank such videos but in practice it's still a big problem. I understand they are trying to protect creators from bad actors but negative feedback is usually more important than positive feedback.
For "creators" on YouTube the real problems seem to come from the contents of comments.
This[0] recent video rant has some interesting insights toward the end of the video where other popular YouTubers are interviewed on how negative comments impacted them. What I found thought provoking was how much of a negative impact some particular types of comments that seemed in good intent-e.g. commenters stating their preference for a previous video format "I preferred when you ___". Feels like Google/social media sites could do something around sentiment heuristics; I know Twitter has started some stuff like this.
So basically, "We understand that this feature is useful in helping you determine where to spend your time and attention, but we're going to do it anyway because it benefits us."
> and to help create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves.
"Because we need our creators to get views and keep making content regardless of whether or not our users think it's worth watching."
It's about corporations complaining about their ads running on unpopular content. It's about making people waste more time on low quality content, scam and disinformation across the platform.
What you hear from them are pure PR lies. They don't care about small creators and they never did. All they want is to make you watch more ads at the expense of your time and welfare.
Just to appease few creator taking away the functionality just seem abysmal to me.
Google is an ad-supported company. They are there to sell you soap, and have no more morality than P&G or Walmart. Their slogan might as well be "Evil for a buck".
Edit: I, too, use the ratio of likes/dislikes to make a decision about spending time watching something.
The people who make these automated videos aren't looking for millions of hits per video, they're looking for a few hundred, which when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of this type of video, means millions of clicks for them. Since actual reviews of older products have a small number of views, the automated ones float to the top of search results. Dislikes was a way of separating the two. Few people click Like for the good videos but there were enough clicking Dislike on the shovelware videos to help filter them out. Expect to see an increase in these automated garbage videos as they're now allowed to drown out actual content.
Fuck Youtube. they need a competitor.
If you read the comments in detail you will see that people describe how they used the dislike count. It's therefore not useless.
It's not my intent here to comment on the utility of the feature in any universal sense - my comment is about the disparity between the reactions of different people. And it's just a casual observation, I'm not trying to argue for any thesis or anything here.
Imagine you are looking for a How-To video on something very common but specific, such as changing a car part or Windows setting, and that when you search for this you are given dozens of options. All of these options are 20 to 30 minutes long and 90% of them are either inaccurate, out-dated, or automated click-bait. This lower 90% will have a disproportionate number of dislikes. Each time you click one of these videos the dislike ratio can save 20+ minutes of your life and this benefit is multiplied by dozens of videos and tens of thousands of viewers.
Not saying those other people are wrong mind you. Your lived experience is your lived experience and no one really has any standing to contradict that. Just expressing surprise at the degree of just how differently different people are reacting to this.
But I think the dislike ratio will still decide whether a video is suggested to you, so will still determine whether you end up watching the video?
And this feature is not even required AFAIK. Creators can simply disable like & dislike if they think they are being targeted.
Of course most creator's don't want to do what you say anyways. Like's help them, dislikes don't. Dislike counts are (well were) for users.
Cowardly move that's being presented as one thing but really there is a deeper message here.
That's why you only ever see positive, happy high-five comments under videos anymore. The dystopian crackdown started sometime after the 2016 US election.
If they did not mention it, the test results were likely not promising, meaning that implementing the move regardless is motivated by something else than an increase in ad revenue.
I know it was for a halfway good cause this time, but does anyone else find it creepy with how much nonchalance they are talking about behaviour modification and nudging here?
Google would like its users to more frequently show behaviour X, so they made some A/B tests, found which UI changes most effectively increase the prevalence of X and are now implementing the changes.
No need anymore to actually communicate rules with your users if you can just manipulate them into showing a particular behaviour.
It's not just Google doing this, however they are in a position to do this most effectively right now.
By fake uploads I mean reuploads that do not contain the actual example. For instance, I might want to watch a Brahmos or Oniks launch (I find the way the missile orients itself very entertaining) and there'll be a bunch of videos which are 'reaction' videos. They'll use a thumbnail of the content but mostly be some guy talking about the content. Or for a football goal, it's some guy recreating it in FIFA. I don't want to watch these things and the dislike bar warns me of the stuff.
This is a pity.
The like / dislike ratio is EXTREMELY useful. I'm very disappointed that they would do this. I expect it will be much harder to avoid useless content with this removed.
Google would fight it. But we could always side-load if they do.
I'd also like to see this done web-wide.
And the results could be limited to people you follow/follow you or all results. Just a nice way to see what people are talking about.
Not sure this belongs in the same extension. But both are manual fixes for social media problems.
Video creators have always been able to disable the upvote/downvote ratios and comments.
Every single time I have encountered a video where the counts have been disabled by the creator, it’s because the video has something objectively wrong with it. It’s inaccurate, misleading, poor quality, offensive, or some has some other generally negative attribute.
This happens less so with comments being disabled. Videos with high up to down vote ratios but with disabled comments are usually because the creator is being attacked by trolls. These videos are usually pretty interesting to watch.
So yeah this is an incredibly short sighted change and is removing an important quality signal to viewers.
What's the "game"?
What game? People almost universally didn't like a CEO giving herself an award.
It hadn't occurred to me that this would happen (although it seems obvious) and it is unexpectedly frightening to me.
I suppose the fallback will be videos with comments enabled, where people can 'like' a comment who is saying something common sense and reasonable in response to the content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9dO_XBt0k8
I believe it is because they see themselves as 'above' YouTube. They don't take the risk of having a Emacs/Vim flame war in the comments and detracting from the points in the video. By disabling comments, the conversation is kept civil, because it isn't there.
They are not resourceful enough to curate a forum, so they prefer no forum at all.
Most organizations (education, government, for-profit, NPO, you name it) that use Twitter rarely if ever interact with any other Twitter account except for preplanned promotional stuff. If you noticed, Twitter added the ability to limit replies. That was solely to please the corporate world who don't like it when someone jumps on the stage that is their platform.
McDonalds doesn't like it when they tweet about their "green initiative" and PETA replies to the tweet with something about beef using x amount of land and y water compared to other food sources, or just a GIF of a cow getting slaughtered. BMW doesn't like it if they tweet about how much they spend on training techs for "world class service" but someone replies with a picture of an engine with a hole in the block because a dealer tech forgot to tighten the oil plug properly after an oil change. Limiting tweet replies means that tweeting for corporations is now a "safe space."
There's an entire business segment dedicated to providing tools to social media teams to alert them if someone who actually is "important" interacts with their social media account. Patrick Stewart tweets about his Juicero blows a fuse? He gets a replacement hand-delivered by a young marketing intern in a star trek uniform who gushes about how she grew up being a fan of "Bev."
You tweet about your juicero blowing a fuse? Nobody at Juicero even sees the tweet, because their social media monitoring tool looked at your profile, saw you rarely get more than 30 views and 2-3 engagements, and knew you represented zero threat to the brand.
If by they you mean Google then I agree. Google reaps the benefits, to the tune of billions, while deflecting as much accountability as possible. Google's entire m.o. is to build enormous scale through software automation without providing any human-level support to its users. Large changes (like the removal of dislike counts) are made only under pressure from powerful groups, unless Google deems such changes to be profitable.
Official Rammstein videos have comments disabled but for a different reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc would attract ugly comments from all extremes
Some other reasons:
I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior.
Also, disabling comments helps me to communicate that they are not a channel I monitor for feedback or questions. I just don't have the time to monitor them, and in Youtube's case this means I either have a potential commenting cesspool on my hands or no comments at all.
To some people this is a huge red flag maybe, but I would wonder if they really understand what it's like to be a publisher on the platform. Again and again I have seen good channels derailed by the absolutely broken commenter-publisher feedback loop...
It is not in the interests of almost any site or platform operator to limit drama, trolling, etc. They want the page views, the time spent in-app/on site, the emotional energy and investment.
Look at celebrities. The job of their publicists is to negotiate with other publicists to manufacture some inconsequential tiff that puts the names of their clients in the media.
You picked no discussion. So now nobody learns anything new from eachother and you turned YouTube into a TV channel with one way communication.
But you drop "censorship" front and center about some random dude's YouTube channel and you're doing some sterling fearmongering throughout the thread in general so I'm going to be honest, I gotta think this is less about any sort of freedom to speech and rather about the privilege of being granted time on somebody else's soapbox--the demand to listened to.
Get your own.
Otoh creators can delete comments. So the comments existing and being positive about a video is not a good signal for the video being good either.
