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Comment by beezischillin | Hacker News Reader

This is part of a wider trend in the corporate internet of getting rid of visible user interaction to stop publicising user opinion. News publications have slowly gotten rid of comments sections, Google itself (an entity quite close to the USG) is following suit. Of course I suspect that the idea here is less about creator choice, since they can already hide and filter user interaction to their hearts content and more about some high profile channels of some importance being able to save face since manually disabling interactions looks worse for them.

I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube. I wonder if something like that would be viable, maybe with the addition of a like dislike bar.

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Do you mean like Youtube's own Youtube Rewind 2018, which it became the most disliked video surpassing even Justin Bieber's Baby? To add extra irony, it was subtitled "Youtube Rewind 2018 - Everyone Controls Rewind". It seems that everyone controlling the dislike button was not appreciated, and while I find this downvote session brilliant I've been waiting since then for Youtube to remove the downvote button.

Isn't that a perfect example of Dislike button being used mostly as a meme or to bully / pile-on? Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on Youtube?

In most other websites and contexts anyway, like/dislike is used to share your taste with the algorithm or to the author, and neither of those are disrupted here. The only thing that is disrupted is the tribal action using the dislike button as a way of publicly and anonymously showing hatred towards content.

It was pretty cringe, and for how much it was promoted, absolutely.

I wouldn't necessarily say that it was the worst video, but the response to it was a response to YouTube's general direction, in my opinion.

https://www.polygon.com/2019/12/6/20998648/2019-youtube-rewi...

And instead of trying to understand the reason that video had so many dislikes they decided the users and the dislike button are the problem, not anything related to the way they're running Youtube. And that reaction just reinforces the beliefs of people that dislike how Youtube is being run.

If I use a dislike button on a platform, it is typically because I want to warn other users away from that content, because its irrelevant, misleading, uninteresting etc. If likes and dislikes are primarily tools for personalising the algorithm to your taste then the platform may as well hide likes from public view as well.

It might not be the worst video ever, but it was definitely among the most universally disliked. It's like downvotes here, you might disagree but it's meaningful signal.

> Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on Youtube?

It was "EA pride and accomplishment" bad. A brainless self glorifying marketing piece that didn't spend a second to even acknowledge all the issues many channels suffered under.

> Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on YouTube?

The worst video on YouTube probably doesn't get actively promoted by Google or carry the weight of being made by Google.

> It was "EA pride and accomplishment" bad. A brainless self glorifying marketing piece that didn't spend a second to even acknowledge all the issues many channels suffered under.

What made the 2018 Rewind any worse than the Rewinds of previous years?

Just re-watched 2017 and 2018

* 2017 music + people doing fun/weird things

* 2018 constant commentary, including mentions on how good youtube/they are and how many good things they did with some music in between. Lead by non other than the man who made it all possible, Mr. Youtube himself: Will Smith.

That last part was sarcasm. There are breakdowns by people more into youtube culture that can point out in detail which inclusions didn't make sense, why music videos from 2016 seem misplaced in a 2018 rewind and how many high profile content creators youtube passed over in order to create the specific public image it wanted to present.

> It was "EA pride and accomplishment" bad

It's funny you refer to Reddit because that's also historically well known for pile-on behavior. Why do you think features such as "hiding vote count for the first few hours" exist? It's been shown that the very first few votes you get can result in the same comment either being downvoted to hell or upvoted.

So if the EA accident was your reasoning for why having dislikes is a good idea, then you really just proved my point, as that too was mostly a meme and perfect proof of pile-on behavior.

> So if the EA accident

Apparently you seem to be in agreement with the group piling on that the contents of the post were bad, otherwise why call it an accident?

> as that too was mostly a meme and perfect proof of pile-on behavior.

So you are saying if it hadn't been a meme most gamers would have up voted a post saying they should feel good from having to spend more on an already full price game?

