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Making the dislike count private across YouTube
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoTime to code up a quick Likes/Views ratio to inject below videos with ViolentMonkey.
- gfodor 5y agoNothing to be concerned about, citizen. If a video is disinformation, no need to look for downvotes, YouTube’s moderators will take care of removing that dangerous content for you. Nothing to see here.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoDislike
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aprinsen 5y agoFloored and pleased by this. A social media company making a real attempt to curb harassment by re-examining fundamental features. Obviously there's more these companies could do, but this feels significant.
- cbozeman 5y agoWow, someone disliking your video is "harassment" now... Jesus Christ, we're doomed as a species. The meteor can't come soon enough.
- MattGrommes 5y agoI've never understood why they even have a downvote feature. It's almost always like 10,000 likes to 43 dislikes. What information is that getting across? Even if it were 10k to 1k, that doesn't even indicate anything real because of so many people disliking stuff because the host is a woman or they were told to by some other Youtuber.
- naiwenwt 5y agoIn my experience the information getting across is just a pulse check of how others feel about the content. Tells you something about what to expect from the video.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoThere are tons of "product review" videos that are little more than an automated voice reading scraped product descriptions along with a slideshow of images from a web search for the item. They have nearly no value but for products with few video reviews, view count is not a useful metric. These faux review videos get downvoted and it serves as a good signal that the video isn't worth watching. The people who make these automated videos aren't looking for millions of hits per video, they're looking for a few hundred, which when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of this type of video, means millions of clicks for them. Since actual reviews of older products have a small number of views, the automated ones float to the top of search results. Dislikes was a way of separating the two. Few people click Like for the good videos but there were enough clicking Dislike on the shovelware videos to help filter them out. Expect to see an increase in these automated garbage videos as they're now allowed to drown out actual content.
- numpad0 5y agoI think recommendation centric architecture that YouTube has changes meaning of upvotes/downvotes from a global content value judgement into a clustering signal. The platform can correlate that signal to the content to cluster users, creators, content, into groups and cohorts. Those characterizations can be further used to optimize platform for ad clicks.
- Liwink 5y agoIt makes me curious why HN does not support "dislike". Will "dislike" make HN more informative?
- ronsor 5y agoHN allows downvoting of comments once you reach a certain amount of karma (500, I think). You can't downvote comments that are direct children of your own, however.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cyberpsybin 5y agoGoogle has been on a roll lately. Most obnoxious web corpo.
- tomc1985 5y agoAwesome -- more positivity at gunpoint
- c7DJTLrn 5y agoSomebody should make an extension that brings back dislikes and comments on videos where they're disabled. Just store it all on a different server but seamlessly integrate it into YouTube.
- skhr0680 5y agoThis your punishment for disliking the YouTube rewind video!
- dongcarl 5y agoA moment of silence for "Neutral Response", which, after 12 years and 10M views has still maintained a 50/50 like-to-dislike ratio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ
- l0b0 5y agoPiling onto the anecdotes, I always do a rough maths of likes vs. dislikes before watching any video from unknown creators. For pure entertainment, a 100-to-1 ratio or better means it might be watchable. For science, maths or computing maybe 20-to-1. If a woman, black person or LGBTQ* person is presenting I assume that the haters have already got to the downvote button, so I give them about a 10x slack.
- gyosifov 5y agoA little experiment: on a limited sample of random videos, it seems like around 1 of 30 people watching will use the like/dislike button. Seeing that a video with 3.6 mil views that has only 9.5k likes would give you a rough estimation of how many people disliked it. Is there a real study on the subject? It seems like it could be used as some sort of heuristic if there is nothing better.
- invalidusernam3 5y agoWhether this is good for creators is one thing, but it's definitely bad for viewers. Likes to dislikes is an indicator of the quality of the video, and how well it matches the title/description. This will fundamentally change what I use YouTube for. If I can't determine the quality of a video without having to waste time watching it, I will just look somewhere else.
- ManBlanket 5y agoMaybe they were trying to do a little something for the creators, so they stop complaining about the rampant abuse of Youtube's automated copyright systems. Seeing as YT is completely unwilling to curb copyright strike trolling, or if a queef accidentally sounds like a Danny Elfman score, the good people at YT can stuff that thumb button and call it a day's work. Yay.
- grammarnazzzi 5y agoWhether it's good or bad for creator or viewers is irrelevant. It's good for Google. That's all that matters. More crap videos will be clicked and more ads will be watched before the content starts and the user can judge wheather or not to watch. More ads watched. That's the only consideration.
