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Comment by BasedAnon | Hacker News Reader

Now for them to bring back the 5 star rating system and video replies!

...and the dislike counting! I don't want to depend on an extension to know whether a video worth to watch or not.

The problem with dislike counting is that the customers of Youtube (advertisers) do not want it, because they are spooked to have their ads associated with perceived negativity.

They really need to fix this, because I have lost counting how many times I've got click-baited with a video that contained either violence in it or its content was completely unrelated to its thumbnail...therefore a visible dislike counter would have saved me from giving them views when they should have removed them from the platform as a whole.

If any YouTube developer is reading this, please fix this dangerous behavior by malicious actors that take advantage of the platform's relatively recent changes.

I'm not sure how to say this without being at least a little offensive: If the above request is in earnest, it is incredibly naïve. You don't think they know this is a problem for users, or that legions of other users share this thought, or more charitably, do you think that sharing this thought will make a difference?

Google doesn't want to solve the fact that users spend more time watching clickbait and low quality videos as a result of removing features that they themselves implemented back when they thought they could be anything more than an advertising company. This strategy also explains what happened to Google Search.

I think YouTube cares quite a bit about clickbait. Just looking at its recommendations vs everything else I see online, it seems fairly tame in terms of clickbaitiness. Check out the trash labeled "powered by Outbrain" across the web...

When they removed public dislike counts, I don't think a visible dislike counter has been visible next to the thumbnail. You'd still have gotten clickbaited for the same reasons back then.

Then they could have a like ratio threshold, below which ads do not get displayed. Arguably this is even better than the status quo: right now ads may display alongside scams and misinformation that would otherwise get disliked.

Advertisers have always had ways to block likes and dislikes. The problem was that dislike counts were abused by people driving dislikes on videos for inauthentic reasons (YouTuber supports cause X, we disagree with X, therefore let's all go dislike all of this YouTuber's videos). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_brigading

Removing public dislike counts takes a good amount of wind out of such campaigns

Hiding dislikes just showed the content was unpopular.

This is always the excuse thrown around. It just doesn't make a lot of sense.

I'm not on Nike, Coke or mega-corp advertising level, but I do spend a lot with google's advertising apparatus, including on youtube-based adverts - not one time have I cared about how controversial or whatever a video might be. I simply want engagement from in-market potential customers... regardless of what content they're watching.

Who are these people that think a Nike commercial being randomly played before a video has anything to do with some sort of endorsement of the video's content?

Journalists both have an incentive to generate a story, and potentially harm a competitor in the ad selling space. So they find as controversial of a video they can find (possibly with really low view counts), start a screen recorder, then hit refresh until a major brand's ad shows up before the video. Now they can run a headline like "Nike financially supports pro-genocide content on YouTube".

It's not an entirely unfair thing either. That is something that is happening, just in miniscule amounts. So YouTube introduced brand safety options which predict how safe a video is and avoids such potential headlines.

However since it's just an algorithm, it doesn't understand nuance. So now creators who are making educational content about tough subjects earn less money because they are bucketed as unsafe. Since unsafe content has less advertising biders, it earns less money.

They already turn off engagement with some of the YouTube short ads, why not do it for all ads?

I don't know what is up with companies wanting to ban the dislike emotion. Spotify used to have a dislike button for that one awful song your favourite musician produced. No longer, I have to skip the same song over and over.

Video replies was a crazy idea in retrospect. Being able to anchor arbitrary videos to any other video at will is insanely ripe for abuse. If the feature existed today you would surely see thousands of spam videos with no relevance to the content they're replying to stuck underneath anything remotely popular. It's a wonder it ever worked as intended at all.

> It's a wonder it ever worked as intended at all

Even when it was available I've only ever seen a few cases of it working well. One prominent one was an educational YouTuber (Veritasium) asking users to post video replies with solutions to a physics puzzle/experiment that he was doing. Besides that, the feature was not used by creators and so spam videos and response girls were rampant in the video replies to most popular YouTubers.

Haha, Reply Girls. That brings back memories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_girl

If memory serves, that was ultimately what got the feature on its way out.

I think it could be a neat idea if you allowed the creator to choose which videos are posted as replies. I know there's so many times where a youtuber mentions something like "if I'm wrong/ignorant post me a link", and the ability to point to a video providing a better method would be invaluable.

OFC, I'm assuming a utopic world here. There's no incentive for neither Youtube nor the creator to do this, as opposed to simply linking more of their own stuff or whatever is ad friendly.

I'm curious if there's a good way to extend this to reply videos that refute the main video. If you lock it to the original authors control then if someone e disagrees with them and is fact checking their BS that reply would never get seen.

Maybe an author's hilight section and then an "other replies" that's more open.

Look at TikTok for how it can be done. It's not perfect but it's used very widely and ties context together across videos.

I sometimes get a box asking me to rate a video I've watched earlier with stars, so that system is apparently not gone completely.

That's funny. So internally they agree that a stars system is more valuable, but for the broad public they have the like/(hidden) dislike.

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