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Comment by slightwinder | Hacker News Reader

And this makes the system useless. Removing it is the healthy solution to interrupt the game.

How does it make the system useless? It simply means the bar for "should I watch this" re: [dis]like ratio changes at least in part based on video content. If I see a technical video with more than 10-15% dislikes, I probably won't watch it or will be skeptical. But a video about abortion can be 50/50 and still have great content.

It seems unlikely that giving someone more information makes something worthless.

This system is useless because it does not communicate the reasoning behind a downvote, nor is it objective in the first place. People downvote for many reasons, and quality is the seems usually to be the most likely. You could make the most informative and objective correct video, and toxic communities could downvote it because they feel triggered for some absurd reasons, or because it competes with their favored content-creator, or because of reasons which are independent of the video itself

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.

Useless for controversial content maybe, not for non-controversial content. What percentage of content on YouTube is controversial do you think? Probably very little, so this "solution" seems like a serious overreach that removes something that's useful 90% of the time to appease some minority.

The system is fine. What if we applied this logic to elections? Just get rid of them altogether since they're prone to brigading.

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.

The same mechanics are at play when people don’t participate in the democratic process. It’s a vocal minority rule. This is why a certain political party in the US tries to disqualify so many people from voting. If we had a mandatory voting system in the US with a federal holiday our government would look very, very different.

No, because if the US had a better voting system it would also require voter ID for example

> The system is fine. What if we applied this logic to elections? Just get rid of them altogether since they're prone to brigading.

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?

Healthy solution? It's hammering a needle with a hydraulic press.

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