YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count
youtube.com
youtube.com
That's how this goes. Once the door is open for censorship, it all works just like lies do, and it's often associated with lies and or hurt egos, say lack of acceptance and respect, and it tends to spread, until it's ridiculous.
And let's get real here: This whole mess is because the government and big media don't like being near constantly ratioed.
They do have the option of improving how they work and what they say, but maybe they feel it is easier to just try and hide the problems. People went away from broadcast because of this crap, and reproducing it online means people will go somewhere else again.
What it won't do is transform things into being reputable.
We would actually listen to the People.
No, that’s clearly not the world we want. Bring on those “crowd shaping tools.
(Edit: Removed the middle paragraph).
Might not do a lick of good. That's OK.
I can, at a minimum, gauge who to trust, who I am working with. A short conversation says a lot. And that's enough to manage what I do, say, risk, reward.
Maybe that is as good as it all can get right now. Maybe not. Real people having real conversations is a path forward though. More people than ever are seeking that having seen the mess you describe unavoidably. The illusion was better before. Now it's all sort of overt, in our face.
Who is "we"? Obviously not the people from the rest of your message.
It’s interesting that let’s go Brandon has become a thing for the most popular president. Why didn’t it happen before?
As I said days before, [0] it will only get worse and YouTube will not change.
Best move is to use it with eyes wide open and continue to seek options for news, commentary, matters of importance.
At some point, "profit", being a higher priority than people, and their needs / interests, isn't going to end well. Never does. To me, the question is all about the timeline and where I'm at personally when it does seriously shift.
[1] And I do not mean to denigrate anyone or YT frankly. See my other comments. It's a rough world. Seriously,
Profit means playing ball with entities that can very seriously impact the enterprise. The money is great, but the cost to everyone is YT and friends doing some bidding they would otherwise want to avoid.
Essentially, it's similar to the military industrial complex. Private extension of government, and big business always does this. Has to, or the real threat might be accumulating soft power, the hearts and minds of the people,
Just saying it's not all money here. Power, and I mean established power, is a factor here as well. Corruption is legal here, and in many parts of the world. What we are seeing now is a part of that playing out.
If we were to have some real conversations, perhaps over beers, in a trust type scenario, I'll bet a whole lot of people in tech get this, have no answers, and would prefer it go much differently. We all know how this stuff can empower people, really improve the world.
That's not changed. But there are things in the way.
That's the nature of censorship.
But especially so when the "alpha testing" is specifically done on videos of the new White House administration.
Unless you're questioning whether removing the downvotes qualifies as censorship at all. Which I would find a little weird.
What hypothetical "pure" intentions would you suggest are possibilities?
Your "censorship" framing is just a speculative assumption. There is no proof that censorship is going on here.
> What hypothetical "pure" intentions would you suggest are possibilities?
There are billions of comments on YouTube and anyone who actually works in software understands that software very often does things that the programmers didn't intend, and I'm not even talking about ML which is literally statistically applied logic, i.e. the wrong thing happening is inevitably assured and assumed from the start.
This whole argument is moot anyway, there's no commercial incentive to hire a legion of moderators because for all that extra money spent they'd simply be accused of bias even if the moderation was actually fair, a statistic of which there is literally no trusted party to arbiter.
That's hiding information that's normally available due to the nature of the content. That's censorship.
Censorship is bad, even if done for the right reasons.
This matter is a running conversation.
From my perspective, there is a least considerable evidence that what you're saying is not true, consider for just one example, the entire comment section on the very video this thread is about.
What are we looking for? Why does it matter?
I see 'em. Have seen them elsewhere too. I didn't see anyone saying ALL comments were being removed, did you?
Now, before we go farther down this road, there is a lot going on. YT, and others, are doing many things to nudge, bias, favor, some speech over other speech. Not all of those make sense. Some are offensive. Others make sense.
These actions in general, and the low transparency related to them, as well as some overt and excessive actions, bans, demonetization, etc... are very highly objectionable. That's where I am at on it.
And I'm going to stay there, until such time as the burden I put up thread is met in a compelling way.
Some are saying these things are just unfortunate artifacts from necessary actions, I do not agree.
Cheers, I've got other things to do, but I did enjoy this conversation.
You've the last word, and I'll read with interest.
It's very convenient for your argument that you can dismiss all the evidence that directly contradicts the claim as stated. Seems to me like this is made up outrage by somebody reading signs in tea leaves.
All I'm seeing from your responses however is just intellectual laziness, borderline concern trolling and trying to mostly defend anti-American actions from a large American corporation. I'm not sure what your goal is, but I don't think you're having this discussion in good faith.
You're also asking for proof of censorship, I'm not sure if you understand how what you ask literally would be nearly impossible to provide because it would be censored. It would have to have you go on and trust to some degree that something was said.
If you want to go about arguing with your "strongly intellectual" mindset you're going to have a rough time being able to comprehend counter intuitive discussions involving the destruction of the very evidence you're trying to discuss.
Seriously, and with due respect, I do not need your endorsement. In the court of public opinion, it's all about the passers by and how this conversation plays out over an extended amount of time. You have put your thoughts here, as have I and we both get to do that!
Bonus: Seems a reasonable conversation. I like those.
My perspective is that of a student of corruption, these general dynamics over a broad range of contexts. There are some basic truisms in play here that speak very strongly to the opinion I expressed.
That's why I lead with, "of course they are", because "that is how these things go."
Time tested, production proven basic wisdom right there. Our history is littered with this crap, and the tech, context, etc... will change, but the humans really don't.
This is a human issue, not a technical one.
The technical arguments are not sufficiently compelling to undermine the entirely obvious transition to a more big media friendly model in progress.
Further, I'm on the solid majority opinion on all this.
To get past that requires proponents show people need this to be done, they are better off, and that somehow they will be better informed, see more value.
Not gonna happen.
Ok. Obviously you don't need to do anything, but presenting evidence for a claim when asked is a pretty basic standard for discussion around here. Peace out.
You want hard facts on political and power motivated behaviors. Over time, as I said, we will learn more.
And hey, I could be wrong. That will come out too.
It's a chicken and egg issue. You can assume if you have an egg you'll eventually get a chicken, but he's saying "you don't know that 'for sure'" until the chicken hatches. It's just feels like concern trolling.
Thanks. That makes sense.
> They're basically trying to take the position of "It's not real until you can have a scientific or political consensus by APPROVED thought leaders."
This is a bizarre and bad faith summary of my position. I have made no statements about "approved thought leaders". What I said is that evidence has not been provided for the claim that YouTube is deleting comments for criticism of hiding the dislike button. I understand that you believe this to be true implicitly and that no evidence is needed to make the claim, but I reject the suggestion that your claim doesn't need evidence. Lacking evidence, you lash out and label me a troll... a foreboding omen for the possibility of civil discussion.
Go back to reddit.
Google will do whatever it takes to monetize every inch of their investment. By turning off dislikes, users will be forced to engage with additional content.
This is also visible on the other side of the spectrum - Google is pushing heavily integrated campaign products (e.g. Performance Max Campaigns), which include non-performing channels as display and video (in comparison to search), which can't be turned off.
At this point they can, as they are a monopoly, but I hope they will get burned, as they are introducing more and more dark patterns, which result in lower than poor user experience.
My take on this - AdBlock relentlessly, support creators directly. Switch platforms eventually - there's choice out there.
Why?
I'm not convinced how much it'd actually impact watch time, but it seems to be the thesis.
Is this really a good metric? Counterpoint: many news videos related to Covid are heavily downvoted. Does that mean that they're bad coverage? or that people don't like to hear what the news has to say?
If I see a covid related news story, I'll just ignore the like/discount ratio. But if I see a tech tutorial or conference talk with 50% like/dislike, I'll be fairly confident that the video isn't worth my time.
It does mean for sure many people don't agree with them.
> or that people don't like to hear what the news has to say?
ironic...
Act of petty revenge for sure, and they'll probably remove you from their fiefdom for being a troll.
Also it would confuse creators: is this video shit, or is it the campaign?
They didn't remove the dislike button, they removed the count.
They removed the count because they found it reduced spurious usage.
That way they can use the dislike count for their algorithm ( and you can still use it for curating your content) without having it influenced by brigading.
I mean they still show it to creators anyways, so I don't get what the weird conspiracies are. Like this is such a nothing of an issue it's insane.
There are of course also arguments there and back. But the emotional reactions are either about interests or feelings. More likely to be feelings here.
This is a wonderful case for removing it. Better than I could have ever proposed.
Youtube didn't add it for revenge and their statement on removing the dislike count shows this.
(No hate, just my opinion, I don't care about the likes)
Checking it back, I only see the likes when I click through them.
High view count does not mean high quality. They are pretty orthogonal.
I see this argument every time dislikes are brought up but no one seems to ever mention views as a third data point. I've never really paid attention to dislikes (other than hearing about dislike raids), but you can still see videos' like:view ratio, which IMO has always been more significant than dislikes anyway.