For example, a Yelp rating itself is useless until you also combine other signals such as the number of reviews, the type of restaurant, and the popularity of Yelp use in an area, and then I find Yelp ratings potentially very useful. Same with Amazon reviews, Rotten Tomatoes scores, or any scoring or review system.
Negative feedback is not always given in good faith.
The amount of trolling (or just outright stupidity, hard to tell sometimes) on e.g. CS conference videos or lectures by women is insane. I entirely understand that the organizations putting those videos up don't want to deal with that nonsense.
Seems like it'd be useful to hide the dislike count only after the video gets a certain number of likes.
Be glad you got to live through this very brief period of awakening because they are about to return everyone back into the darkness again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
See also Revolt of the Public, which explores the consequences of the internet breaking monopoly control over the flow of information. As you point out, it's the alternative channel that gave rise to unauthorized voices. What we're seeing play out is a fight between the dissenting public and the ruling elites. Removing dislikes is just the latest in a series of moves to reassert control over information.
https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millen...
I did too, it is pretty depressing to see people here applauding efforts to thwart dissenting opinions.
It came as a shock to me at first, but now I simply accept that people are wired for self-preservation via cognitive compartmentalization.
People here will argue vim/emacs for weeks, but will happily repeat mainstream media talking points on every major social/political issue.
This is why I restrict my usage of online communities based on expertise now. I will find world class programmers/scientists on HN, but those same geniuses will be hilariously ignorant on history/politics.
Such is life. HN is definitely not a one-stop shop, but it's unrivalled for anything STEM related.
This was one of the major inflection points for worsening quality of content on reddit, and it will be for Youtube too. For exactly the reason you've described.
(Though compared to reddit ads, these job listing have a very light touch. And they’re just a free perk for YC companies)
It is a dangerously noisy signal and this change is long overdue. Every COVID-related video on the front page of YouTube is spammed to high heaven with dislikes and "PLANDEMIC"s and "let's go Brandon!"s from right-wing antivaxxers. It's gotten to the point where YouTube is the premier distributor of antivax propaganda—only YouTube puts it one click away from the top of the fold even when not logged in—and it's a major threat to public health.
"If so many people like this, it probably has value." "There is always a few dislike from haters, safe to discard them."
The only times I remember seeing a high dislike-to-like ratio are on things that went viral in the wrong circles, so internet decided to mass-downvote the for inconsequential reasons, like Rebecca Black's Friday or the announcement for some video game that isn't made to appeal to the "core gaming public".
Personally, I think this is all flowing from a fundamental problem: there is no concept of "credibility" with upvotes and downvotes. As conservatives are fond of saying "facts don't care about your feelings", but all our social media use feelings to determine which "facts" get the loudest boost.
Any system that uses a raw number of votes (be they up or down) as a weighting score is basically encouraging botnets, brigades, etc. Like, every climate activist has a swarm of climate-change deniers following them around online and I consider their opinions worse than useless.
Just as Google graphs the relationships between sites and uses that to rank them, also graph the relationships between users and use that to rank them.
Like, important figure who's followed by numerous media experts and is consistently upvoted by respected people? Their opinion has weight. 1000 score per updoot.
Crank who has few followers, gets all their news from extremists on youtube, and does nothing but hurl insults at politicians all day? 0.01 score per updoot.
It's not democratic, but information isn't a democracy.
Let them keep upvoting and downvoting. And take that information for what it's worth.
I also disagree with the mandates and downvote all of the covid vaccine propaganda video I see on youtube.
Regular people are tired of the lying whether they agree with the vaccines or not.
It's statistically impossible for the like/dislike ratio on COVID-related videos to be representative of public opinion.
What does that even mean? What makes you think saying yes to vaccine but no to vaccine mandates means they don't "accept the vaccine"?
> Additionally, most people agree with the mandates
From the latest poll [1] (conducted between 11/05-11/07):
> Table POL11: Even if neither is exactly correct, which of the following comes closest to your opinion? Government mandates to receive a COVID-19 vaccine
44% of registered voters say they violate the rights of Americans
45% of registered voters say they protect the rights of Americans
1. https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017d-0982-d3c9-a77d-0b9a9...
Most videos about the COVID vaccine that we're talking about are simply stating that the vaccines are effective and safe. Calling those "propaganda" and "lying" is not accepting the truth about the vaccine.
> From the latest poll [1] (conducted between 11/05-11/07):
Vaccine mandate support is ahead by 1 point in this poll, yet COVID videos with correct information about the vaccine on YouTube are 80%+ dislikes. Precisely my point.
Would you rather not know something is controversial? What mechanism would you prefer for nudging people outside of filter bubbles?
I'm happy to be generous and consider all videos with heavy dislike ratios as victims of brigading and not of public sentiment.
Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate.
The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.
This is very similar to the problems where YouTube fits you into filter bubbles, and Netflix struggles to tell you good recommendations. TikTok supposedly does a better job then others at this, likely due to having lots of signals from short videos.
We have this problem with movie reviews as well. I lost all faith in Rotten Tomatoes when I saw Knock Down the House's viewer ranking go from the upper 80s to single digits over the course of two years. As more and more people found out that AOC was a star in the film, the score went down. It is a great film in my opinion. I wrote a script to scrape the reviews and provide details about the reviewers. So many 1 star reviews were new accounts that had just rated this film + maybe the Ilhan Omar film. Furthermore most of them don't even explain why they rated it that way(we all probably know why). This led me to think, what else is being manipulated? Are studios just buying up good reviews?
Recently they have introduced "Verified Reviews". This attempts to link your Rotten Tomatoes account with the movie theater so you can get a Verified Review checkmark if they have confirmed that you actually bought a ticket to the movie. Users can then filter on Verified reviews. This is a good first step and will probably help to curb abuse.
And who exactly are these nebulous people? This sounds like something O'Brien from 1984 would say about Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers.
Imagine that there was a group that really, really hated the color green, and they're so passionate that they fly "We Hate Green" flags outside their house, completely tie their identity with hating green, go to we hate green rallies (imagine having that little respect for your own time?), wear we hate green shirts, make up childish "We Hate Green" code words (e.g. Let's Go Purple!) for when they are among the greenies, and these people seemed to have endless idle time to sit brigading every bit of content to downvote it or leave nasty comments because something in the video was green. That is just noise to everyone else. Everyone else -- the majority of the public -- finds no value in their hyper-polarized, agenda-driven contributions.
And I'm not just talking about people who like green, but people who are indifferent or even anti-green but they don't find any value in having a review bombed because this idle group was mad that they thought it was "green woke".
It seems most people are engaging with YouTube in the same bubbles as any other social media platform.
The "propaganda" videos I see (when searching for them) on YouTube don't have large dislike ratios, they are very much liked by the people who consume that content. An example is PragerU videos.
Take the Gillette ad as a great example. No dislike button? Now the “lack of downvotes” can be used to indicate the normalization of such propaganda and imply people support the message.
Your use of the word "frightening" is an understatement in my opinion. Using the dislike button to add to the dislike count is a form of speech, and YouTube is silencing it. Given the growing disconnect between reality and content produced by the mainstream media, politicians, etc., YouTube should be increasing options for the masses to warn others about content, not decimating them.
For people that don't know SponsorBlock is a magical extension that uses crowdsourced data to automatically skip in video advertisements/end title/start tile junk that youtubers tend to do. What an amazing show of the power of software and intuitive thinking.
More seriously: I can understand people feeling bad for negative opinions on their own content (it's hard and you need to feel it directly to be able to understand), however if they do want to protect creators which can't protect themselves, make it invisible for the creators themselves, like a button to "don't see dislikes on my own videos". Those creators will probably be unaware of the fact they are being disliked and learn from it, but at least viewers won't be disturbed.
There's lots of interesting design choices they could have made of not encouraging dislike storms while still giving valuable info to viewers like highlighting if any video has an unusually high dislike to like ratio or attaching comments to dislikes and highlighting highly upvoted reasons why certain people are choosing to dislike a video etc.
That said, a couple of years ago I somehow ended up on a channel with literally hundreds of videos. I swear, the average view count of this woman's session was way below one. I just wonder how is that even possible. Spent about 10 minutes clicking on random videos and well, it was sad. Real sad. I wonder if she would've kept going if numbers were hidden. I think she would've bailed long time ago.
At the end of the day you are manufacturing consent for your users as per the demands of your corporation friends and advertisers. You want a happy place where everything is happy and joyful with no abuse and attacking but alas that is not the world in which we live. Have fun and make profits hacking the brains of the viewers you "say" you care about for your advertisers and corporate friends.
Peace out!
