4 ms·

The article implies something nefarious going on here, but there are plenty of entirely rational innocent explanations. i.e. the videos are attracting a large q

by xmodem 6y ago

The article implies something nefarious going on here, but there are plenty of entirely rational innocent explanations. i.e. the videos are attracting a large quantity of spam dislikes, and YouTube is bulk-removing them.

dominotw 6y ago
> a large quantity of spam dislikes what exactly is a 'spam dislike' . I don't see how thats a valid explanation.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Probably bots, people who do nothing but dislike videos, Indian sweatshops that are human bot farms, dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes, etc.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    > people who do nothing but dislike videos > dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes this is not spam. how does youtube knows which dislikes are driven by 'social media post' ? > Indian sweatshops that are human bot farms someone is paying sweatshops to dislike whitehouse youtube? How do you know this ?
    - ardy42 6y ago
      >> people who do nothing but dislike videos >> dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes > this is not spam. Also how you think youtube knows if a certain user is disliking because they read a social media post ? I believe Reddit calls similar activity "brigading," and it's against the rules there.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      >this is not spam. Dislikes are there to help human users of Youtube (and the AI recommender systems of Google) not to be some sort of god given metric of anything. Spam is anything which makes dislikes less useful as metric for those things. Users who dislike everything aren't a useful metric. >Also how you think youtube knows which dislikes are driven by 'social media post' ? A sudden jump in dislikes with a referal tag of <insert social media>. Probably mixed with their knowledge of those user's other Youtube browsing behaviors. And Google's absurd knowledge of your internet browsing behaviors via its massive analytics network. I'm sure there's whole teams doing nothing but this at Youtube and I suspect they have very sophisticated methods at this point.
  - logifail 6y ago
    > dislikes driven by social media posts (Disclosure: I live outside the USA, I'm not politically active, I have no horse in this race) It's clear from the way that many people write that if "their side" is doing something it's almost certainly the best of reasons and if "the other side" is doing something it's for the worst of reasons. From the HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." How can we reintroduce good faith into everyone's interactions with the political class? Right now it seems it's perfectly OK to assume the worst possible interpretation of anything a politician says* When did the world get like this? How do we fix it? * if s/he isn't from your party. If s/he is from your party, of course you assume the best interpretation.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      This is nothing new in terms of US politics and political candidates gladly fan the flames: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2019/07/11/a-short-history-of-campaign-dirty-tricks-before-twitter-and-facebook/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2019/07/11/a-short-his... edit: And if I remember in Rome a politician was literally killed by a mob of his opponent's constituents so this has been going on for thousands of years.
- uberswe 6y ago
  One way I have seen this done in the past is that you have contest sites. As a user you gain x number of entries for every action you take. One of these actions can be to go in and like or dislike a video for example. Sometimes the sites can even check that the action was performed. Someone wanting more entries might create lots of fake accounts. I'm sure there are many other ways to do this but that is one example on how spam dislikes can be generated.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    But what would someone get out of paying ppl to dislike whitehouse videos ?
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > But what would someone get out of paying ppl to dislike whitehouse videos ? Propaganda.
      - dominotw 6y ago
        But how do you know this is happening for this video though? OPs original assertion was that this has ' innocent explanations.' Indian sweatshops, contest sites to spread political propaganda ect are conspiracy theories with no proof, far from 'innocent explanations'
        ardy42 6y ago
        >>> But what would someone get out of paying ppl to dislike whitehouse videos ? >> Propaganda. > But how do you know this is happening for this video though? It's still the answer to the question you asked, whether it's actually happening or not.
        dominotw 6y ago
        Ah yes you are right. You were responding to my question. I had all the replies mixed up.
topspin 6y ago
> the videos are attracting a large quantity of spam dislikes Prior to the bulk-removal the dislikes are tracking the views; the dislike growth curve is a close function of the view count curve. That is unlikely to happen if the dislikes are bulk spam. We'll be told it's 'spam' or 'bots', and Youtube will rely on this as the plausible explanation should they bother to address it at all, but the inconvenient truth is that the most likely explanation for the dislikes is viewers. Otherwise one must posit a sophisticated spammer that is carefully tailoring their dislikes to camouflage their activity. I suspect the only meaningful response we'll get is a throttling of the API used to do the analysis.

