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Comment by Wronnay | Hacker News Reader

So YouTube removes down votes and Twitter adds them? Feels like Social Media Companies don't know what they are doing

Youtube didn't remove the downvotes, just everyone's (besides the creator) ability to see them. But they still matter for internal algorithm and the creators are still affected by them - by both being pushed down in relevancy, and also psychological impact?

Twitter is also apparently keeping the downvote number secret except for the poster.

If those who downvote lose the ability to see the results they're going to start forgetting to downvote.

More like people just want to rage. Even HN loves its pitchforks.

lol, 'even', I find HN in particular loves pitchforks.

These are some topics which are a lightening rod for this, and I’ve seen some in the last day.

Green political parties who don’t support nuclear power.

Comments describing positive aspects of covid driven lockdowns.

Don't forget systemd.

Is "there's someone wrong on the internets" the same as pitchforks?

YT still has downvotes — you're just not allowed to see them anymore.

Which is really a shame considering how many informational(ish) videos are on YT. Downvoting was really helpful to tell, when you search for "How do I unblock my sink drain" who is full of crap. Downvoting on opinion, social and gaming videos serves no purpose.

Twitter as a platform which has no ability to store and reliably surface informational or factual messages is completely devoid of the types of content where peer feedback is helpful - the only thing tweet scores measure is "hotness" which could be entirely opaque to the user base (both up and down).

There's an extension to show downvote count again.

That's amazing. Link is here for others who are interested: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis...

It's only going to work for a couple of months, because YouTube has promised that the API will start returning zero for that number fairly soon. They have not committed to a date, and I doubt they will, simply roll it out when they feel they can.

The API already returns 0. The extension uses extrapolation of it's user statistics to estimate.

A whole platform change just because the Biden admin had an abysmal downvote ratio lol.

I thought it was because YouTube was butthurt about the dislikes on its own YouTube rewind garbage.

They just stopped doing those Rewind videos entirely.

They tried a lot harder on the Biden admin videos, first culling downvotes, but it was still overwhelmed.

A tracker was made during the original culling: https://81m.org/78/

That and all the mainstream media outlets who hate that they can no longer fool everyone by buying off critics for favorable reviews. Oh yeah, and it just so happens they also pay YouTube huge sums to promote their content.

Citation needed

Had a fun one the other day: try to figure out which is the correct pronunciation of puissant. They’re all different and the most viewed ones are wrong.

https://youtube.com/results?search_query=puissant+pronunciat...

Previously, downvotes were the sign of which videos were wrong. Now it’s only comments, and most people don’t comment.

I picked the most-viewed one I saw on there and it was like "pWISS-unt"

I really hope that's one of the incorrect ones, because otherwise I've never once pronounced it correctly. I pronounce it as in the French but without the nasal on "-ant" and I hit the T just a bit (it's typically written as a loan word, not an italicized foreign word, after all).

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