If excessive social media use is correlated with damage to mental health, then framing this as beneficial sounds contradictory. Now that social media platforms have reached a critical mass, they should be judged not just for being toxic and user-hostile, but also for being too effective at accepting and retaining people for excessive amounts of time.
That being said, there is no globally-visible '%age of viewers like this' value on each title. Instead, thumbs up/down seems to be used as probably one of many signals in the '% match' (how likely are you to enjoy it) metric.
Of course, this is just my theory about a segmentation of the population. Then there are people with their own agenda, and will use the dislike button as a protest for other things. Then once it reaches some threshold, some people just like to hit the dislike button to see how far they can push it.
Disclaimer: These are my own views, and not of my employer.
Disclaimer: These views are entirely my own, and not of my employer.
I don't think you can conclude that from the above. My point was that dislike ratios attacks basically abuse the feature that previously provided valuable signal to the user on whether the video was of good quality. Now, this removes the incentive for dislike ratio attacks to abuse this feature.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employer.
We should hide the dislike count so the mindless don't submit to "bad think"
My point: There's always a balance, and health misinformation is costing a lot of lives today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MczumO5PHXg.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employer.
And now we circle back to the classic question, who determines what constitutes hate-speech and who is responsible for making the judgement? The kinds of people who end up as censors tend to be the most sensitive and the false-positive rate is very high. There is no shortage of partisan activists willing to indiscriminately label things as racist or hateful these days.
Additionally, what constitutes misinformation that costs lives? I remember back when claiming sanitizing surfaces did not reduce the spread of COVID was misinformation and grounds for a ban on social media platforms. Turns out, sanitizing surfaces really doesn't slow Covid at all. So much of what we know to be 'true' is actually in-flux and subject to change as more time and research goes on.
My point is, wanting to restrict hate-speech and misinformation is not a dangerous thing in and of itself, but it should be done with great caution and hesitancy because you run the risk of censoring true information and preventing people from expressing ideas that run against the orthodoxy of the censors. I hope that people don't view things as black and white as 'allow hate-speech, yes or no?'
Agree (This is my personal view, and not of my employers)
Indeed. It is.
> and health misinformation is costing a lot of lives today
Thats a pretty cynical view of humanity - should we ban motorcycles because they are costing peoples lives? What is so bad about letting people make their own choices?
> are you OK with hate speech on social media
I believe in "free speech".
For example, is it even possible for you to tell me an objective definition of "hate" speech or "misinformation"? I bet you can't since it ends up being whatever Alphabet, or Meta's truth and morality departments agree on.
Without ways to express yourself the internet will just turn into TV - where people who agree with the megacorps get to hear their own echos all day.
Ridiculous analogy. We're talking about preventing the spread of a lethal contagious disease. If driving a motorcycle made everyone around them unsafe then it would be a valid comparison.
Not totally untrue
> We're talking about preventing the spread of a lethal contagious disease
Getting vaccinated doesn't stop the spread... if you believe everything you hear our government officials say then I have a war in Iraq and a truck-load of cloth masks to sell you.
Lets bring it back to that specific example someone brought up, which is vaccination. Do you think it a good thing, personally, for less people to be vaccinated?
The key point here is the treatment of those opposing certain views as clearly stupid and in need of protecting is toxic and non-productive. Is Joe Rogan a mindless Trump-voting retard?
You're not going to reach people by silencing creators - you're just going to make their viewers feel prosecuted, angry, and confused. They'll just move to other platforms and probably vote for Trump again...
The way to reach them would be through dialog etc. which is getting more impossible by the day.
The other person suggested that less people might be vaccinated, and your response was to talk about "bad think", and "changes or influences others", where the specific topic is "changes or influences others" to cause less people to be vaccinated.
This implies that you, for some reason want less people to be vaccinated, and that it was a good thing to "changes or influences others", in such a way as less people get vaccinated.
And I am suggesting more people might get vaccinated if they are treated as intelligent and allowed to engage in dialog instead of being shadow-banned and removed.
You previously suggested that it was be a good thing to "change or influences others" to not get vaccinated.
That is the statement that I am taking issue with. When you implied that it would be a good thing for less people to be vaccinated.
But that would be bad if that happened right? If people got encouraged to not get vaccinated, that would be bad?
> is barbaric and unhelpful.
You think that it is barbaric that a dislike button is not available on one single platform? Because that is what the other comment was about. It was about the dislike button.
It was not about videos being removed en-mass. Instead it was about a dislike button, on one platform.
Yea of course, and thats my point. I think banning these videos and the ability to show discontent makes the problem worse and further divides us on political lines. What exactly is your argument here?
> You that that it is barbaric that a dislike button is not available on one platform?
The removal of the dislike button is another step in an undeniable trend toward censorship against anything mega corps and governments decide is not moral or truthful.
People can tell when they are being herded around and silenced, and they dislike it.
Great, so then you would agree then, if someone's "opinions especially if it changes or influences others." caused other people to not get vaccinated, that that would be very bad, and that it would be a good idea to make sure this person is less successful, in their ability to influence others to do that.
Otherwise you are not changing people's minds, you are simply making their voices disappear from your computer screen.
Is the future of humanity only that corporate-approved ideas and protests are allowed in the public square? Could this ever backfire in the future?
An average person might get their speech silenced when they get some fact wrong. Does the mass media suffer that same fate when they get something wrong? What are the consequences of effectively creating unequal classes of people?
Just a few random questions and thoughts that this line of thinking leads to, in my opinion.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employer.
I think we can do better than letting free human discourse be controlled by a handful of megacorps and Susan Wojcicki.
Disclaimer: I don't need to repeat an annoying disclaimer in every post.
I would be open to hearing better ideas, please elaborate.
Short of building a time machine and going back and heeding Senator McCarthy's warning, the solutions are very simple in my opinion.
1) Really teach people that words have no power over you unless you let them.
> Sticks and stones may break my bones
> But words shall never hurt me.
Internalize this and voila: any "hate speech" that exists is de facto powerless to harm you.
Society has unfortunately taken the opposite approach and acts as if the existence of hate is harmful by itself and magnifies it to an extreme.
2) Teach people that everything you read online should be considered fake news until you verify it.
Voila. You're immune to fake news, medical misinformation, authoritarian government propaganda, and anything else that's not real.
Society has unfortunately taken the opposite approach and wants to have the political establishment "fact check" and decide what's true for you.
Dislike is incredibly useful to the user. Seeing a high dislike count on video (with some exceptions) indicates a video is likely not what it purports to be.
Less than 80% approval -> I don't watch.
I use a Ratings Preview chrome extension to show me the downvotes next to the thumbnails, and it will be rendered useless. I guess I'll just stop getting into Youtube rabbitholes now.
Maybe it is a blessing in disguise.
From my personal perspective, most vaccine related videos have high % of dislikes. And bunch of videos implying Ivermectine as a cure videos have a high % of likes. I think the dislike ratio is not as valuable to many of these videos.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employer.
This was such an obvious/good change to make. Viewers will still be able to use views:upvotes ratio for determining a video's popularity/worth. A mob won't want to attack that ratio because a high view count could encourage more views.
Judging by what's bubbling up on HN, I guess I'm in the minority on this one.
It's very sad that this is the only instance in the announcement where they mention viewers, and the reasons cited has nothing to do with viewers' interest.
But I want to focus on one big problem with dislikes and down votes. It applies to Youtube, Reddit, HN and probably everywhere you can dislike something: too often people use it simply because they disagree with the opinion expressed or simply dislike to creator or author.
This really diminishes the value of downvoting (IMHO) and I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to address it by figuring out who these opinion downvoters are and just shadow banning them, specifically you let them interact with the UI elements but it doesn't do anything. My theory is you'd get a much better result.
You also have people who review bomb things and I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's a way to express dissatisfaction with, say, company actions (eg ridiculous DRM) and that has value.
You also see things like on restaurant reviews "giving one star because even though the food was excellent and we had a reservation for 4 at 7pm on Friday night, we had to wait 45 minutes when we turned up at 8pm with a party of 11".
I am inclined to think that downvoting and dislikking actually has pretty limited value with the way people use it.
Now I am going to have to do the same method on YT videos as I do shorts, where I go look at the comments first which is unfortunate.
Stupid move from YT but was warned it was going to happen.
As a viewer, who uses YouTube for educational/learning reasons, dislike ratio is really important for me to know whether I should or should not spend the hour or sometimes more to watch it, rather than go find something else which may be better.
The pessimist in me sees this as a way for YouTube to take away that knowledge you'd have up front, forcing you to watch a video (and the adverts it contains) before you can decide whether it was worth your time.