Sure, you and I can do the math, establish a threshold value above which a video is worth watching (this was _much_ more intuitive with a like:dislike ratio btw), and compare that for each video. But can your mom do that? Can your kids do that? Can you do that while drunk? Can you do that with mind fog and high fever from Covid? Can you do that during a schizophrenic episode? Can you do that when you have early stage dementia?
This change is an attack on the people most susceptible to manipulation. I am outraged that you're making up excuses.
On the issue of hiding dislike counts itself, I don't think it's a big deal, as I don't believe it's the quality signal that some suggest:
1) there's the trolling behavior it encourages, which detracts from the meaning of dislikes
2) relative likes are sufficient, harder to game and less troll-inviting
3) the content, being video, speaks for itself more than text, making it easier to determine what's likely to be of interest.
4) what does dislike even mean on YouTube? Disagreement? Something else? I don't trust that there's enough consistency to give it meaning I care about
5) the number of views is also a better indicator of potential quality than dislikes.
In fact, on that latter point, the percentile of the percentage of the video watched, relative to other videos, would probably be an even better indicator.
That dislike count was essentially noise.
Can't agree. Perhaps you've forgotten about clickbait thumbnails and video titles.
"Top 10 Scariest Roller-coasters" with photo-shopped thumbnail of a coaster car mid-air between fake section of track. Literally millions of views from people wanting to see this incredible coaster that jumps the gap. What you find is an ordinary video of copied, grainy clips of ordinary coasters.
Previously, such a video had a HUGE number of downvotes. Now those dislikes are hidden, the deception is permitted to flourish.
So, again, I said views are (generally) a better indication than dislikes, not a perfect one.
>Literally millions of views from people wanting to see this incredible coaster that jumps the gap.
Don't know how much of a vid must be viewed before YouTube counts a view, but that's also where my suggestion to rate by percentage of the video viewed comes in.
>Now those dislikes are hidden, the deception is permitted to flourish
I think (hope) most people are trained to ignore those fake vids over time, but content that is outright misleading should really be flaggable and removed by moderators anyway vs hit with vague dislikes.
Link integrity has always been a thing. Fake thumbs and misleading video titles are a link integrity issue. By hiding downvotes, Youtube has awarded a gift to clickbait content creators.
Don't forget clickbait thumbs and titles range from blatant lies to "somewhat exaggerated". View count won't indicate quality for those.
Besides, a video released only 2 weeks ago might be high quality but low view count. 200 likes and zero dislikes for example on a new video from a low-key channel about a niche subject, is a very good indicator of quality for that new video. Now with that ratio hidden, all we see is "200 likes" but with possibly higher dislikes hidden from view.
>people watch the whole video waiting for the thumbnail's promise that never arrives. Partial view stats won't help in that case.
Neither signal is perfect, but it's easy to simply smash the dislike button for any or no reason. OTOH, actually watching the video takes effort and commitment, which is in itself a signal. Many people will give up fairly quickly.
So, the chances that the majority of people are watching entire vids waiting for the thumbnail to happen is IMO substantially less than the chances that people just effortlessly smash dislike.
And, I think people get trained pretty quickly to avoid the "impossible" thumbnail with massive landsharks eating trains or whatever.
>video released only 2 weeks ago might be high quality but low view count
Relative like-to-view ratio is probably a better indicator than factoring in the oft-abused dislike button.
>200 likes" but with possibly higher dislikes hidden from view.
Again, YouTube should offer a flag button for scammy or otherwise disagreeable content, then moderate accordingly. That's far better than a generic dislike button.
But, we're probably going to agree to disagree here.
But I don't think there is deep evil thinking behind dislike change - in large corporations people need promotions, some entrepreneurial PM and couple devs identified the opportunity and went for it. Directors/VPs are too disengaged to truly understand impact of changes.
What is their political agenda?
Only if you consider egalitarianism and diversity as political issues. To most of society they are universal values so it’s not contentious.
It's not black and white.
For example, what do you mean by egalitarianism? Equality under the law? Well, Republicans/Liberals tend to agree with equality under the law, whereas Leftists and Gender/Racial Identitarians don't. California recently tried to repeal 1960s civil rights legislation preventing discrimination by race, precisely because they'd like to discriminate on the basis of race...because to them, egalitarianism doesn't mean equality under the law, but rather that the law should have weighted parameters necessary to transform societal outcomes into equal measures by arbitrary population, irrespective of those population inputs. Mind you, these are the people claiming to be egalitarian. As Ibram X. Kendi says himself, "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." To many (most?) people, that isn't egalitarianism...so it's political. It's clearly not a universal value when it's actually a bundle of competing values claiming the same word.
What about diversity? What, that diversity is just good? Is that the point? Because what exactly do you mean? What if there was a group of liberal people who had democratically made their society in accordance with what they felt aligned with liberalism, and were suddenly being told that a major influx of right wing evangelical Christians were to be allowed to come into their society (and be given exactly the same voting rights as them)? What about a group of frat bros? Is this the kind of diversity you mean? You just accept that diversity is indiscriminately a net positive? What exactly is the mechanisms that makes that be the case? Surely it matters what the cultures are that are being made to coexist, what degree to which they have common ground, what degree to which their respective strengths cover for their respective weaknesses, the rate at which the cultures can tolerate the encroachment of the other while still remaining cooperative rather than hostile, the degree to which each culture has its elements preserved independently of the product of the two cultures interacting, and the degree to which the cultures are encouraged to and are actively assimilating. I mean, this is just scratching the surface. There are many factors that determine whether or not diversity is actually a good thing, and it often comes down to magnitude and rates, which are seemingly unwelcome from that sort of conversation. And then there is the (now tired) distinction between superficial diversity and diversity of thought. There is the (racist) notion that diversity of skin color will result in diversity of thought, proposed by exactly the sort of people who actually detest diversity of thought, and just want to see different colored faces in the crowd. Again, this is just scratching the surface of this conversation.
So to say "it's not contentious" is pretty ridiculous, because these are completely loaded terms that mean completely different things to completely different people who ultimately have completely different goals for society. They're not universal values.
For one, Indian immigrants in the US disproportionately enter medicine, as do other Asians, in total constituting 17% of doctors. This is despite Asians constituting 6% of the population. 5% of doctors are black, despite constituting 13% of the population. In accordance with most advocating diversity for the sake of diversity, the reason for the disparity is assumed post hoc to have been due to discrimination...but why? It's as if the inputs have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the outcomes. In order to seek population parity, that would mean arbitrarily capping the number of Asian doctors, and arbitrarily pulling black doctors from a pool of applicants that literally doesn't exist.
Rather than a deontological approach, of perhaps simply ensuring that the hiring process is as blind and devoid of bias as possible, diversity advocates are instead interested in diversity for the sake of diversity.
Again, this is political beyond just "being a good person" or not.
It's always been like they I think. Good people can't imagine just how evil people can be because it's so far from their own reality.
this isn't a small change, it's a major platform decision that impacts user experience, usability and engagement -- it's also received strong criticism from the community including from the original founder of Youtube [1] (see description), but they're pushing it through anyway
You're being too naïve about the corporate agendas behind this change.
It is still a big Internet out there. All it takes is an up and coming platform to steer people elsewhere.
YT is big, and yeah they will carry on via inertia, but for things like news, organizing, commentary? Yeah, people will seek it elsewhere.
Others will figure this out. The value is high enough for users to fund it. I would for sure. In fact, funding that via small money from people is likely the best model. AD driven stuff has too many conflicts of interest.
net_votes = up_votes - down_votes
The difference between 102+/100- votes and 2+/0- votes is large, but invisible on this site. I think it would be better for HN to go to where YouTube was, giving us an idea of both the net vote and the level of activity. Like up/down or up/total or net/total.
HN comments can still be downvoted (if you have enough karma) so arguably you can still get signal quality from the sum of votes.
Especially since in most cases, you can simply comment instead of downvote.
Downvotes on HN comments aren't a pure quality signal. HN's culture is that downvoting something just because you disagree with it is perfectly cromulent behaviour, as established by PG himself:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691
Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of that decision, but I didn't start this site.
Also, at a sample point of one, I make an effort to never downvote because of disagreement. I don't behave that way on reddit. Something about herd mentality perhaps.
It could be that people who agree upvote without replying, people who disagree reply to argue against it. HN discourages non-substantive replies; if you agree with everything someone says, it can be hard to generate a substantive reply to it. (In practice, occasional non-substantive agreeing replies are tolerated, but people who do it more than occasionally often encounter some pushback.)
If my comments are highly upvoted, I've hit upon a truth or realization with which many people agree. If my comments are downvoted, I've also likely hit upon a truth or a realization, but one with which many people are deeply uncomfortable.
It's up to my own powers of discernment and wisdom to determine if people are all wrong and the prevailing sentiment is incorrect, or if it's me who's out in left field and is significantly off-base. We will never engineer a button to press to give us this insight.
There's literally zero transparency here. At least on Reddit you can track the censorship in real time.
you’re literally writing this underneath a very popular, negative, front-page post about a big tech company.
