YouTube removed dislike counts, so this guy made Rotten Tomatoes for YouTube | Hacker News Reader

YouTube removed dislike counts, so this guy made Rotten Tomatoes for YouTube

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501 pointsthunderbong303 comments

The other thing they seem to have done around the same time is heavily bias towards showing only positive comments. This is quite damaging when searching for, for example, medical content.

At first when I found a video where every visible comment was “Omg! I’ve tried everything for years, and this is the first thing that worked. You’ve changed my life”, I was excited! Now, I realise that almost every physical therapy video contains the exact same comments. Presumably because they are the ones the algorithm pushes to the top.

This means it’s really hard to know which content is actually trustworthy, especially when there’s also no downvotes. And for a lot of thing this is really important.

It’s as if Amazon showed only the glowing five star reviews - suddenly you don’t know what the common problems are with the product you’re about to buy.

Don't think I would go to youtube for medical advise without doing real research afterwards.

Yes, the comments system is being heavily biased and that is great. People might not remember but youtube comment section was about the most toxic place invented by humans. It was so bad I don't think anyone thought it could be salvaged.

This is probably googles biggest achievement of late. Hardly perfect, but it truly have changed many millions of lives for the better.

But no, it is not and never has been a good place for discussions. Unfortunate, yes, but this is so much better than anyone could have hoped for.

I wouldn't take it being positive for granted. This is exactly the kind of setup that perpetuates echo chambers. Polarisation is a genuinely dangerous phenomenon; when we loose our ability to have a conversation with those we disagree with, dark times are ahead.

The previous was also an echo chamber though. Not saying youtube doesn't have problems because oh do they have problems. But it is the only case of a big social network, that I know of, that have been able to improve their discourse.

There should be a name for this new phenomenon. It's akin to forced hive mind cleansing of discussion. Bandwagon discussion? One-way communities?

I've noticed it for the last couple years too.

There is heavy censorship on interactivity in most web apps today. Searching is restricted, discussion is restricted and viewing other discussions is restricted. Restricted by YouTube's bias.

In the case of YouTube at least, to me this seems like it's probably overcorrection being done to try to manage the particular brand of extremely over-the-top negativity that's commonly seen in the comments section. Comments like this often require moderation for being abusive or otherwise breaking ToS but can't be handled right away, so they bubble the positive comments up to so at least the questionable comments are buried a bit and don't get as strong of a bandwagon effect.

If this is what's actually happening, it's a case of particularly nasty commenters ruining it for everybody.

Which is a worse problem to the minority than the over-correction is to the majority. Yeah, it makes sense what YouTube is doing, but I wish people would see it for what it is and understand that it definitely isn't a healthy space. Heck, where is these days?

Technofascism.

No privacy, censoring, coercion and an artificial image of "happiness" everywhere, just like on the facade of North Korea's buildings (or the smile on Joker's face).

Toxic positivity?

Lovebombing is a thing

Censoring external link is also a pain. Web is dying.

Whitewashing, misleading, misdirection, misinformation

I noticed this with tutorials. “Omg I’ve been struggling forever with this and this is the best explanation”. Then turns out to be a very shallow overview of the topic that doesn’t actually explain anything and it’s not even a tutorial.

Or people showing off their electronics projects, all the comments are just EE students from countries where the unis are degree factories asking for code etc so they can rip off the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ-kgruAG68, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M2AOPGqR-M etc, so easy to find.

It's always the same "how can I contact u" "circuit diagram and code pls" "what is x project cost" <--- important for these countries. So many EE students in places just ripping off other people's projects & the uni doesn't know better or care aha

Couldn't it be also because of bots/paid-humans writing the same kind of comments and liking them to make them bubble to the top?

No. Because it does the same thing for comments by normal people. It's an actual feature of YouTube now. YouTube has been censored for a while. Writing anything even remotely critical is weighted down. You can only critically write good things about something, but that's not very easy to do.

There's a reason why youtube comments are echo chambers of "happiness for the video". It's like Reddit, where you are writing comments to pass the hive mind filter. Welcome to modern communal interactions, where having a valid or invalid opinion is bad only because it is different.

HN is no different. For a handful of select hot-button topics, any deviation from toeing the party line will result in near immediate downvote barrage and eventual [flagged][dead].

On the flip side, for some (usually the same) topics it’s easy to write banal karma-fishing comments sure to rise to the top of the thread. At least HN has a time-decay aspect on those.

HN still seems to value constructive criticism though, to an extent that is simply not possible on YouTube.

YouTube comment section is basically a cesspool of toxic positivity now, with absolutely no informational value at all.

I feel like this has been the case for a couple of years now, where nothing even slightly critical will be surfaced by whatever automated algorithm they are using to filter/boost content.

Eh. I've seen it happen and it's really damaging to discussion. I now actively avoid some topics and let people believe whatever they want around a few topic where the community usually get it wrong, but actively resist getting corrected.

Which topics are those? It doesn't take many downvotes/flags to kill a post here but for most issues there isn't a single hive mind and the result really depends on the thread and also time.

Thank you for writing that. I think both karma limits/day and a downvote limit/user need to be instituted to allow for respectful disagreement and useful conversations on HN.

> Writing anything even remotely critical is weighted down. You can only critically write good things about something, but that's not very easy to do.

While objectivity and truth are both good, the way how people phrase things can sometimes come across as quite mean spirited, almost like an attack on someone else. This is probably in part because there absolutely are people online who actually enjoy posting vile comments and hurting others, so many have their guard up. Ergo, more luck can be had when phrasing things constructively or without a tone that might even accidentally appear dismissive.

> There's a reason why youtube comments are echo chambers of "happiness for the video". It's like Reddit, where you are writing comments to pass the hive mind filter. Welcome to modern communal interactions, where having a valid or invalid opinion is bad only because it is different.

I'll even go as far as to admit that in my eyes this is for the better. Recently someone from LTT came out as trans and many of the comments initially were just painful to read. Lots of attempts at being as hurtful as possible and just horrible rhetoric, that not only adds nothing to the conversation, but also brings down the mood of everyone. But revisiting the video now, most of the comments are far more civil and the vile things have mostly been purged, reading the comments now doesn't hurt.

It's probably quite hard to find a middle ground between being too aggressive or lax with moderation and the degree of this will vary between different communities - what sentiments are okay, what jokes are acceptable, what rhetoric can be used. My hopes are that Internet and the various popular communities will remain humane, while still allowing for discussions and disagreement about most topics.

I think that HN typically finds a decent balance: people can have disagreements without getting too uncivil and it's kept that way. I remember discussions about WFH and someone who told me to "get cancer and die" got flagged and more or less removed from the discussion, because that didn't contribute anything.

Booking shows only the glowing five star reviews and Amazon probably prefers good reviews too (not the "useful" or "popular" reviews).

Amazon makes it very easy to see the 4/3/2/1-star ratings just by clicking the rating you want on the left after clicking the rating on the item page. Not saying all the reviews are legit, but they do let you see the poor ratings, which I find very helpful.

Well, all of the comments are going to say it's the first thing that worked. It's not going to be the second thing that worked, since once one thing worked the person doesn't need to keep looking for more.

The point is that the comments saying it didn’t work won’t be seen.

People are more likely to comment when it worked and upvote comments that give them hope.

Uh, do you remember what youtube comments were like 2016-ish and earlier?

It seems obvious to me the overall experience of youtube comments is much more dependent on youtube's choices than people's behaviors.

> People are more likely to comment when it worked

That's just not how people work.

Good point this could have been better phrased. I think I meant more like "In regards to health, my impression is people talk more about things that worked for them even if they're false positives (placebos, regression to mean etc) than they do about true negatives (things that didn't work)."

