> [can you reasonably say rallying a mob against someone harasses or silences that person?]
Metrics would support that. A large number of humans speak less when they see their speech is unpopular.
Metrics would support that. A large number of humans speak less when they see their speech is unpopular.
This is a good thing. Some videos are bad.
People who make content in the public sphere should expect others to engage with it.
That's controversial. Determining correctness by popularity is one of the most common logical fallacies.
What isn't controversial is that allowing targeted harassment of creators is bad for YouTube.
If I call myself a baker and open up a bakery, my customers will either like my cakes, dislike my cakes, or not have a strong opinion either way. They will express their opinions in a variety of online and offline forums. Some of them might be cranks and trolls. Others might be discriminatory towards people who look like me. Those people are jerks, although it is sometimes hard to tell at first. It is even harder to have formal rules for fairly and efficiently filtering out the jerks.
But the point of having a public business is that you're putting yourself out there. If you don't want to get the feedback, maybe you should be able to disable the up/downvote feature on your videos, just like you can disable comments. And I completely get why some people disable comments on YouTube, for the same reason I get why some companies will want an active presence on Facebook and Twitter but not reddit.
But if you're going to take away up/downvotes site-wide, then YouTube's same rationale should apply to disabling comments site-wide. The harm that you can commit through paragraphs of text is so much more than you can in a single bit. Coordinated harassment campaigns can use comments to doxx, to spread misinformation, to send viruses and malware, and more.
And you know what, we need to get rid of elections too. That's just a single bit you flip for a candidate or an issue. If the concern isn't the harm of the downvote but the danger of compressing discussion into such a lossy format (like how people critique Twitter's character limits as to why it is a bad platform for nuanced discussion), then voting for elections seems to be just a problematic, right?
> The harm that you can commit through paragraphs of text is so much more than you can in a single bit.
That's whataboutism. It's an important topic as well, but not what's being discussed.
I'm not sure why you raise elections, but the premise ("if the concern isn't the harm of the downvote") is antithetical to the discussion (which is concerning the harm of targeted downvote campaigns).