Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

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The stated reason for getting rid of dislike visibility was very suspicious to me. While I don't deny that targeted harassment and bandwagoning with dislikes on certain channels/videos happens, there's no way it was happening frequently enough to warrant removing the feature from all videos. I saw no reason why individual creators couldn't stick with hiding the controls on a per-video or per-channel basis.

Removing the dislike count takes away a valuable indicator of low quality and/or time wasting videos. Yes, it has false positives on charged topics, but I use it to help determine if an intriguing recommendation or search result is actually worthwhile or just clickbait. I suspect YouTube was pleased to remove the like/dislike visibility because it would boost engagement metrics. I assume any concerns about quality or the viewing experience are secondary or considered inconsequential.

Edit: They removed the dislike visibility, not the dislike button.

The dislike button was never removed, that is not accurate. The dislike count is no longer being displayed to viewers. Dislikes still exist. In my opinion, it is important to be accurate with language.

Isn't this a distinction without a difference? The point of having likes/dislikes is it's supposed to be a social signal for quality of the content? I have found dislikes useful for knowing which videos to skip if I am crunched for time and do not want to watch all of them, like music.

I believe disliking it also influences whether or not you are recommended similar content.

Author/owner of the video would still be able to see it, so they can judge if their audience liked the video or not. But still, the biggest value proposition of having the likes vs dislikes is for viewers, not content producers, so it really sucked it went away.

I regularly dislike decent content based on my idea of what youtube thinks of my recommendation preferences. It’s baffling how much I need to manually participate in their “engagement” metrics to be able to go to youtube.com without closing it shortly thereafter. And I wonder how much more echo chamber-y it is for less tech-savvy users who rarely touch these controls.

80% of regulars are not subscribed and don’t “like” videos according to content creators, that’s why they nag for “like, subscribe” five times per minute. Developers tend to think that bigcorps’ data analysis is at a rocket science level, when in reality it’s probably less efficient than SQL LIKE query could be on some `video.tags` field.

I've never really found the like/dislike buttons useful, and tbh they could get rid of ratings altogether and not much would change for me.

Just a counter opinion, I find them fairly useful. Not 100% useful, but more often then not very useful.

As someone who looks up tutorials on various pieces of software, the dislike ratio was a pretty good indicator as to whether or not a particular video would help me do what the title of it says without me having to sit or scrub through the whole thing

Thanks to the idea of disliking as a meme, the ratings are essentially meaningless. An overwhelmingly disliked video is probably worth watching, if for the humor alone.

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