(This is different than other things like online reviews for products which are more biased towards negative experiences.)

Honestly, it isn’t hard to justify Youtube’s choices on this very specific issue. The dislike button presumably has a function beyond public shaming. I expect it’s primarily for tailoring recommendations and tuning their algorithms, but in any case it was clearly being abused by troll hordes.

If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video, or could identify other statistical aberrations, it stands to reason that such abuse would actively interfere with the legitimate functionality it was intended for and/or work against the interests of YouTube, advertisers, as well as authors and viewers.

I personally think that removing the public counter was an elegant solution in this case, as it suppresses the worst excesses of trolling while maintaining the original intent of the dislike feature, which should improve the overall experience for most users, generally speaking.

I watch a lot of Youtube videos for DIY stuff like car repair and home improvement.

The like/dislike ratio used to be a very good way to quickly see if the person who made it knew what they were talking about.

Now I instead have to spend a bunch of time reading through the comments to make that determination.

Not that bad DIY videos are useless. They can be a good way of reading a lot of comments on not how to do things. So they have their place. But I want to know that going in.

I completely agree with that, in the past if I saw a DIY video with a 50% upvote rate, I'd know that it should probably be ignored and to look for a better source. Now, I'm not sure. I have to comb through the comments to find out if that particular uploader missed something, left a bolt loose that should be tightened, etc.

and also negative comments can be removed

Can't you do a similar heuristic with view compared to likes?

That is not the norme, it happen but for very small number of videos, you can not getrid of important functionality on the site as a dislike buttn jut to prevent few of these incidents from happening

Except that the ratio could easily be gamed

Removing extremely useful features to avoid such edge cases is a poor move imo.

I hear this sentiment sometimes on this discussion. Even if it is true, it most often wasn't gamed.

Maybe YT already incorporates ratio in its ranking algo and has been helping you all along

If it is incorporated, its definitely not effective. Clickbait dominates Youtube's recommendations and search despite consistently low thumb ratings. An easy example would be a procedurally generated channel such as this one:

https://www.youtube.com/@futureunity5129/videos

Sort by "Popular" and you'll see that their most watched videos have consistently low like/dislike ratios yet are still being actively recommended. If you use Youtube's search feature, these same channels and videos will come up long before the actually informative channels do.

You could argue it's been helping Youtube by wasting viewer's time and making them watch extra ads but its certainly not helping the viewers find what they're looking for. Even mass reporting the channels doesn't seem to stop them.

a 15 minute DIY video in which 12 minutes is ads and sponsorship and rambling intro a

SponsorBlock improves the experience quite a bit.

Doubtful that they can do this in a way that accurately and effectively helps the user compared to showing the dislike count.

YouTube is plagued by low quality content with clickbait titles, descriptions, and images. Often they outright lie about the content. The recommendation algorithm prioritizes these videos first.

Users can't determine in advance that these videos are poor quality, so they'll be forced to watch those poor quality videos until they find a good one. YouTube wants it to be like this because it increases time on the platform and their advertising revenue.

Along the way, users can dislike these videos but that video still gains views which helps push itself upwards in the recommendation algorithm. Particularly videos with clickbait titles, descriptions, and images tend to amass large numbers of views in short periods of time, which YouTube may recognize as "going viral" and give it an additional push in its recommendations when searching for important keywords.

Furthermore, many users are also watching these videos whilst not logged in or don't care to click dislike, which is another lacking signal to help tune YouTube's ranking algorithm correctly.

> in any case it was clearly being abused by troll hordes.

Citation needed. I've never seen any data published by the YouTube team that showed that downvotes were being "abused by troll hordes" to the point where this was such a large problem that it merited a site-wide removal of dislike counts.

With your amount of evidence (zero), I could just as easily claim that they removed the dislike counts purely because of the ratios of the YouTube Rewind videos.

If you don't thinking trolling/brigading isn't a thing I've got a bridge to sell ya.

They clearly exist, but are they big enough things to outweigh the usefulness of downvotes? Not to mention youtube already dealt with large-scale brigading by rolling back downvotes.

Please comments before replying.

> to the point where this was such a large problem that it merited a site-wide removal of dislike counts

> I've never seen any data published by the YouTube team that showed that downvotes were being "abused by troll hordes"

Same but maybe they consider the people who downvoted their recent editions of Youtube Rewind troll hordes

>If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video, or could identify other statistical aberrations, it stands to reason that such abuse would actively interfere with the legitimate functionality it was intended for and/or work against the interests of YouTube, advertisers, as well as authors and viewers.

But if you can see that these dislikes were from trolls, then you can account for that and not have the algorithm register them.

How would you even distinguish people who immediately realized the video was shit and so downvoted and didn't watch from trolls?

By comparing standard deviation from every other rating's time. By comparing account voting patterns across videos. By comparing registration time and voting time. By identifying grouped clustered votes time relationship. This just on top of my head, going to bet there is going to be more to be found in aggregate.

I think we can infer that troll doesn't need time to watch video. So if a dislike came from a user with watching time is less than 10% (just as an example) it can be categorized as troll.

I’ve definitely watched less than 10% of a lot of videos and would downvote them if it was easier on TV.

Lot of videos either start with a nonsense intro/bad audio.

I've disliked many videos based on the first few seconds, or just the title alone if it's click-baity enough..

Why waste the bandwidth, click through rate hit, and drama over users getting shadow banned for their trolly opinions?

Because users clearly care about the information it provides them, to the point of implementing third party solutions to restore it as best they can.

> then you can account for that and not have the algorithm register them

It’s an unsolvable problem which is why they disabled it entirely. If you “account” for “bad” input the only consequence is that those responsible for that bad input figure out how to get it classified as good input.

> It’s an unsolvable problem

If it's an unsolvable problem for downvotes, it's an unsolvable problem for upvotes, too. The reason they took away downvotes is because they started to partner with the networks, to artificially boost their posts, and to deemphasize and demonetize their traditional amateur comment (inspiring a shooting.)

The mainstream content gets ruthlessly downvoted because polish doesn't equal quality, and the networks (wisely) don't want their stuff distributed by a platform that allows users to mark it as bad. So Youtube took away the ability to mark content as bad. It's no more complicated than it looks.

I am sure the removal had more to do with certain ideological views/content being more likely to be downvoted. The decision came soon after the critically panned Susan Wojcicki YouTube CEO 2021 Free Expression Awards. This probably has the record for the worst ratio of any video in the site's history.

People watch videos in their idelogical niche anyways, so ideological downvoting aint that much of a problem.

What? Suddenly we are in a ficitious world where there are droves of trolls disliking videos, and somehow they are sentient as to YouTube's recommendation algorithm, and they desperately want the video to disappear from everyone's recommendations, so these trolls come up with new and inventive ways of DISLIKING videos?

I don't think I've ever read more made-up scenarios than on this website.

Google didn't think it'd be worth it to pursue a solution that would solve this, and probably nobody internally wanted ownership of it. The second best solution is the one that doesn't cost much and solve the problem. Youtube being the only game in town, where are people gonna go anyways? Daily Motion? Post implementation KPI probably showed that traffic hasn't budged, and the problem has been solved. As far as Google is concerned, it was a rational decision.

You don't even need to be famous in order to get trolls who are hating you so much that they make it their job to ruin your life. When you get above a certain size you will have organized troll armies coordinating attacks on private Discord servers.

You really don't think there's a single person out there who wouldn't pay 20 bucks to a farm to downvote a competitor's video? Not a single one?

Obviously, now they pay to upvote their own.

What have we gained?

Groups of trolls banding together to down-vote people they dislike is as old as down-vote buttons. Surely you've heard of brigading?

right, I don't think the comment was disregarding bregading. That a multi-billion dollar company's algorithm is too dumb to deal with it is what astounds.