This is better for freedom of expression and showing the split would be a bad idea imo. Comments who are more upvoted are also more downvoted because they are more visible (as they rank first)
That's an oversimplification; downvotes may also reduce the visibility of comments by making them an eyebleeding gray-on-white.
That fixes many of the abuse problems with downvotes.
HN situations are also monitored by the site operators themselves, who intervene. YT is too vastly big for that.
Agreed. Another way of framing this is that HN is sponsored by an organization that makes a lot more money per HN user than Google makes per YouTube user. In other words, HN users don’t have to pay for their own moderation by generating revenue in the same way YouTubes users do.
No it's not, it's our society that's fucked. It's our CEOs' legal requirement of fiduciary responsibility that causes these problems.
YouTube was 10.9% of Google's revenue for the year 2020, with something around $19,770,000,000 of income. How many employees could Google hire to manually investigate and take action against users? Even 10% of that income to address this problem would hire literally tens of thousands of people to tackle the issue.
The "problem" with Big Tech is that they're convinced of their own intelligence and they all believe they can automate their way to Utopia. Well you can't. You're not that smart. You're not that wise. You need bodies on the ground, you need hands doing work. We may get there some day, but it won't be today, tomorrow, ten years from now, and it may not even be a hundred years from now.
A little painful hubris in the form of some of these enormous social media platforms collapsing not under their own weight, but under their own arrogance in the form of thinking they can automate their problems away, would be a good dose of medicine sorely needed.
The entire revenue of $20B could be blown through on reviewing 6B comments.
If you want to keep this activity to 10% of revenue, that caps you to 600M comments.
> No it's not
And I specifically said the site operators; people hired by Google to moderate are just hired help. They are not equivalent of a dang.
Could they do it better than an algorithm which already does it for free?
Also, I think your overestimating the number of YT comments. Let’s assume 1 billion hours of watch time per day, and say 20 billion videos, but only 1 in 10,000 views get a comment. That’s just about your 600M threshold per year picked from super inflated costs.
GIGO, your numbers are incredibly rediculous.
What do you think is the average number of quality, thoughtful reviews you can obtain per hour, from an individual, week over week, month over month?
Don't forget that people eat lunch, pee, call in sick and have productivity slumps.
And how little do you think they should be paid?
Lets just assume perfect efficiency and then handicap it to account for lunch, peeing, pooping, killer bee attacks, etc. How about peak efficiency * 3/8, which basically says you only expect your workers to 'work' 40 hours per week, but in an 8 hour day only actually get 3 hours of work done?
Lets say a long youtube comment takes about a minute to read at most, and since we aren't going to quiz people for comprehension later we just need them to see if there is anything objectionable in the comment, we can take 1 minute to be a hard upper bound for the time it takes to handle one comment. The shortest comments take around 5 seconds. Let's assume the average is about 15 seconds (most comments are less than 1/4 the length of the longest comments).
So given the above they can do (3 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour) * 4 comments/minute == 720 comments/day. If we are forced to hire in the US we can easily find people to do this work for $25/hour working from home.
So every human review costs ((8*25)/720) == 27 cents. This is like 1/10th of your estimate and I feel like I'm going out of my way to make the numbers unrealistic in your favor.
Realistic numbers would be that it takes 15 seconds per comment on average and you hire people part time so they don't get burned out on reading comments (or full time but only part of their day is spent reviewing comments). With the same numbers as above, but not paying them to poop and pee for 5 hours out of an 8 hour day gets the cost per review to like 8 cents.
You do know most moderation is contracted for much less than $60/hour. Potentially to offshore corporations paying less that US minimum wage.
It's doable, but an uncomfortable reality.
Tens of thousands of people moderating comments sounds like the worst of both worlds. Not nearly enough to keep up with volume, and way too many to ensure quality moderation. You'll get a horde of randos deleting stuff in idiosyncratic ways while bad stuff keeps getting through anyway.
This is nonsense pretty much every time it’s trotted out. There is no objective “requirement of fiduciary responsibility” that governs every action a CEO might take in a given situation, especially not for dumb minutiae like “allowed unfettered downvoting.” If it was this simplistic, we wouldn’t need CEOs at all.
Use your preferred search service to search for fiduciary duty myth.
I wonder whether using a ratio instead of difference would help?
The same principle could be applied to upvotes/downvotes too, yeah?
If by "ratio" you mean showing both the net score and the total number of votes, I guess that would be one way to solve this. But a single ratio score (i.e. net score divided by total number of votes) is probably just going to look weird and useless.
Controversial posts would get a score near 1 instead of fluctuating. You would also get a rough idea of intensity as more ratios become possible when the number of votes increases.
I think it's still simple enough to be transparent to most users.
Those are not just "upvote if you agree with this positive sentiment", but often giving valid reasons against someones opinion.
"That's not abusive at all", you may be thinking. But calling others names, even something as nonsensical as calling them a "handjob", can still easily fall under their terms of use.
If you refer to the original video[1], people are nothing but critical of the change. Why aren't those being disappeared? Maybe because Youtube doesn't care what people post as long as they follow their terms of service.
Their systems could perceive it as an attempt to evade the filter.
Many of us who used to defend Google before now don't.
Some because Reader.
Some because the nymwars/Google+ (the single identity part).
Some because Google shuttered Google+ after they had made it the only social network some of us ever liked.
Some because Google is sucking the oxygen out of markets and then leaving.
Some because of how eager they are to obey China.
Some because of the James Damore story.
Some because search has been more or less broken for a decade and nobody cares.
Point is: there is a limit how many times and how badly you can disappoint/hurt users before even the most ardent fans gets tired of it.
But it must be weird to go from everyone supporting and cheering you forward to everyone suspecting you of having something foul in mind again.
Also, their terms of service are not divine unambiguous laws. They makes the the rules themselves, and enforce them as selectively as they please.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219
[2]: https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-was-censoring-china-propag...
This is one step removed from not being able to criticize [elided so as not to send this thread the wrong direction; use your imagination].
It was a handjob. He wasn’t wrong. And his comment abused no one, merely a corporation.
If you’re arguing that an ML algorithm picked up on their comment and deemed it problematic enough to shadowban him forever with no appeals process, then that’d be even worse. But doing it manually is nearly as bad.
Remember, you can’t just “create a new account” on YouTube. You have a fan base. The only reason we heard his message at all today was because YouTube chose not to restrict his ability to post videos too; other moderators might. Especially against someone so abusive, who is clearly harming the wider community… right?
I think this type of thing is going to become a bigger deal over the next decade. Being shadowbanned from Twitter would kill me; I’ve put years of effort into it. But we’re one handjob away from people being fine with it.
This doesn't sound like healthy engagement. When people talk this way about online video games we consider it an addiction issue that needs addressing.
Corporations are people too you know.
Everyone is hating on the removal of the dislike count; across many videos and many comments. If I hear that more of them are getting removed or shadow banned and that they hadn't used a vulgar word, I'll start believing that YouTube is suppressing opposition to the change.
The end result? I'm sticking to my current channels. I can't be alone and knowing that YouTube takes recommended content so seriously, I have to imagine this is going to panic plenty of product managers at YouTube.
They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user.
In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view.
Over time this should put pressure on them to be open to a better platform and make the move as soon as such platform exists.
Over time means nothing until there's actually competition, and there's nothing on the horizon that can compete to the scale of YouTube. Your content creator is not moving anywhere any time soon.
That's why I choose to reward them through non YouTube platforms like Patreon. I've also noticed a huge trend in content creators making sponsorship deals that they embed in their own videos. I sense that canceling your YouTube premium won't hurt them as much as it used to in the past. Plus, you can give a portion of your subscription to them directly, should you so choose.
Monthly donations are cool but limited as they only distribute the money among few people because they're expensive and a commitment.
My dream, if I had the patience to build it, would be a platform that distributes some amount of budget among every content creator you have watched. Out of my $100, everybody gets $2. A bit like Brave Rewards, without the crypto stuff.
So no, they probably won't lose "users", but they may lose "engagement," however they're measuring that at the minute.
This is not a logical conclusion.
Twitter is different to blogging (also shorter) it has killed a lot of the blogging market.
In fact, a lot of Youtube is too long, as the content producers chase the ad revenue.
Logically things will continue and everything will go to smaller chunks.
As I grow older, I watch longer and more informational videos than I did 10 years ago.
I something learned from the MMO boom back in the days of WoW. After WoW came out, there were a glut of other MMOs. Game companies were like, "Look at WoW! Players love MMOs! If we make MMOs, we'll be rich!"
Almost all of them failed. The problem wasn't that the games were bad. Many were technically and artistically better. It definitely wasn't that gamers couldn't afford them. Cost was within the level of disposable income for most. The problem wasn't even network effects and userbase, though those do have an effect. Gamers move to new games all the time.
The problem was that there is one fundamentally scarce commodity: human time.
Thinking of competition in terms of physical goods is using an Industrial Age definition of competition when we're living in an Information Age. Consumers need a wide variety of unrelated physical things, so competition is only really meaningful between the products of the same kind. Also, producing goods has a significant per-unit cost.
