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Comment by dynm | Hacker News Reader

I find this debate a little strange. My position is that youtube is a private company, they should be allowed to do whatever they want, and people should be able to choose a video service that meets their needs. If you feel that youtube is so dominant that this is cramming a "no dislikes" policy on the whole world, isn't the problem really that you think youtube is a monopoly, not dislikes per se?

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.

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I don't see how that is relevant to this debate. Of course they are free to make product changes. As a user I am free to dislike it and complain about it in an effort to get it to change. What do you suggest we do? Should we all just shut up? I've been a paid youtube premium member since the beginning. As well as a youtube tv subscriber. They should take user feedback seriously. But they aren't.

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.

I see what you're saying. Certainly, I didn't mean to imply that anyone isn't entitled to complain about it! I should have worded what I was saying differently: There are tradeoffs in having dislike counts visible. Having it will be better for some people, not having it will be better for others. So if we only have one only service that provides video to everyone, then we're stuck in a situation where one of these groups has to get a worse experience.

You seem to be coming to this debate with a very different set of assumptions. I think with a bit of creativity, YouTube could satisfy both sides. Give creators the ability to remove dislikes. They previously had that ability, but they were forced to remove likes and dislikes together if they wanted do to that.

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.

Isn't that a strawman? You can call out companies for doing crappy things with their products without advocating government intervention.

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".

Seconded. This “private companies can do what they want” isn’t the “gotcha” many people think it is. Societal values exist independent of the specific implementations of laws meant to protect them, and in places where the law doesn’t reach—like the USA’s 1st Amendment not applying to private businesses—I think it’s still worth talking over “Hey, the law doesn’t really enforce this value here, but maybe it’s a good idea to abide by it anyway”. Saying private companies can do whatever they want is just stating the obvious and avoiding the question of what they should do.

>"youtube is a private company, they should be allowed to do whatever they want"

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.

The problem is that network effects determine what video service we use, mostly, as internet users. Saying that you could choose an alternative service is like the old argument that you could move to another country if you don't like it here [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo

The thing is, it’s not just about some general “video service”, people want exactly what YouTube provides just without the specific things that they don’t like. Finding a specific service that does that is nigh impossible.

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.

Is this an argument for a centralized govt provided video platform?

The average government would invest billions, privatize it immediately for millions and socialize the difference.

They're a private company who is free to do what they want, and the people complaining are private individuals who are free to do what they want. There's no assault on anyone's liberty in either direction. Companies can freely modify their products, and customers are free to be pissed off when they do. In this case, people feel that YT is removing dislikes to prevent PR damage to brands and individuals who post unpopular videos on their website. They think Google is prioritizing its profits at the expense of their product. Let them complain.

Nobody is asking the government to step in to stop Youtube from making the change. People are just complaining about the change, like they would for any other change a company may make.

These "private companies" are effectively governments of their own. Capital is global and claims no single nationality.

"'cause you are the government. You are jurisprudence. You are the volition. You are jurisdiction. And I make a difference too."

YT is a private company on paper. In reality it's a fiefdom that has complex relationships with the emperor of the White House. The YT fief has a good deal of influence on the empire's subjects, the fief decides what they get to see, the emperor himself uses YT to speak to the public, and thus the fief has soft power over the emperor. It so hapoens that the emperor is wildly unpopular, his edicts on YT get wooed by peons, but the emperor also has power, and can force his will onto the fief in many ways. YT had to yield in this case, perhaps in exchange for a small favor from the emperor.

No one has argued Youtube isn't allowed to do it. It is just customers complaining about the move. If McDonalds got rid of their Big Macs, people might complain about it, but that doesn't mean that McDonalds has a hamburger monopoly or that the complainers think McDonalds did something illegal or something they weren't allowed to do. It is just customers complaining about a feature they liked being removed.

If you go to the store, demand a Big Mac, and complain to all present that the Big Mac got cancelled, then they'd ask you to leave. And, sure, folks would be upset about being asked to leave.

Yes, and if McDonalds saw tens of thousands of people complaining that the Big Mac got cancelled, they might decide to uncancel it.

Or they might hold the line. Corporate execs got their agendas (egos)

Everything stems from YT being a monopoly, but since YT is so ubiquitous it can feel good to vent/rant with everyone else about something we all agree on, and here it's that the dislike counter was removed for an arguably bad reason.

Pretty much, YouTube is for video watching what IE used to be for browsing back in the obscure IE6 times. Unless you live in China where it's blocked.

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).

Public debates around policy changes are just another feedback mechanism to let companies know when they effed up. Its up to YouTube to consider how much they value it.

yes, they are allowed to do it. nobody is demanding the government to intervene and bring the dislikes back. I don't know which debates are you referring to.

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.

So being a private company means no one can criticize you and the detrimental effect you're having on public life? Besides, that YouTube is a monopoly isn't the main problem. Few people complain about utilities that work well. It is rather that YT has done harmful things as a monopoly.

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.

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