Ding ding ding!

You basically can't allow people to give negative feedback for a thing and have that feedback mean anything (ie affect recommendations for anyone but you or show it to other users) without insincere feedback being used to hurt the reviewee.

There are ways to counter this, the easiest is to not show negative reviews but count them positively, a dislike actually boosts them just like a positive review would. Not really recommended due to promoting rage bait but brigading would stop working.

You also can't allow people to give positive feedback without insincere feedback being used to artificially promote things. If you're going to have a feedback system, you need some manner of checks and balances on it to limit insincere feedback.

Counting them positively results in the problems which tiktok is currently facing with “rage bait” content.

That would be the other consequences, yes. So can't say I recommend it.

> There are ways to counter this, the easiest is to not show negative reviews but count them positively, a dislike actually boosts them just like a positive review would,

I think it would be better to just merely count the number of upvotes and complete, or almost complete views, for boosting purposes.

The downvotes should be for tailoring feeds, whether personal, or the aggregate feeds of people with similar interests and like/dislike votes.

Any specific criticism can be saved for the comments.

How was it being abused by troll hordes enough to warrant that change? Only time I've seen videos with huge downvotes were for negative product sentiments (e.g. pay to win schemes), bots clearly compiling videos of product specs and reviews off Amazon and passing off as their own, or when the video was clearly clickbait. I spend an unhealthy amount of time on YouTube and I don't remember coming across videos that seem "abused by troll hordes" - okay, maybe for some products, but not widespread as you would lead me to believe.

Also, couldn't you have stopped people from rating your videos if you felt you were being targeted? Maybe if the search results on YouTube and Google were actually better than they were 5 years ago I'd buy into the downvote interfering with their system. The only good thing on YouTube is their recommendation algorithm, and I don't buy that dislikes would have altered that system. In fact, didn't that exist before this change?

once thing that anecdotally comes to mind was that Westworld videos used to be heavily downvote brigaded because some sort of 4chan mob didn't like Thandiwe Newton.

I remember it because I originally put the show aside because all the trailers had such extremely high downvote ratios. It seems to be somewhat common with content around videogames as well that provokes online groups for one reason or another.

Public shaming is essential. Anyway it still happens, even more brutally, in the comments.

What they should have done is add more detail on the nature of the downvotes, like the Steam store does for negative reviews. That is, have graphs of positive and negative ratings over time to make any downvote brigading obvious. Maybe have a way to exclude "less-verified" votes, or allow the viewer to look at only e.g. YouTube Premium votes (which are more likely to be real people given the cost). And so on...

Perhaps they could do as on Stack Overflow, and let a downvote cost one point from your accrued points? Or perhaps that's too much of a re-design. It could regulate spam downvotes though. (I think the biggest problem with SO is that your point pool is visible, with gold and silver and so on, which leads to anyone with a high enough sum being treated differently, although that might actually not reflect competence or expertise.)

That's nonsense. That *might* be a good reason to block users from using the dislike button but that's no reason to make it invisible.

The reason to make it invisible is so more users waist their time on clickbait garbage.

It actually makes perfect sense considering YouTube's business model of advertising and "engagement".

While advertising-based business models are ultimately always at odds with the user, they can (and have successfully) coexisted in the past - a product can have a certain amount of advertising/user-hostility and still remain usable. That's what YouTube used to be until now - they had to keep the advertising/user-hostility somewhat tame in order to keep growing their marketshare.

The problem is that in a monopolized vertical, there is nothing preventing the product from going "all-in" on advertising and we're now seeing the late/terminal stages of this cancer in action.

Removing dislikes and having people watch videos that are known to be bad still counts as "engagement", especially if people have to waste time watching the video fully before realizing it is bad. Even better, if they end up doing so and then have to try a different video then it's even more engagement.

The nasty side-effects of this change (up to life-threatening consequences in case of DIY videos for example) aren't their concern nor liability.

I was an old YouTube "Paid" subscriber. I can't remember what it was before "Red" or even if it was a thing? Anyway it's been quite a while. The dislike removal annoyed me but the straw was the whole "Shorts" thing.

My subscription feed almost 10x'd overnight to the point that it had no value. I started unsubscribing from the "short" spammers which were genuinely good channels and this got my subscription feed as to be very little. Not enough to be worth paying for so I cancelled.

I put the money to Audible now.

I find it staggering that youtube didn't know I was a paid member as far as a product. I wasn't allowed to filter shorts. I was still (before) Sponsor Block being fed in-video ads. So the only thing they ended up offering me was a very limited paid UBlock/SponsorBlock experience which is already free. I don't think I have actually lost anything by not paying "premium".

I have the same gripes about the "shorts" thing, but YouTube without a premium sub is just unwatchable due to the adds and not allowing background play on mobile.

Both mitigated using revanced

Saying that it was weighed against the intrest of advertisers is not correct. It was a political descision made to stop political opponents from leveraging the dislike ratios of certain online videos to their favor in debates.

There is no proof that it was because of invalid dislikes, made by bots or anything like that. Calling the source of the dislikes trolls is unsubstantiated.

Why Youtube cares about politics is a large topic, but I don't think it is in any way shape or form correct to state that it was a advertiser/investor/monetary driven descision. Sites have likes/dislikes because it increases engagement, even negative engagement is engagement.

Is everyone forgetting WHEN the dislike counter was removed?

It was shortly after the CEO of YouTube posted a video in which she gave herself the Freedom of Speech of the Year Award.

The video was nearly 100% dislikes.

I guess it was a coincidence that dislikes were removed "due to being abused by troll hordes" shortly afterward.

Source, if anyone is interested: https://web.archive.org/web/20211205064314/https://www.freed...

>she gave herself the Freedom of Speech of the Year Award

On Hitler's birthday, nonetheless.

Not only I want it back, but I want it right in the search results.

It would be great at filtering prank videos which pretend to be something else, then switch to a Rickroll or something.

I think just having to watch a significant portion of the video before you can leave a like or a dislike would have largely mitigated the brigading issue. Besides, it would have made the reviews more thoughtful overall.

Maybe removing the dislike count is a simple and effective solution, but I would not call it good or elegant because of its downsides.

As other comments have pointed out, it's unlikely it had anything to do with troll hordes.

In reality, it's more likely the dislike button was removed in order to force people to spend more time watching the video, increasing engagement.

I can't think of anything that's been ratio'ed hard where it would make me think that the dislike count needs to be hidden everywhere. For instance , Rings of Power trailers got hit pretty hard, and some of the more woke hollywood adaptations, but those things also bombed (at least given expectations) so it's hard to say the ratio didn't represent public sentiment.

> it was clearly being abused by troll hordes.

same goes for the like button.

but, apparently hacking likes it's ok...

There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that the dislike count was "abused by troll hordes". Your arguments are very weak and remind me of the rhetoric used by totalitarian regimes in justifying their censorship.

"Public shaming" is the result of creating content that most likely deserves to be publicly shamed. This has also not disappeared, but is now in the comment section. This is just as "elegant solution" as SWAT team shooting all the hostages in order to be able to injure one hostage taker.

Most likely the reason to remove the dislikes is either because

a) YouTube for some reason wants more user engagement in the comment section

b) To protect American corporations (advertisers) from the uncomfortable reality that 95-99% of the people don't like their woke-content.

YouTubers already had the tool they need to combatting this kind of troll by disabling rating and comment.

Disabling dislike has the unfortunate side effect of making scam videos a lot harder to identify. And before people comment, no, manually disabling rating and comment was not the same as the current system, and would absolutely sound the alarm bell on informative/educational/infomercial videos in the old days.