With information—especially entertainment media—anything that takes user attention competes with every other product that does the same. It doesn't matter if the products are completely unrelated: they burn the same scarce resource, so users using one are less able to use the other. And this is the only scarce resource in the equation since the marginal cost of streaming the same movie to one viewer or a million is essentially the same.
YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Fortnite, Instagram, Fox News, Minecraft, Reddit, Spotify, they're all competing against each other.
As Reed Hastings said once, "You get a show or a movie you’re really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep. And we’re winning."
I don’t know how well Nebula is doing, but I don’t see it as impossible that there is going to be some fragmentation in the video space in the future.
I wish Peertube or something would take off. The kind of centralization YouTube has isn't healthy, and it's easier and cheaper to host video now than ever since HTML5 video became a thing. If you're running a business, depending on the goodwill of a third party company's free offering (which costs them a fortune to run) is nonsensical.
Not an uncommon state of affairs, for open sources va proprietary.
TikTok has a horrible conversion rate though.
A lot of them are cross-posting to Odysee, and some are also on Nebula.
Edit: Do any of these content creators posting to other non-YT sites mention the availability of these sites in their YT videos? If not, then they are not really convinced of their staying power themselves.
Yes. EEVblog mentions Odysee all the time, and many many channels mention Nebula when shilling Curiosity Stream. They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma.
Why so? Are these other platforms unable to payout as much as YT? Seems natural that ad revshare would not be the same on a site that nobody has heard of compared to the numbers available from YT. Doesn't seem too enticing for creators to go to other platforms where there is less revenue potential.
I'm just not seeing the prisoner's dilemma here. I just see people placating a noisy herd by offering content on other sites while still firmly attached to the teet of YT.
I assume this is less of a risk now than it used to be, because more creators are promoting alternative sites, and I'm even seeing ads for TikTok on YouTube itself.
About the software, I have a dream (tm): NNTP expanded so that it can be integrated with other services, include small binaries natively, or magnet links when above a certain size, the torrent being automatically created, seeded and linked by the originating user's client, employ enough security to become troll/vandal proof, etc. The infrastructure is already here, but the protocol is too tied to the limitations of the Internet in the 70s and 80s and takes for granted that everyone is a gentleman, which makes it hardly usable today.
YouTube is becoming the place you find content, not necessarily though where you spend money. They're going to start caring about this.
- Curiosity Stream/Nebula (Adam Neely, Mary Spender, Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, Super Bunnyhop)
- LBRY/odysee (DistroTube)
- FloatPlane (Linus Tech Tips)
None of these has a nice recommender like YouTube, so you'll likely either have manual curation (Nebula, Floatplane) or drown in a sea of bad/uninteresting content (LBRY)
The main point of that list was: there are multiple platforms that try to be a "YouTube for people who don't like YouTube, for a point in time when YouTube gets horrible", with some people creating content there, and e.g. odysee lets creators sync their videos so you get exactly the same videos from them on YT and on Odysee. But for most creators this is still additional work for little benefit since their main audience is on YT.
But the more important point is that even if all the many dozens of mostly small channels I subscribe to were on some other paid video service, I wouldn't want to track down and check in on all those services. Even just 3 would be a vastly worse experience than YouTube, especially since there would almost certainly be huge variation in the features and quality of their various web, mobile, and TV apps.
The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.
Absolutely, as long as there was widespread agreement in both the distribution mechanism and important video features like closed captions.
> The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate.
No, but the consistency and ability to get everything in one place is pretty vital, and is something you pretty much get for free from single centralized sources. The closed nature is obviously one of the huge downsides.
> The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.
Yep. Another big one is the cost of serving videos.
It would take over a hundred years for a person to watch a single day's worth of YouTube uploads. At this point it would take the literal apocalypse to stop them.
Basically, I've stopped using YouTube as a source for finding new content. If I get linked to a video from a trusted source (here, reddit, etc), then I'll watch the video, but they lost me as a member of the community.
Gotta get that gold.
If only I could calculate the total electricity burn planet wide because 4 billion people can't turn their screens off. I wonder how a 4 billion screenburn compares to 1 million Bitcoin miners, or whatever the total is.
I listen 95% of the time, lectures, opera, podcasts, other stuff, and there are multitudes of data that don't need me to be staring at my screen.
Rumble and Rokfin, where more and more them are moving. History is littered with bankrupt companies who thought they were untouchable because people had nowhere else to go.
[1]https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-spac-...
Long running project of mine. "Corporate change bounties". Customers leave some supplier and then state why and somehow demonstrate how much cash has exited with them as a customer.
Here's an example. Let's say att lobbies hard against net neutrality and customers were fed up and left. They could go to this site and somehow select "att + net neutrality + i will return if they support it" and then through some black magic prove that they were a long time att customer that paid $X/month that just cancelled.
There's a way to avoid the black magic by making it a "crowd funding" style site but in many conversations effectively zero people would want to give, say Nestle or Walmart, a gift in return for them not being an evil prick.
So there's gotta be some kind of balance. A number representing potential money on the table that can be captured if a policy change happens.
I made two versions of it a while back but new ideas are hard so oh well. But maybe a third time it will work, who knows
Simplifying dramatically, there's new solutions to acknowledged problems and unacknowledged problems.
What you say satisfies the first one.
The unacknowledged problem requires you to first connect desperate ideas and consolidate them together in the prospect's mind. Then you need to convince them that it's a suboptimal state of affairs. Then you need to convince them that an amelioration is attainable. Then you need to convince them that you provide it.
Contrast this to the first one. The prospect knows things are suboptimal, has a current insufficient remedy and is open to a better one. You need to convince them that you provide it.
That's way way easier - like orders of magnitude, a "completely different problem domain" kind of easier (It's worth noting that elevator pitch templates address the easier type of new)
Next task, solve the first one in under 5 or so seconds of exposure: connect ideas, show it's a problem, demonstrate the mechanism, and propose a plausible solution that's easy to participate in.
Maybe that's trivial for you but I personally have very little aptitude for that and struggle immensely with it
[1] all those startup books become a giant soup after you read a bunch so sorry if this was like Moore or Christensen, I think it's Blank. If anyone remembers exactly where this was I'd love to find it again.
"Your app predicts when my lightbulbs will go out and it costs $1? Wait, why wouldn't I just do what I do now which is have some spares and wait till one actually goes out?"
If the target customers have already found each other, it's an easier sell. If they haven't then you have a "customer diaspora"
For instance, if I have a new game, there's plenty of organizations, institutions, and forums I can introduce my game on.
If instead, I have productivity software that helps disorganized people manage time better, there's no "disorganized users group" or "decluttering news" website to find the people ... it's a slog. Where would those people concentrate? A bar on a weekday night maybe? The most inconvenient parking spaces of an office park? I don't know.
At least to me this is a harder problem
Once you move the discovery off YouTube, it becomes trivial to move the content to another video host. The discovery is the lock-in.
You may be a HN TikTok skeptic (there are many) but TikTok is already expanding to things you’d find on YouTube historically, like tutorials, DIY, arts and crafts.
Paying for the privilege of interacting with some shitty thing I don't like to be entertained.... doesn't seem entertaining to me.
lmfao
They did this with an understanding of its impact on engagement.
I get that creators want to be paid and need a better home than youtube, but none of this bodes well to me yet.
>because I can no longer gauge how worthwhile they are to try and watch.
That is YouTube's job. Their recommendation algorithm will try and suggest videos that are worthwhile for you to watch. The order that videos are recommend is how know which videos are likely more worthwhile for you to watch. After clicking on a video most people judge the video be just watching the first few seconds an opposed to looking at the likes. They will switch to a different video if they didn't find that one interesting. Another common behaviour is just skimming through a video.
Stupid "I don't want to think" content got replaced by twitch, even through many twitch streams contain hardly any interesting "content" they are sadly stile miles better then most/close to all "dump" YT content (because "dump" YT content has gotten pretty bad).
And high quality YT content often gets demonetized and seldomly recommended, because its either not advertisement friendly enough or doesn't cover a wide enough audience spectrum.
In my personal experience, I rarely even noticed the dislike count. Sometimes I'd wonder who the few unfortunate people were who disliked a video with about 1000x as many likes. It reminded me of the 1 star reviews you see on Amazon complaining about the postman for a product that otherwise has a stellar record. I just assume something is wrong with those peoples computers which made their video glitch out or something. I don't really trust negative feedback that much when it is paired with an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for the same thing. And I don't think I ever encountered a video with anywhere near the number of dislikes as likes, let alone more dislikes. I personally have never disliked a video. If I'm watching something new, I'll just watch part of the video myself, and decide if I want to watch the rest or click away to something else.
When I heard the announcement of removing the count as an effort to combat brigading, it made a lot of sense to me. I've seen the growth of negativity across the internet in the last few years. People are actually addicted to outrage these days, so anything that can help eliminate that seems like a good idea to me. The fact they kept the button there and still show the count to the uploader seems like they've at least tried to appease the diehards who appreciate having that dislike button - pretty fair if you ask me.
