Return YouTube dislike count | Hacker News Reader

Return YouTube dislike count

returnyoutubedislike.com

130 pointsNoWayDude192 comments

  > You can still dislike videos to further personalize and tune your recommendations.

2016 Dislike button: Feature to inform other users that a video is not worth watching.

2021 Dislike button: Feature to inform google to show _you_ other content.

Google is hijacking user interface concepts to slowly train users to train the machine about how to train them.

I think this is the key point: the signal is valuable enough for Google to keep it to themselves. Similar to the work done to hide referrer when clicking through searches (of course there's a good reason!).

This is a weirdly polarizing topic. I don't think I've ever clicked on the dislike button, personally (but I do click on the like button, occasionally).

It would seem like people use the dislike button to signal that "I don't agree with the premise of the video" as much as it's to signal that "this video is actually crap". Same as with Reddit downvotes - it shouldn't be used for downvoting legit content that you don't agree with but.. we've all seen how that works in practice.

IMO the dislike count is useless for filtering out "bad" content - you have no idea if it's really a crap video or if it was just brigaded by people who live by "alternative facts" and don't like the specific video due to it having _actual_ facts (or.. politics). Other than certain genres.. like children videos/animations.. there's no political agenda there and dislikes are a genuine "this video is crap" indicator :)

Edit: as is rightfully pointed out in replies, tutorial/how-to videos are other some of the other genres of videos where the dislike count is actually really useful. I totally agree with this - I just gave one example of children videos but there are definitely others as well.

However I still think that in the bigger picture, these genres are popular amongst us, HN folks, but by far the most YT video views come from genres where dislikes are an indication of "I don't agree with you / I don't like this genre of music / I have a different political view / I'm too old to understand this crap that kids are consuming these days / etc". I hope I'm wrong though :)

> IMO the dislike count is useless for filtering out "bad" content

I don't know what kind of content you consume on youtube, but this does not reflect my experience at all. I'm regularly researching repair/modding manuals or enthusiast videos and the dislike count is a very, very good way of telling how good a video will be. Sometimes things are done in a really bad or even dangerous way, or the whole video is just someone describing the problem and then skipping the actual fix.

The only other place I've seen dislikes is at pr videos that went viral for their outright offensive hypocrisy or otherwise badly formulated message, which I wouldn't call a bad use either.

I do agree with you! Repair guides (and similar how-to's) are one of the genres where the dislikes are actually an indication of the quality of the content.

I'm just making an assumption that most of Youtube content that's consumed, is in genres where the dislikes are more a signal of "I don't agree with you/your political view/taste of music/etc". I hope I'm wrong.

Dislike buttons in special interest topics are probably a more informative signal than they are otherwise, but I've never personally spent much time looking at the likes one way or the other. Comments are usually much more informative. E.g. "these instructions for the EG1772Z worked for my EG1781T, except that I had to pry off the plastic plate that hides the access bolt first." or "Ok video, but if he had done X first, he could have finished with half the trouble." or "Be careful prying the case loose. I broke the plastic tabs with my screw driver."

I see quite a lot of news clips, and in that case, negative ratio is almost always the result of brigading. Here's an example I ran into this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kqEMLiE5CU

Out of nowhere, 95% dislike ratio. Any other video on that channel has maybe 400 votes total, this was has 5K dislikes out of nowhere, very clearly some group of antivaxxers brigaded it. The video is perfectly normal and nothing out of the ordinary, so the vote count is just misleading and useless.

Outside of politics and other controversial topics, the dislike button is immensely useful in determining the quality of a video. If one has several thousand likes and just a few dislikes, you can be relatively certain that the video meets or surpasses expectations. If, on the other hand, it has a high number of dislikes, there's a good chance that the video will not meet the average user's expectations. If you play those videos, usually the issue will surface for you as well and you can save yourself the remaining time on the video looking for better content.

Biggest miss is tutorials etc.

Dislike ratio really useful to judge which ones are not worth the time.

If I come across a low-quality rip of Dark Side of the Moon and dislike it, will Youtube recommend to me less Pink Floyd or less low quality rips? What if I dislike that horrible Barenboim performance of Beethoven's Ninth? Will I get less Beethoven or less horrible performances? What about reports of Israel killing Gazan children, when the video footage clearly shows children killed when a Hamas projectile they were "guarding" prematurely detonated? Do I get less news or less lies? What about that idiot who knows a lot about cars and car history (Donut maybe) but screams and acts like he graduated from Animal House? Do I get less informative car videos or less puerile screaming and sentences composed of 15 cuts, sometimes right in the middle of a compound word?

I think that basing recommendations on a single dimension is flawed in its own right.