This example showcasing malicious TOR browser being distributed, and might already get someone politically jailed or even killed: https://youtu.be/XS-r2Vpkxas

I myself sincerely cannot find any justification for the current system.

> it was clearly being abused by troll hordes.

Maybe on some type of videos. For the type of video I watch (non polemic content) it was a very useful indicator of what to expect. My youtube experience has degraded since they removed it and I think I watch less videos as a result.

> If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video

Why not only allow using the dislike button upon watching the video or some proportion? But then what's the proportion? I'm sure I can dislike something almost immediately. I can even dislike the idea of a video, can't I? I'm a Youtube user, I'm not sure why I wouldn't be allowed to dislike any video that I dislike, for whatever reason, because I dislike it.

This is an odd thing to hypothesize at this point. YouTube has the data now, until they release the stats and let us know if the move actually had the desired effect, talking about it like this is entirely pointless.

Has hiding dislikes stopped pile ons? (I bet it hasn't)

They calculated that removing it would cause longer youtube usage. They've said to people it is against trolls.

did they state as much? I don't know, beyond ignoring automated means, I don't think there should be much more debate on who and why.

Something else strange is that they removed the dropdown option to sort videos in a channel in chronological order ("oldest first").

It's been a while since they removed it. It's probably because playing rarely-played videos costs more in bandwidth. You can still find them, of course, but it's more work.

It's one reason why I love channels that take the time to make meaningful playlists: they're in whatever order the channel decides, which is often oldest-first in the context of a regular series.

In my experience that kind of playlists are always newest first.

I watch a channel that has hundreds of videos playing a city builder, with playlists for each city they've streamed. I just looked and they're all oldest to newest, but yeah, I guess its up to the creator.

The frustrating bit if they get it wrong is YouTube autoplays the next video, which would be going backwards for you.

I think they also realized they didn’t want to be a video archive service but a “come back for the new thing” service. Otherwise they’re just holding everyone’s home movies

>It's probably because playing rarely-played videos costs more in bandwidth.

Huh? Why would that be the case?

They exist on fewer servers, so they have to be pulled from deeper levels of cache, or maybe even no cache. Popular videos will be cached on edge servers all over the place, and will be quick and easy to deliver.

That's a good point that I didn't consider. Still, I don't think this was the right direction to go. If the videos were already rarely watched, going out of your way to make them less watched isn't going to save much bandwidth.

How do you know?

Azure, AWS, Google cloud all pay less for data that gets accessed regularly.

Google Cloud charges $0.02 / month for each gigabyte of storage, but if you store it in an infrequently accessed volume you can qualify for special pricing of $0.0012 / GB / month. That's a 177% difference in storage costs for cold storage vs hot storage.

So yeah, it's MUCH cheaper to store it in infrequently accessed volumes. And stopping people from finding the oldest videos allows them to do that.

According to Google Cloud, archival storage is only meant to be accessed once a year at most. Even infrequently watched videos should be considered hot (i.e. likely to be accessed more than once a month).

True. The most recent videos of popular channels would be cached in multiple locations to improve latency, but rarely accessed videos would exist at only one (or two for redundancy) data center.

I feel that this change served creators (too): Long-running channels transform over time, in production value, niche, style, messaging, etc. Creators want you to look at this new image instead of their old one.

(Imagine looking through your old vs new social media posts... which would the current-you agree with more?)

Indeed, that was actually my inkling rather than the infrastructure cost angle. Though it doesn't make sense that it would be blanket applied, rather than being part of channel configuration for those creators who care about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS1qfuKfVN8

They appear to be bringing it back based on a recent video from their Creator Insider channel

It's not too strange if you think that YouTube is trying to abandon its past to become another also-ran on-demand broadcast service.

Probably assuming oldest one like archived data and storing them accordingly.

Are you sure this isn't just an option for some channels to decide if they want it? Some channels definitely still have this sort option available.

No, they removed it. While I believe they haven't shared the reason they do it, I think it's probably due to backend changes to reduce costs of hosting older less popular videos (maybe moving them to nearline storage?). Some previous discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33559888

Yes/no, "Some channels definitely still have this sort option available". Many smaller (?) channels still have this button. Also sorting by date still works for all channels after editing URL.

I don't know exactly, what is the criteria for hiding that button, but consider size/geography/political views/ability to inject ads/etc. YouTube shadowbanned comments, likes, videos for a long time; consider this as another technique of shadowbanning without explaining anything.

Any examples? I just checked about 20 channels I'm subscribed to that have between 1k-15k subs and there's no Sort By Oldest button.

Wouldn't it make more sense to install an extension that shows the dislike count again? https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ I've been using it since YouTube removed the dislikes and it's worked very well...

It's just guessing, and rather inaccurate, isn't it?[1] I don't see the point.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43m7I9GOpM

It's not _guessing_ per se. The dataset includes dislikes from before YouTube removed it from the API, from then onwards any dislikes in the interface while using the extension get sent to their backend and get registered. The numbers are _extrapolated_ (but not guessed) of course since not every YouTube will be using the extension. Take a look at the FAQ [0] where this is better explained.

[0]: https://returnyoutubedislike.com/faq

It’s a guess. Maybe an educated guess, but it’s still a guess.

Strictly speaking, sure. But calling every data-extrapolated result a "guess" wrongly, IMO, lumps it in with guesses based on no evidence.

I'm sorry, but the extension has a grand total of 14k users.

There are some 368 million DAILY active users on youtube.

It is making claims based on a dataset of roughly 0.0003% of the population of users.

It's a GUESS. A bad one at that, since the people who install that extension are absolutely not representative of the general youtube user.

If we expand it out to the 2.28 BILLION monthly active userbase... the data from the 14k users is basically meaningless.

---

Think of it this way - if you were seconds in the day, those extension users are 25 seconds. if I were to try to measure any sort of meaningful data in a day by using 25 seconds of data, I would likely be horribly, horribly wrong.

Ex: My water company billed me and it's bullshit, I've been carefully tracking usage data for 30 seconds after I wake up every day, and I never measure any usage! Why are they billing me?

Holy cow, I measured our water usage today and we used a whole gallon over the 25 seconds I measured!!! We're blowing through nearly 3000 gallons a day!

---

Both are horribly, horribly wrong estimates. A sample size that small is not very valuable.

It's not a guess, it's much worse than a guess. It's inherently biased: it collects data from people who care downvote count to the extreme only. They care the count so much that they installed an extension specifically for it. Think about it.

It's not randomly sampled from the whole demographic. It's not SteamDB*.

It's not different from getting "the opinions of generic US people" from the comments below Biden/Trump's tweets.

* Technically SteamDB has a bias too: it samples from the players who made their profiles public only.

Rather biased, too. Though in this case towards the preferences of the user.

The guess is accurate enough to be way better than nothing.

https://automaton-media.com/en/column/20230125-17606/

> the actual number doesn’t even reach 10% of what RYD displays. This isn’t just a slight miscalculation; it potentially changes the impression of the video itself

> there are also cases where the actual number of dislikes for a video on the channel are 5 times higher than what RYD estimates. Sometimes it’s too high and sometimes it’s too low

The video you linked showed it being relatively accurate though.

It did not. In one case it had the number of dislikes correct, but the other cases showed it out by up to 50% - and these were videos that had dislikes registered before youtube disappeared them.

Out of examples, only one was majorly off and these were from a channel with a very limited number of like / dislikes. In other examples the share of likes / dislikes was roughly not too much off.

Being off by up to 50% is plenty of signal.

The video linked is also a small YouTuber with not many views on their videos. Looking at the comparisons it actually gave a pretty close count. Sure it's not exact, but considering it's a small niche YouTuber it seems to be giving a fairly decent approximation. On even larger YouTube channels it's likely going to give you an even better sample of whether people like or dislike the video.