I feel that the issue with the dislike button is its ambiguity, similar to star ratings. A Uber driver or Ebay seller with a many of 4-star ratings is clearly fine, but one with a moderate number of 1-star ratings is not, despite having the same average ranking. In the case of Uber/Ebay, the better question is a simple "Would you do business with this individual again?" For YouTube, the public dislike would be better replaced with something like "report content," followed by a choice of "clickbait/inaccurate content/hate speech."

> Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on Youtube?

It has the most downvotes but it definitely doesn't have the worst ratio. The many likes and many dislikes don't suggest "worst video", and it's not the worst video, so all's good there.

If you want to remove tribalism by hiding a counter, they will pile up in the comments, upvoting one of those that says “disliked it, who same?” to the top. Fighting with it is just naive. It’s all real people, so love them as they are.

>as a meme or to bully / pile-on

It was an effective form of harmless electronic civil disobedience, a simple and albeit entertaining but still meaningful message of solidarity from the masses to a corporate entity.

The interesting thing about that video was that the Internet took it as a win, YouTube apparently took it as a learning opportunity.

Yes, Gab made their own browser called Dissenter that added a comment section to every page of the Internet. Interestingly, I can find very little when Googling for it now. I'm sure other projects have tried this too.

It was deemed too dangerous by the powers that be, so it was banned from app stores, the extension was banned by Firefox and Chrome, etc.

Posting and deleting the same comments dozens of times is seriously abusive and I've banned the account. Please stop now.

Yep. Corporations are working hard to turn the internet into broadcast TV, back when the broadcaster had all the power and you took what they gave you and you liked it because you didn't have a choice.

What is the average person going to do now that they have a dopamine response addiction to instant feedback and immediate knowledge at their fingertips? Read a book? Go for a walk where they're not constantly scouting for a situation where they can take a picture and receive happy brain chemicals from thousands of people?

> I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube.

Hypothesis is such a tool: https://web.hypothes.is/

Isn't Reddit and hackernews a comment section with upvote and downvote for the entire internet ?

Reddit is a comment section filled with insufferable morons who allowed their website to become a way of repackaging fun parts of the internet with astroturfing.

Hackernews is not different, except most of the posters work in a single industry.

Too true.

And you don't get downvote powers until you've been vetted.

> I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube. I wonder if something like that would be viable, maybe with the addition of a like dislike bar.

If something like that ever took off, it would devastate independent publishers and a huge part of Internet culture by draining interactions out of websites. Google tried it before, and fortunately it failed. I think it's one of the worst possible things that could happen to the Web.

A lot of mainstream media sites have removed comments sections from their articles, there's no user interaction left on those.

That's what blogs are for. Write a blog post about the article. If it's good enough, it will get traffic.

If you believe blog posts are the same thing as comments, why did you write a comment to say so?

Not every site is the same. News sites in the US turn off their comments because it's too difficult to moderate in the current political environment.

Hacker News isn't a content site, but is mainly created for commenting. It is less political than the news sites which removed comments. It can also handle the moderation more easily than news sites partly because it has a very strong ugliness and usability filter.

To be fair, comments _must_ be moderated or they turn into a cesspool in short order. A like-dislike count does not have that problem, though. And YouTube isn't removing the comments (yet).

My experience is that in many scenarios, comments were an attempt to create sticky relationships when the comments themselves add very little.

Take a news site, an article about, say, Trump becomming President. Comments are likely to range from "I can't satnd the guy" though to "I'm so happy he got in". They aren't going to add much of any value to the conversation.

I am seeing more attempts now of people attempting to be "clever" in their comments and start dropping 'facts' taken from various places. Again, interesting at best but at worst it doesn't add anything.

Votes are perhaps less contentious but what are they really saying? I like the article because it is factually correct or I dislike the article because Trump is President?

Then again YouTube comments can be pretty funny and interesting these days. They're a nice way to interact with the content creators, and with other followers.

>News publications have slowly gotten rid of comments sections,

Slowly? I havent seen comment on majority of new sites for years.

On the other hand: I'm not shocked, majority of stuff written there was basically trash.

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