- sircastor 5y agoI feel completely opposite about this. I have never (and I mean never) viewed the dislikes as an indicator of the quality of the video, or it’s content. It’s only ever been a number that some arbitrary set of people have incremented. To me the video’s quality is self evident, pretty quickly.
- mgr86 5y agoHave you ever done a DIY project around the house? There is a lot of trash out there, and the dislike to like ratio is a great way to quickly parse out the crap without 1) reading bottom barrel youtube comments or 2) watching 22 minutes of nonsense at 1.75x speed.
- 83457 5y agoI wonder if the catalyst was the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack video dislikes. Many said Nintendo wouldn't even notice but maybe they did and advocated for the change.
- jrootabega 5y agoNote the logical fallacy they want to implant here: Dislike "attacks" result in high dislike counts, therefore all high dislike counts are not genuine.
- kf6nux 5y agoWhy are you making that logical fallacy here? It wasn't present in either the video or the article.
- kmeisthax 5y agoI personally think this should only apply in specific circumstances, such as smaller creators or creators likely to be targeted by harassment (e.g. women, racial minorities, openly LGBT, etc). However, I can also imagine a counterargument that hiding dislikes here would be considered some kind of indicator that a person is worth harassing for lols. I'm not sure exactly how to balance that.
- MatthiasWandel 5y agothe ability to hide the like/dislike counts has been there all along. I don't see why they want to take this choice away from creators.
- cute_boi 5y agoI am very ambivalent about this decision. I have saved multiple hours just by watching ratio of like and dislikes. At least show us the ratio and better hide the like count too. (but we know they wont hide like count because they want to keep user engaged to earn more advertising $$$) Just to appease few creator taking away the functionality just seem abysmal to me.
- adamc 5y agoI'm not even ambivalent. It is clearly hostile toward the viewers, but helps content creators (or some content creators). Google is an ad-supported company. They are there to sell you soap, and have no more morality than P&G or Walmart. Their slogan might as well be "Evil for a buck".
- remram 5y agoAlso you could already disable showing the count of likes and dislikes publicly.
- omoikane 5y agoI wonder if they tried a different alternative where anyone can upvote, but only content creators with certain karma (say, 501 upvotes) are allowed to downvote. Some news sites do this and I wonder if things worked out better this way.
- sellyme 5y agoI'm getting real sick of websites I use becoming less and less functional the bigger they get.
- vezycash 5y agoAnd when people stop hitting the dislike button cos they feel it doesn't count, Youtube would retire the dislike button, citing low usage.
- deelowe 5y agoThey have been steadily moving towards recommendation engines that rely more on inferred behaviors than direct feedback for a long time. I'm surprised they didn't just completely eliminate dislikes. That aside, timing sure is interesting given the recent Nintendo fiasco. Wonder how much they spend on ads each quarter.
- AndrewUnmuted 5y agoThere have been many other high-profile examples of fiascos dealing with the 'dislike' button on YouTube. Most notable, I think, would have to be the Biden administration's [0] challenges they're facing with the official White House YouTube account. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mczlz7/whats_up_with_all_the_biden_dislikes_on_youtube/ https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mczlz7/whats_...
- qqtt 5y agoIt's probably not so much about Nintendo specifically as one advertising partner, as much as it is about encouraging the advertiser ecosystem to be comfortable with continually spending money on Youtube as a platform. If Youtube removes dislikes, there is less risk for these viral "dislike" moments to happen, which can make content producers and advertisers nervous. Additionally, Google probably puts way more resources than you might expect into things like moderating the usage of the dislike button and making sure it isn't exploited by bots, nefarious actors, etc. Not much downside from the business side of Youtube in taking steps to sunset the button.
- bko 5y agoIt doesn't really matter if they remove it or not. Perceptions are what matter. People will be able to upload videos that are disconnected from what most people believe or actually want and there's no way to show that you don't agree with the video. And I begin to believe its me that's wrong, when I might be in the silent majority. Then YT can control the algorithm further obfuscating popular beliefs and culture.