You may challenge the assumption that only diehards care about this, but I've just looked at a few videos in my feed to see the number of likes and it's abysmal. 40k likes for a video with 4M views. 18k likes for a video with 800k views. They're all like that. The like/dislike metric just doesn't have much engagement. While you predict dire consequences for YouTubes future and panic among their employees, I am thinking that casual users probably have not even noticed at all.
The fairest critical take I've seen (not that I totally agree with it, but I respect his experience as a creator) is probably Linus' "rant": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN3ojSzyIG8
Different use cases for YouTube, presumably? If you're listening to music or watching well-established content creators, then dislikes are basically irrelevant. But if you're looking for a "how to" tutorial, dislikes and comments are the only way to quickly sort the good from the bad.
This is the "edge case" (not the best term for it, but whatever) I'm talking about, but I still don't really buy it. There are a lot of signals for how worthwhile a video is going to be, and frankly I'd rank likes/dislikes as the least useful one, mostly because they provide no context and aren't normalized to the video's view count.
If we see an epidemic of amateur electricians getting zapped, etcetera, I suppose YouTube will have some egg on its face. But somehow I don't think that's going to happen.
What are those other signals to help filter quality? Because in my experience, the dislike-to-likes ratio is the #1 statistical signal. It beats the #likes/#views ratio which is far weaker. Comments are not a better signal because (1) they can be deleted by the channel and (2) they take more work to scroll through than just looking at the public dislikes number.
It doesn't even matter that dislikes don't have "context" (do you mean "downvote reasons"?). To me, the context is the video itself.
If I come across a plumbing how-to and it has more dislikes than likes, it's a junk video. MKBHD is another youtuber that explains the usefulness of dislikes counts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaaJyRvvaq8
EDIT add: also note in the MKBHD video the comments from other famous youtube creators that they also depend on public dislike stats when they themselves consume videos.
This is because dislike counts are in my experience extremely unreliable—they may be elevated for stupid and irrelevant reasons on a really great video, or they may not be significantly elevated on a video that is very much not worth my time. Anecdotally (though no more so than any other account in these comments, AFAICT), I've found this to be true even on videos with relatively objective subject matter.
This is not as good a signal because for many long-tail videos, the topmost video in the search results has a bad dislike-to-like ratio.
>and 2) the video itself.
This is not efficient use of time for the viewer because the point of a quick statistic is to avoid watching the video in the first place.
>This is because dislike counts are in my experience extremely unreliable—they may be elevated for stupid and irrelevant reasons on a really great video,
Totally opposite experience. For thousands of videos I've consumed that are not-politics and not-music such as tutorials, the bad dislike ratios were the most reliable indicators Youtube had for trash videos.
To be clear, I'm talking about dislike ratios and not absolute counts. Maybe that's the source of the disagreement? E.g. if I see a video with hundreds or thousands of dislikes (absolute counts), it's not a problem unless the ratio is out of whack.
So what is the point? Unlike a lot of people I've discussed this with, I can at least respect your position as being based in some kind of believable and relatively well-developed use case. But nothing we've said here has even touched on the (alleged) negative externalities of visible downvote counts that (allegedly) motivated this change in the first place. And, again, we just don't have the data to understand the tradeoffs there.
I entered this discussion because I really, honestly don't understand why so many people are so angry about this. And, despite your efforts, I still don't. I have no trouble believing that these legitimately bad, long-tail, high downvote count videos exist, but I still see them as exactly what my original comment characterized them as: an edge case.
I guess I'm just looking for a bombshell that will make me understand, because that's how obvious the downvote count stans make this issue out to be. You aren't wrong just because you don't have such a bombshell, but you aren't going to convince me you're right just by telling me that the way I use YouTube is wrong.
Because the public dislike counts are now gone, examples are hard to find. In any case, here's a screen shot of a popular video from The Verge that's not long-tail. The deep link showing 1200-dislikes-vs-839-likes: https://youtu.be/WuunLhXcUo4?t=15
That's an example of a high "dislikes ratio" alerting the viewer to a trash video. Lots of bad videos with corresponding dislikes on Youtube are not an edge case. I encounter them every day (e.g. product reviews, DIY how-to, etc)
>, but you aren't going to convince me you're right just by telling me that the way I use YouTube is wrong.
If you're happy using Youtube without considering dislikes, we're not saying you're wrong. The point is that your dismissal of public dislikes is not relevant to how _others_ depend on it to avoid wasting time. The examples of famous youtube creators also looking at dislike counts to save time is very telling. Even though they themselves suffer from dislikes on their own channel, they still depend on dislike counts when consuming others' videos. The youtube creators are also some of the most sophisticated viewers of Youtube content and their usage of dislikes ratios matches the reality of many in this thread who use the metrics in the same way to filter out bad videos.
When downvote brigades are brought up, the first response is always something along the lines of "all engagement is good" and "downvotes aren't a negative signal in the algorithm", the thrust being that downvotes don't actually hurt creators and they're just being a bunch of crybabies. But it is, frankly, totally incoherent to claim this and then turn around and also claim that downvotes are an important signal for deciding which videos to not watch. I hope you can see the contradiction there.
I point this out, and the next claim they trot out is "downvote brigades are rare to the point of being insignificant". To which I say, well, prove it. Prove it, show me the data, and make the case to me that saving X man-hours of wasted time watching unworthy how-to videos is worth crushing Y creators' nascent careers.
People asked why disliking POTUS matters now, when it didn't before.
People asked why big media gets to fact check everyone, despite obvious, daily bias and error, and dislikes are hidden for them and this helps everyone how exactly?
People noticed some creators are widely disliked consistently, yet enjoy consistent promotion. They noticed money seems to matter.
Creators who generate many ratioed videos are different from those who don't, or who have a mix of some kind too.
All of these were brought up in discussion, brought to me by normies basically unable to buy into the, "you do not need that info because..." line they were given.
And now that they are talking about it, topic of interest, they are wondering about other things, like why their Facebook keeps removing what they thought were private exchanges...
Your bomb shell is watching people lose trust and see less value in all of this than was true a year ago.
In fact, this sort of thing is IMO one of the best arguments for removing downvote counts.
Beyond that, I frankly don't think people should have trust in "platforms" telling them what to think, so if this change wakes up some of the "sheeple" I can only see that as a good thing. I certainly think that taking away a tool that allows people to trivially express their shallow hatred of a thing can only improve the state of discourse and critical thought in society.
Pages of discussion on how data should be interpreted.
All the while ignoring the big players who did not like the fact that they are widely disliked.
As for taking away a tool...
POTUS has a very low approval rating. The dislikes follow, as they should.
That same POTUS getting after long overdue policy with majority public support would very likely see a different outcome.
People disliking big media and government sell jobs? SHOCKER!
Of course they did, and of course it leads to questions which, of course led to eliminating the source of those questions.
Finally, "I don't think people should..." Full stop. We need to realize those other people have agency and work from there.
It feels like people are imagining some fantasy scenario where there are hundreds of similar videos with not that many views but very different vote count patternsm...
100% this will end up killing someone.
Someone just commented this "check out flat earth videos... they remove all comments that are critical and now with the dislike counter gone i guess the earth is flat.".
Indeed. In this case for example it should not be flagged, but down-voted by the community.
I don't really buy it.
I do not think so either, to be honest, but perhaps there may be something to it.
By that I mean for example, I knew of many people who were outraged and dismayed when RSS feeds started to disappear from websites. They belonged to a class of individual who prefers things to be categorized as granularly as possible. That kind of person is highly upset when their categorizing toolset is downsized.
But other people never bother with those tools, don't care if they're eliminated, and frankly find it hard to sympathize with their hypercategorizing comrades.
I'd seen some; wishing I could unsee those.
Right now, I enjoy having a broad mix of people, young, old, men, women... to talk to. One thing I love is when they bring me stuff to discuss.
The trick is to express an interest and make those conversations fun, real gives and takes.
The numbers on people seeking news outside the established media are pretty high.
YT and the White House did that public beta and that was noticed! Brought to me by others who probably would not otherwise.
"Why hide dislikes for POTUS?"
Why indeed!
The people saying few care about the details like the HN crowd usually does are not wrong.
But there is more to this than that.
Discussing whether dislikes is useful to understand potential video quality is a mixed bag like proponents of that idea say. And in some instances, say for how to videos, it is a great metric, like those proponents say too.
A higher order look at this is more like what normies are into.
They ask how come this became an issue after POTUS, CNN and Fauci got ratioed non stop?
They ask, "who decides what is misinformation? Is it the same people getting RussiaGate wrong for years, and who always seem excited about endless wars?"
I can make a case for how hanging out here alters perceptions in like kind.
Maybe more people talking outside their comfort zone, with a more diverse set of people and contexts is a good thing. Having done it for a while, I sure think so.
People do not care too much about the details. They care a lot about being managed, essentially told they need to be guided in this way.
I have a solid mix, and have cultivated that over a considerable time too. Started a decade ago.
Indies, Dems, GOP, you name it. I enjoy politics and culture. No judgement, just frank talk.
