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Comment by elcapitan | Hacker News Reader

While I think this may be helpful for the larger part of Youtube that is just entertainment, I find that in many parts where I'm looking for concrete information (like introductory talks on a topic, lectures etc), the "community" part is often not very helpful - if I can't see critical comments early or see the "thumbs up to down" ratio (which has been changed recently apparently to just show "up"), it's harder for me to judge whether I really want to invest 20-60 minutes into watching the video. So I end up just skipping through the video trying to get a first impression of what the quality is.

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Especially things like wood-working and chain-sawing videos. Downvotes and critical comments are key if you want to keep your fingers and your head.

> Especially things like wood-working and chain-sawing videos. Downvotes and critical comments are key if you want to keep your fingers and your head.

Yeah. In an ideal world "howto videos for dangerous activities" or even just "howto videos in general" would have very special policies applied to them. There's a lot of people who have no idea what they're talking about who like to make howto videos, and it's super important to surface critical information about those.

Which is a good demonstration of one of the fundamental problems of trying to make a general content-agnostic distribution platform. A general platform run according to contemporary business practices will tend towards one-size-fits-all policies, but that works about as well as one-size-fits-all pants.

>So I end up just skipping through the video trying to get a first impression of what the quality is.

while this might seem annoying when one is used to the up/down vote mechanism I honestly think incentivizing people to check content for themselves is a significant improvement.

I think a lot of websites should remove signals and tone down recommender systems in favor of making people just watch or read. It's one of the things I still like about HN. The greyed out downvoted comments and order aside there's no real visual cues or gamified mechanisms here.

How often are you actually looking for information on YouTube? This is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say removing the up to down ratio was a good thing.

I installed addons so I could see the ratio before I even clicked on the video. It’s saved me so much time. (Unfortunately it only worked on YouTube so when I searched on Google I still stumbled onto bad videos and wasted a lot of time)

I was skeptical about removing dislikes at first. But the more I think about it, the more I admire the decision.

It's slightly inconveniencing the majority in order to protect the minority from harassment. If anything, it shows YouTube has the balls to do what's unpopular.

I honestly think that the reason Youtube gave for removing dislikes based on their will to protect “the minority” from harassment is plain BS. I personally don’t see anything brave on it. IMO There are much clever and better mechanisms YouTube could have implemented to prevent that claimed “harassment protection”: What about requiring the user to watch certain proportion of the video in order to allow to like/dislike it? What about doing a better job detecting and purging bot accounts? What about improving the feedback loop from the user when he/she dislikes the video? What about improving the shitshow that is the copyright violation claim system which is something that truly kills many minor channels?

If anything, it is the most lazy measure they could came up with, but even with that, I simply don’t buy it and I suspect the reasons behind are others.

That's certainly true. However, I really miss dislikes for tutorial. If I'm repairing a sensitive piece of equipment, dislikes are useful to cut out the noise from the signal.

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