I think these are actually two different things.

One shows dislikes. One provides a big picture review page for whole channels.

This is literally in the second paragraph of the article.

Remember that you can't use an extension on all browsers and on all platforms. So, having a common platform makes sense.

Return YouTube dislike is available as a toggle in setting with Yattee on iOS/macOS. The app is available on tvOS as well, it runs Piped or Invidious as the backend and filters out all the ads too. Very nice on the Apple TV.

https://github.com/yattee/yattee

https://www.returnyoutubedislike.com/install

Works for firefox, chrome, opera, brave, edge, tapermonkey userscript.

Firefox android not supported natively, You have to use newpipe fork. I havent tried tampermonkey in ff android, be right back.

It's actually also available as an option in Revanced too.

Those should be called "crippled" platforms or browsers.

Desktop Safari has extensions yet that plugin does not support it. At some point developing for anything but Chromium ceases to make sense since your potential users can just install Chrome, so who cares..

> Desktop Safari has extensions

As a desktop Safari user: Safari theoretically has extensions. Apple made it painful and expensive for developers to publish, and so the ecosystem is in an abysmal state, with ultimately the users losing.

I'm torn between paying for extensions (that are free for other browsers) as a way to say "sincerely thank you" to those developers who bother, and absolutely not paying - to send a message, that this system sucks.

> Apple made it painful and expensive for developers

The most Apple thing to ever have Appled.

And then people say why is market share of Firefox decreasing.

If extension developers spend just a little time porting their extension, then they can point either way.

By forcing your customers to only support chrome, you are helping chrome build a monopoly overtye browser based internet where all extensions and work and play happens only on chrome.

Please do better.

And yes. I have an extension that is built for Firefox and chrome so I have some skin in the game

Well, if you're comfortable with sending your youtube view history to another website.

https://github.com/Anarios/return-youtube-dislike/blob/5c738...

How else could it work? I guess maybe a one-way hash would provide some level of anonymity but that's the best I can think of.

How would a one-way hash even work? They already have a database of views for a video by its ID. If they hash those beforehand that solves nothing. They have the actual ID for that hash - they have to, cause they need to provide you data on it.

It could work similar to how haveibeenpwned works - send a prefix of the video ID and respond with a list of all matching IDs with that prefix. The server only knows the list not the actual video. The client can pull the correct ID out of the list.

(this was how HIBP worked before at least, IIRC)

They'd have to key the votes by the hash.

A lot of trust they don't keep a map from hash->id behind the scenes though for data they already have.

Hell, a YT ID is 11 characters in a base64 character set. While a lot of possibilities, I do think the entire domain can be precomputed for some amount of costs.

That's not a very honest way of phrasing whats happening there. Sure it "leaks" that you are retrieving this VideoID from this IP, but you make it sound like it's sending your youtube viewing history to some random website.

Either way, I'm fine with this type of "leak" of data, as it's fundamental to an open web and can't be easily solved without cryptographic/hashing hoops. What's next, you want anonymity from the server that you're requesting content from, really?

Well, YouTube already has it.

ha wow, thanks for pointing that out. I just uninstalled.

How did you think it was working exactly?

People often use technology without thinking about or knowing exactly how it works.

By talking directly to YouTube, instead of this other random website.

Please as least click the link before posting comments

An extension that takes the 'rotten tomatoes' rating (from the OP site) and places it near the like/dislike icon would be useful.

That extension wouldn’t probably last 6 months on the google owned chrome extension store

It is there already? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-dislike-bu...

Not sure how long it's been there, but it's been approved by someone, you think they'd remove it after that?

Edit: looking at the reviews of the extension, it has reviews from a year ago (until I stop going backwards) so seems you're wrong

YouTube monopoly is really hurting internet and the world.

YouTube at this point is globalized TV controlled by one country: U.S.

It got so bad that for countries that do not have their own platforms, YouTube become as worse as adversarial subversive NGO that dictates one narrative and suppresses other narratives. i have seen in recent years countless examples of channels wiped from platform for holding opinionated views not aligned with Neo-liberal west.

Removing features so that you watch what they want you to watch.

My experience in the Netherlands is completely different than what you are saying.

When not logged in, the front page is full of right to extreme right content, always a click or two away from conspiracy theories and/or Thierry Baudet, the leader of the FvD, which is basically a neo nazi party.

Perhaps people in the Netherlands value right content over left content more than you realize.

Or perhaps outrage increases engagement, and YouTube optimizes for engagement (i.e. ad revenue)

Their exists plenty of toxic leftish content that increases engagement.

I need to try to use YouTube logged out, I have never done that to be honest.

What I saw is that objective and tolerant (compared to some rest of YouTube in my opinion) channels from my subscriptions were erased by YouTube, aka Deplatformed[0]. Other channels mostly about politics with pessimistic negative worldview connotations and selective biased view(IMHO) continue to grow to this day (context: all russian speaking channels). For example channel of Artemy Lebedev ( tema.ru/travel/ ), in recent interview he shared that since then he continued to upload, and YouTube erased so far eight of his newly created channels, but he does not care. I bet that latest one[1] will be also soon erased. Another channel is GoingUndergroundTV (interviews with politicians), it is now hosted on Rumble.

It's really not that hard to connect the dots why all this happens, for example person like Garry Kasparov could not ever be deplatformed from YouTube, not matter how biased and one sided world view he projects to audience of his former country, becouse he is not a strange man to certain establishment (He attends private 2023 Bilderberg Conference with figures like Henry A. Kissinger)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming [1] https://www.youtube.com/@ArtemyLebedev-sd8nf

Don’t be evil, unless I guess it starts hurting the ad money.

So your experience is exactly the same: Online US-controlled media can create uprest, extremism, hate subgroups in foreign countries at will.

Those look more like similar than completely different experiences.

I noticed the same thing in the US. When logged in I get mostly suggestions of stuff I tend to watch, which includes a few left leaning commentators and some more centrist news sources like NPR. If I check logged out, I get tons of right wing, own-the-libs type content with a lot of "men's rights" stuff.

> more centrist news sources like NPR

NPR is not considered centrist, but left-leaning.

When I check logged out I get CNN and Fox side by side, along with a lot of non-political basketball and Mr. Beast type stuff. Content probably varies on your IP address.

NPR is only left-leaning when you ignore how far right all US politics are.

Ya, only if your Overton window has been knocked completely out of whack by right wing extremism.

Why is Men's rights in quotes?

Oddly enough, when I log out and use a new browser I get nothing but CBC, CNN, Fox, and things like Mr. Beast.

None of which I watch.

I would suggest watching some things outside your bubble. Watch it from the mindset of a poor person who isn't sure where their next meal will come from.

As an FYI, some of the contents of men's rights extend to family court and have an obviously devastating impact on children. Some of those children are boys, whom will inevitably become men. There's also a population of men but not cis men.

You should try to read things more charitably/interpret them in good faith. I'm assuming they are referring to content that claims to be about "men's rights" but is actually redpill-ish and just plain women bashing.

Similarly, there is a lot of content that claims to be "feminist" content but really it's just women saying all men are trash.

Both are extremely harmful for gender equality and both tend to get recommended pretty happily by YouTube.

OK, I'll ask -- can you give some specific examples of wiped channels? What is an example of an NGO promoting one narrative and what are the other narratives being suppressed? What are countries this is happening in?

I'm genuinely interested in the specifics here. I always want to be knowledgeable about different narratives.

Because my impression was that YouTube will serve you up recommendations on any topic you watch, because its goal is to serve ads, not to further a neoliberal narrative over others. But if YouTube is hiding certain narratives, I definitely want to be aware, to understand what kinds of categories they fall into. Can you share what you've observed?