It's nothing to do with recommendations. You search a term, you look at the videos, ones with large amount of dislikes are usually crap so you choose another one.

yea, or product reviews (especially for more esoteric things). you can immediately tell if its real or a bot generated slideshow with a TTS of amazon reviews

> you have no idea if it's really a crap video or if it was just brigaded by people who live by "alternative facts" and don't like the specific video due to it having _actual_ facts

I feel like this would only apply to a few areas that are highly polarized (COVID stuff, political, etc.). But the vast majority of content I (and most people) watch does not fall into heavily polarized topics like that and the risk of brigading is zero.

Its misuse is a smaller deficiency over the larger overall benefit of it though. For every oppressed and brigaded youtuber there's dozens if not hundreds of smaller channels that make crap content that don't deserve the algorithm boost because they gamed a certain keyword.

I am not sure that is it reasonable or desirable (let alone possible) to treat "like" and "dislike" as signals of the quality of the video in some objective sense. It is certainly not what the everyday English usage of the words means.

It's a dislike button, the reverse of like button, so it's normal people use it for content they dislike, including political content.

They're removing dislikes because of a multitude of reasons, from my own thought.

1. Movie companies don't like releasing trailers and seeing their dislike numbers reaching orbit.

2. The current US administration doesn't like the vast number of dislikes on their videos compared to likes.

3. Advertising agencies don't want their ads related to videos that have high numbers of dislikes, so google is finding "middle ground" and only making the counts visible to the creator so advertisers have less to complain about.

4. People get their feelings hurt when they put a lot of work into a video, only for it to immediately get disliked or "brigaded" by people.

I think the whole fear of "people might dislike-brigade videos" is really only a concern for any online "celebrities" who upset their fans, and for large companies who for some reason think like/dislike ratios are any indication of actual opinion.

Possible solutions other than removing dislikes: - Youtube doesn't count a "view" unless some criteria are met - I assume watch-time is one of those. Just do the same with dislikes/likes. That will immediately get rid of the vast majority of spam up/downlikes. (Sidenote: if they don't have any current criteria for what constitutes a "real" like or dislike, that's on them lmao)

- Leave it up to the creator to show or hide likes/dislikes.

- Leave it up to the advertiser. If they don't want like/dislike counts to be shown on their videos, they get less ad revenue (which will never work, because Google likes money)

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I guess since Youtube "is a private company and can do what they want!" they'll just keep forcing up and coming competitors out of the industry through predatory practices and maintain their top status as a video upload platform.

> they'll just keep forcing up and coming competitors out of the industry through predatory practices

They don't need to. The only alternatives to YouTube are social media platforms like Twitter, FB, IG and TikTok.

There's a million things wrong with that* but my main quarrel is that they're not searchable. YouTube may be closed off and may have a limited API but it still has discovery outside of the platform and videos can be downloaded.

*Like no one uploading let's plays, repair tutorials, indie songs, etc.

The benefit of YouTube is its past content. We're trapped.

There is so much glib defense in this thread:

1) I’ve never used this feature

2) People have nothing better to do with their time

3) Why do you care so much

Can someone explain why this is a good decision by YT without low blows? Why is this even a polarizing topic?

Currently we're using youtube API to get dislikes count

...so they just hid it from the user, and the actual number is still there if you know where to look? That's surprising.

The public dislike count will be removed from the API next month unless the api call is authed with an account associated with the channel.

God. Even if you buy the "social experience" argument (which I don't really), removing it from the API for non-owners is just malicious.

Well the reason they state in the email is "To make the dislike count private across the platform, we also will be removing public access to the dislike count data via our API."

But if you have a system that doesn't display the dislike count publicly you can apply for a exemption.

Why?

The owner of the channel can still see the dislike numbers, just the general public can't.

Not sure what they'll do on Dec. 13th[1] when the YouTube API no longer allows developers to access this information.

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/134791097/update-t...

They have bajillion different clients. Web, iOS, Android, PS4, various TVs, and more, all of which are being used by people on all sorts of devices in all sorts of different versions.

Probably they will either begin at some point to return the value “0” for dislike count for others than the uploader at some point or if not they will probably freeze the value at its current. Maybe it’s already frozen. Did anyone try to see if the number is changing as seen publicly by one account when new dislikes are added by other accounts?

The API will be removed in mid December.

It's visible to the uploader only, so yes it's still there.

yes, they removed the dislike count to shield creators from "attacks" to improve their mental health, so the only one you can see it now is the creator. YT is either very stupid or their lying about their motive. I wonder which one is it.

Or commenters aren't bothering to do basic research before mouthing off on ycombinator? To quote from https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/134791097/update-t...

"Developers: If you’re using the YouTube API for dislikes, you will no longer have access to public dislike data beginning on December 13th. Your end users will still be able to view dislike data related to their own content on authenticated API requests. You can apply for an exemption (to have dislike data on non-authenticated calls) as long as you don’t display or share dislike data with your end users."

