14 ms·

This seems rather user-hostile. The downvote count is useful for identifying videos that aren't what they claim to be. And how about DIY videos that give terrib

This seems rather user-hostile. The downvote count is useful for identifying videos that aren't what they claim to be. And how about DIY videos that give terrible advice? A big downvote ratio will get most people's attention in a way that critical comments may not.

motbob 6y ago
I agree that removing public dislikes is a pretty bad idea, but it's not that important of a tool in fighting misleading videos. I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with misleading thumbnails/titles, and what stopped the glut was not dislikes, but rather Youtube's use of watch time as an important metric.
- retsibsi 6y ago
  Fair point, but I think downvotes have been useful to me relatively recently. Fake videos may not show up in recommendation feeds, but they still appear in search results don't they? (And if you're searching for something relatively obscure, you can realistically hit the bottom of the barrel, rather than only seeing the more highly rated results.)
  - mrkramer 6y ago
    >Fake videos may not show up in recommendation feeds, but they still appear in search results don't they? Use report button
    - retsibsi 6y ago
      I would for anything truly extreme (like some horrible shock footage in the middle of a supposedly innocent video). But I don't know if all of these videos actually violate any rules; often they are of the kind <title: THING YOU'RE LOOKING FOR>, where the content is actually someone talking about the thing I'm looking for. edit: Or another relatively common type, not necessarily fake or even strictly misleading, just cynically low-quality: a video made by pulling some text content from the web, feeding it through a speech synthesiser, and playing that over over the top of some 'relevant' images.
      - mrkramer 6y ago
        When you are reporting a video there is "Spam or misleading" option but then again you are left with YouTube algorithm deciding whether video is really "spam or misleading" or it is malicious report. For the past couple of months I was regularly reporting group of spammers spamming links in comment sections but to this day I still see them running amok.
    - 8note 6y ago
      Given its Google, I assume those get forwarded to /dev/null
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  From a YT standpoint, if I am looking for "interview of HenryBemis" and there are 10 likes and 1000 dislikes, it means that this is probably NOT the video, but someone commenting on the video (e.g. I wanted to see the Oprah-Harry-Meghan video). If YT removes the dislikes from the public eye, I will either have to scroll ahead, OR watch 5-10mins waiting for the thing to start, then go and try some other video. YT increases user engagement (I have already watched 10mins of one video and now heading for the next.. and the next.. and the next..). So, for YT this is a win-win.. it's the user that gets tricked. Bravo YT, well played (not!)
  - retsibsi 6y ago
    > if I am looking for "interview of HenryBemis" and there are 10 likes and 1000 dislikes, it means that this is probably NOT the video, but someone commenting on the video This is the sort of thing I had in mind. Some of it is complete junk and some is probably interesting to some people, but the titles are sufficiently misleading to attract an eye-catching number of downvotes. I can't remember exactly when I last came across this kind of content, but it was definitely quite recently, so I don't think youtube has stamped it out.
    - Sodman 6y ago
      You see this very frequently in DIY how-to videos. There's usually about ~30-60 seconds of very helpful instructional content, buried somewhere towards the end of an 11 minute video of rambling and common knowledge. I suspect largely because the monetization gets better if your video is longer than 10 mins...
- tjoff 6y ago
  The reason downvotes didn't solve that issue was because you couldn't see the ratio until after you had clicked. There was plugins that showed it when browsing and it made such a difference.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  > I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with misleading thumbnails/titles Oh, that's still happening. It never stopped.
  - motbob 6y ago
    If the problem still exists, it's way less noticeable than it was in 2010.
    - retsibsi 6y ago
      Oh if you're going back that far, then yes, it definitely still exists, though I don't doubt it used to be a lot worse. (I phrased my first response carefully in case there had been changes in, say, the past few months that I hadn't fully noticed.)
    - duskwuff 6y ago
      It's still absolutely rampant for some types of search terms. For example, try searching for "electronic projects", "crafts", or "life hacks" in an incognito window. The vast majority of the results for all of those search terms have misleading thumbnails and/or descriptions.
- aquadrop 6y ago
  Dislikes are good not just for identifying bad videos, but also good videos. You can see it in the like/dislike ratio. The higher the better, videos with ratio around >98-99% have very high probability of being good etc
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    Comparison of likes to views works well enough. Actually, they don't even need likes, they can understand good and bad videos just by analysing how long viewers spent viewing the video. Likes (and dislikes) are needed mostly for viewers who might want to feel helpful.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      View time isn't adequate if a video isn't obviously bad until the very end though.
      - lightgreen 6y ago
        Good videos which end terribly are exceptionally rare. Dislike mobs do more harm. They probably ignore dislikes already.
        duskwuff 6y ago
        > Good videos which end terribly are exceptionally rare. 1. Videos which promise to show something that never actually appears 2. Very short videos which are difficult to not watch in their entirety
    - aquadrop 6y ago
      I don't need "them" to analyse it, I want it for myself.
- nonbirithm 6y ago
