Hacker News Reader

Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

> I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching

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.

View on HN

Harassment could be solved in way saner ways, like detecting unusual peaks of dislikes at some content.

Without the like vs dislike ratio, I'm less likely to use Youtube. I'm already using Bing and Google to search for videos b/c they absolutely botched their search experience.

I've started using Bing more and more as well. I never thought I'd see the day.

The changes they've made over the years have made a huge difference in the amount I use it. I used to often spend a lot of time discovering new channels and videos and overall just enjoying entertaining content. Compared to today, I've uninstalled the YouTube app from my phone and when I visit the site in a browser I generally ignore the homepage and just search for updates on the content I'm interested in, watch one video if I can find anything that looks relevant and then close the page. If their goal is to show more ads, they're shooting themselves in the foot.

> 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.

Channels can already disable the like and dislike bar.

Then why not keep counts and ratios optional?

That's the f*** up part. It's already optional. The owner can choose not to show it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com