Edit: best I can tell (looking through comment history) is that the commenter is upset specifically with YouTube banning content and channels that "denies or trivializes" Russia's invasion of Ukraine:

> YouTube has also been able to operate in Russia despite cracking down on pro-Kremlin content that has broken guidelines including its major violent events policy, which prohibits denying or trivialising the invasion. Since the conflict began in February, YouTube has taken down channels including that of the pro-Kremlin journalist Vladimir Solovyov. Channels associated with Russia’s Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs have also been temporarily suspended from uploading videos in recent months for describing the war as a “liberation mission”. YouTube’s chief product officer, Neal Mohan, said: “We have a major violent events policy and that applies to things like denial of major violent events: everything from the Holocaust to Sandy Hook. And of course, what’s happening in Ukraine is a major violent event. And so we’ve used that policy to take unprecedented action.” [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/22/youtube-u...

Ya I regularly wipe my cookies and start over with YouTube and the politically charged fresh slate recommendations are definitely not Neo-liberal.

I worked hard to make my youtube feed mostly free of political content.

One time, PragerU stuff starts appearing in my recommendation....I cannot ban it fast enough.

I'm not sure why you were downvoted for this. Maybe HN readers are mostly far-right, lol.

I have noticed that there is a contingent that seems to downvote but not respond to new comments with leftward inclination. Usually the comments recover but presumably enough do not that it’s worth the effort.

It’s a very real thing.

Yeah. “Neo-liberal” is defiantly not how I’d describe YouTube political content. Everything I get is far right bullshit.

I think the youtube algo just serves you what it thinks will get you engaged (hate watching?). In the past I've gotten both right and left extremist content. I eventually set my youtube settings to delete everything that is older than 3 months, my feed has been way more usable since I did that. That plus using revanced to remove all the stupid shorts and news/promo sections from the app.

YouTube always gives me the vague “people in your area and time of day” answer, which is totally bullshit. It’s content driven. You watch a video about fighter jets, or Ukraine, get Matt Walsh telling you how we have to eliminate trans kids. Watch an Alan Watts or Terrance McKenna video, get an ad about how the ancient Egyptians used magic flutes to generate antigravity fields to build the pyramids.

This has also been my experience. Whenever I view the YouTube homepage signed out or in an incognito window, the video/creator selection is almost wholly alien and often very unaligned with my personal views.

Well, duh.

Its personalized.

If you signed out - how do you expect them to show you personalized results?

Of course the homepage you see is different than the default or what others see.

I'm very happy with the state of my homepage and the recommended videos they push to me. Everything is very on-topic to my interests and what I have curated as my watch history over the years.

I do agree the default experience is pretty bland and lackluster.

Youtube lacks a button “Show me something else”.

I’m stuck in a local minimum, but I keep hearing about valleys of people watching entirely different stuff. I tried searching but the search keeps returning “content I might be interested in” (ie absolutely unrelated to the search) and it’s impossible to “discover more”.

(And in France, the “discover” tab is swamped by rap videos).

So it is true there can be some local minimum problems. Sometimes I'll get on a random topic binge for a few days and I'll notice my homepage changing (sometimes for the worse.)

In terms of getting out - hard to say. I rarely if ever use search on YouTube or even most of the discovery features unless there is a very specific video I'm looking for. I don't search specific topics or interests to find content. I don't even use the "subscriptions-only" view because I like seeing the algorithm recommend new things to me and I know good content from any of my subscriptions will bubble up if it is good. A few YouTubers I do watch religiously and will personally check their page every so often.

Most of the content I watch and people I subscribe too I found pretty organically. Something will pop up on the homepage that I like. I'll check out more of their videos. Then the next day that person and similar channels will start showing up in the algo. Eventually I'll subscribe if its consistent quality. Rinse and repeat.

My current homepage consists of indie gamers playing new games, some technology channels like LTT or similar, low-level electronics and circuit board design, a few programming channels, documentaries for speedrunning history, some DIY channels for DIY or furniture building, Ancient Egypt and its conspiracies, game devlogs. I have a guilty pleasure for Minecraft but its been a few weeks since I watched anything related so looking now its completely fallen off the algo.

Every so often I'll get a channel rec from reddit or here and I'll check them out.

Oh - don't be afraid to curate your watch history. If I watched something I didn't like I go into my watch history and remove that video so it no longer has influence on the algo. I like my history to be an archive of what I have watched so I can find it again though so this is rare.

A button was actually introduced a couple of years ago for that! It is called the “New to you” button: https://9to5google.com/2021/10/25/youtube-new-to-you/

I use it regularly, but it is well-hidden (usually, the rightmost tag in the ribbon of buttons at the top).

Replied here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36112597

That is not upsetting. Article you mentioned proves that YouTube is used as weapon of censorship, denying that is Westsplaining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westsplaining

From the Wikipedia link, "Westsplaining" is about characterizing the situation in Ukraine as a US-Russia great-powers conflict (Russia vs. the West), and how that denies and ignores the role of the Ukrainian people for self-determination.

But from your comments, you seem to be interested more in the Russian narrative which similarly denies Ukrainian self-determination.

So it actually seems that you yourself are part of the "Westsplaining" problem. In contrast, YouTube is ensuring that Russian disinformation about what's happening in Ukraine isn't crowding out Ukrainian's own voices and testimony.

I'm not saying whether YouTube's policies are good or bad, but they certainly are not a version of "Westsplaining". It's the exact opposite, in fact.

Also curious about some specific examples.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34907079 Is one example OP has posted about before, but light on details.

YouTube bans basic daytime adverts because of American puritanical beliefs.

Which daytime advertisements are you referring to?

I'm very interested in this as well. When I clear cookies and go to YouTube I always see crap for kids, Mr. Beast, and lots of feel-good stuff. The 3 front page recommendations right now on a fresh browser are about a shelter dog getting adopted, a movie called The Policeman, and a video with different versions of the song "one, two, buckle my shoe".

I experience this with Twitter too - people complain their default twitter is alt-right, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, etc. and I don't see any of that in a fresh browser. It makes me wonder what people are watching and visiting so much that the algorithms throw alt-right stuff in their faces with such regularity. I follow Elon Musk and all the other expected tech people a tech person would follow and I don't experience this version of Twitter and Youtube everyone seems to complain about.

In my experience the default does not lean right. But it is very easy to start getting recommendations that way and once it starts it doesn’t seem to stop.

My take: YouTube provides the tools, then people use them in a biased way. If liberals in your country are good at technology and conservatives are not, the liberal point of view will look like it's being pushed.

Something happened yesterday to me that really drove it home. An AI scam started showing up for me. Before I realized a scam, I made a comment pointing out that what they were saying was incorrect. They deleted my comment, reported my email address to YouTube as a scammer so shutting me down real quick. It was then I noticed they had 50k subscribers despite only being a couple of days old and they had a product to sell in the description. Clearly, the people behind this account were tech savvy.

tl;dr: The viewpoints of tech savvy groups in your country are going to win out. Info promotion and suppression is not a conspiracy of tech companies.

> If liberals in your country are good at technology and conservatives are not, the liberal point of view will look like it's being pushed.

Awareness of the rules makes a difference too.

If a particular political group is frequently posting videos that flagrantly break the TOS (as might happen with particularly polarized members), they're much more likely to get reported and banned before they make much headway. It's creators that sit firmly within the rules or carefully run right up alongside their boundaries that do well in the long term.

> If a particular political group is frequently posting videos that flagrantly break the TOS... they're much more likely to get reported and banned before they make much headway.

They are also able to get feedback and learn how to adapt, in the cat-and-mouse game of spam/SEO/wrongthink. IMO, these groups are the ones that know how to exploit the algorithms best, because they have a ruthless survivalship happening.