  Beyond the debate on whether or not downvotes are useful as a tool, I think about the higher-level implications of a change like this. One of the most powerful media platforms in the entire world can institute a change like this under everyone's watch, and none of us have any recourse. A couple of programmers in their two-week sprint can fiddle around with some Javascript and push it out to the masses, and suddenly large swathes of the historical record are gone forever. (If you consider downvotes to be historical, that is.) Imagine if someone could white out a section of a book and apply the changes instantaneously to every printed copy of that book in existence. I think about the implications of being able to look back on human history, and how that historical narrative is increasingly in the control of technology companies and a relatively small amount of people who decide to change that narrative for everyone else. I remember many chronological videos that specifically call out the dislike ratios of some YouTube videos as evidence of the negative backlash certain companies or individuals have received. With no dislikes, that point can no longer be made. That information is lost. During a live recording of a Japanese entertainment group I watched, whose videos will be preserved on physical discs and be watched by thousands for decades to come, they announced on camera that, in the span of their two-hour performance, they had reached trending status on Twitter. All they had to mention was the word "trend," and the audience responded with enthusiasm. The influence of Dorsey's creation has permeated so many of our lives, including the people who, ten years ago, would never have cared about what bizzare-sounding technologies like Ruby on Rails would eventually enable them to obtain: a universally understood, instantaneous signal of approval. I believe that the record of who we were and what we did will be important for us to be able to look back on, as it has been for centuries. But it seems that, in the coming decades, that will not always be up to us to decide - just a couple of people in the engagement bureau who decided for us that the alternative was better.
  - mygo 6y ago
    > Imagine if someone could white out a section of a book and apply the changes instantaneously to every printed copy of that book in existence. Considering a fifteen year old YouTube video can resurface and the millions of votes can change the vote-ratio, digital media isn't necessarily the same as a permanent historical record.
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lbarrow 6y ago
The content creators are also users. The announcement emphasizes that they're doing this to help improve the content creator experience.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Waterluvian 6y ago
Now that I think of it, Twitter doesn't have downvotes and I've never struggled to tell a bad tweet from its ratio.
- vkou 6y ago
  A bad tweet is obvious because it's easy to digest. Unfortunately, the 'dislike' signal on a YouTube video doesn't tell me if it's because an expert disagrees with its content, or because the creator is being brigaded, or because the downvoters disagree with their politics (related or unrelated). The comments are a better signal, but looking through them requires reading... YouTube comments.
  - Waterluvian 6y ago
    I'm not sure bad videos are any harder to digest than bad tweets. Maybe a bit more time consuming?
    - hnick 6y ago
      Yes, if I am trying to fix my dishwasher and I see a video with a high dislike ratio I will move on because at best it's probably a time waster and at worst dangerous. My options now would be to spend a minute or two watching it or reading the comments (engagement!), which may not exist on some niche videos you run across for things like this. This adds up when browsing. Don't forget creators can disable comments too.
      - Waterluvian 6y ago
        Just pick the video with a lot of upvotes that has a good title card and is early on in the search results.
        hnick 6y ago
        I'm pretty sure this is how you teach YouTube that you like clickbait. But I guess that happens anyway.
mrkramer 6y ago
I think that YouTube algorithms are so smart right now that YouTube doesn't need dislike button anymore it can simply rank bad videos so low that you don't even know they exist. Edit: YouTube algorithms are so smart* I was exaggerating using hyperbole(figure of speech) in order to imply strong impression and feeling that YouTube algorithms are good enough for YouTube to afford dismissing dislike button. Instagram is doing fine with likes only so I don't see a reason why YouTube wouldn't. Go to comment section to say what is wrong with the video you are watching or use report button if the video is violating TOS.
causality0 6y ago
Companies are only interested in user behavior that increases engagement. Everything else is on the chopping block.
- justaguy88 6y ago
  s/engagement/addiction/
- EricE 6y ago
  Downvotes increase engagement. Otherwise they wouldn't have been put there in the first place. No, the real issue here is too many of the "right" things are getting downvoted. So when The White House, Disney or the Academy disable downvotes on part or all of their videos but other wide swaths of videos don't need to disable downvotes, the contrast causes them to stick out like a sore thumb. It calls attention (also known as engagement) - but not the kind of attention those who run social media companies want. Attention that is counter to the desired narratives is unacceptable. So here we go with the lame excuses that are all the sudden relevant when they weren't when the like/dislike stuff was instated decades ago? Give me a break.
  - jetpks 6y ago
    You are all over this thread claiming that the White House is explicitly pressuring Google to remove this feature of the site. Do you have supporting evidence, or did you just make this up? It seems more like you have a narrative and agenda to push.
    - jokethrowaway 6y ago
      The White House is just the last one whose videos dislikes are being made fun of and shared in memes I'm sure YouTube consulted with their biggest customers and partners before removing a functionality that increases engagement
      - daemoens 6y ago
        Yeah the only reason The White House YouTube channel receives views right now is because Trump used it to to campaign and it became fairly popular amongst his supporters. It's main audience is still his supporters because most people don't really watch The White House on YouTube.
EricE 6y ago
Your first mistake was thinking that you are the user they care about serving :p
- retsibsi 6y ago