The pragmatist in me however believes that if we're going to remove dislike counts, we should remove like counts, but again, the pessimist sees this as something that wouldn't benefit YouTube.
Ultimately, given that people are being abused through the counter, I accept the removal of its utility and will probably just bounce out of videos that may or may not have been suitable much more quickly.
For the record, I believe I may have _clicked_ dislike, no more than a handful of times ever for really, truly poor "content".
Let me guess… Except for dissenting or disliking comments?
This move is all about removing users ability to voice disapproval in a simple and effective way when big corporations stumble.
Think PC movie remake-trailers, out of touch YouTube rewind videos, etc.
All heavily disliked, and users were allowed to say that.
I guess only corporate praise is allowed from now on?
- IMO a fair decision would have been to remove count for both dislikes and likes if they really cared about bias but they don't.
Organized like/dislike campaigns motivated by whatever commercial or political or other reasons are facilitated by a sense of impunity and unaccountability.
It even goes to some facebook groups, discords and more. Say anything that's against the grain and immediate kick and ban.
What a change from the old days, where through debate you found great middle ground, or just fun chat/time waste on IRC.
> You can still dislike videos to further personalize and tune your recommendations.
2021 Dislike button: Feature to inform google to show _you_ other content.
Google is hijacking user interface concepts to slowly train users to train the machine about how to train them.
Which works, I suppose, but if you take it to it's logical conclusion we'll end up with there simply being no user interaction at all.
Why not simply hide the vote count (either way) until a certain threshold of votes is reached? This could be set higher for channels that are just starting out. Below a certain vote count, I personally don’t see much value anyway.
So I read through the comments more and many deal with quality of content - for example instructions that are flat out wrong. I viewed a video on how to change spark plugs in Honda 6 cylinder car. The content creator gave the instruction to put dielectric grease right on the tip of the spark plug. I found a comment that pointed out how utterly stupid this was. Yet the comment was pushed lower by many comments praising the contect creator for his helpful video. So I have to conclude that down votes are a usefull tool. Even if they are misused.
So... People will hate watch someone they don't like, and comment on the video about how stupid that person is. These videos with high engagement end up serving lots of ads, and YouTube makes money either way. So my tinfoil hat is that when YouTube recommends a video, before if I saw the heavy dislike bar I might think, "Why is YouTube recommending this bad video to me?" But with dislikes private, I might just engage with the video and think less about why the algorithm recommended it to me.
I think that when it comes to engagement, Youtube should just police content fairly, apply countermeasures to prevent gaming the system, and allow valid/trusted user accounts to have merit in rating content. There is no easy answer ultimately.
Here's my view: Removing down voting is FAANG's (=big corps) and MSM's reaction of many users down voting (in my eyes rightfully so) videos from public institutions who spread nothing else than propaganda. FAANG and MSM are now afraid that this sentiment contaminates other citizens.
Now, the only people who will downvote are people who are technically savvy enough to realize that downvoting will help YouTube recommend better videos to them.
It's a shame, YouTube is one of the last platforms where publicly expressing your disapproval via a voting system is possible. And I think this has an effect on the nature of internet discourse. Look at the difference in conversations on Twitter vs Reddit. On Twitter, if you see something that you disagree with, you leave an (often ad hominem) comment. On Reddit, you just downvote, and feel equally satisfied.
The issue is that it's so critical to learning these days, and so much of the entertainment I consume comes from it. Can't say I'm surprised though. Social media has it's positives and enjoyable properties, but in the end, they will manipulate the platform in the most fiscally advantageous way.
When something controversial happens from now onwards, you will have engage in the comment section. Humans cannot just move on when they have strong feelings about something like Politics or Climate change for example. With the dislike button gone, most people will feel the need to say you don't like/agree with a video. How do you do that? Comments. The negative engagement makes Youtube/Google money. This has been a known fact for a long time. This way they can cash on it more with increased engagement.
So many videos the last year has been downvoted severely because people see through all the bullshit being peddled by the mass media.
YouTube has been censoring and removing any content they can that is against the narrative being created by the mass media.
Large news stations have disabled comments on their videos to try and prevent dissent from being publicly viewable. Some of those videos has so many downvotes, it's hilarious to watch how the users are no longer sleeping and instead reacting to the bullshit.
And now, when censoring and disabling comments still can't hide the enormous dissent, they try to remove even the downvote button.
That's where we are in 2021. Pathetic.
So I guess I'd rather see the dislike button be removed more than I would like to use that information to inform me about the video in question. I don't tend to even look at how many likes vs. dislikes something has, anyway. My tastes are different enough from the norm that it isn't really that helpful of a statistic for me.
Toxic positivity is not a good thing, and not "much better"
Maybe if Google wants to do something good, they should stop avoiding paying right amount of tax for starters?
How about anti-competitive behaviour?
The fake virtue signalling from big co is nauseating...
Peertube/NewPipe + own API key with the exception will be the way to go now.
For example, if you use Nintendo products, you can see that they rarely allow unfettered communication. For example, you can choose from a list of things to say, or you can choose an emotion to express, but you can't type whatever you want to other players on their network (usually).
I want the dislike button to send a negative signal to the recommendation algorithm, but it seems to act more like an elevator door close placebo button. [0]
[0] https://www.quora.com/Does-the-close-door-button-in-U-S-elev...
I suspect that not showing the dislikes drives up engagement, but in my experience as a user I rarely look at the number of dislikes to judge a video.
We have a lot of problems where our society has been too successful at its technological goal. Inequality, climate change, gun control. All areas where capitalist economics has produced wild success and enormous effort is diverted from other useful goals to control that success.
I'd like to see the actual data. What metric was used to determine whether or not this change resulted in '[..] better protect creators from harassment'? Hopefully it wasn't something weak like opinion polls.
A data oriented company not sharing data from a scientific experiment makes me suspicious.
So let's report this official announcement!
Click 3 dot -> Report Abuse -> Submit Report.
Maybe Hacker News effect could change it! Yes we can!
(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rYZTN5NkxmQ 11k / 70k)
I don't even know what does that mean. Just cringe
If YouTube was just looking out for big brands and/or advertisers, they could have restricted the change incredibly simply. By making it a global change they're saying "ok now we understand how our UI actually led to some pretty bad outcomes in ways we failed to anticipate, and we're fixing that".
* clickbait headline videos that don't deliver - ie, content in thumbnail never shows
* obviously some political content has been getting dislikes which is embarrassing and risks govt coming after them. Trump threatened this and dems are also now making noise here, so these platforms are vulnerable.
* Dislikes were pretty rare, usually in my case I had to be really annoyed at something to dislike it. I didn't mind scams that were properly described, but some stuff is annoying because it's a bait and switch.
Anyone who has paid any attention at all knows exactly why they are doing away with the down vote count and it has nothing really to do with any sham experiment that is post hoc rationalization for a foregone conclusion.
[1] - https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/five-stars-dominate-rat...
The stated reason, as ever, is bullshit.
Although I guess it all counts as engagement, so win-win as far as YT are concerned.
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller, Gab TV
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
Is it any coincidence that, in an era where establishment media frequently gets highly ratio'd (look content from the White House, MSM, films with political agendas), an organization that relies on advertising as well as government contracts makes it convenient for said establishment to perpetuate the illusion that there is no dissent?
Let's put aside the possibility that getting brigaded with dislikes can be psychologically harmful to the individual.
How will there ever be actual revolts against the establishment if everyone believes there are no other dissenters? That's the real trouble behind making it impossible to share any negative sentiment on the internet, which is a pattern that mainstream platforms like Google/YouTube are continually edging towards, and it's a darker pattern than most people understand. The simplest way to prevent threats to your regime is to make it difficult, if not impossible for people who agree on the wrong things to recognize that they are not alone.
Hold on ravenstine... these are just dislikes on a bunch of dumb cat videos. You call that "dissent"?
When a piece of media with a wide audience is overwhelmingly disapproved of by that audience, that tells you something about reality. Being selectively exposed to only approved opinions is a disconnection from reality. If you aren't connected with reality, at best your ability to make predictions is impaired, and at worst you can be controlled without even knowing it. If you think you're the only one that disagrees with CorpGov propaganda, you are much more likely to sit on your ass, never getting up to vote, never getting up to protest, never expressing your disagreement with the establishment, because what would be the point? All you could do is accept that you are the crazy one and go with the flow, which happens to be highly convenient for the power structure.