It’s not just that. There’s a very real outrage machine on the right that works the refs so they get a breaks for what are very obvious TOS violations.

This is quite a narrative. I think the correct perspective is: YouTube caters to local governments, which often want to limit what their population has access to. Many countries regulate their speech much more heavily than the United States.

You watch what your government wants you to watch.

I don't know about monopolisation (other than Google/YT's massive reach) but their shadow banning of comments is something I find worrying. You can't say something without double checking if it's been binned, and it doesn't have to be that controversial.

I made a comment on some chap making a living from scraping and mentioned mozrepl, tried submitting about 5 variations of it but it never stuck. So all those millions of comments on there, who's to say what the middle ground is (other than the filter).

Why is it always the same types of people peddling the same noise?

You're constantly posting russian propaganda here, with links to russian propagandist telegram channels, foxnews.com, RT, propagandist twitter accounts, propagandist youtube channels... and of course you're singing the wonders of Elon Musk next to this.

"Blah blah the west, liberals, etc" -- please. You'll jump at the opportunity to defend Russia and whine about "The West" the first chance you'll see. Don't pretend you're in favour of anything just in this world.

The story goes, the internet propagandists that are paid for the work are paid more if people respond. Best to just downvote, flag, move on.

Pretending there isn't a difference between "opinionated views" and collaborating with Russian military while spreading disinformation doesn't help you.

The examples you've provided have done the latter.

Stop using indirect language to hide your beliefs.

Websites or services that act as personalized recommendation middle-men with a less "trashy" presentation for the recommendations themselves are a great idea. Essentially, I'd like "Rate Your Music" for all sorts of things. There's a reason why a handful few are trying to get those "Action Button" Youtube videos submitted to Letterboxd.

I guess I also believe that plenty of platforms with user-generated content have boundless stuff to see, and making the platforms themselves responsible for recommendations gives them almost too much responsibility. I understand it's part of the business plan, but recommendations would become less toxic of a phenomenon if they weren't forced onto your regular user experience as you engaged with the platform.. and better if they were more individual and something you'd have to access separately. Like movie reviews in the paper!

> Websites or services that act as personalized recommendation middle-men

These are impossible without a legal precedent to make adversarial interoperability legal again. While it was never explicitly made illegal, copyright law and the CFAA have successfully been used to curtail it.

Software that wraps common services such as YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/etc and added its own features on top (such as custom recommendations, etc) is routinely attacked and taken down. That's why there are no mainstream alternative clients for any of those services.

I don't get why the Reddit crowd cares so much about disliking... Mostly without even a comment or something.

Everytime on groups that share a userbase with Reddit, and on YouTube, you get haters. You don't know who, you don't know why, they just downvotes and burry your comment and they're not able to comment back.

It kills online discussions, make an echo chamber for the leading opinion, and kills any content that's a bit different.

For exemple, some awesome song about Assassin's creed was featured on YouTube, a few years ago, next to related content. (Assassin des templiers)

The quality and the realisation were sublime.

But it got tons of thumbs down because it was in French, and haters only want content in English (filtering your exposition to international content was not the point of upvotes and downvotes!)

So downvotes are pointless imo. It's great they get rid of it (and HN should do the same for the quality of the discussion)

YouTube is plagued by low quality content with clickbait titles, descriptions, and images. Often they outright lie about the content. Any DIY is a crapshoot. Even if it's not a lie, often it doesn't work or it's actually dangerous. Videos with lots of downvotes is a quick and easy indicator not to bother watching the 10 minute video to discover if it's good quality. YouTube's intention here is clear: if one can't determine in advance when a video is poor quality, they'll be forced to watch those poor quality videos until they find a good one. This increases time on the platform and their advertising revenue.

Many great videos have a lot of dislikes. I don't understand this argument. It's a useless metric. I don't care who wins the popularity contest.

Many =/= Most. The dislike ratio was extremely reliable when it came to identifying clickbait. Maybe you don't care about that but many others do.

There is a conflation of the like and dislike button of multiple attributes:

1. agreement

2. respect

3. fascinating

4. production quality

These 4 attributes should be graded individually rather than together.

The YouTube dislike button existed long before modern Reddit culture (lol) did. If anything, the Reddit vote system is quite different since it does not really show the absolute number of up and down votes, and they are even slowly moving towards phasing out the % of up/down votes display counter on posts. It never was available for comments in the first place.

Plus, dislike also boosted engagement and could be good for your video, so again very far from the Reddit karma system.

Dislikes have problems, and I'm not too bothered about it on YouTube since I literally never looked at it, but I do think that being able to quickly indicate something is low-quality content is valuable. Think of Twitter, where your only feedback is likes from people who agree with you, so your followers just reinforce your own thing in a positive feedback loop that echo chambers yourself much more than something like Reddit or HN.

Yeah, but especially on YouTube, you tell YouTube that you didn't like the opinion or the content, so that the AI only serves you the same things on a loop.

And not only to you, but you also to the creator, who might be doing something great, As well as to everyone, as you burry the video if it's too downvoted.

If you don't like something, just move on. Or reply to it.

Because if you just downvote without commenting, the creator of a video doesn't know if it's low quality, or if there are just haters out there.

The value of the dislike button was in warning other viewers about scams and clickbait. If you watch a bad video, realize its clickbait, and then simply move on that would be rewarding the clickbaiter and making the problem worse.

YouTube still has the dislike button. It just doesn't show the count or ratio.

The problem with toxic positivity is toxic positivity. Without constructive feedback, content will skew towards safe and seeking approval rather than important or courageous. It's impossible to be real if there's only one candidate to vote for.

Perhaps we should consider alternative indicators to replace positive votes as well, although this may prove to be an even more difficult challenge.

The crux of the issue may lie in the semi-permanent nature of online communities. In real life feedback usually fades into obscurity given enough time or isn't given much importance anyway. However online it's different because anything you said can be retrieved and resurfaced infinitely, influencing the mindset of interactions.

I cringe thinking about things I said and made in the past (but have learned from), although it isn't sitting on a forum for me or anyone else to resurface, giving me peace of mind.

Agreed.

I don't see why HN even needs downvoting when the comment slips down in relation to upvoted comments?

Downvotes unfairly weight opinions of those who are intolerant as people with higher tolerance will less likely or never use downvoting.

Digg at least made downvoting fun and not so serious.

>Everytime on groups that share a userbase with Reddit, and on YouTube, you get haters. You don't know who, you don't know why, they just downvotes and burry your comment and they're not able to comment back.

I mean, this is exactly how HN works in any controversial thread.

I’ve almost rage quit the site like 3 times from having written a fully thought out high-quality reply and gotten “you’re posting too fast” garbage.

Really dang, you couldn’t have said that when I hit <reply> instead of <post>, so I don’t waste my time typing a long comment only to have it hit a brick wall?! Ugh

It's just anti-short-seller bullshit. People running scams hate any way to mark things as scams, and they love praise removed from all context.

Hear, hear.

Another term for downvotes is: casual meanness.

If HN isn't willing to get rid of them, then they should at least cost you something: 10 karma points, maybe.

It has nothing to do with meanness. It’s community curation.

Upvotes provide you a signal that some people like it. Downvotes provide you a signal that some people dislike it. They are completely different.

Downvotes prevent unpopular things that have a fervent user-base from sitting on top.

Perhaps. And also allow a brigade to suppress opinions they don't like.

Youtube dislikes didn’t go into a combined score. So there was no suppression. As a viewer it was an extra signal.

And upvotes allow a brigade to push their own narrative over others. Both can be "abused", but both are necessary for a healthy community. In fact, without downvotes, it's way easier for a brigade to control the narrative of a platform.

> Downvotes prevent unpopular things that have a fervent user-base from sitting on top

It's the definition of an echo chamber, isn't it ?