  Oh I know, I am pretty cynical and not exactly outraged here. But although they don't care about what's good for us, they do care about what will keep us on the platform. And if it gets harder to find good stuff and filter out the dross, that could conceivably have negative consequences for YouTube in the long run.
  - CyberRabbi 6y ago
    They hate us. The little guy. No criticism allowed
  - EricE 6y ago
    I'm not outraged - I'm amused. The ultimate admission the only way they can spread their messaging is through force, not honest competition of ideas. How superior. Nothing proves you have a worthy argument better than outright hiding from dissent. Again, they don't care if you stay on the platform. If they did, they wouldn't touch it. The disagreement buttons were added in the first place because they increase and maintain engagement. After a few decades it's now all the sudden a problem? Ha! The real problem is their desired narratives are being soundly rejected and it's embarrassing. So here we are.
    - retsibsi 6y ago
      > Again, they don't care if you stay on the platform. Why not? Even if you're right that they care more about propaganda than money, what's the point of propagandising to an empty room?
      - EricE 6y ago
        If logic were involved we wouldn't be having a discussion about removing dislikes in the first place, no? :)
Answerawake 6y ago
Seems like an opportunity to create a browser extension to have crowd sourced upvote/downvotes kind of like Reddit masstagger. Wonder if there is a way to ensure that upvote/downvotes are not tampered with on the server side.
- noxer 6y ago
  Ping the guy from https://web.sponsor.ajay.app/ https://web.sponsor.ajay.app/ maybe he likes or dislikes the idea ;)
- paulwilsondev 6y ago
  it's called the Gab plugin or "Gab.com Share Extension"
tayo42 6y ago
Are people really using votes like that? You putting your trust in deciding quality in a vote count? There's so much wrong with that.
- TheTrotters 6y ago
  It’s the worst solution except for every other we’ve ever tried.
  - tayo42 6y ago
    There's plenty of other ways of figuring out if something is good. When you go to a restaurant do you just look at the star rating? Or do you read reviews, look at the menu, ask ppl etc
    - subsection1h 6y ago
      There aren't plenty of ways of quickly figuring out if a video is bad. It's clear that people is this discussion are focused on different types of videos, and the varied responses to the removal of downvotes reflect this. I'm focused on board game videos, which are the only videos I watch. A large number of downvotes on a board game video indicate that the video includes major rules mistakes. So when I see many downvotes, I simply play another video. I'm not going to bother performing a thorough investigation of the quality of one board game video that has a lot of downvotes.
- clord 6y ago
  noisy signal is better than no signal, which in turn is better than manipulated signal. at least with this change they won't be deleting[0] dislikes anymore. [0]: https://phzoe.com/2021/01/27/white-house-youtube-dislike-manipulation/ https://phzoe.com/2021/01/27/white-house-youtube-dislike-man...
  - tayo42 6y ago
    I would say votes aren't a signal at all. You can be voted in either direction for anything. You don't know who's voting or why. All that article shows is that the votes are manipulated by users too, there's no signal in down vote brigading like that
munk-a 6y ago
Hrm - maybe this is deserving of some public health lawsuits for any anti-vaxxer videos that slip through their content filter and end up hitting trending. Youtubers have mentioned that up/down votes seem to have very little effect on video surfacing so I think Youtube has already figured out that folks are heavily biased in up/down voting and removed it from any algorithmic uses.
simonsarris 6y ago
Yeah. The downvote count is extraordinarily important when looking at things like chain sawing how-to videos. So many people uploading unsafe practices. More benign but sharpening videos have the same thing. Some look good but show bad technique.
- notatoad 6y ago
  I've used a fair number of YouTube how-to videos and never thought to check the downvote count. If a video contains bad advice, there will be a well-upvoted comment explaining why it's wrong. That's a lot more informative than an opaque counter
  - klondike_ 6y ago
    The difference is that the video uploader can delete critical comments
throwawaysea 6y ago
I agree. I've seen a lot of YouTube videos that are basically a robotic automated voice-over on top of some stock footage. They're everywhere, and usually I can avoid getting tricked into watching them based on the dislike count. But the like count alone is not enough to figure that out since niche videos can have low like counts.
cpeterso 6y ago
Google wants to maximize their watch time metrics. Users are less likely to watch a video with many dislikes. If the user watches a bad or unhelpful video, that just means the user will have to watch even more videos to find a good one. :)
drusepth 6y ago
Honestly, having dislike buttons always seemed _extremely_ user-hostile to me. You can get a lot of the same signals a "dislike" gives by just looking at the likes-to-views ratio, without introducing a method of negative feedback on what is often a largely creative endeavor that people put a lot of work into. Comments on YouTube are bad enough. If you want to tell a video creator their work sucks, comments still work fine.
cronix 6y ago
Look at the downvotes of this channel. Just pick any video since Jan. It's around 4:1 dislikes to likes. You can bet this is why they're doing it. https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos
- lalaland1125 6y ago
  This seems like a pretty baseless conspiracy theory.
- wdb 6y ago
  Similar to the Star Wars channel
- hntroll666 6y ago
  It's actually much worse than 4:1. YouTube is often hiding upwards of 90% of the dislikes. Like another poster noted, you can see it on https://81m.org/ https://81m.org/ .
- tootahe45 6y ago
  This is also prevalent on those very scripted SNL-type 'comedy' channels that always make it to the front page, or vaccine safety videos (YouTube keeps showing me these videos of black people taking/administering vaccines in a propagandized way because they think I'm an African-American antivaxxer?). What's strange is these channels will have millions of subs but very few views, always with about 6:1 downvote:upvote.
rajup 6y ago