> their own content on authenticated API requests

of course you can still see your OWN dislike but not the overall ratio, but the uploader can see that. what's your point exactly

I think the removal of the Dislike shows one of the key problems of Social Media. They want to act as old school broadcasters in the information age. The Dislike button made companies immediately aware of the success of a campaign, something that terrified the heads of marketing.

The idea is that once you remove the risk of executives to be exposed to bad publicity will go away. I don't think it will work but it shows the users are not the real clients, the users are the product.

The button will still be there but only the creators will be able to see the numbers, so it won't affect companies' ability to be aware whether their campaign was successful or not.

Democracy dies in darkness. This is another step towards the shade...

This is far FAR too melodramatic of a reaction

The dislike button didn’t make YouTube democratic.

I don't think so actually. Big tech is dystopian in nature these days.

How much closer toward the shade did society move when reddit removed dislike counts? Did we move away from the shade when YouTube introduced them in the first place? Is adding and then removing net neutral? So many questions about this hyperbole...

Democracy is Greek for “I can see how many people pressed the dislike button on this video”.

MKBHD had a good video about this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaaJyRvvaq8

I cancelled my youtube music subscription and had that as the main reason for cancelling. You gotta vote with the wallet. But I don't honestly think google cares about what their users cares about.

At least it doesn't feel that way.

Google cares very much about what their users think, it's just that you're not a user, you're the product google sells.

I really am surprised that it matters to you that much.

Removing useful features is typically a reason to walk away. I'm really surprised you are really surprised.

Hopefully the community will come together and figure out a good solution for the mess that YT is creating.

> Hopefully the community will come together and figure out a good solution for the mess that YT is creating.

If youtube won't host the information, it becomes a search problem: who has voted on this link? How have they voted?

Certainly the easiest path would be to create a new centralized site that hosts all these votes. Then create an extension to add these downvotes back in.

Ideally you'd probably want to also have folks be willing to track views too, since downvotes is pretty much a consideration of ratios; 22 downvotes doesn't sound like a lot if there's a million views but it's a lot if there's 100 views.

So now we have an extension that tracks every youtube video you view and submits it to some centralized site, along with upvote/downvotes.

It'd be excellent to try to evolve a more distributed p2p architecture for doing this, but short of recording it on a blockchain- and a roll-up side-chain probably won't help- there's not a lot of good ways to do this. An intermediary step would be to have folks create micro-pages that record their votes. Then we can search "link:https://youtube.com/1a2s3d4f" to use google to go find all the votes people have created.

It's sad & bitter Youtube is de-democratizing this way, is serving their customers & not the audience, but it does interestingly highlight what a hard problem it is to create real demoncratic systems online.

I think it's as simple as commenting "dislike" on the video instead. It will fill the comments with negative responses that are easily recognized, and while you don't get counts it won't be hard to tell if a video has a lot of dislikes.

It would be better to get a count and ratio of like to dislikes but Google doesn't want that so comments it is.

The other option is an off-site like/dislike page that is hosted off of Google's servers and not subject to their tos. Maybe accessible through an extension. Abandon YouTube like/comments since they clearly can't handle the engagement and host the discussion on a third party page - one page with a like/dislike count for each YouTube video and with better forum type tools than YouTube comments offer. A good opportunity for a third party to build a tool that solves the problem outside of YouTube.

The problem is that some videos disable comments (e.g. see the white house videos), or the video owners will simply delete those comments.

In general when I see no comments on a video I know the video is garbage, so that helps on its own.

ive used youtube daily for years and never once looked at or clicked the dislike button (or the like button). seems to work fine for me

I've used YouTube daily for years and always found it quite useful to see dislike bar, because it's rare to see more than 10% dislikes on a video, so whenever that happens, you know that something's wrong.

I use it prolifically to mark videos that are hard to watch or lack the content they claim they contain. I consider it a noble service to my peers.

fair but id assume the algorithm prioritizes watch time anyway. people might dislike a video but then watch it anyway… guessing youtube is going to opt to keep showing the video.

Hopefully the community has something more interesting in their life to care about.

It is absolutely worth caring about. YouTube's feedback to users is monumentally important, as it's the go-to source of video-based information for hundreds of millions of people. It has the potential to feed people really toxic content.

Most of the community likely watches videos through Reddit or FB which have built-in downvotes so they won't even notice.

I'm guessing YouTube regrets putting comments and votes on its videos in the first place. Embedding YT videos still gives YT views (unlike, say, reposting a gif to 4chan) and I would think that they'd prefer FB/Reddit would just eat the controversy over curating comments and votes instead of having to subsidize it themselves.

Yes, the way it’s always done.