Personally, I don't care that much in the case of YouTube because I believe it has peaked long ago and is begging for a serious replacement. But if all mainstream social media decides to go full speed ahead with this sort of reality manipulation YouTube is attempting today, then I think we are headed for trouble as a global/digital civilization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ
A brilliant example of very-large-scale spontaneous cooperation: 12 years and 10.4M views, and the like/dislike ratio has been at equilibrium the whole time.
Purely rationally speaking, I think whether or not a dislike amount is shown or not is not gonna be impactful for the things YouTube should optimize to become a better software product and company.
In order to battle fake news, misinformation and fostering a happy and global community, much more fundamental changes are appropriate. But those are inherently incompatible with the liquidity model Youtube/Google/Alphabet have chosen: Increasing shareholder value & profit.
this was probably the final nail in the coffin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDcvPf78g1k
go glimpse it in all its glory before it gets memoryholed
Boycott YouTube.
Visibility of voting only reinforces agreement ahead of any independent consideration.
Direct link to the video if you want to “Dislike” it. Or “Like” it too I suppose.
Also I can still see the count: as of this writing it is 2.8K up and 1.6K down.
That sounds like a great result!
The problem would be if they did not test any other side effect of removing the dislike button. For example, if the only thing they tested was whether it prevented mob downvoting in a small number of cases, and not whether it negatively affected the experience for a majority of users, the results of the experiment would not mean much. Based on the reaction, I am guessing this what they actually did.
(If they published their methodology and results somewhere, I apologize: I looked but did not find anything like this).
That's the problem with product research: it's often poorly designed, when it's not just designed to confirm a prior decision and back it up with some data.
likes / (likes + dislikes)
I used this quite a lot for determining if a video was decent or not.
That aside, timing sure is interesting given the recent Nintendo fiasco. Wonder how much they spend on ads each quarter.
Most notable, I think, would have to be the Biden administration's [0] challenges they're facing with the official White House YouTube account.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mczlz7/whats_...
If Youtube removes dislikes, there is less risk for these viral "dislike" moments to happen, which can make content producers and advertisers nervous.
Additionally, Google probably puts way more resources than you might expect into things like moderating the usage of the dislike button and making sure it isn't exploited by bots, nefarious actors, etc.
Not much downside from the business side of Youtube in taking steps to sunset the button.
Specifically, if a popular video has a small number of likes, one can safely assume that it has a large number of dislikes.
A video that makes people angry might encourage people to vote who otherwise wouldn't have voted
A video that makes people angry will encourage people to dislike the video, and thus eat into the total vote share.
I agree that this likely only covers videos with a large number of views (~millions). There's a long tail where the view count/vote count is not enough to comment on the number of dislikes.
Disagreeing with people vociferously: you get told off and soft-blocked from HN.
Rampant conspiracy theories? Totally hunky dory.
Seriously, look at the mayhem in these comment threads. This is Q-level madness.
About conspiracy theories, assuming that policies created by known democrat supporters are influenced by what issues democrats faces isn't any more far fetched than assuming that policies created by known republican supporters are influenced by what issues republicans faces.
Why not just hide dislikes from people until they've seen a certain percentage of the video?
YouTube recommendation is so bad. Even when you aren't interested in something, they keep on showing it until you click on it. For example, I watched a few Squid Game videos a few weeks ago. Suddenly, because Ben Shapiro did a video on Squid Game, it kept on showing me that thumbnail for days.
The algorithm should have realized that his channel was much more about right wing news than Squid Game and shouldn't have shown it every single day on my recommendation. I don't watch any politics on YouTube.
The worst part was if I clicked on the video, it would re-enforce the algorithm that I wanted right wing news. So the only option was to click the dislike button. It feel like I was force to click the button.
I suggest to report the post at Google page.
So click 3 dot button -> Report Abuse -> Submit Report.
These small 3 steps can show the power of our will! Yes we can!
So in response to YT taking away downvotes because it’s abused by angry trolls and brigaders you decide to abuse and brigade a different system. Surely nobody can predict what will happen.
I use the dislike button to inform other users that the video (usually tutorials) is poorly made and is not worth watching. I get huge value by other users doing the same. That's not trolling and that's not abuse.
People hitting the company that censors them is not good or bad, it's inevitable. Also, a lot of people who used dislike will now resort to writing unflattering comments to express themselves. That is also inevitable. Let's see how that plays out. Surely the content creators' feelings will be spared.
I don't do that, by the way, thanks for asking. I'm just saying it's utterly moronic to take away freedom of expression from all users and channels just because a small subset can't handle seeing a fucking dislike.
Such policies should be opt-in for each channel / creator. But that won't help politicians and big brands to save face, so we can't have that. Sad.
Were it "An update on," we'd know dislike counts were being deleted and every API that ever mentioned them would be breaking.
Surely this change doesn't solve anything?
For a balanced assessment, you also need to take the destroyed value of disabling the feature into account.
It’s not ideal as upvote/downvote for filtering trash, but it should still help.
People will often watch something they dislike with more intensity than something they like. The number of dislikes isn't the reason they want to watch it, it's the idea the title or cover image brings to mind. And those ideas and images are curated by Google.
Take the number of dislikes out of visibility and you strip the noise away from the signal that makes them money; views.
And who knows, the user might end up watching something that they wouldn't normally due to dislikes and, surprise, they like it. More exposure, less echo chamber-like. Less potential influence over a viewer's opinion of the content.
This is yet another move to make YouTube friendly to the same powers that be everywhere. This is a tool for centralized control, not a platform for everyone.
The reason they're doing this is the whitehouse is a joke. It's harder to convince the proles they should continue to be as easily mollified as they are when the proles aren't aware of how angry everyone else is.
It's hard to convince the world that what the TV people are paid to say is correct when it's clear that the vast majority disagree.
Because google wants to control public perception, and the entire public conversation about EVERYTHING
Especially the "Don't forget to smash that like button below" became so much noise that it's getting auto-filtered in my head
This change feels like the next step of positioning YouTube as something like a TV alternative, encouraging more long-form content and series over one-off videos.
Now there's obviously a lot of videos that are just bad or full of lies that should be negative. But there's also plenty that sit negative for reasons entirely made of opinion.
Its like they haven't though this through...
I can see a couple outcomes from such a system:
- downvotes are guideline violations
- upvotes indicate relativity, not necessarily agreeableness
- no interaction would be common
All of this is centric to a users thought. I don't think a machine could be taught these things.
Wow. Well, the politically motivated truth behind this change is pretty darn obvious, right?
If you're confused what I mean, check any US mainstream media video with an obvious political slant but pretending to be "objective news" and look at the like/dislike ratio. The system is totally working...except it isn't working out well for the political party that YT would prefer.
The more striking thing to me is how little effort they put into the cover excuse. IMO this just shows they don't really care about the optics of censoring speech or letting users flag propaganda. Quite brazen.
Or are you meaning we must "protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated"?
The underclass must not be allowed to organize or disseminate "dangerous" ideas.
The social signal that a large number of people disapprove of content is what they are looking to hide.
It isn't just important for us to know if the majority of viewers think a fortnite walkthrough is shitty. We also need to know when a politician is lying to us.
Do most people think this is bullshit? That is what the like/dislike ratio communicates so succinctly.
[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/354506/update-american-public-o...
If you want discourse about a video and its propagandiness then IMHO reddit would be a better place to get that because it has conversational features, unlike other social media spaces.
It’s like a seatbelt. You can require that everyone have access to one but you can’t require that everyone use one.
Seatbelt laws exist, in many places in the US if a cop sees you driving without your seatbelt on you are getting pulled over and getting a hefty fine.
Was it "politically motivated" then? Or just when it confirms your own biases (now)?
Absolutely. 2019 was only 2 years ago. YT's politics are the same now as they were then.
Also, "dislike mobs" are hardly a thing at all. Almost always a large number of dislikes on content like "rewind" videos expresses widespread genuine disapproval of content. In the rewind example, users likely found this content cringy and felt pandered to.
Here's evidence of a dislike mob being organized: https://libredd.it/r/Conservative/comments/l2d9ma/youtube_de...
Here's more evidence of widespread abuse by the right wing: https://www.thedailybeast.com/leaked-the-alt-right-playbook-...
You're so out of the loop, I can understand why you are confused.
> Almost always a large number of dislikes on content like "rewind" videos expresses widespread genuine disapproval of content
Go ahead and post your evidence please.
Presumably he's referring to this?
It's hardly a shocking conclusion. He's old, boring, out of touch, and wildly disliked by both the far left and the entire right.
In other words, democracy doing democracy things?
Have you heard of 4chan? Or any reddit like forum? People organize pretty quickly on internet.