"A big downvote ratio will get most people's attention in a way that critical comments may not." I'm sorry but this is one of those things which absolutely needs citation. I can't remember the last time I looked at likes/dislikes to decide whether to watch a video. The thumbnails on the watch/rec page are what draw me in to watch a video, I don't bother looking at the number of likes/dislikes (or comments) until maybe after watching the video.
- CryptoGhost 6y ago
  It's often an issue with how to and DIY videos. A big offender is Howcast. They have good search results because of their early presence on the platform but a lot of their videos are low quality by modern standards and not worth watching. Lots of high quality channels now producing dedicated content for whatever you were looking for but can be several videos down in lists.
fargo 6y ago
or check the date
WalterSear 6y ago
I always assumed I was training it to show me things that I do like.
cwhiz 6y ago
I disagree. Downvote just lets the mob bury shit they disagree with.
IncRnd 6y ago
Well, this might be why. [0] That's a Biden video hosted by CNBC Television that currently has 571 upvotes and 1400 dislikes. There there is the Joe Biden channel, where almost all videos have at least 50% dislike count compared to upvotes, and a significant number have more dislikes that upvotes. [1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f2D0GxCuBo [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/JoeBiden/videos
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Vote bombing long predates the Biden presidency.
  - IncRnd 6y ago
    This is not about vote bombing but a recent change made today. My comment shows one possibility, to hide that the videos of certain accounts have many dislikes. There are other accounts which are subject to vote bombing that have relatively constant levels per video of dislikes, so it doesn't appear in this case I mentioned that you drew a valid conclusion.
- africanboy 6y ago
  and that's a good reason to hide downvotes then if the spin becomes "Biden wants it" without any proof, Biden videos will keep being downvoted only because those who oppose to him think he is censoring YouTube But that's not what downvotes on YouTube should be used for I am sure Biden as the President of the USA has the power to ask YouTube to reset the counters and call it a mistake, there would be no need to change the entire platform for everybody else
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
ridaj 6y ago
Keep in mind that downvotes will likely continue to be taken into consideration by recommendations and search. To be honest heavily downvoted videos don't usually show up much in my YouTube experience. I'm pretty sure comments on DIY videos are more indicative of quality than downvote count
itisit 6y ago
Regardless of direction, votes are also useful for misidentifying videos that are what they claim to be. Rare kudos to YT; thumbs-up for the anti-reductionists on this one.
karmasimida 6y ago
Dislike is just way for some trigger-easy crowd to show how fragile they can be. Most of the time I found it useless, I don't mind at all it gets removed.
rangibaby 6y ago
This is Youtube's revenge for users not loving the Rewind 2018 video
onion2k 6y ago
The downvote count is useful for identifying videos that aren't what they claim to be. Down votes only tell you someone decided to give a negative reaction. They don't tell you anything about why they did that. Using them as proxy evidence for your assumptions is dubious, especially on videos with small numbers of votes. Often the reason why public dislike numbers are hidden is because people copy reactions - a visible count of down votes attracts more down votes. That doesn't tell you everyone who watched the video had rationally decided that the content is actually bad.
- timdaub 6y ago
  Have my downvote sir.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    This proves my point. :)
signal11 6y ago
Law of unintended consequences -- will we see more usage of the 'Report' button, now that there's no way to signal that "this video is BS"?
1billionstories 6y ago
they don't care. this was done to prevent every official Joe Biden video getting 10x the number of dislikes as likes. go check any recent one
africanboy 6y ago
most of the votes (up and down) don't come from real people and do not represent real users' opinions and are casted for the most stupid reasons, like in DIY video example I am friend with the author or am friend of a competitor. there is nothing more hostile to users than the fake information YouTube is providing I would go as far as to remove the votes completely and sort the videos randomly It's the same old story of HN downvotes They happen randomly, sometimes users are targeted by bots that downvote everything they write and, most of all, if there is no way to know who downvoted you, the only way to survive it is to make a new account, because "moderators" don't care, their job is not to protect users, but to protect their employer. Same goes for YouTube they are an ads company disguised as a UGC platform. Advertisers and Premium subscribers are the real users. Wanna really be user-friendly? Show voters' ids! We all know it will never happen.
- africanboy 6y ago
  as a proof of what I've written on the parent comment, I made the usual mistake yesterday: I commented on a thread about bitcoins writing that no, btc won't save the World and no, very few people got rich, btc are not making the general population rich. Of course I received a couple downvotes, that rippled over my previous comments on completely unrelated topics, like this one, just because my other comments where more than 24 hours old and they couldn't be downvoted as per HN rules (the parent comment was already 15 hours old when received the only downvote - meaning nobody cared for it - at the same time of the btc thread that was fresh). > You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own comment, and you cannot downvote 24 hours after the original comment was made. If downvotes where ided, it would be obvious that the downvotes on the comments on this thread were just retaliation from the frustrated owners of bitcoins whose propaganda was being questioned. The id doesn't have to be the real useranme, it could be a random id that identifies a user for a brief period of time (48 hours) so that other users could report the issue, knowing that it's not their paranoia, but a real thing.
masto 6y ago
I'm apparently not most people. I watch far more hours of YouTube every day than I'd like to admit, but I never even notice the like/dislike counts, let alone rely on them to provide any meaningful signal.

