Return YouTube Dislike

A lot of things YouTube has done in the last few years have pissed me off, but haven't really effected the amount of it I watched. This is different, not because it pisses me off, but because it genuinely reduces the usefulness of the whole service. I used to have a vague idea of the quality of a tutorial from the like/dislike ratio, but now I actually have to watch each one instead. For anything where my need to know is marginal, it's a large disincentive. So suddenly I'm searching on search engines instead of YouTube and trying out various other video services. And finding that some aren't bad.

I hope this extension catches on. Not only will it make YouTube more useful again, but it has the potential to bypass the games YouTube plays with those numbers. I hope something similar can emerge that indexes the content independently of YouTube. I hope some other open protocol emerges that lets us disintermediate YouTube all together.

I find users' attachment to trivial details of services they use so fascinating. I honestly cannot recall a single instance of when I cared that something was changed that I loudly complained. I decided that either the service was acceptable to continue using or I began searching for alternatives. But many people do care and I'd be interested in learning more about why that is, if anyone has any reading recommendations.

Also, this whole situation reminds me of a time when Facebook was changing their design relatively frequently. As a result groups such as "1 million strong against the Facebook redesign" kept popping up. And of course this masterpiece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KvZ-KQWuJM

e. I remembered an instance in which I complained: it was when a service silently added telemetry and implemented it as opt-out instead of opt-in.

Interesting, according to the GitHub, dislike data is still available via the API but it will be removed soon. It mentions there is some kind of effort to scrape as much dislike data as possible while it's still there.

Silly question: I can still see the number of dislikes on YouTube videos, is this still being A/B tested, or does it refer to other functionality?

I would posit that those who feel strongly about this are a miniscule but vocal minority of regular visitors to YouTube and overrepresented at places like HN.

By itself, the like feature has never been a good signal about the quality of content, and is more of an emotional referendum on the level of controversy surrounding the video or creator. It has been a useless feature for a long time, I really can't say I have taken it seriously since I first encountered YouTube around 2006. This is a tiny concern compared to the influence that the recommendation algorithm as whole wields over both consumers and creators on the platform.

Likes have always been some part of that algorithm but the significance of their role in recommendations seems to have waned as time went on. As such, they are largely useless to both users and YouTube, which seems to explain this decision.

If anything it is a testament to how much other information they are now collecting on user engagement that they no longer feel they need this feature.

i still see the dislikes. and a couple of people have said the same. what's going on? a/b testing taken too far?

This uses “a combination of scraped dislike stats, estimates extrapolated from extension user data and estimates based on view\like ratios.” I.e. guessing.

I'm surprised so many people care about this... No one is making you use this product. If you don't like the product decisions, go use something else. Many creators post their content on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Finally, you're also free to do something else unrelated to content consumption, like building something or reading a book.

So this is more like an estimation based on the people using it?I mean it's better than nothing, but i guess it will vastly depend on the type of video and the extension audience.Stil,considering the amount of YT users...

Sadly the official dislike button won't return, i'd say there is less than 10% chance at this point.Too much "wrong think" for Youtube's shareholders,advertisers & partners(especially political ones). Also the people don't really seem to care, but this kind of "we know better what's good for you" slippery slope did not make waves in the past(except for maybe small functionality/design issues where youtube was more like testing the waters on some updates) so can't say that i'm surprised.