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Comment by s3p | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

Dwnvotes were much more powerful, so we've made it more annoying and expensive to control the algorithm.

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.

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