YouTube Dislikes Viewer
github.com
github.com
Because it's from the co-founder of YouTube? Surely that gives their opinion more weight and notability than the Average Joe/Jane online?
What is this co-founder's current position at YT? "When the site was introduced in February 2005, Karim agreed not to be an employee and simply be an informal adviser, and that he was focusing on his studies."--wikipedia So, not very influential.
Again, it's just another person's opinion.
* Also from wiki: "In November of 2021, Jawed updated the description of "Me at the zoo" to "When every YouTuber agrees that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube ".
People build up this mystique around founders/co-founders that borders on religious. I don't drink that kool-aid. I've been in/around too many cults in my life to fall into that trap.
I think you've answered your own question "why is it any more interesting" in this (HN) context.
If that opinion was so important that caused the co-founder to launch a campaign to wrestle control back, then let's get the popcorn. Now we have something interesting and that former co-founder's opinion suddenly has meaning. Otherwise, they really don't care and are just mouthing their opinons to see their like counts go up (but not their dislikes because, phew, those are hidden now)
Many HN readers think the visionaries who actually create billion dollar businesses have more valuable opinions/insights than the visionless corporate bureaucrats who ultimately end up in charge.
The best argument I've seen so far is that it just makes all videos look "liked", and none "disliked" because likes are still shown.
Dumbing down the platform in pursuit of simpler interfaces (however you want to justify it) isn't always what actual users want and or need.
For reference, "Me at the zoo" was the very first video uploaded to YT.
Also, RIP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ
I'm not exactly a Google-tier product designer, so I have to imagine such a proposal has already been seriously considered... Perhaps they're waiting for the dust to settle before trying other approaches?
In any case, the idea is not necessarily novel in the social media space. I recently learned that Twitter has a similar strategy for discerning content quality: the ratio[1]. It's not something that's explicitly exposed to users as a statistic, but it's basically just one step away.
[1]: https://eclincher.com/your-tweet-got-ratioed-what-next/
fUCK IT i AM NOT HITTING THAT BUTTON NOW. dOUBLING DOWN!
If likes actually meant anything, then the YouTube front page wouldn't be a microcosm of cultural decline.
In the case of an instructional video, it can really be frustrating to watch 10-20 minutes of something before realizing that the maker did it wrong, didn't document it adequately etc. Those videos tend to have a high ratio of dislikes to likes and that can easily prevent one from wasting their time.
I've been doing a lot of home renovations this past summer and watching instructional videos to help guide me. There's a lot of trash out there and it's not always immediately obvious as so without watching for a decent chunk of time. Conversely, there are a lot of videos with low-production values that are highly useful, so judging alone based on ten seconds can be misleading.
There are lots and lots of very niche videos posted by normal people who aren't professional "youtubers" and really just want to help someone out and document things they've done. Video quality, editing, etc. can be crappy, but the information within can be just what you need. Unfortunately there are also lots of absolute trash videos that sort of claim to show you what you need but in the end they don't. Same format. You can't tell which is which before you watch, unless you see that at least half of the thumbs are down in which case it's probably a trash video.
Your use-case was always best fit through the Home Improvement/DIY StackExchange site[0], where an answer is a link to a YouTube video. You can then easily compare different videos, comment and dislike them, and the best videos for that use-case would get to the top of the page.
This may very well be a repeat of Digg 4.0. If we can get the word out that everyone should move their queries from asking YouTube to asking StackExchange, the entire space can be improved over-night. It's all already waiting for us.
Rather than just begging to see YouTube's historical dislikes use it as a start to completely replace YouTube's manipulated and untrustworthy under video section.
You could have it in a window beside the YouTube video or in its own box below and just move on from YouTube comments and dislike control. In the long run it sounds like something better that could pressure YouTube to improve their own meagre and useless comment system.
Surely Google is gonna feel pressured because of extension that will have few thousands active users at most.
It's trivial to write such a thing, but someone has to host the content at an https:// endpoint for browsers to access it, and so someone has to pay money for hosting, and someone has to charge users for it, which means enforcing an acceptable use policy, which requires staffing abuse reporting and moderation to keep up with usage, which requires charging users for that, too. Anyone who tries to skip any of those steps ends up going broke and shutting down or losing payment and hosting providers. And you might still find that the target market for this is very small (thousands of users worldwide), or that the target market is largely unwilling to tolerate enforcing a code of conduct. And don't forget the guaranteed lawsuits from companies who think they have a right to disallow you from recording comments about their site! Oh, and spammers and abusers, you'll have to have a plan for dealing with those, except that your target market may be largely unwilling to tolerate identity verification checks (simply charging money isn't enough).
None of this is an obstacle to launching a site that charges users from day one to participate, as long as you build it lean, with a cost model that effectively scales as users participate, and with a working anti-spam/abuse model. It's just that most modern startups want to launch with a 'free' tier, and that's simply not compatible with this idea on the modern anonymous internet.
Spam/abuse is always an issue but matter less because you're not on someone else's platform who will kick you off at a whim.
It's ok to have acceptable use policy and moderation, but when you aren't running on google or amazon computers there's a lot more leeway and less sudden termination.
You can, of course, choose to violate any/all AUPs, but it's best to be aware of them before doing so. Unwitting AUP violations are still sufficient cause for enforcement.
They want to be CorpTube. Allowing just anyone to upload videos is $$$$ and the vast majority of content I assume likely does not do very well for ads.
They are putting their efforts behind attempting to be another Over the Top cable services plus a clearing house for Corporate media "Clips" and redistribution.
YouTube (as well as Facebook and Instagram, and to a lesser extent Twitter) are under considerable pressure by media and activist groups to combat trolling, hate speech and mental health effects.
Organized "dislike" raids are one of the most annoying things on the Internet - even right here on HN, there are somewhat regular complaints about people wading through entire pages of an user's comments just to downvote them. Reddit is orders of magnitude worse.
For example Likes/Views ratio.
If a video has 1M views but 1000 likes I can most likely ignore it
If a video has 1500 views but 1000 likes now that's something I should be looking at
this is my thing about social media in general. i don't mean for this to sound attacking, but more of an open discussion. i'm also not a big fan of "ratings" which is essentially what the likes/dislikes/views ratios equate.
What am I reading for? Hell I haven't been asked that before" --Bill Hicks
No, print is dead. So sayeth social media
Neither HN or YT are social media.
Old comment got flagged inappropriately. Please don't abuse the flag action.
(The source code isn't helpful since it just pulls the number from author's server.)
>Hey there, I have just checked the Youtube's official change-logs and it seems that they will stop providing dislikes in the youtube Data API. That's why I am launching an archiving API that will allow anyone to see dislikes of any videos. This package will keep logging number of dislikes of any video and feed it to the API. In future, we will do something even better!
IMO one small step towards corporatism/away from democracy for youtube, one huge hallmark event showing which way the winds are blowing.
But removing this ability to see sentiment toward a vid (irrespective of gamification of such) is a stupid idea.
In case clicking the link is just too hard /s