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Comment by willhinsa | Hacker News Reader

Can we go back to the chapter on YouTube where we had downvotes so we can tell whether or not a video is going to be high quality and informative or not?

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I don't understand YouTube's move to remove the downvote button - cyber bullying? What I will say though is it actually hasn't stopped me from being able to identify a bad video. If a "bad" video had 1,000 upvotes and (previously) had 10,000 downvotes, combined with a high view count and engage via the comments, just removing the downvotes still tells me everything I need to know: 1,000 upvotes on a high view count video with high engagement? Probably a bad video.

But again, I don't know why they removed it? /shrug

We all know why they removed it, they were butthurt over their cringe rewinds consistently getting downvoted into oblivion. /s

I think it was less Youtube's ego and more the ego's of its advertiser and IP-hoarding-company patrons

Because corporate videos like movie trailers kept getting destroyed and it became a news event when there was a massive downvote count.

They had a setting to disable votes per video but that just means the company admits the video is unpopular.

Poor multibillion companies getting bullied, who can defend them?!

>movie trailers kept getting destroyed and it became a news event when there was a massive downvote count

Ah, so they did it to counter vote-brigading? Makes sense now.

I think it was more useful for evaluating videos with low view counts. Maybe the video was good/useful, just not by an established high subscriber YouTuber. Or it's garbage spam but I can't see the 200 downs next to the 20 ups.

FWIW there's an addon [1] that can help with this.

[1] https://www.returnyoutubedislike.com

This is corporate greed at work. A tiny minority of users know the importance and value of a symmetrical voting system.

Most users dont care. So Google removes it because its good for business, not for the user.

Massively downvoted videos are bad press.

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