No, because in the youtube case it doesn’t actually suppress it. It was an extra bit of information that you could use to determine if a video was likely misleading.

YouTube is, at all times, pro-echo chamber. So this is not their motive.

If it is, an echo chamber isn't always a bad thing.

Dislikes were a fantastic way to determine if a video had a misleading thumbnail or title at a glance. Now you have to waste time determining if the contents of the video are factual or not, which can become infuriating, especially for technical work that demands accurate information.

You do need to reach a point threshold before you can downvote though which I think helps here. It's 1,000 or something.

Innovative Idea:

Instead of a single dislike button, force the user to select a dislike reason, with choices such as:

- title doesn't match content

- content is in unexpected language

- content is in low visual quality

etc.

Unfortunately, exactly the people who abuse the dislike button are the ones who won't care which reason they pick - they will just pick one.

All Youtube has to do is review one of the dislike reasons and if it's not true ignore the rest of the dislikes for that reason. If a bunch of people dislike it because the title doesn't match the content, but it does match, ignore other dislikes for that cite that reason.

I think they didn't just remove dislike counts, but are actively suppressing negative comments.

If I watch a speech of someone from the German (right-wing) AfD party, which I very rarely do and start reading the comments, I feel like I'm visiting an echo chamber. Zero negative comments which simply can't be the truth.

I don't think YouTube themselves are doing that. As the uploader, AfD can absolutely just remove all negative comments they don't like. And they've been able to do that since YouTube started.

My understanding is that comments with negative sentiments get held for moderation and bigger channels never go through and approve them so they’re effectively shadow banned comments

Can they filter out words automatically? Like I know that tons of people seemingly love to be moderators (for free) so maybe some channels just have enough mods to delete stuff very fast, but sometimes the whole comment section is just too clean. Do YouTube channels have more advanced moderator tools now?

The funny thing is that I started to get that impression on videos of Moroccan politics of all things. Not some western culture war topic haha.

> Can they filter out words automatically?

Yep. See "Blocked Words" https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9483359?hl=en

There's also the option to manually approve every comment.

There is a lot of shadowbanning on Youtube!

It could be that YouTube secretly supports right-wing German political parties, and is suppressing alternative views in the comments, or it might be that YouTube just thinks the world is too cynical and suppresses any comment with a negative tone irrespective of political bent, OR—and stay with me on this—the channel itself may be moderating its own comment sections out of pure self-interest, and YouTube as an organization isn’t particularly interested in the goings on of local German politics. Who can say?

They are, but indirectly via the video recommendation algorithm.

I also started working on a similar website several weeks ago. It's called tuberank, feel free to check it out!

https://tuberank.org/en

Smart idea... Hope it catches up

If it does there will then be the "verified YouTube critic score" and the "audience score," where only the critic score is displayed at first glance. You know, because actual popular sentiment is the antithesis of advertising.

Even Rotten Tomatoes has changed this recently to break the audience score into 2 new categories. "Verified Audience" and "General Audience". Disney was probably putting pressure on RT after years of putting out garbage and getting review bombed.

There would be no need for review bomb if they were widely disliked. The issue is that they were not widely disliked and certain groups are angry other people consume this content.

> There would be no need for review bomb if they were widely disliked.

This is circular reasoning. You're calling something a "review bomb" because you're assuming from the outset that its not widely disliked, despite the large amount of negative reviews suggesting it is in fact widely disliked.

I did not called it "review bomb", the whole thread started with the "review bomb" promise.

Review bomb is when whole group goes out of their way to seek content they disagree and then downvote it. There is zero reason to organize all of that for widely disliked content.

However, especially right wing groups do it against mildly popular content they do not want other people to see.

> There would be no need for review bomb if they were widely disliked.

What is a review bomb if not a symptom that something is widely disliked?

There are no review bombs on stuff that is widely liked either.

> There are no review bombs on stuff that is widely liked either.

Typical review bombs go against liked content.

Or maybe they were widely disliked, but this was not reflected in the critic score because certain groups were promoting the content.

Disney has been underperforming at the box office for a while now. Review bombs are a symptom of not focusing on the product (entertainment, story).

And to my original point, if review bombs are a symptom, then "verified reviewers" is addressing the symptom, not the problem. Same reason YouTube took down dislikes. It was around the time the Rings of Power was getting wrecked by LoTR fans.

They made a mistake by removing the star rating system.

You can download the dataset of dislikes and analyze it in ClickHouse:

https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/getting-started/example-datas...

Funny idea: What would happen, if a bunch of relatively well known Youtubers made it their mission to say at every video ending, that one should upvote for disliking a video and that they consider upvotes to be dislikes? If it became big enough of a movement, would upvoting also be removed?

I understand that not everyone will appreciate or connect with crafted and dedicated videos, and respect the diversity of opinions. However, given the rarity of positive feedback in a niche, the negative ratings without constructive criticis felt particularly impactful.

Ia there a way to search for youtube comments? I watched over 200 videos from some series and remember a particular comment under one of those videos.. but it seems those are not indexed by google, so you cannot search for youtube comments

Youtube is bracing itself for Twitter's land grab.

Personally I think Youtube is screwed.

Getting a TypeError: Le.find(...) is undefined when going to https://www.favoree.io/search

needs a bit more work :)

Is it going to put its thumb on the scales to counteract "review bombing/troll campaigns" for widely disliked but powerfully backed YouTube videos the way RT does?

It's impossible to feasibly counteract review bombing.

It's even worse when you have to release a non-native extension, as that introduces a selection bias among people who want to review bomb on the main site but can't.

"people who want to review bomb on the main site but can't."

We all have different hobbies it seems.

What happened to the good old punching ball, to blow off steam?

You can do that offline where it doesn't affect other people.

Yeah, cause they are not that much widely disliked, it is just an attempt at political pressure and attempt to make them see widely disliked.

if its "not that much" and creates deception then why make site-wide changes that make it even less transparent? If a video had 4k dislikes and 46k likes then you knew that 4k accounts disliked it. There's little room for speculation there. Now you have to go to the comment section to get an idea of public opinion, where the theorized vocal minority have far more potential influence (because they can leave multiple comments, but only one thumbs down)

How long before youtube removes everything but "what's next" and turns into a TV channel?

honestly I hope not long. I could not care less about what random people like or dislike, what they comment on videos, or anything else. what's next is a great feature since I put on a song and it plays something similar next. a TV channel is the perfect use case for youtube, where instead of selecting a channel like on TV, you select a channel by type of video you first play.

sidenote: I had no idea youtube had likes or dislikes until I read this post. I have however, used youtube to, you know, play a video and look at that video. I have zero idea about other components of the site, outside of the video playing, and a list of what's next. I've used youtube since before it was owned by google.

now I don't know if I'm the target demographic, but it seems to me like youtube is doing the right thing and focusing on it's core feature while removing screen spam. and w/ ublock, I haven't seen an ad on there in a decade.

Unfortunate to be called something like that instead of an alternative for IMDB's ratings or something.

Rotten Tomatoes is clearly meant to be just a parody website. Look at its name. It can't be taken seriously.

Huh? Rotten Tomatoes isn't a parody, it aggregates "critic" scores for movies.

There is a Firefox extension that brings it back...

Well why we don't have a review platform for YouTubers? Because it's free

There are browser extensions that get you the dislike counts, and they are accurate.

This just shows how little power we have over corporations, and how they can just get away with the stupidest things because "people will just forget about it." It's honestly sad.

somebody should take youtube private and get rid of all the shit videos

Did you forget Alphabet (Google) owns YT?

Didn't click surely LGBT people have less than 10% approval on this unless its a pre-misstep Milo Yannopoulos type

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