motbob 6y ago

I agree that removing public dislikes is a pretty bad idea, but it's not that important of a tool in fighting misleading videos. I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with misleading thumbnails/titles, and what stopped the glut was not dislikes, but rather Youtube's use of watch time as an important metric.

retsibsi 6y ago
Fair point, but I think downvotes have been useful to me relatively recently. Fake videos may not show up in recommendation feeds, but they still appear in search results don't they? (And if you're searching for something relatively obscure, you can realistically hit the bottom of the barrel, rather than only seeing the more highly rated results.)
- mrkramer 6y ago
  >Fake videos may not show up in recommendation feeds, but they still appear in search results don't they? Use report button
  - retsibsi 6y ago
    I would for anything truly extreme (like some horrible shock footage in the middle of a supposedly innocent video). But I don't know if all of these videos actually violate any rules; often they are of the kind <title: THING YOU'RE LOOKING FOR>, where the content is actually someone talking about the thing I'm looking for. edit: Or another relatively common type, not necessarily fake or even strictly misleading, just cynically low-quality: a video made by pulling some text content from the web, feeding it through a speech synthesiser, and playing that over over the top of some 'relevant' images.
    - mrkramer 6y ago
      When you are reporting a video there is "Spam or misleading" option but then again you are left with YouTube algorithm deciding whether video is really "spam or misleading" or it is malicious report. For the past couple of months I was regularly reporting group of spammers spamming links in comment sections but to this day I still see them running amok.
  - 8note 6y ago
    Given its Google, I assume those get forwarded to /dev/null
HenryBemis 6y ago
From a YT standpoint, if I am looking for "interview of HenryBemis" and there are 10 likes and 1000 dislikes, it means that this is probably NOT the video, but someone commenting on the video (e.g. I wanted to see the Oprah-Harry-Meghan video). If YT removes the dislikes from the public eye, I will either have to scroll ahead, OR watch 5-10mins waiting for the thing to start, then go and try some other video. YT increases user engagement (I have already watched 10mins of one video and now heading for the next.. and the next.. and the next..). So, for YT this is a win-win.. it's the user that gets tricked. Bravo YT, well played (not!)
- retsibsi 6y ago
  > if I am looking for "interview of HenryBemis" and there are 10 likes and 1000 dislikes, it means that this is probably NOT the video, but someone commenting on the video This is the sort of thing I had in mind. Some of it is complete junk and some is probably interesting to some people, but the titles are sufficiently misleading to attract an eye-catching number of downvotes. I can't remember exactly when I last came across this kind of content, but it was definitely quite recently, so I don't think youtube has stamped it out.
  - Sodman 6y ago
    You see this very frequently in DIY how-to videos. There's usually about ~30-60 seconds of very helpful instructional content, buried somewhere towards the end of an 11 minute video of rambling and common knowledge. I suspect largely because the monetization gets better if your video is longer than 10 mins...
tjoff 6y ago
The reason downvotes didn't solve that issue was because you couldn't see the ratio until after you had clicked. There was plugins that showed it when browsing and it made such a difference.
duskwuff 6y ago
> I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with misleading thumbnails/titles Oh, that's still happening. It never stopped.
- motbob 6y ago
  If the problem still exists, it's way less noticeable than it was in 2010.
  - retsibsi 6y ago
    Oh if you're going back that far, then yes, it definitely still exists, though I don't doubt it used to be a lot worse. (I phrased my first response carefully in case there had been changes in, say, the past few months that I hadn't fully noticed.)
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    It's still absolutely rampant for some types of search terms. For example, try searching for "electronic projects", "crafts", or "life hacks" in an incognito window. The vast majority of the results for all of those search terms have misleading thumbnails and/or descriptions.
aquadrop 6y ago
Dislikes are good not just for identifying bad videos, but also good videos. You can see it in the like/dislike ratio. The higher the better, videos with ratio around >98-99% have very high probability of being good etc
- lightgreen 6y ago
  Comparison of likes to views works well enough. Actually, they don't even need likes, they can understand good and bad videos just by analysing how long viewers spent viewing the video. Likes (and dislikes) are needed mostly for viewers who might want to feel helpful.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    View time isn't adequate if a video isn't obviously bad until the very end though.
    - lightgreen 6y ago
      Good videos which end terribly are exceptionally rare. Dislike mobs do more harm. They probably ignore dislikes already.
      - duskwuff 6y ago
        > Good videos which end terribly are exceptionally rare. 1. Videos which promise to show something that never actually appears 2. Very short videos which are difficult to not watch in their entirety
  - aquadrop 6y ago
    I don't need "them" to analyse it, I want it for myself.
nonbirithm 6y ago
Beyond the debate on whether or not downvotes are useful as a tool, I think about the higher-level implications of a change like this. One of the most powerful media platforms in the entire world can institute a change like this under everyone's watch, and none of us have any recourse. A couple of programmers in their two-week sprint can fiddle around with some Javascript and push it out to the masses, and suddenly large swathes of the historical record are gone forever. (If you consider downvotes to be historical, that is.) Imagine if someone could white out a section of a book and apply the changes instantaneously to every printed copy of that book in existence. I think about the implications of being able to look back on human history, and how that historical narrative is increasingly in the control of technology companies and a relatively small amount of people who decide to change that narrative for everyone else. I remember many chronological videos that specifically call out the dislike ratios of some YouTube videos as evidence of the negative backlash certain companies or individuals have received. With no dislikes, that point can no longer be made. That information is lost. During a live recording of a Japanese entertainment group I watched, whose videos will be preserved on physical discs and be watched by thousands for decades to come, they announced on camera that, in the span of their two-hour performance, they had reached trending status on Twitter. All they had to mention was the word "trend," and the audience responded with enthusiasm. The influence of Dorsey's creation has permeated so many of our lives, including the people who, ten years ago, would never have cared about what bizzare-sounding technologies like Ruby on Rails would eventually enable them to obtain: a universally understood, instantaneous signal of approval. I believe that the record of who we were and what we did will be important for us to be able to look back on, as it has been for centuries. But it seems that, in the coming decades, that will not always be up to us to decide - just a couple of people in the engagement bureau who decided for us that the alternative was better.
- mygo 6y ago
  > Imagine if someone could white out a section of a book and apply the changes instantaneously to every printed copy of that book in existence. Considering a fifteen year old YouTube video can resurface and the millions of votes can change the vote-ratio, digital media isn't necessarily the same as a permanent historical record.
- 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lbarrow 6y ago

