Hacker News Reader

Comment by topynate | Hacker News Reader

Just in case someone in a position to do something about it is reading this, there's a graceful way out for Youtube. Leave dislike counts publicly available via the API. That way people who use the ratio to evaluate videos (very useful for reviews) can install a browser extension, but dislike mobbing will be minimized, seeing as most casual users will not bother installing such extensions.

View on HN

They don't need a "way out." Just put it back the way it was.

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.

Honestly I think the best solution should have been to let creators enable/disable dislike visibility on each of their *own* videos. Removing that for every single video on the platform is a supernova level of overkill.

They already have that. You can disable comments and voting, as far as I know.

I would guess that doing so absolutely destroys your video discoverability, knowing YouTube.

The Google Chrome team uses a similar strategy to deal with backlashes: They leave a feature they want to removed behind a feature flag to keep the outspoken users happy. A few releases later, they remove the flag, when the casual users have moved on and there aren't enough outspoken users to cause any kind of mobbing.

Feature flags are not meant to be used as a general settings, it's mainly for testing, flags also auto expire so they need to be renewed after certain amount of chromium releases [1]. Old features behind the flag are left for few releases so they can be rolled back in case something bad happens, not that users manually should toggle them on.

[1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...

I mean really, if you want a downvote button, I'm sure there is or will be a browser plugin that you can install that will put the downvotes back in there. Then you know YT isn't messing with the counts as an added bonus (of course, you have to trust that the plugin maintainer isn't...)

The downside is that you'd end up with facebook memes showing all of the dislikes that "YouTube doesn't want you to see".

This would be useless from facebook's perspective since the brigaders would just make a browser extension to monitor up/down votes anyway.

Most people probably view from mobile so this would have limited usefulness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com