0.001%? 0.01%?
As I said, they are hardly a thing at all.
Luckily they are typically organized so insecurely that we have a lot of evidence of them: https://www.thedailybeast.com/leaked-the-alt-right-playbook-...
It can be politically motivated now, and reputationally motivated then. It can also be both, then and now. We know nothing outside of what YouTube's PR department is telling us, and all PR is nonsense wrapped around bullshit.
It's pretty obvious why they're rolling it out now. YouTube spends a lot of its time suppressing signals it doesn't like.
But, in the end, who cares? Everybody not suffering from brain damage knows that YouTube manipulates the hell out of all of the public metrics; and everybody who isn't clinically dead knows that these things are gamed into uselessness.
I think it's worth really pondering this phrase. It's the kind of thing people just toss out without really thinking about what it means, in the hopes that it will produce automatic head-nods from the reader. When you are so deeply, heavily, unwaveringly invested in a very specific idea to the extent that anything that slightly disagrees with that idea has an "obvious political slant", you are literally brainwashed. I know that's an overused accusation, but it's hard to define "brainwashed" any other way; you've decided that your very small bubble of beliefs is the truth, and therefore any video that doesn't 100% conform to it is "obviously" politically biased and full of lies. And what does "politically" even mean? That word has just lost all meaning. Politics is just anything that affects people's lives.
The reality is that everything related to COVID or vaccines that isn't 100% Q-anon Trumpist cult-thumping is currently brigaded with downvotes. Do you not see the irony in rejecting everything outside of your bubble as obvious lies, while simultaneously calling for less censorship? All you're really saying is: we want every idea censored except for ours.
You used the word "obvious" twice, and the whole post has a "you know what I mean; wink wink, nudge nudge" vibe to it. I know I won't change your mind, but I just think it's worth pointing out to others to really just notice how weird that use of language really is. The Q-anon thought-virus is real and it has evolved to be very good at what it does. This kind of language is part of its infection mechanism. It's worth really examining.
I still am very confused by what you mean and what you're getting at with this.
> If you're confused what I mean, check any US mainstream media video with an obvious political slant but pretending to be "objective news" and look at the like/dislike ratio. The system is totally working...except it isn't working out well for the political party that YT would prefer.
In other words: People are disliking obvious political propaganda that YT would prefer that you like.
However in reality YouTube has no political bias.
The only one benifiting from this is Youtube itself since we'll have to watch entire videos wasting hours on useless content and they make more money.
"dislike attacks" what an implausible argument.
What's this world coming to?
I think it would be a good idea to do the same with the Likes count.
I fundamentally disagree with the idea that a dislike is "harassment" or an "attack". This really reads to me like Google is upset by the politically contentious videos that do get ratioed, and this is politically motivated on their part. Generally speaking, YouTube content creators trend left on US political issues, but YouTube's audience reflects the mainstream and trends slightly to the right on US political issues, which means that left-leaning politically contentious videos tend to get ratioed, and that includes left-adjacent issues that aren't strictly political but have been politicized.
Either YouTube is a place for creators to put themselves out there and engage with their audiences... or it's another place that is corporately whitewashed to be as inoffensive (and thus uninteresting and shallow) as possible. Historically it's been the former, and I see this as another in a long string of moves by Google to turn it into the latter... despite that being exactly what people fled from when they started spending more hours watching YouTube than they did television. It seems Google doesn't know or doesn't care what their audiences actually want.
Bah.
It was nice to have a universal Youtube meme, if you post that the person who failed at Mario Kart "Never had the makings of a varsity athlete" nobody knows what you're talking about, or if you comment on a board game Let's Play video that "I didn't know this was a Red Coin level" again, straight over their heads. But everybody knows a number of dislikes reference. Whether it's "13 people just want to watch the world burn" or "9 Yoshis watched this video".
Some people think that the more likes a video has, the more the community agrees with it's message, and therefore the more truth the video contains. The classic appeal to the majority fallacy.
This is only going to strengthen those communities and empower them further.
"Upvote this comment if you disliked this video:"
For those reasons, the dislike button is not going to be a great loss for anyone but those who were using it quite seldomly, and they are a minority.
You know, that thing where a video has 100 views but 150 likes+dislikes? It's simply too annoying to me.
=> I mean, if a multi-month, google-scale experiment says it helps, it... probably does?
Helps who?
Youtube user incentives are not necessary alligned the with company incentives. If it helps by making you a "peaceful" consumer who can't assess on average how other people think.
Maybe it is good for youtube but is it good for you.
Also, publishers still get to see it, it's only viewers that won't. Which probably means we'll all have to engage a lot more with the algorithm to route around garbage, but I kind of do that already so I'm not convinced it's a dealbreaker.
> Helps who?
>> "Earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike count to see whether or not changes could help better protect creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks – where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos"
Creators, apparently.
Search "covid vaccine" and have a look through those as well. Plenty of them have many more dislikes than likes, especially if the video is about mandates and or from MSM.
Dislike has no other effect that I am aware of. For this reason it was always broken as far as I'm concerned.
Surely that exists.
Like counts / view ratios tell me if a video is worth watching.
Overall , this is a pretty bad move, If a creator feels harassed by dislikes , they should use it as a way of learning to grow thick skin, They need it anyways as public professionals.
Instead what now went away, is information on how others in a community reacted to a video or content,
Dislikes have always been a great way to detect misinformation or incorrect content or atleast give a hint that a topic needs more researching.
Now, someone who’s new to all of this, Will see a youtube video on cleaning their desktop and wont understand why,
Running “sudo rm -rf —no-preserve-root /“ Is a very bad idea ....
(Pls dont run this command on your computer)
"Sans la liberté de blâmer, il n'est point d'éloge flatteur"
YouTube is trying to manipulate people in order to remove dissent.
Nothing about this "removes dissent" since comments still exist. And you know, the entire mechanisms of government and public protest which predated YouTube.
What it removes is the ability for people to gamify a metric. The metric still exists. It's still used for ranking and personalization.
But a brigade of leftists swarming a button on a video that mentioned nuclear energy isn't useful.
YouTube doesn't need to be nationalized. It needs thriving competitors.
This reeks of the silencing of what is perceived as dissident voices, is all.
I've personally never hit a like or dislike button in my life, never will ... but found it interesting as a viewer to see the ratio. Even knowing this ratio is probably at least partially the outcome of bot farms and the like.
Disney, DC Comics and the like must've complained about bad ratings/unfavourable like/dislike ratios I guess..
Let's try and see this as a tangent/bastard child of Newspeak. What better way too have people forget about something than to remove its linguistic manifestation from the dictionary? Same thing here, except people's way of expressing their approval/refusal. Google and the like are literally after the ultimate "macdonaldification" of people - cattle unable to say "NO".
(edit typos :-) )
Have a great day all :-)
This is a ridiculous decision. When someone puts something into the public space and everyone dislikes it, that should visible to anyone. This is just going to make ridiculous conspiracy videos and other harmful material like racist propaganda seem more legit than it is viewed by the rest of the public.
Report videos that violates Youtube's guidelines, and start your own platform if you take issue with the engagement tools they offer. Arguably, the data shows that outrage drives unhealthy engagement [1], and this appears to reduce outrage driven engagement, no different than HN flamewar detection and other mechanisms to encourage more civil discourse.
EDIT: Youtube isn't the internet, nor "commons", it's a single web property. Lots of other forums for your speech (including your own Mastadon, Discourse, or Peertube instance).
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=outrage+drives+engagement
There was a user-submitted recipe app that had a similar problem, where rating system on recipes is challenging because does it imply that the recipe was incorrect, the food tasty, the writing poor? It is too hard to get that signal from a single point of "average rating"
What that means depends on the crowd.
(But I will admit that I often downvote things simply because they are inaccurate.)
The parent poster saying "I've never hit a like or dislike button in my life" is a little bit like saying "I've never thrown litter or picked up litter in my life". Both understandable, one respectable, the other a bit weird - if you like the environment you are in but leave all the litter collecting to others and don't contribute to it, what's that saying about you and your one-sided use of the environment?
If you want HN or YouTube to have stuff you like, and not be overrun by the wild west of the internet, and there are no paid editors like the newspapers of old, not adding to the collective voting is like saying "everyone else, moderate this for me into a place I like, thank you".
The Prime Directive protects lesser-evolved, unprepared civilizations from the dangerous tendency of well-intentioned starship crews to introduce advanced technology, knowledge, and values.
The videos that people fully watch, have a positive comment section, and receive many more likes than dislikes are the videos that should result from searches.