The content creators are also users. The announcement emphasizes that they're doing this to help improve the content creator experience.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Waterluvian 6y ago

Now that I think of it, Twitter doesn't have downvotes and I've never struggled to tell a bad tweet from its ratio.

vkou 6y ago
A bad tweet is obvious because it's easy to digest. Unfortunately, the 'dislike' signal on a YouTube video doesn't tell me if it's because an expert disagrees with its content, or because the creator is being brigaded, or because the downvoters disagree with their politics (related or unrelated). The comments are a better signal, but looking through them requires reading... YouTube comments.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  I'm not sure bad videos are any harder to digest than bad tweets. Maybe a bit more time consuming?
  - hnick 6y ago
    Yes, if I am trying to fix my dishwasher and I see a video with a high dislike ratio I will move on because at best it's probably a time waster and at worst dangerous. My options now would be to spend a minute or two watching it or reading the comments (engagement!), which may not exist on some niche videos you run across for things like this. This adds up when browsing. Don't forget creators can disable comments too.
    - Waterluvian 6y ago
      Just pick the video with a lot of upvotes that has a good title card and is early on in the search results.
      - hnick 6y ago
        I'm pretty sure this is how you teach YouTube that you like clickbait. But I guess that happens anyway.

mrkramer 6y ago

I think that YouTube algorithms are so smart right now that YouTube doesn't need dislike button anymore it can simply rank bad videos so low that you don't even know they exist. Edit: YouTube algorithms are so smart* I was exaggerating using hyperbole(figure of speech) in order to imply strong impression and feeling that YouTube algorithms are good enough for YouTube to afford dismissing dislike button. Instagram is doing fine with likes only so I don't see a reason why YouTube wouldn't. Go to comment section to say what is wrong with the video you are watching or use report button if the video is violating TOS.

causality0 6y ago

Companies are only interested in user behavior that increases engagement. Everything else is on the chopping block.

justaguy88 6y ago
s/engagement/addiction/
EricE 6y ago
Downvotes increase engagement. Otherwise they wouldn't have been put there in the first place. No, the real issue here is too many of the "right" things are getting downvoted. So when The White House, Disney or the Academy disable downvotes on part or all of their videos but other wide swaths of videos don't need to disable downvotes, the contrast causes them to stick out like a sore thumb. It calls attention (also known as engagement) - but not the kind of attention those who run social media companies want. Attention that is counter to the desired narratives is unacceptable. So here we go with the lame excuses that are all the sudden relevant when they weren't when the like/dislike stuff was instated decades ago? Give me a break.
- jetpks 6y ago
  You are all over this thread claiming that the White House is explicitly pressuring Google to remove this feature of the site. Do you have supporting evidence, or did you just make this up? It seems more like you have a narrative and agenda to push.
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    The White House is just the last one whose videos dislikes are being made fun of and shared in memes I'm sure YouTube consulted with their biggest customers and partners before removing a functionality that increases engagement
    - daemoens 6y ago
      Yeah the only reason The White House YouTube channel receives views right now is because Trump used it to to campaign and it became fairly popular amongst his supporters. It's main audience is still his supporters because most people don't really watch The White House on YouTube.