by xmodem 6y ago

dominotw 6y ago

> a large quantity of spam dislikes what exactly is a 'spam dislike' . I don't see how thats a valid explanation.

marcinzm 6y ago
Probably bots, people who do nothing but dislike videos, Indian sweatshops that are human bot farms, dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes, etc.
- dominotw 6y ago
  > people who do nothing but dislike videos > dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes this is not spam. how does youtube knows which dislikes are driven by 'social media post' ? > Indian sweatshops that are human bot farms someone is paying sweatshops to dislike whitehouse youtube? How do you know this ?
  - ardy42 6y ago
    >> people who do nothing but dislike videos >> dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes > this is not spam. Also how you think youtube knows if a certain user is disliking because they read a social media post ? I believe Reddit calls similar activity "brigading," and it's against the rules there.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    >this is not spam. Dislikes are there to help human users of Youtube (and the AI recommender systems of Google) not to be some sort of god given metric of anything. Spam is anything which makes dislikes less useful as metric for those things. Users who dislike everything aren't a useful metric. >Also how you think youtube knows which dislikes are driven by 'social media post' ? A sudden jump in dislikes with a referal tag of <insert social media>. Probably mixed with their knowledge of those user's other Youtube browsing behaviors. And Google's absurd knowledge of your internet browsing behaviors via its massive analytics network. I'm sure there's whole teams doing nothing but this at Youtube and I suspect they have very sophisticated methods at this point.
- logifail 6y ago
  > dislikes driven by social media posts (Disclosure: I live outside the USA, I'm not politically active, I have no horse in this race) It's clear from the way that many people write that if "their side" is doing something it's almost certainly the best of reasons and if "the other side" is doing something it's for the worst of reasons. From the HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." How can we reintroduce good faith into everyone's interactions with the political class? Right now it seems it's perfectly OK to assume the worst possible interpretation of anything a politician says* When did the world get like this? How do we fix it? * if s/he isn't from your party. If s/he is from your party, of course you assume the best interpretation.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    This is nothing new in terms of US politics and political candidates gladly fan the flames: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2019/07/11/a-short-history-of-campaign-dirty-tricks-before-twitter-and-facebook/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2019/07/11/a-short-his... edit: And if I remember in Rome a politician was literally killed by a mob of his opponent's constituents so this has been going on for thousands of years.
uberswe 6y ago
One way I have seen this done in the past is that you have contest sites. As a user you gain x number of entries for every action you take. One of these actions can be to go in and like or dislike a video for example. Sometimes the sites can even check that the action was performed. Someone wanting more entries might create lots of fake accounts. I'm sure there are many other ways to do this but that is one example on how spam dislikes can be generated.
- dominotw 6y ago
  But what would someone get out of paying ppl to dislike whitehouse videos ?
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > But what would someone get out of paying ppl to dislike whitehouse videos ? Propaganda.
    - dominotw 6y ago
      But how do you know this is happening for this video though? OPs original assertion was that this has ' innocent explanations.' Indian sweatshops, contest sites to spread political propaganda ect are conspiracy theories with no proof, far from 'innocent explanations'
      - ardy42 6y ago
        >>> But what would someone get out of paying ppl to dislike whitehouse videos ? >> Propaganda. > But how do you know this is happening for this video though? It's still the answer to the question you asked, whether it's actually happening or not.
        dominotw 6y ago
        Ah yes you are right. You were responding to my question. I had all the replies mixed up.

topspin 6y ago

> the videos are attracting a large quantity of spam dislikes Prior to the bulk-removal the dislikes are tracking the views; the dislike growth curve is a close function of the view count curve. That is unlikely to happen if the dislikes are bulk spam. We'll be told it's 'spam' or 'bots', and Youtube will rely on this as the plausible explanation should they bother to address it at all, but the inconvenient truth is that the most likely explanation for the dislikes is viewers. Otherwise one must posit a sophisticated spammer that is carefully tailoring their dislikes to camouflage their activity. I suspect the only meaningful response we'll get is a throttling of the API used to do the analysis.