What use is a gun if you remove the bullets?
> You can still dislike videos to further personalize and tune your recommendations
Not long ago in history, such a statement would have been totally incomprehensible, I mean completely nonsense. Even linguistically, there's so much baked into this. For starters, that there is an algorithm which which the viewer has a relationship with, and that the viewer wishes to further refine that relationship by expressing preferences. Yet, the interpretation of those preferences (by servers) are held within a black box.
The fact that this is truly a nuanced idea is why it's such a troubled case as a feature for the uneducated masses.
Ok, I'm being disingenuous, that is the Webster definition.
Do you think Google is satisfied that people will readily associate dislikes with metaphorical bullets?
Which is good or bad depending on whether or not you're in possession of functioning moral capacities
It turns out YouTube didn't see much benefit in providing a way to (metaphorically) shoot content creators. Taking the bullets out seems like a positive step for the community as a whole.
The button itself will remain.
The power of resisting something comes from feeling like many other people are also resisting it. Removing the dislike count means the user can't see if he is alone in his opinion or not.
It's a shit move designed to promote further self censorship and control over the minds of the users.
but as I wrote a few minutes ago ..
./dislike > /dev/null
Quoting from the article: "We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video."
Remove negative counts, make people more likely to click on videos, serve more accompanying ads, profit.
Simples.
Be the true reason whatever, but this is another concrete step into the direction of censorship initiated by the Big Tech during the pandemic.
The rationale is, Google noticed that people use the dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video.
If you can't use dislikes to decide whether or not the video you're considering is actually worth watching, you're more likely to click simply to find out.
In order to find out, you first need to watch the ads.
That's all. Someone at Google simply just put two and two together and realised that the visible dislike count was costing them in ad clicks.
Was it politically motivated? Probably not.
Will it have profound political effects? Absolutely!
How were you seeing the dislike count before clicking videos before?
I might be mistaken but I thought under normal circumstances you couldn't see the dislike count until the video was already starting anyway.
Disabling autoplay on an ongoing basis isn't an option for me because I won't log into Google services, except to check who is still mailing my gmail address on the long tail of de-googling.
Not in my world it's not. I'm pretty sure FF has disabled autoplay as well as default. The only time autoplay is allowed is when listening a "full album" play list. But that's only after I've scrolled the list to make sure some asshat hasn't pushed in a rando video below the first page.
Still. Far more likely to quit in the first 10 seconds than you would be to stick around for a couple of minutes and find out. Let alone click a related link.
If I can tell just by the dislike count if a video is a fake tutorial or w/e, I'm likely to leave immediately. If I'm on my phone (don't have adblock), I'll have closed the video before the preroll ad even lets me skip it.
Now, I'll have to sit through it and make youtube some money before I can determine if a video is any good or not.
Edit: Think about all those scam channels on YT. Disabling likes/dislikes looks fishy, but now they don't have to worry about that since only the likes are visible. This is a massive win for the "GTA online free money"-type channels.
I am sure they have better data than anybody as to how often a video is loaded for the first time and disliked within a few seconds of starting.
While once in a while this could be caused by a bad video start it probably mostly isn't caused by the content of the video.
By looking at behavior of users and pattern matching it probably wasn't hard to see that certain users were "making the number big".
Additionally as the article details they likely targeted those users with a new "don't show the number" feature and saw an improvement in the unwanted behavior (unnecessary dislikes).
The reality is that while dislike is fantastic from a quality filter standpoint human behavior likes making numbers big and sometimes they do weird things you have to correct for.
YouTube people have spent years censoring inconvenient thoughts (e.g. the lab leak hypothesis), juicing rankings in favor of mainstream media, and outright banning their ideological opponents.
If they believe that they're just making the internet less "toxic", it's because they don't differentiate between people with different value systems and monsters to be silenced.
There is zero chance this lately instance of censorship is profit driven. It's yet another favor Google is doing for an establishment that's rapidly losing credibility with the public and control of the narrative.
"What we learned from the experiment: Those in the experiment could still see and use the public dislike button, but because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior 1. We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks. Our experiment data confirmed that this behavior does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels."
It's not about appeasing Disney, it's about discouraging shitty behavior.
It will likely so give some good results in the background for YT and media partners but it is allowed to be both.
How is this any different than users targeting a video with lots of likes to drive up its count, though?
If YouTube were hiding both the public like and dislike counts, I wouldn't give this a second thought. But to say "seeing counts influences people" as a reason for hiding dislikes, and not extending that same argument to likes as well just seems a bit shallow.
Public counts are useful because they provide a gauge of perceived quality. If I see a video with lots of likes and no dislikes, it's fair to assume I'll like that video. If I see a video with lots of likes and I can't see the dislikes, I have absolutely no idea whether I'll like it or not; maybe it's a really good video and everyone liked it, or maybe the majority of people disliked it but I just can't tell. If you're removing my ability to gauge quality anyway, then why not just remove the like count as well?
This change is essentially shifting from "three out of five dentists prefer Trident" to "three dentists prefer Trident". The loss of information is so substantial that the remaining information is essentially useless.
If there's really great documentary about the International Space Station, I'd expect flat-earth believers to think that it's rubbish, that's just part of being human.
Conversely, if I saw a documentary about abortion (or some other very polarized topic) which had a 9:1 like-to-dislike ratio, the difference between that ratio and my expected 1:1 ratio would tell me that lots of people thought that the video was high-quality, even those who didn't share the same ideological views.
Perhaps, it's hard to fake enough ups to really make a difference to the ranking, but it was easy to bury things?
What do you mean? It's different because it's literally the exact opposite.
Would you write a comment if it was only visible to the creator?
If there's a user that is going around disliking a ton of videos, especially on a single channel, and/or without watching some minimum time or % of that video, it seems likely that user is being abusive; so perhaps shadow-ban that user's votes?
Similar with new users.. disallow use of dislike completely until they've been around a while and built up some reputation/history (by watching, upvoting, etc). If the user is possibly a bot (I assume there's algorithms to determine confidence of bot vs real user), require more verification.
I'm sure there's a reason they're not taking this approach, but I find it hard to believe they're choosing they way they are based on the reason they're giving here.
The most disliked video on YouTube happens to be a video made by YouTube themselves. [1] I guess they really didn't like that.
--
[1] YouTube Rewind 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-disliked_YouTube_...
Notably, their rationale they posted. Isn't it possible that they both see a positive outcome for creators not to get votebombed, and remove negative publicity from corporate partners like Disney?
I challenge anyone to tell me they do NOT think that brigading downvotes/dislikes is a thing on forums and Youtube.
This seems to come from a culture in which disliking someone, disagreeing with them or telling the they're wrong is the worst offense possible. In no way is it comparable to actual harassment, so of course people speculate about alternatives.
If someone gets recommended a video and they don't like it, disliking is then constructive criticism.
But there are groups out there that actively look for particular types of content to dislike - without even watching it.
It's all irrelevant anyway - their stated justification puts "harassment" first. Given the poisonous cancel culture that exists inside Google it's very obvious what their real motives are and the rest is thus all open to question. If it was 10 years ago Google's only justification for this sort of change would have been to improve the utility of the site, and we'd have believed it because that'd have been consistent with their other actions. In 2021? Not so much.
The discussion is about whether YouTube should be hiding the existence of these occurrences and the potential ramifications of such a policy. I haven’t seen anyone denying the existence of brigading.
Out of curiosity, what is the criteria for dislikes to be considered brigading? If I share a video containing hateful comments towards a community of people and they share that video amongst their community, what do you think the outcome of that will be? I would bet a high percentage of viewers from that community will dislike the video. Is this brigading? Why or why not?
The question to ask is not what reasons could they have done this for, but why did they do it in this particular way at this exact time?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/youtube-doesnt-like-...
What I find cringeworthy is this keyboard warrior mentality of likening an incentive change on YouTube videos to dissident activity, as if downvoting some cat video on the internet is like publishing Samizdat in the underground of the Soviet Union, maybe pipe down a little bit
like downvoting a cat video is the only type of video being downvoted. If a "tutorial" is bad, people can downvote it. If the next view sees lots of downs, they can avoid it and go to the video saving them time, and no longer rewarding with ad share for a worthless video.
> maybe pipe down a little bit
the exact point is that this is terrible because the downvotes aren't representative of anything. two examples. Go to Youtube right now, pick a 5 minute daily covid update. I'm not talking about op-eds, just factual reporting about the stats. Chances are it has been downvoted 80% because there's a bunch of crazies on that site downvoting every news video.
another example, Thandiwe Newton years ago made some political comments 4chan didn't like, so they started to bombard every westworld video with her in it. I saw those ratios and decided to not watch the show for months. Turns out is actually great and it was just some right-wing internet mob being angry about her.