EricE 6y ago

Your first mistake was thinking that you are the user they care about serving :p

retsibsi 6y ago
Oh I know, I am pretty cynical and not exactly outraged here. But although they don't care about what's good for us, they do care about what will keep us on the platform. And if it gets harder to find good stuff and filter out the dross, that could conceivably have negative consequences for YouTube in the long run.
- CyberRabbi 6y ago
  They hate us. The little guy. No criticism allowed
- EricE 6y ago
  I'm not outraged - I'm amused. The ultimate admission the only way they can spread their messaging is through force, not honest competition of ideas. How superior. Nothing proves you have a worthy argument better than outright hiding from dissent. Again, they don't care if you stay on the platform. If they did, they wouldn't touch it. The disagreement buttons were added in the first place because they increase and maintain engagement. After a few decades it's now all the sudden a problem? Ha! The real problem is their desired narratives are being soundly rejected and it's embarrassing. So here we are.
  - retsibsi 6y ago
    > Again, they don't care if you stay on the platform. Why not? Even if you're right that they care more about propaganda than money, what's the point of propagandising to an empty room?
    - EricE 6y ago
      If logic were involved we wouldn't be having a discussion about removing dislikes in the first place, no? :)

Answerawake 6y ago

Seems like an opportunity to create a browser extension to have crowd sourced upvote/downvotes kind of like Reddit masstagger. Wonder if there is a way to ensure that upvote/downvotes are not tampered with on the server side.

noxer 6y ago
Ping the guy from https://web.sponsor.ajay.app/ https://web.sponsor.ajay.app/ maybe he likes or dislikes the idea ;)
paulwilsondev 6y ago
it's called the Gab plugin or "Gab.com Share Extension"

tayo42 6y ago

Are people really using votes like that? You putting your trust in deciding quality in a vote count? There's so much wrong with that.

TheTrotters 6y ago
It’s the worst solution except for every other we’ve ever tried.
- tayo42 6y ago
  There's plenty of other ways of figuring out if something is good. When you go to a restaurant do you just look at the star rating? Or do you read reviews, look at the menu, ask ppl etc
  - subsection1h 6y ago
    There aren't plenty of ways of quickly figuring out if a video is bad. It's clear that people is this discussion are focused on different types of videos, and the varied responses to the removal of downvotes reflect this. I'm focused on board game videos, which are the only videos I watch. A large number of downvotes on a board game video indicate that the video includes major rules mistakes. So when I see many downvotes, I simply play another video. I'm not going to bother performing a thorough investigation of the quality of one board game video that has a lot of downvotes.
clord 6y ago
noisy signal is better than no signal, which in turn is better than manipulated signal. at least with this change they won't be deleting[0] dislikes anymore. [0]: https://phzoe.com/2021/01/27/white-house-youtube-dislike-manipulation/ https://phzoe.com/2021/01/27/white-house-youtube-dislike-man...
- tayo42 6y ago
  I would say votes aren't a signal at all. You can be voted in either direction for anything. You don't know who's voting or why. All that article shows is that the votes are manipulated by users too, there's no signal in down vote brigading like that

munk-a 6y ago

Hrm - maybe this is deserving of some public health lawsuits for any anti-vaxxer videos that slip through their content filter and end up hitting trending. Youtubers have mentioned that up/down votes seem to have very little effect on video surfacing so I think Youtube has already figured out that folks are heavily biased in up/down voting and removed it from any algorithmic uses.

simonsarris 6y ago

Yeah. The downvote count is extraordinarily important when looking at things like chain sawing how-to videos. So many people uploading unsafe practices. More benign but sharpening videos have the same thing. Some look good but show bad technique.

notatoad 6y ago
I've used a fair number of YouTube how-to videos and never thought to check the downvote count. If a video contains bad advice, there will be a well-upvoted comment explaining why it's wrong. That's a lot more informative than an opaque counter
- klondike_ 6y ago
  The difference is that the video uploader can delete critical comments

throwawaysea 6y ago

I agree. I've seen a lot of YouTube videos that are basically a robotic automated voice-over on top of some stock footage. They're everywhere, and usually I can avoid getting tricked into watching them based on the dislike count. But the like count alone is not enough to figure that out since niche videos can have low like counts.

cpeterso 6y ago

Google wants to maximize their watch time metrics. Users are less likely to watch a video with many dislikes. If the user watches a bad or unhelpful video, that just means the user will have to watch even more videos to find a good one. :)

drusepth 6y ago

Honestly, having dislike buttons always seemed _extremely_ user-hostile to me. You can get a lot of the same signals a "dislike" gives by just looking at the likes-to-views ratio, without introducing a method of negative feedback on what is often a largely creative endeavor that people put a lot of work into. Comments on YouTube are bad enough. If you want to tell a video creator their work sucks, comments still work fine.

cronix 6y ago

Look at the downvotes of this channel. Just pick any video since Jan. It's around 4:1 dislikes to likes. You can bet this is why they're doing it. https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos

lalaland1125 6y ago
This seems like a pretty baseless conspiracy theory.
wdb 6y ago
Similar to the Star Wars channel
hntroll666 6y ago
It's actually much worse than 4:1. YouTube is often hiding upwards of 90% of the dislikes. Like another poster noted, you can see it on https://81m.org/ https://81m.org/ .
tootahe45 6y ago
This is also prevalent on those very scripted SNL-type 'comedy' channels that always make it to the front page, or vaccine safety videos (YouTube keeps showing me these videos of black people taking/administering vaccines in a propagandized way because they think I'm an African-American antivaxxer?). What's strange is these channels will have millions of subs but very few views, always with about 6:1 downvote:upvote.

rajup 6y ago

"A big downvote ratio will get most people's attention in a way that critical comments may not." I'm sorry but this is one of those things which absolutely needs citation. I can't remember the last time I looked at likes/dislikes to decide whether to watch a video. The thumbnails on the watch/rec page are what draw me in to watch a video, I don't bother looking at the number of likes/dislikes (or comments) until maybe after watching the video.