More people than you know find that to be high value and it is not easy.
Those questions are not partisan.
They do speak to class though.
Just saying...
They still do not make sense, and I do not care who was POTUS.
Personally, I do not feel POTUS needs dislikes hidden, no matter who the POTUS is. Biden, at this time, has a pretty low approval rating and has not made good on many promises people value highly. And I only mention that to highlight the large number of dislikes make sense! Same goes for CNN and friends, who regularly get major things wrong, and who are being held up as authoritative.
Generally speaking, these disconnects are not partisan at all. People in general are going to oppose this kind of information management, and it's implied they are too stupid to do it for themselves and need the help.
Viewed through this lens the broad and sustained opposition to this move is no surprise at all.
Changes to favor big media are unpopular. Changes to hide dislike data, which further underscores the favoring of big media, are unpopular.
There are other things, and I see no need to detail them.
This is all about both suppressing dissent and the support for it.
Unless you have a super compelling alternative...
Isn't that good for them though? Generally speaking, it's a lot easier for youtube to do a few red carpet partnership shenanigans with the ssniperwolfs and mrbeasts in the top ranks and screw the long tail. That story has played again and again all over the entertainment media industry.
If everyone does what you're doing, they can potentially even get away with having to do less content moderation, or quietly "disappearing" channel categories, etc. You're already getting sort of played by relying on recommendation systems in the first place. People seem to think recommendations scour the deep web to cater to them personally, but the Occam's Razor take is that you get shown whatever the algorithm determines is clickbaity enough for your general flavor of hivemind.
When I'm considering whether I might like to watch a video, I do the unthinkable and just give it a go for a few minutes if it looks like it might be interesting or entertaining. I don't really need aggregated opinions from random people on the internet to help me make my decision on whether I like it or not. I couldn't, for example, tell you if I'm currently seeing dislikes on videos even though I've watched a fair few of them recently.
You do this on a societal level and you waste centuries. There's no need for thousands of people to watch a few minutes of a bad DIY video to conclude that it's crap.
What you are missing is that YouTube recommends videos that you will likely enjoy. YouTube's recommendations try to minimize this waste.
Especially given that I've seen other social networks take a similar course, I trust Google's analysis of the effect of visible vs. invisible dislike counts over the ad-hoc common sense of the uninvested technorati.
It's just additional signal on the content in a world where I just can't read it all.
It's something fucked up on their end, lots of users are affected (also since long before this dislike count thing happened), and they're in no hurry to fix it.
And there's no point posting on support.google.com about it because clueless "Product Experts", aka non-employees who don't actually know anything, will just parrot the same old "Oh your comment must've been detected as spam" "Oh your comment must've violated Youtube policies" "Oh the channel owner must've deleted your comment" nonsense.
This is just a shadowban / temporary suspension from commenting, and there is no evidence it's in any way related to "criticizing dislike removal".
There's no evidence that it's "a shadowban / temporary suspension from commenting" either. It's not in my case, nor I doubt for all the other users I've seen complaining about it. It's a bug on Youtube's end, plain and simple.
That was the last thing he commented which strongly suggests it is. The other few comments he showed were innocent ones praising animations and stuff too.
I'd say correlation != causation, but it's not even correlation because it's literally a single data point. In no other context would people from HN try to extrapolate a single data point into such a strong claim.
It's like finding a street full of protesters and trying to figure out the best way to make sure nobody sees them. The problem isn't your method, it's your goal.
[1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
* "the information in this video is wrong"
* "i don't like the person who made this video"
* "this isn't the content i expect from this channel"
all of which is vastly more useful than just a downvote.
Unfortunately comments are less indelible (more delible?) than downvotes. As evidenced by the shadowban in OP.
It is not like I can't leave comments anywhere like the guy in the vid, it just, sometimes happens with specific things, with no clear indication as to why it happens.
My takeaway is that I've minimized my interactions with Amazon's fake reviews. I don't trust them, and if I need something "for real" (not on a whim), I just go to a reputable vendor instead of "Aliexpress but with 100% markup". (The reputable vendor still marks things up by 100%, of course, but at least they're not Amazon.)
I remember when YouTube comments still had a neat and convenient little "translate" feature. Made it actually possible to practically cross the language barriers in comment discussions.
That lead to many interesting insights and discussions, and then, it was suddenly just gone. Which in practice meant that a whole bunch of people that used to be able to communicate with each other, crossing language barriers (How wonderful!), now suddenly couldn't anymore..
It's like the exact opposite to what the web was supposed to do, and the trend has been steadily keeping up. Removing the downvotes is also removing a form of signaling, and thus communication.
And the trend is not just reserved to YouTube, it's even more and more of a thing in places where it absolutely doesn't belong; Many modern video games do not have an "all talk" function anymore, out of fear nasty things might be written and then read by too many people, possibly leading to controversy in the bored "gaming press".
At this rate I wouldn't be surprised to even see YouTube comments go away for good.
But there is no option to turn this automatism off... and this automatic changing of shit is totally pissing me off.
It is indeed infuriating to have titles translated behind your back. But even worse is the fact that the feature assumes that people only speak one language. Most of the world, myself included, speaks several languages. I don't want video titles translated, but I especially don't want them translated when they're in a language I speak fluently. You'd think that the mindset of inclusivity, which is perhaps the most valued in the places where these tech giants reside, would perhaps allow them to consider that telling people on the other side of the planet how they should use a thing as fundamental and personal as language might be a bad idea, and that their monolingual bubble is the exception, not the norm.
Shaddowbanning should be like the justice system, it is better to let a a hundred guilty go unpunished than to convict one innocent person.
It doesn't tell you "that's not allowed" or something. It updates the UI so you think it went through but it actually didn't.
The issue is that someone is complaining that Youtube is auto-deleting their comments.
Unless you know someone inside Youtube who has the technical knowledge and access to dig into this there is no way to know exactly what happened to your account: how your account's auto-deletion state got triggered.
It could be due to some completely different reason not related to the content of their posts being remarks against the Youtube change with regard to downvotes.
Maybe the comments were simply too repetitive in their content, and triggered a mechanism against repetitive posts (being predicated on the hypothesis that repetitiveness is an earmark of spam).
Or maybe the comments used offensive language; could be that YT has some mechanism to put serial posters of comments that use certain words on ice for a while.
If you look into the Youtube support forum, a large number of people have or have had this problem.
It may resolve itself if that person just stops commenting for about a week.
I fail to understand why people think that's true. I see a far simpler explanation, which is that advertisers don't want people to know people think of their products. Let's just take the Juicero company\1 for example as we all know its product really "missed the mark" 2. Assume the fact that they released their juicer via a huge amount of digital ads. A lot of people would probably think their product is good just because they like their ads 3 as they seem to be competently made. But since we all know the product is extremely bad, people would probably give their ads a thumbs down on YouTube. However by removing the dislike button, determining if the product is good or bad by seeing the likes or dislikes on its video would become impossible.Of course over time the press would have shown the product as being a complete waste and word of mouth would be terrible, so the company would eventually implode as it did in real life.
1 I know its defunct
2 https://www.failory.com/cemetery/juicero
3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAsEEW7WUHA&ab_channel=Juice...*
I am a huge fan of YouTube, and I consume way too much YouTube. I mean, there's also problems with YT, make no mistake, but I'm admitting my bias, and also proclaiming my experience level.
A year or more ago, someone alleged to me that the like:dislike ratio is informative, and I've been watching it since then on videos that I was watching anyway. I've also been watching it especially closely since they announced this any people said they value the ratio. Nearly every video I see on YT has near the same ratio, about 90:1. 30:1 is extremely rare, 150:1 is even more rare. I don't doubt that there are worse videos out there than 30:1, but YT never shows them to me.
When I want to just binge on woodworking crafting videos, they suggest good stuff in my feed. With a 90:1 ratio. When I want to teach myself something, I search for that specific topic and they suggest good stuff. With a 90:1 ratio.
And when they do suggest crap, like often my feed will contain some "how to do basic web dev" video that is full of distortions or outright errors (as a moderately senior web dev, this is an area where I am not subject to Gell-Mann error), those videos STILL have the same damn like:dislike ratio, so how could I use that ratio to protect me from errors?
How the hell are other people allegedly finding these videos with dislike numbers as high as 10%? (I mean, before this month. Obviously now you cannot do the experiment I've been doing.)
As a side note, my Dislike Count only went away a few days ago. I dunno when it went away for other people.
They've lost their grip on reality, and the majority of viewers understand that and show their distaste towards their non-stop lying and gaslighting, while they brazenly push narratives funded by billionaire philanthropists in spite of their abysmal, spiraling ratings.
I strongly suspect YouTube is having the same problem rotten tomatoes has been having in recent years... In their case we've seen films such as Captain Marvel do very poorly with audiences, while largely receiving praise from critics. What's the problem with that? Well, if you happen to land on a certain side of the culture wars you may start asking if the film's audience review is actually a reflection of the films quality or if it's just a reflection of it being vote bombed by misogynistic trolls. If you think it's the latter then you might feel the need to take action, and in the case of rotten tomatoes you might start altering and deleting audience reviews to ensure the audience score is conforming with what you know to be their true opinion of the film.
