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Comment by hinata08 | Hacker News Reader

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)

View on HN

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.

Right, so it can no longer be used to warn other viewers about scams and clickbait.

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.

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.

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.

> 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 ?

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

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.

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.

sorry, I meant HN here

On HN you can showdead, so it doesn't matter. You can still read even flagkilled stuff.

It allows us to review the moderation and decide if we approve of it. There's even a vouching mechanism, which is absurdly parliamentary for web 2.0.

edit: there are even mods running around saving stories that they think were unfairly judged.

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.

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

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