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Comment by radlad | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure. Reddit, Hacker News, etc. all offer ways for content to be downvoted. This allows for user moderation, which has pros and cons, but seems to work better against disinformation than platforms like Facebook which only allow "likes."

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I've always used the like / dislike ratio as a measure on the quality/controversiality of the video in question.

Removing it makes paid content so much more attractive for starters...

I am almost laughing as I'm writing this, but reality is moving towards 1984 much quicker that I ever imagined.

The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video. Which obviously is the point. Damn Google got really evil real fast.

There are way too many 15 minute videos along the lines of "How to do X in Y" which should be 30 seconds long. The downvotes are telltale for these, then the most upvoted comment tends to be, "actual answer at 13:30".

Or the video just isn't what the clickbait title says.

I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk.

> I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk.

Ans quite frankly, things being brigaded probably means it's a political hot take, that's even boring when you agree, and just stupid when you don't. If you remove those from the downvoted video list, you're probably left with only a few actually insightful and useful videos.

> There are way too many 15 minute videos along the lines of "How to do X in Y" which should be 30 seconds long.

This is why I stopped using YouTube a few years ago and heavily prefer text+image tutorials to videos nowadays. YouTube is pushing longer videos, because they show you more ads in the middle of them and creators are also rewarded with more money for longer videos + they can insert their "sponsor messages" a.k.a. even more ads.

reality is moving towards 1984 much quicker that I ever imagined

Nothing says “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever” like removing the 'dislike' count from YouTube videos.

Perhaps a smelly sock instead of a boot?

> The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video.

They neither removed nor disabled the dislike button.

They just silenced the audio of the telecast

That's moving the goalpost. They're removing all negative feedback in public.

And even then, saying they didn't disable the button is only arguably true. The button no longer performs its primary function.

> That's moving the goalpost.

I'm not the one moving the goalpost—it started as "reality is moving towards 1984", then "they removed the ability to give negative feedback", and now it's "they removed the ability to see the negative feedback that others gave." That's a significant change.

> saying they didn't disable the button is only arguably true. The button no longer performs its primary function

I'm more sympathetic to this argument—that the primary purpose of the "dislike" button isn't to give the creator negative feedback, but as a "rating" system, with the only 2 possible ratings "+1" and "-1". The problem with that is that, "they changed the rating system" doesn't seem to merit all of the comparisons to 1984. And "more like 1984" vs. "less like 1984" seems a silly way to evaluate rating systems.

Edit: actually, the rating system changed from "+1", "-1", "no vote", to "+1", "no vote"—since you can see the # of views, then you can determine roughly how many "no votes" there are.

It works on Hacker news since the vast majority of people here share the same interests. The same is true in theory on reddit, where the voters on a single subreddit share the same interests, and importantly reddit has rules against brigading to at least try to enforce that limitation.

The basic problem is whether a downvote on a cat juggling video means "this is a bad example of juggling cats" or does it mean "I don't like cat juggling"? On YouTube, it's much more likely to mean the latter, but it's the former that's actually useful.

> the vast majority of people here share the same interests

What are those interests that the vast majority of people here share?

Pendatry:D

HN is a self-selecting echo chamber for people who like the content that is posted to HN.

Ok well, you didn't answer the question, you just repeated something generic you've heard here, I guess. Whether it's true or not, who knows. I'm not sure what it means exactly. How would you go about testing whether that's actually true?

I dislike a fair percentage of the topics posted here regularly, or have no interest in them, and I suspect that's not uncommon. A survey on that subject would be fascinating.

That makes me wonder why you choose to stop by HN. Surely there are a large number of other tech-based feeds that would suit you better.

I wouldn't say there is anything here that I personally 'dislike', stuff that doesn't interest me, sure, but then I just don't read about it. I don't feel the need to down vote it though.

That's the difference I think

This is an excellent point. A dislike value is a single number but represents a large variety of reasons, only some might relevant to if you would think the video is good, and you don't know the breakdown.

> On YouTube, it's much more likely to mean the latter, but it's the former that's actually useful.

What makes you say that? Why is the person that doesn't like cat juggling even clicking on the video?

Because Google steered users this way via their auto-play next video feature. I’ve avoided it like the plague it is so I’m not precisely sure where I saw it, but I’m absolutely sure there was language to the effect of “we pick the next videos automatically based on your likes and dislikes” which translates to “dislike means give me less of this” which means they’ve skewed the usefulness of the metric. It’s no longer clearly indicative of bad content, it’s now indicative of bad content or content users don’t want to see more out automatically.

I'd argued before that dislikes should be removed from hn and i've removed them myself from my own view.

further, YouTube only said the dislike count is private so the moderation still happens

And what's the argument? Legitimately asking, I use it to downvote comments that are low quality in my opinion and I don't think that has a negative impact on HN at all.

I’ve noticed on occasion that comments that border on political speech can really go either way, even if they argue the same point in the same way. HN is, at least according to dang, an unusually diverse community, so leaving it up to a dice roll and timing for a comment to survive its first 10 minutes seems not great.

I often see completely factual comments get downvoted once (to 0), and since it then gets a little greyed out, people turn off their brain and blindly ram the downvote button on it. It just leads to bandwagoning.

I find the opposite. Fairly often one of my comments will get a quick downvote or two, but they quickly then get enough upvotes to get back into the black, I expect as reasonable people, who might not have bothered upvoting the comment otherwise, do so because they can see that it didn't deserve downvotes.

downvotes on HN are, by official policy, for disagreeing with ideas. They are not just for low quality posts. And, even on sites where downvotes are supposed to be for low quality/off topic, etc enough people still use them as "I don't like this idea and don't want you to spread it even if it's arguably valid".

Further, they're a form of violence against the poster. Not sure what other word to use to be told in a single click "You Suck!". It is or arguably can be a form of bullying.

I personally upvote posts I disagree with that nonetheless improve my thoughts and productively challenge my assumptions. I prefer a voting convention that increases the probability that I give my attention to worthwhile content rather than trendy sentiment.

[clarification: I suspect you agree and do not mean to imply otherwise, though I do not know]

> downvotes on HN are, by official policy, for disagreeing with ideas

Care to link to that policy? I was always of the impression that short low-quality comments that don’t further the discussion are prime examples of acceptable downvote targets here. Disagreeing with a constructively expressed idea is best done by expressing your own argument in a reply.

> I was always of the impression that short low-quality comments that don’t further the discussion are prime examples of acceptable downvote targets here. Disagreeing with a constructively expressed idea is best done by expressing your own argument in a reply.

Amen to that. Not how it always works around here though.

They are not, the guidelines are linked in the footer and don't mention anything about downvotes aside from "not talking about downvotes".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

A quick google

https://www.google.com/search?q=disgreement+downvote+hacker+...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996858

They are not a form of violence. That's concept creep in order to force home a rhetorical point that you're trying to make.

> Further, they're a form of violence against the poster. Not sure what other word to use to be told in a single click "You Suck!". It is or arguably can be a form of bullying.

Your point before that part was something I could engage with, but if you really see any form of disagreement as "violence" or a "form of bullying" then I don't understand how you can even function online.

"Further, they're a form of violence against the poster."

You suck.

Raw votes are pretty bad at moderation. Voting features are there primarily to help engage visitors so they will return.

HN and some subreddits avoid becoming tools of disinformation because they are managed by dedicated moderators who remove posts, comments, and participants who are acting in bad faith. (Facebook does not do this.)

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