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Comment by invalidusernam3 | Hacker News Reader

Whether this is good for creators is one thing, but it's definitely bad for viewers. Likes to dislikes is an indicator of the quality of the video, and how well it matches the title/description.

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.

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Whether it's good or bad for creator or viewers is irrelevant.

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.

I feel completely opposite about this. I have never (and I mean never) viewed the dislikes as an indicator of the quality of the video, or it’s content. It’s only ever been a number that some arbitrary set of people have incremented. To me the video’s quality is self evident, pretty quickly.

Have you ever done a DIY project around the house? There is a lot of trash out there, and the dislike to like ratio is a great way to quickly parse out the crap without 1) reading bottom barrel youtube comments or 2) watching 22 minutes of nonsense at 1.75x speed.

Not to mention the multitude of unsafe practices by inexperienced DIY youtubers, that are more often than not highlighted (and easily visible), in the like/dislike ratio.

Regardless of how you interpret it, they're providing less information

Maybe they were trying to do a little something for the creators, so they stop complaining about the rampant abuse of Youtube's automated copyright systems. Seeing as YT is completely unwilling to curb copyright strike trolling, or if a queef accidentally sounds like a Danny Elfman score, the good people at YT can stuff that thumb button and call it a day's work. Yay.

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