Nobody ever downvotes shitty tutorials, because the only people who passionately downvote youtube videos are crazy. I can't tell you how many crappy tutorials with wrong info in it i've seen, entirely upvoted.
Speak for yourself?
I watch football highlights on YouTube. Due to copyright many videos are just clickbaits with perhaps a few seconds of real footage, or are missing games or whatever. The up/downvotes are a reliable measure in that niche.
The video owner can disable comments. Why not allow them the decision on showing/hiding this data? Clearly, there are people that are in favor and some that are against. Allow the "publisher" to make the decision. Seems like a decent compromise.
It's the intent behind all this that I find repulsive. As someone justly mentioned above, this all comes down to uninterrupted flow of content towards (less) able to resists psyches.
End result: $++;
If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be.
It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others.
The beginning of the end of being able to trust YouTube stats (as if that wasn't already an issue).
Goodbye old useful web... sigh
Reddit has always had a significant problem with downvote meaning "disagree" or "dislike", which according to redditquette is incorrect usage. In practice, the downvote is about enforcing groupthink on reddit and enforcing subreddit culture, and it is just as powerful today as it has ever been. Sort by "controversial" and you'll see.
5:1 upvotes to downvotes is a lot better than 25:21
In the end, pretty much all such voting mechanisms are flawed in some way or another. More interesting are the comments left by known experts in the field.
Agree with this. I think downvoting is net-negative, as it encourages bad actors. Let relative upvotes determine quality. For disagreement, use comments. For content that violates terms or is misleading, etc, use flagging.
Not to mention they delete entire subreddits, like r/nonewnormal that was going against the narrative about covid from the start.
We now have an online social media where you will never see anyone disagreeing with you, because the mods take care of that.
If you're on the old Reddit, some subreddits used CSS to hide the downvote button, which I think is dumb, but you can easily get around that by going to the new Reddit long enough to downvote.
Really ? There’s always your own evaluation of the content - as well as snopes, comments, other opinions, other media sources
Why are dislike counts more credible than like counts?
>It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others.
How would you discern that from a creator producing genuinely disliked content? And, what difference would it make if you could? Genuinely asking.
Nobody said they are. I'd be about as upset if like counts went away but dislike counts remained. The point is having both counts gives you a very useful signal.
Interesting thought: why do you never just see a dislike button anywhere?
>The point is having both counts gives you a very useful signal.
No. The point is that you really don't know how useful the signal is.
Dislike buttons actively encourage bad behavior, so can create skew in the signal. That's intuitive, and also backed up by YouTube's research; hence the change here.
There are many ways of doing so, with their own pros, cons, and time requirements. At best you're losing a relatively low quality way of quickly filtering out some videos.
> It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others.
You seem to want it both ways. It is judging videos by this ratio that allows the harassment to have an effect.
There may also be an emotional component to it; a private downvote likely stings a lot less than a public one. It prevents people from piling on or joining in the harassment. And it can allow YouTube to shadowban harassing accounts.
For the people who could actually affect change, it hides nothing. YouTube and the creator both get to see the numbers, and in extreme cases, they'd be available for law enforcement.
> The beginning of the end of being able to trust YouTube stats (as if that wasn't already an issue).
These stats were never trustworthy for viewers.
I think it was mostly about politics.
dislike > /dev/null
That seems like an absurd idea.
If your idea of being a dissident is a dislike button ... I don't know what to tell those folks.
Those dislikes are pretty irrelevant.
How about making an effort to remove polical and health misinformation?
The dislike button is for the people
This Trump rally from The Hill, where he tells his followers to get the vaccine that he got, garnered 1.5k likes and 1.3k dislikes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huQdxDnQkac
Here Trump hints at a 2024 run on the Today show, but it has more likes than dislikes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU7MWvwTOzw
Here a Fox affiliate covers a recent Trump rally, but it has 10 times more likes vs dislikes! Didn't anyone tell them about the grand Youtube conspiracy?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi4niom7se8
Does that fit your narrative or no?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcRVR63dnDA
And this:
...but the recent video of Biden getting sworn in has more likes than dislikes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2305DGsceE
He's been president for nearly a year. Youtube is really bad at this conspiracy stuff I guess.
Do you think anybody below the VP level of YouTube would be told? Guess what, no google employee talked about PRISM either.
They can say whatever reasoning they want, that does not necessarily make it true. Google has a well defined history of lying publicly or hiding the things they do. Dragonfly, PRISM... These things take brave whistle blowers that have their lives ruined to reveal.
If I said, "I am going to eat this fried twinkie because it is for my health" would you take that as a factual statement (that twinkies are healthy) just because some PR department repeated it on my behalf? Google saying they are not doing this on behalf of the current administration means nothing. Nobody reasonable expect them to really be honest with the public/users anymore.
Now they are giving up and just hiding them now.
Here's evidence that the videos are subject to organized brigades: https://libredd.it/r/Conservative/comments/l2d9ma/youtube_de...
>Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration. [...] The government and Google shared engineers, lawyers, scientists, communications specialists, executives, and even board members. Google has achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government: a true public-private partnership. [0]
>MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, I would say first, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that [The White House is] in regular touch with social media platforms — just like we’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets — about areas where we have concern [1]
>So it is possible YouTube removed dislikes it deemed "spam" from videos posted by the White House account, including the Jan. 20 press briefing video. But there is no evidence YouTube deliberately removed authentic dislikes from the video to support the Biden administration or silence critics. [2]
[0] https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...
[2] https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jan/25/did-youtube-r...
If this change happened or not due to such collusion is secondary to the thing worth noting: it would not be surprising if it did, it would be consistent with the governments positioning if it did, and it would also be hard to prove if it did, and if it was proven it would be vociferously defended by legions of commentators and the media. All that would need to happen was for the government to suggest the downvotes on pro-vax vids were contributing to deaths and ergo liability, and suggest the whole feature serves as a mechanism for disinformation they may be liable for in general, perhaps criminally so if the feature can be traced back as a proximate cause of something like the capital riot. Poof.
> so if the feature can be traced back as a proximate cause of something like the capital [sic] riot
Then they would have removed OAN's video claiming Trump won the presidency, but they didn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4c5dYDD9xw
A video being organically downvoted to oblivion is way different than a bunch of users organizing on 4chan, Reddit, or being directed by their favorite parasocial media personality to go bomb a video/product.
If I was YT I wouldn't want to bother policing this crap and just take away all the incentive to do it in the first place.
Solid analysis backed up by data..
I was just wondering if there was any evidence that the government was involved in UI change. There isn't.
Check the like/dislike ratio for any mainstream media video which features an obvious politically slanted view on some topic.
The problem here is that people are using the like/dislike ratio to indicate what may be biased content masquerading as 'objective news'. It just so happens that this (accurate) method is flagging the left leaning propaganda that YT wants to propagate.
I'm guessing you're a conservative, and you don't want dislikes to go away because you think it's great that pro-democrat videos get downvoted, but you can't base real public opinion on YouTube dislikes. It's massively astroturfed
You mean the vast majority support vaccines because they will lose their jobs if they don't "support" them?
Please stop. Most conservatives support vaccines. Your idea of conservatives has an insidious skew that's just plain wrong.
What a world we live in.
Edit: Oh no! I admitted that because I don't want to those videos I got rid of all recommendations. So off-topic I know!
They could craft a set of hot button keywords to deliver a much better experience (i.e. if I say I don't like sports, then don't recommend sports videos) but they choose otherwise and handwave a bunch of mumbo jumbo just like what you wrote.
Imagine if you could no longer choose what to watch on your TV but instead it chose for you. Are you good with that?
I don't understand this part. So, hiding the dislike count means less people will dislike.
Then what's the point of disliking a video? It provides much less feedback to a creator than just commenting, it's more often used as a signal to other viewers. If it's hidden, there's really no point of including it at all. In fact, why not remove likes too? And while we're at it, let's remove the view count too.
This is a really strange change, and I'm not sure that I'm happy about it.
For comparison, Reddit posts advertising that looks exactly like a user post. With voting and discussion turned off.
YouTube has removed dislikes from White House videos in the past: https://cnnbc.com/youtube-deleted-2-5-million-dislikes-from-...
Connect the dots.
It's useful for users to figure out if it's worth spending time watching the video.
That usefulness degrades for politically charged content but holds for things like how-to guides, lectures, etc.