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Comment by godshatter | Hacker News Reader

Likes and dislikes are a horrible way to judge a video, ime. I don't know who liked or disliked a video or for what reasons. A like by someone may be a good reason for me to watch the video where a like by someone else might be an excellent reason not to watch it. Similar for dislikes. Of the two, I guess I prefer likes. People who dislike videos are usually upset about something specific, often things I don't really care much about. People who like something generally actually like it, as far as I've seen.

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.

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> I do the unthinkable and just give it a go for a few minutes

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.

Doesn't seem like society is all that concerned with how much time it wastes watching Youtube videos either way. But, in this situation why wouldn't prioritizing videos with more upvotes not work just as well?

A bad DIY video is an innocent example. Removing dislike counts is a blanket net gain for people publishing misinformation.

Relying on viewer voting to identify misinformation is a terrible idea. These videos are deceptive by design - and in our polarized environment the voting is probably a better reflection of the audiences's priors than the truthfulness of the content.

Because you don't know whether the video on the top of the queue is one with like/dislike ratio of 90% or 10%. If it's the latter, you are inclined to get off YouTube and start searching elsewhere.

>You do this on a societal level and you waste centuries.

What you are missing is that YouTube recommends videos that you will likely enjoy. YouTube's recommendations try to minimize this waste.

YouTube's entire business model is to occupy your time; whether it's a waste or not doesn't matter to their bottom line. They will absolutely not do anything to minimize the waste.

If YouTube notices people keep bouncing from your video it will not perform well due to the algorithm. YouTube wants you to be watching content, and not spending time searching around for content to watch.

Some of us are looking to learn or do a specific thing, not just waste time on whatever videos YouTube is recommending. This weekend I am planning to install a tow hitch on my car. I highly doubt YouTube is going to recommend just the right video for that at exactly the right time. YouTube knows me pretty well, but I doubt they know whether I want to learn about dark matter or modular synthesizers at this exact moment.

That's what the search bar is for. You can ask YouTube to recommend you videos based off of a search query.

Other people have already made this point but the places it’s very clear likes/dislikes are great for is for “how to” type videos. In that case you very likely know that the dislike or like is because it effectively showed you how to do something.

You'll see some video of some guy in Bangladesh doing some "you should never do this, but you can do this" wiring job to make some piece of industrial machinery run and it will either be 1000:1 likes or 1:1000 in favor of dislikes, pretty much wholly dependent on whether Reddit has found it. So I just wind up watching it to figure out why everyone hates it so much.

There are better ways to prevent downvote brigades than removing dislikes altogether. Not to mention that keeping likes around doesn't solve anything, as it can be exploited in the same way by upvote brigades! As long as you don't start to actively detect fake accounts and don't limit the number of upvotes / downvotes per day a person can give, it will always be possible to game the upvote metric by a small group of people / bots.

The metric I use in hn is votes to comments. When I want a good non controversial read I go for a low ratio of comments to votes. When I want a more controversial topic I find the things with more comments to votes.

It's just additional signal on the content in a world where I just can't read it all.

I actually can't believe some people are defending youtube on this.

Why not? They have a hell of a lot more experience running a video sharing and networking service than most folks do.

And that somehow means they are making decisions optimal for users or society, contrary to their behavior history?

It means they're more likely to have the resources and data to think decisions like this through.

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.

Sometimes I tend to hold some controversial beliefs temporarily for the sake of arguing. It helps to keep an open mind.

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