- gitpusher 5y agoRIP to one of my favorite YouTube comment formats: > "<dislike number> of people <something funny related to the video>"
- BoardsOfCanada 5y agoFor me that's the silver lining of this change.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- glouwbug 5y agoFor me it will be this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ
- thamer 5y agoUnlike with the "k" suffix for thousands that we have today, YouTube used to show the unabbreviated number of likes and dislikes even for larger numbers of votes. This video was remarkable for the fact that it maintained pretty much a perfectly equal number of likes and dislikes for years (rarely off by more than 1). It was a tacit agreement among viewers: if you saw a mismatched count, it was your duty to vote towards restoring the balance. The two numbers are probably off by several hundred these days.
- Bedon292 5y agoApparently you can hover over the bar under the the like / dislike and get the exact counts. Its off by 10 as of this post. Edit: And it was corrected immediately. Refreshed and they were back to even.
- prvc 5y ago>This video was remarkable for the fact that it maintained pretty much a perfectly equal number of likes and dislikes for years (rarely off by more than 1). It was a tacit agreement among viewers: if you saw a mismatched count, it was your duty to vote towards restoring the balance. While this may seem pretty cool and fun to you and me, in Youtube's view this is an "attack".
- jarek83 5y agoHow this is useful to people wanting to watch meaningful content? Like many wannabes post football games highlights that just turn out to be some fake content. I can quickly figure that out by seeing 95% dislike ratio. Now I'll be forced to experience it by myself (and watch ads before it of course)
- emkoemko 5y agowhat about all the crazy stuff on Youtube? conspiracies? fake bs etc etc now it will just have likes? sounds like a good idea :) and lots of people watch Youtube on smart tvs with no way to see comments, what on earth is Google doing
- jarek83 5y agoSeems like Google does not know internets. No wonder, they are like a cancer to Internet for long time now.
- herewego99 5y agoLooks like rick rolls are back on the menu boys.
- herewego99 5y agoand scare videos.
- _trampeltier 5y agoI think you maybe just should be able to vote, after you watched, maybe over 50% or so, if the video.
- suyash 5y agoIn other words "High dislike count in our videos hurts our ability to make more money so we don't want people to leave when they see others disliking the video, better we don't want other to dislike, only like and see count of how many likes" - IMO a fair decision would have been to remove count for both dislikes and likes if they really cared about bias but they don't.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- crowcode 5y agoWildly disappointing but not surprising. The dislike count is the most helpful indicator for users to know if a video is a scam, complete clickbait, a fake tutorial, etc. I'm sure it's also very inconvenient for large media corporations and powerful groups when their videos get disliked into the ground.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoUp votes could also arguably be seen as harmful to mental health and the ‘fear of missing out’ phenomena.
- SnoozyBreak 5y agoOn google maps the most informative reviews are the negative ones... even if the ratio is highly biased to 5-star ratings, the few negative ratings usually leak the more honest opinions which help you qualify the positive reviews.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoYou WILL watch the video You WILL like the video You WILL have absolutely no say over anything
- lifeplusplus 5y agoRegulatory hijacking but of private entity. Reddit, YouTube, and such have already made clear and they no longer pretend to care about free speech and instead have an agenda
- podgaj 5y agoI am done with the internet. It is nothing but toxic positivity.
- shreyshnaccount 5y agoCuz they dont want rewind to becone the most hated video again
- eranima 5y agoIt's sad to see Hacker News defending vote brigading. If you're like me and watch a lot of history YouTube videos, it's obvious that this is happening. Watch any video on African history and it's plainly obvious that this is a problem. The ratio was _never_ a good indication of anything other than a video being targeted. If you believe it was, I can only assume that you agree with the targeting.
- randyrand 5y agoWhy not let creators choose?
- bob229 5y agoWho cares. YouTube is cancer
- cblconfederate 5y agoThe more serious problem is when organized mobs , which may be politically motivated and even organized by oppressive states, use the report button to flag videos as inappropriate, which , as i understand, do not appear in recommendations and other listings. And youtube is very happy to remove those.
- blunte 5y agoFor the viewers (us), this is the opposite of what they should do. For us, they should be showing the up/down count ratio on the video preview link itself so we could easily identify the garbage videos without even having to click on them. Of course this would reduce the amount of ads and pages they would serve to users, so it's in their interest to do everything they can to prevent users from being warned of time-wasting content.
- Hugsun 5y agoThe corollary is that wasting users time more aggressively is more likely to instill resentment and platform abandonment. Definitely a two edged sword.
