The problem is people also use it as a propaganda tool to bury videos they don’t politically agree with. Normies have much lowered like/dislike button engagement so it’s a disservice to the vast majority.
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?
- 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.
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".