I'm not saying YouTube did remove the dislike button for political reasons, but their reasoning for doing so certainly doesn't make any sense. If creators are being harassed by the dislike button they can just disable it as many creators had been doing. And if you disable the dislike button you're only encouraging hate in the comments, which is probably worse for a creators mental health, and already enough of a problem on YouTube as it is. The timing of this move is also extremely suspicious. Nowadays my YouTube homepage seems to be full of mainstream news channels which I haven't subbed too often pushing the mainstream narrative in regards to COVID vaccines or some other hot culture war issue.
Right now I have 6 mainstream media videos being shown on my homepage none of which I have subbed to, 5 of which are COVID related and the other is about Ghislaine Maxwell. I have absolutely no interest in this content, in fact I actively try to avoid the news but YouTube for whatever reason has been pushing these videos onto my feed recently and therefore if I do end up watching them I'm likely not going to enjoy it much and am probably quite likely to downvote them.
I guess I'm not saying big tech have an interest in controlling what information you see and how you perceive it, but it certainly looks a bit suspicious.
You know what else you can't be 100% certain of? How many dislikes this video got.
It's one thing how the comment disappears. It's a whole other thing how you are asked to "take a screenshot of the disappeared comment to investigate".
If you feel this singles out Google, think twice. Yes, Google definitely wasn't afraid to meddle with its search results for its own gains before. But there are other companies having practices just as shady.
Like "how the Apple Podcasts app went from a 1.8-star score all the way to 4.6 stars in a month without any actual fixes"
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791968/apple-podcasts-...
Hiding dislikes, disappearing comments, tricking users into reviewing unrelated services.
There is a broader issue unfolding recently about platforms and transparency.
(Only half-serious. I've seen a few "upvote this comment to dislike the video" and similarly clever workarounds already, so there does seem to be some bits of opposition and creative thinking left.)
Great idea! Too bad it doesn't work if the creator disables comments...are there any ways to navigate around that obstacle?
https://returnyoutubedislike.com
I absolutely oppose heavy censorship but some is required otherwise it would turn into crazyshit.com, the only way to have a censor free platform is to be rid of the scum bags that post scams, child porn etc.... Its unfortunate politicians managed to creep their way into youtube and impose biased censorship but its no surprise with how Google is already under the governments thumb with how biased their search results are. Youtube will never be what it was before and I doubt an alternative can take its place without the same thing happening. Thats part of living in a corrupt society, where Wallstreet reigns supreme,the rich exploit and profit off loopholes in our laws instead of doing the right thing, politicians are allowed to be bought through campaign donations and the media isnt held accountable for blatant tabloid like lies. Things will get substantially worse when Meta goes live and studies its users as they go on VR. On the bright side it could be worse, at least were not in a police state like China, Iran where they are trying to ban pets since its Haram or a country with no widespread internet access like North Korea.
I have a feeling Youtubers are probably the segment most annoyed by the change, which happen to be the ones with the megaphone.
Yes, lots of people do that to avoid wasting time on bad videos.
Especially for product review videos or tutorials, the first thing I look at is the dislike count compared to the like count. If dislikes are high, it's because the reviewer didn't provide useful information. E.g. a "top 5 dash cams" where the video is simply a slide show of dashcams will have more dislikes than likes.
Dislike counts may be unreliable for politics videos but it was an accurate indicator for other topics like DIY how-tos. With the dislikes gone, I now scroll through comments first before hitting play. (But some channels disable comments so that doesn't always work.) I hope Youtube brings the dislikes counter back as their policy change is very user hostile.
My experience with how to videos is that I'll search on Google, it'll pull up a good video and take me directly to the point in the video that discusses what I want to know. Sometimes I use number of views or number of subs to judge whether a video is worth watching.
I've only ever used the like button a handful of times when I want to quickly save a video. I've never used the dislike. I always thought of them more as a metric YouTube uses in their algorithm and not something people pay much attention to , which can still be the case when the numbers are hidden. Maybe I'm wrong though.
I'm unaware of such statistics.
>You don't even see the number of likes or dislikes in the video listing page, right?
Correct, the dislikes count was only visible if you clicked into the video. So users that depend on the dislikes count to avoid a bad video would have to click into each video and take a quick glance at the dislikes/likes ratio. If the dislikes are too high, immediately exit out and click the next video.
>I've only ever used the like button a handful of times when I want to quickly save a video. I've never used the dislike.
I also never use the Like & Dislike _buttons_ but that's not relevant to how I found the dislikes _counts_ useful. (Because enough of other viewers expressed their vote by pressing the dislike button.)
> I always thought of them more as a metric YouTube uses in their algorithm and not something people pay much attention to
Lots of viewers pay attention them especially when searching for new videos from unknown creators who are not in their feed. A short video from MKBHD explains the usefulness of dislikes counts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaaJyRvvaq8
E.g. a tech conference might have generated 50 videos each an hour in length. The ones with too many dislikes, I just skip. The dislikes stats helped prioritize what to watch in this age of information overload.
>which can still be the case when the numbers are hidden. Maybe I'm wrong though.
Yes, Youtube says the algorithm will still consider dislikes even though they are hidden for recommendations. But people still want to see numerical stats to quickly curate videos that Youtube did not recommend.
I guess I do the same when I'm thinking about buying a book about a technical topic, after all - I read the amazon reviews to see if it's going to be a waste of my time.
But many videos disabled comments while the dislikes count was still visible to help decide.
>You should also acknowledge that you may like content that is unpopular (highly disliked videos
For non-politics or non-music videos such as how-to tutorials or product reviews, I've never experienced this. The crowdsourced dislikes was a very accurate indicator of a bad video and I've never disagreed with it.
It might be but often it's not. A common reason comments are disabled is that a female is in it which invites rude sexist remarks. For example, there was some advanced math university lectures taught by female professors and every one of them was spammed with "men of culture, we meet here again". Understandably, the channel later disabled the comments out of respect for those women but at least the dislike numbers were still visible.
>, it is still very easy to discern whether the video you are about to watch is controversial.
No, it's actually cumbersome and wastes extra time to determine if many how-to videos are bad quality without a dislike count. That's why so many are irritated that Youtube removed it.
> No, it's actually cumbersome and wastes extra time to determine if many how-to videos are bad quality without a dislike count.
If this is such a hassle, why participate here on Hacker News, a website providing nothing but informational content with no visible downvote ratings? Could it be possible that this inconvenience is not as bad as you're making it seem? There's plenty of low effort and low quality content reaching the front page every day. Whatever method you use to filter through the content here can also be applied to any other website with similar rules.
No, I wasn't talking about Numberphile. I was actually talking about videos from Institute for Advanced Study: https://www.youtube.com/user/videosfromIAS/videos
Last month, every one of those videos that had a young female professor in the thumbnail had the "men of culture we meet again" spam and other rude comments. All the comments have been recently deleted and disabled.
>Hacker News, a website providing nothing but informational content with no visible downvote ratings?
The HN (net) downvotes are visible because the posts are greyed out. For tech topics (not politics), I don't scroll to the bottom to read a bunch of greyed out comments. Downvotes lowering their visibility are saving reading time on HN. Same idea as Youtube dislikes.
I mean there's the Numberphile where they claim that the sum of 1 to infinity is -1/12, supporting their claim by rearranging terms in an infinite series in ways that are not allowed, while not explaining that the actual topic that they are talking about requires both a different definition of equals and extending a pattern into where it is not properly defined. So yeah, even Numberphile can put out a trash video full of errors.
By the way, I just checked the dislike ratio using an extension and while that video was still mostly liked, it has about 20% dislikes whereas most of there videos are less than 1% dislikes, so while the dislikes didn't work perfectly, they at least did inform people that something was going on with that video.
* a smaller group of people who care about it (like me);
* and a majority of people who don't care either way about votes.
YouTube can satisfy both by keeping downvotes, but Google is notorious about not giving a fuck about users and only caring about results.
The small number of people who care about downvotes aren't going to stop watching because they're gone, so when viewed through the lens of Google's metrics these people simply don't exist at all.
People rarely even use the like button, let alone the dislike. I'd wager the majority of casual users don't even know anything has changed.
When the dislike count was available, videos in the same category I mentioned above would get 100 likes to 1 dislike, perhaps that I'd call somewhat rare.
But either way, I also don't care about the removal of the dislike count at all, one can still access the ratio via views to like count.
It does sound actually crazy that people are up in arms about this.
So frustrating not having the dislike button
>So frustrating not having the dislike button
I can understand the satisfaction of smashing the button on something you don't like... but does your frustration take a different form that translates into more/less usability?
(I can also imagine that a dislike button might help in an overall rating system like Yelp or Rottentomatoes, but then those systems don't serve me particularly well either. If something is hugely popular, that means middlebrow tastes like it, which isn't that useful. I don't want to watch or read Stephen King, and after all, people vote with their dollars for McDonald's. I suppose this could be a useful metric on youtube for gaming livestreams or skating videos or something?)
