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Comment by Aunche | Hacker News Reader

I think you're very much overestimating how much big corporations care about Youtube dislikes. Unless if there is a massive conspiracy of advertisers unilaterally demanding Youtube remove its downvote count, which there is no evidence for, advertisers have no leverage against Google. What's far more likely is that visible downvotes are a signal for people to not watch a video, and Youtube wants people to watch more videos, so they watch more ads.

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There’s already more legitimate content on the platform than anyone could watch even if they spent their every waking hour on it, so I doubt boosting viewership is the goal.

Deliberately shaping public opinion in unpopular directions therefore seems like the most likely motivation.

The other, slightly less nefarious possibility is that they don’t actually want us to watch videos and drive up bandwidth costs. Good engagement means people just sit and watch the video instead of clicking something else and be served another ad. When people clicked a video and saw that it was overwhelmingly disliked, they would leave immediately, but now they are forced to sit through the whole ad to see what the video is about.

It’s also possible that people with good taste are more likely to be using ad blockers, so a content connoisseur is really just a parasite in the eyes of Google.

> What's far more likely is that visible downvotes are a signal for people to not watch a video, and Youtube wants people to watch more videos, so they watch more ads.

I think you are also overestimating how much people look at downvotes. Most people click, watch and move on if it's not good. Have you ever seen a Tiktok user?

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