Is it? Is there a good community alternative to Whatsapp and Facebook that is also used by people other than terrorists and right wing activists (joke)?

Last time I tried to switch to an alternative, I ended up with my messaging spread out to many apps. So I ended up going back to the common denominator: Whatsapp

I don't want to be pedantic here but Facebook was the replacement for Google's Orkut. Orkut started messing up and they lost their leadership position almost overnight.

I message almost everyone I know on Signal. I have WhatsApp installed (no permissions) for when I need to contact someone who doesn't have it.

Oh interesting. I only had two contacts on Signal.

Seems to me like the core of the problem is that, despite its flaws, this is one more step away from any semblance of community "moderation" at a time when trust in platforms is low. It doesn't surprise me that the issue is polarizing. At its core, the world seems split on whether platforms should take a more active role in controlling content vs allowing the market to decide.

This is YouTube protecting institutions and commerical organizations who are posting massively unpopular videos and getting ratiod, for the most part.

Panel three of the comic at the top of the page is either an opinion or an untrue assertion, and the entire situation pretty much hinges on it.

No; because of brigading and pile-on effects, downvotes weren't a quality signal for quality. That was the whole problem.

the new dislike count will just be spammed "dislike" comments.

These commenters will have their google accounts banned. That happened before

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_susp...

The YouTube channel can arbitrarily delete comments on their video.

At least until the system starts auto-flagging them to be hidden, yes.

there will be code or even memes, not an easy task. twitch still has problems with that, kids will always find a way around that

Definitely. I look forward to the measure / counter-measure fight.

... but this is the same company that currently owns the top-tier solution for ad spam and ad fraud; I expect them to be slightly harder to defeat than Twitch.

I see comment spam in every major youtube video I see. As long as its not a top level comment, it doesn't seem to stop any spam at all.

Whatever their spam product is they're either not using it in youtube, or it doesn't work.

But in order to see that you would have to read YouTube comments, and nobody should be subjected to that. It is inhumane.

Can someone explain why this matters so much to so many people? I'm genuinely perplexed. I'm not a regular YT user, let alone content creator, and basically treat YT like any other video hosting service. So I definitely leave open the possibility that I might be be missing something. But the extreme responses in some of these comment threads give me the distinct impression that there must be money on the line or something.

Its about the user experience which is why you don't seem to understand if looking at it like any other video hosting service.

YouTube was without a dislike button for most of it’s existence - why care now?

YouTube started with a star system, right? 1-2 stars is basically a dislike, 3 stars would be "meh", and 4-5 stars would be a like.

Then they changed it to just like/dislike, because the star rating is too granular? Either way, like with Amazon, like/dislike can have as much fraud as Google/YouTube wants. Their best partners are obviously going to have more likes to help lead to more views to help lead to more advertising.

Bless you magical wizards. I don't know why as I haven't analyze it much but for some reason this really frustrated me and made me feel powerless.

The polarized post-facts world was abusing a feature, so the owners of the platform took their toys away. This should come as a surprise to nobody.

I am on Firefox and can still see the dislike count is this AB testing?

Of all the things to waste your time on. I know, its just my opinion. Feel free to disagree.

I am interested to know what your day to day experience is and what quantifies wasting ones time? What if that is the persons hobby and passion was it really time wasted or was it rewarding to the author?

Their hobby and passion is to restore Youtube's dislike button?

They likely spend enough time on YouTube to feel that the removal of the dislike count will have a negative impact on their experience.

Also my first coding was a raspberry pi connected to a relay and a lamp and an infrared sensor. If you walked in front of the sensor the lamp blinked SOS in Morse code then it emailed me saying motion detected in your room. The project really had little use to me as I don’t need to guard my room but the reward when it actually worked was something I can’t really explain other then to say super satisfying.

Their hobby and passion is to build something they could be used by thousands of people and put it out for free

No. Their hobby is to create things. To code. This is a cool project if not for you then for those who do miss the dislike button. Personally I do a lot of diy repairs. I want to know if I am wasting my time with a video.

All kinds of ratings systems should just be removed.

I have had app at Play Store for a long time. It receives only low ratings, because there is one feature missing. App itself if free and has a lot of features. How does this encourage having app at Play Store at all?

It is similar at all other platforms. We need encouragement for all developers. Not dislikes.

Why don't you make that feature? Is the feature integral to the purpose? Would a normal person assume an app that supposedly solved your problem has that feature?

Its not straightforward if your app doesn't deserve low reviews or not.

I'm not yet sure adding that feature be possible, how complex it would be to add it, or would it cause security issues or other problems.

There is already easy workaround to have that kind of feature already.

and is that communicated in the description of the app?

Yes, it's in description of app.

it sounds like a major communication issue, where users are expecting something you don't offer, or that the competition does and thus they expect you to offer it too.

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