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Comment by felistoria | Hacker News Reader

The White House has one of the worst ratios. I would imagine thats likely why it happened.

This is some next-level conspiracy. Like most, it's feasible and perhaps in the realm of possibility, but there are probably 30 explanations above it in the "that makes sense" queue.

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.

It's because their explanation is nonsensical on its face. How is a dislike "harassment"? How are genuine groups of people downvoting something an "attack"? YouTube isn't like HN where likes and dislikes are summed. People disliking a video doesn't change how many people liked it, both are visible.

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 seeks out content that they wouldn't ordinarily interact with just so that they can dislike/downvote it or post nasty comments - that's an attack.

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.

YouTube knows how someone arrived at a video - if they wanted to, they could only count likes and dislikes from people who had the content recommended to them. Or they could drop likes/dislikes from incomplete views. Actually I think they already do that, I recall reading something to that effect years ago.

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.

> I challenge anyone to tell me they do NOT think that brigading downvotes/dislikes is a thing on forums and Youtube.

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?

I 100% believe that high dislike counts on ideologically favored videos is the real reason. This includes both White House sources and official propaganda regarding Covid-19 and vaccines. (It is undoubtedly propaganda IMO, though note that that does not necessarily make it wrong)

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?

The change was being explored years before Biden was president

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/youtube-doesnt-like-...

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