CryptoGhost 6y ago
It's often an issue with how to and DIY videos. A big offender is Howcast. They have good search results because of their early presence on the platform but a lot of their videos are low quality by modern standards and not worth watching. Lots of high quality channels now producing dedicated content for whatever you were looking for but can be several videos down in lists.

fargo 6y ago

or check the date

WalterSear 6y ago

I always assumed I was training it to show me things that I do like.

cwhiz 6y ago

I disagree. Downvote just lets the mob bury shit they disagree with.

IncRnd 6y ago

Well, this might be why. [0] That's a Biden video hosted by CNBC Television that currently has 571 upvotes and 1400 dislikes. There there is the Joe Biden channel, where almost all videos have at least 50% dislike count compared to upvotes, and a significant number have more dislikes that upvotes. [1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f2D0GxCuBo [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/JoeBiden/videos

ceejayoz 6y ago
Vote bombing long predates the Biden presidency.
- IncRnd 6y ago
  This is not about vote bombing but a recent change made today. My comment shows one possibility, to hide that the videos of certain accounts have many dislikes. There are other accounts which are subject to vote bombing that have relatively constant levels per video of dislikes, so it doesn't appear in this case I mentioned that you drew a valid conclusion.
africanboy 6y ago
and that's a good reason to hide downvotes then if the spin becomes "Biden wants it" without any proof, Biden videos will keep being downvoted only because those who oppose to him think he is censoring YouTube But that's not what downvotes on YouTube should be used for I am sure Biden as the President of the USA has the power to ask YouTube to reset the counters and call it a mistake, there would be no need to change the entire platform for everybody else
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

ridaj 6y ago

Keep in mind that downvotes will likely continue to be taken into consideration by recommendations and search. To be honest heavily downvoted videos don't usually show up much in my YouTube experience. I'm pretty sure comments on DIY videos are more indicative of quality than downvote count

itisit 6y ago

Regardless of direction, votes are also useful for misidentifying videos that are what they claim to be. Rare kudos to YT; thumbs-up for the anti-reductionists on this one.

karmasimida 6y ago

Dislike is just way for some trigger-easy crowd to show how fragile they can be. Most of the time I found it useless, I don't mind at all it gets removed.

rangibaby 6y ago

This is Youtube's revenge for users not loving the Rewind 2018 video

onion2k 6y ago

The downvote count is useful for identifying videos that aren't what they claim to be. Down votes only tell you someone decided to give a negative reaction. They don't tell you anything about why they did that. Using them as proxy evidence for your assumptions is dubious, especially on videos with small numbers of votes. Often the reason why public dislike numbers are hidden is because people copy reactions - a visible count of down votes attracts more down votes. That doesn't tell you everyone who watched the video had rationally decided that the content is actually bad.

timdaub 6y ago
Have my downvote sir.
- onion2k 6y ago
  This proves my point. :)

signal11 6y ago

Law of unintended consequences -- will we see more usage of the 'Report' button, now that there's no way to signal that "this video is BS"?

1billionstories 6y ago

they don't care. this was done to prevent every official Joe Biden video getting 10x the number of dislikes as likes. go check any recent one

africanboy 6y ago

most of the votes (up and down) don't come from real people and do not represent real users' opinions and are casted for the most stupid reasons, like in DIY video example I am friend with the author or am friend of a competitor. there is nothing more hostile to users than the fake information YouTube is providing I would go as far as to remove the votes completely and sort the videos randomly It's the same old story of HN downvotes They happen randomly, sometimes users are targeted by bots that downvote everything they write and, most of all, if there is no way to know who downvoted you, the only way to survive it is to make a new account, because "moderators" don't care, their job is not to protect users, but to protect their employer. Same goes for YouTube they are an ads company disguised as a UGC platform. Advertisers and Premium subscribers are the real users. Wanna really be user-friendly? Show voters' ids! We all know it will never happen.

africanboy 6y ago
as a proof of what I've written on the parent comment, I made the usual mistake yesterday: I commented on a thread about bitcoins writing that no, btc won't save the World and no, very few people got rich, btc are not making the general population rich. Of course I received a couple downvotes, that rippled over my previous comments on completely unrelated topics, like this one, just because my other comments where more than 24 hours old and they couldn't be downvoted as per HN rules (the parent comment was already 15 hours old when received the only downvote - meaning nobody cared for it - at the same time of the btc thread that was fresh). > You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own comment, and you cannot downvote 24 hours after the original comment was made. If downvotes where ided, it would be obvious that the downvotes on the comments on this thread were just retaliation from the frustrated owners of bitcoins whose propaganda was being questioned. The id doesn't have to be the real useranme, it could be a random id that identifies a user for a brief period of time (48 hours) so that other users could report the issue, knowing that it's not their paranoia, but a real thing.

masto 6y ago

I'm apparently not most people. I watch far more hours of YouTube every day than I'd like to admit, but I never even notice the like/dislike counts, let alone rely on them to provide any meaningful signal.