Even outside of outright scams its still useful. For example, there's a Numberphile video (a high quality channel that explains math to ordinary people) where they go off the rails and make a bunch of errors to claim that the sum of 1 to infinity is -1/12. It's based on real concepts but the way they present it is completely incorrect. It had a dislike ratio of 20% whereas most of their videos have a dislike ratio of about 1%. By seeing such a high number of dislikes, it alerts the user that something could be off about this video and that they should not take what is said at face value.
Or is it anti-spam algorithms getting triggered by people flooding the comments sections of videos with the same inane comments? And/or getting flagged by creators and other youtube users?
Frankly, I can't see most creators wanting their youtube video comments full of "BRING BACK THE DISLIKE BUTTON", and I could see lots of their fans being annoyed by such comments as well.
My guess is that 95%+ of youtube users are more annoyed by an extremely vocal minority disrupting things than they are the removal of the dislike button.
What do you think about our product? interested? very interested? or very interested? which one? which one? which one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZJQDpS7ikc
With the dislike count gone you cannot make a quick judgement about what Youtube recommended to you. Less power to the people, more power to Youtube.
It's a very subtle change. Also a monumental one.
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
They like my dislikes since I frequently 'dislike' videos I actually like as a strategy, I do so specifically for truth-tellers that I figure youtube doesn't like, for two reasons:
(1) I write algorithms and thus know it causes pain for YT algorithm writers, going ... crud, the pattern is not as easy as expected so now I have to write another exception/condition. Each one makes their code more complex of course and a little bit less maintainable. (2) To help protect the content creator from rising to top of the list for getting canceled as the higher the views combined with the ratio of likes/dislikes the more likely humans in the office will be talking about them and drool over dropping the axe.
I'm subscribed to over 200 channels but many are truth-tellers. Others are science/engineering/computing but some are even lefties, and of those, when they are pushing the official narrative bull, sometimes I upvote (the opposite of what I really think).
For 1+ years I've been saving my comments to be able to prove in court some day that I am civil yet often shadow-banned (2.48 MB today). Anyone can sue via the Sherman Antitrust Act etc etc in Federal court for collusion and so on.
(YT likes people trying to viciously tear each other's throats out, good times, but posting intelligent informative content does not serve to create a wonderfully dumb underclass. Yesterday for example, someone had asked how to really understand voltage, was asking for help and my reply was deleted immediately).
I'm only aware of one comment of mine with more than a mere handful of likes. Currently at 3.9K, quoting the scientist in the video ...
"Cats may purr for any number of reasons" Scientist code for: We weren't able to get a cat to purr to study it
There are content creators who make the occasional video that gets ratioed. And there are others who have a majority of their videos ratioed.
When people see that, they ask why?
And you look at big media, and government, and I think this removing dislikes doesn't make any sense from our point of view, but it does from theirs.
Person sees the video and how liked it is. In the past he would have seen 3k dislikes and perhaps started to think, what's wrong with the content? Perhaps they would not buy my book..
But not anymore, now we can sell the ideas much easier. And if we think positively, buying likes is much cheaper now than before. No need to worry about those dislikes so much. Just buying enough of them for making the content more believable!
Thank you YouTube for making these business practices easier.
Kind of like the more a weak person's immune system deals with a virus the more mutation the virus makes and in the end the stronger it becomes.
It's quite annoying when I'm looking at neutral, nonpolitical content, and I can't get a sense of whether or not other viewers hate it. I look at a decent amount of tutorial content for various things, and the like-dislike ratio is fairly indicative of whether or not the content is wrong or if I should even continue watching it.
That’s exactly the problem, though. Nobody hides the like bar unless they expect a bad rating, so a hidden like bar might as well just be all red (people tend to assume the worst).
No matter what your view is on this (harassment or genuine negative sentiment, it doesn’t matter) an optional like bar might as well be mandatory for all the good it does.
I’m confused by your suggestion. I have no interest in watching videos that my friends are uploading (because my friends aren’t uploading). How would having a site where my friends post videos help this situation?
This is something else... Probably a bug.
Hate-watching?
Here's the video, for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJOTdZBX1g
Base on my personal experience during the last few days, a "Fairly Good" video should give you something close to 0.06 on the metric. (reminder: the sample matters, you have to do your own numbers)
I guess now they have to remove the view counts too LOL.
My block-list & 'don't recommend channel' is growing faster now.
(I'm guessing Facebook has already experimented with this).
Seems great from a board room, YouTube is too big to fail in 2years...
But this is just a signal that the platform is decaying to the latest generation of artists/creators...
Shame that for now they have a stranglehold on money and advertisers.
Something is amiss here.
(Yes, Im still salty about comment ratings and still want them back.)
What does it achieve?
That's the theory anyway. No idea if it works, but YouTube's not the only network to adopt this approach.
AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY
I was under the impression cyberpunk got that right, generally.
Taken in aggregate, in a world with multi-trillion dollar corporations censor their users, it's not ridiculous to talk about this as tyranny. There is no one tyrant, but every corporation rules like one and taken as a whole, the "world's government" (in this case the set of the most powerful corporations) is tyranny.
Anyway, I'm neither here nor there on the argument, but I don't see what's so laughable about OPs offhand comment.
There are literally hundreds of social media platforms and video hosting sites on the web. Many Youtubers are even advertising their content on alternative platforms.
Being popular is not the same as having a monopoly. Youtube doesn't control infrastructure, they can't prevent users from watching other sites or hosting videos elsewhere. They're not granted special privilege by a government. We've just convinced ourselves for the sake of political narrative that these platforms have far greater power than they actually do.
Once a corporation reaches a certain size, do you really think it’s possible for any other company to overtake it?
There is in fact something stopping them. There are in fact many things stopping them.
When you have $100 billion war chest, are you really going to let someone just walk in and eat your lunch?
Regulatory capture, lobbying, price manipulation, etc., are all things stopping these companies you just referred to, FYI.
Video services are interchangeable. They all have video. They may not have the videos you want to watch, just as other restaurants may not have food you want to eat.
YouTube makes a product. You use that product. No one is forcing you, legally or otherwise, to use it. You can easily not use the product. There are viable competitors to that product. If YouTube stops being good, people will move on to another product.
You cannot, on one hand, remark on how much nicer of an interface YouTube has while also complaining that a change the team which created the superior interface has chosen to make, in hopes of making the interface better, is somehow "tyranny".
You are not a serious person.
I cracked up. This is the hell world we have been pushing for - it's arrived.
I have a similar IRL situation where I live. I need a vaccine passport to go into places where I can request an ID (which can only be done in person). I need an ID to apply for a vaccine passport.
One has to wonder whether these systems are broken by design.
Edit: I clearly didn't word this well, because people are responding to me with things I agree with. Let me try again. Certainly, everyone can and should complain about this if you want to! (You have my thanks in this case, I don't like it either.) I'm just saying that in a "normal" situation you'd be able to respond to this change by switching to a competitor. I don't think the complaints are strange but rather the lack of complaints about the fact that there are (sorta/kinda) no alternatives.
Some countries (mostly of the EU) already try to enforce some control against this kind of monopolies but they are still too bland.
And competition fails to appear thanks to the WhatsApp effect. If most of the content/friends are on it, its not easy to change to another platform unless something drastic happens (like the Great Firewall).
It is however totally possible to find or create and alternative video platform (this is something that plenty of YouTube creators already do). People just don’t want to make the trade offs that solution requires.
that being said, it is also their right to shut down whatever content Russia/China/Iran/etc finds disagreeable, I'm sure you don't mind that either.
Is this a new thing? I see this argument all the time.
When Coca Cola made their impopular recipe change were people defending it with "oh it is a private company, haters gonna hate".
I use youtube for entertainment and learning. This change has seriously made youtube less useful to me on the learning side because the dislike count was a good signal to the quality of the information in the video.
A lot of the YouTube community is reeling from this because the harassment concern brought up by YouTube management doesn't seem legitimate. They've never proven this is a real issue that warrants such a big change. It just seems like an excuse to push an unpopular change for nefarious reasons.
"'cause you are the government. You are jurisprudence. You are the volition. You are jurisdiction. And I make a difference too."
The public/private distinction is important to respect, but according to reason. They don't live in hermetically sealed off universes as some libertarians would have you believe. Just as government can overstep, so can private business.
Yes? But this isn't the source of why people are upset. As far as I can tell, no one is protesting YouTube's ability to do what they did. No one is demanding the government force YouTube to reverse this decision.
I also feel like reflexive arguments like "So-and-so is a private company and can do whatever they want" is unhelpful and irrelevant to the discussion. Do I really need to be reminded that some giant corporation has control over their own platform? Was I ever under the illusion otherwise? Why is corporate criticism met with a reminder that they had the right to make the decision?
Additionally, the entwined mindset of 'you can just go somewhere else if you don't like it' is also unhelpful. Very few decisions like these are bona-fide deal-breakers.