- blunte 5y agoIndeed it does instill resentment, but as with many other big companies there's really no alternative. Someday youtube will fall second to a service that better meets the users' needs, but I suspect that will be many years from now. I think a lot of the behaviors companies exhibit like this are related to US stock markets and the fixation on quarterly earnings per share. So much executive compensation is stock/options that it's a wiser bet for execs to optimize for the short term. Planning for 5+ years is no longer reasonable from their perspective because even with the best intentions, unplanned events can ruin everything. They might as well do whatever they can to cash in as quickly as possible. I don't see this changing for any reason. So what will happen is that every 5-10 years some upstart company will gain enough funding to replace the tired old leader, and then within 5-10 years it will become that same tired old leader.
- Hugsun 5y agoThis sounds a lot like creative destruction, a concept considered very important in the book Why Nations Fail. It's a good read.
- mindcrime 5y agoIt's funny how differently people react to things. I look at this and think "there is nothing about Youtube that I find more useless than the dislike count, and I think this probably - on balance - a Good Thing." Everybody else seems to think it's an attack on the fundamental essence of all that is Right, Good, and Just in our universe. Weird... I never would have expected so much consternation about a dislike count.
- leppr 5y agoMany people probably felt the same with Google Reader or any feature Google killed. If you read the comments in detail you will see that people describe how they used the dislike count. It's therefore not useless.
- mindcrime 5y agoI didn't say it was useless, I said that I find it useless. Not the same thing at all. It's not my intent here to comment on the utility of the feature in any universal sense - my comment is about the disparity between the reactions of different people. And it's just a casual observation, I'm not trying to argue for any thesis or anything here.
- mike741 5y agoHere is an easy example to understand the utility of the dislike count: Imagine you are looking for a How-To video on something very common but specific, such as changing a car part or Windows setting, and that when you search for this you are given dozens of options. All of these options are 20 to 30 minutes long and 90% of them are either inaccurate, out-dated, or automated click-bait. This lower 90% will have a disproportionate number of dislikes. Each time you click one of these videos the dislike ratio can save 20+ minutes of your life and this benefit is multiplied by dozens of videos and tens of thousands of viewers.
- mindcrime 5y agoI don't have any problem understanding that some people find it useful. I'm just surprised that so many people seem so worked up over this, given the comparison to my own subjective experience, which is that the dislike count has almost zero utility. I suppose it comes down to the nature of how one uses YT. Relative to the things I watch, I can't remember a single time I ever used the dislike count to influence whether or not to watch a given video. shrug Not saying those other people are wrong mind you. Your lived experience is your lived experience and no one really has any standing to contradict that. Just expressing surprise at the degree of just how differently different people are reacting to this.
- reubens 5y agoA lot of comments about the inconvenience to the viewer given this was how we decided whether to watch a video. But I think the dislike ratio will still decide whether a video is suggested to you, so will still determine whether you end up watching the video?
- livinginfear 5y agoWould it be a bit conspiratorial to guess that this is related to the terrible like/dislike ratio on the Biden administration's YouTube presence, as tracked by https://81m.org/ https://81m.org/
- dingle_thunk 5y agoThere's a like button and no dislike button on the freaking blog post. Can you imagine the dislike ratio on this if they allowed it?
- gnicholas 5y agoThere’s a flag button. Also, there’s no way to disable comments, so people can easily express their opinions in long form as well.
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoYes, by all means, let's protect our advertisers from the users of the platform. Great thinking!
- ddingus 5y agoHiding the dislike info on POTUS seems important now. Hiding the dislike info on CNN seems important now. Public trust in government is low. Public trust in corporate media is low. It's been policy to manufacture consent in the US for quite a while now. Hard to say this move isn't more of the same, and it's equally hard to say it helps more than it hurts too.
- uejfiweun 5y agoYeah, this is pretty obvious. The government is getting very unpopular right now, just take a look at the like/dislike ratios for any vaccine related announcements or inflation related announcements. They are just gonna shut the whole party down if they can't spin it the way they want. Very authoritarian. It's not a huge change, but these things happen bit by bit - the US is slowly converging with China.
- lostgame 5y agoWow. Crazy people still exist on HN. Good reminder.
- uejfiweun 5y agoI am not an anti vaxxer or anything, I am just stating what I have seen on youtube on these videos. For example this was after 10 sec of searching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0z3sLYvxX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0z3sLYvxX4 Thanks for the insult, though. Intolerant closed-minded assholes still exist on HN. Good reminder.
- colinmhayes 5y agoThe fact that the number of crazy people who are voicing their opinions is surging is exactly why Google needed to dump the dislike button. The toxicity is clearly causing what will soon be irreparable harm, and political bandwagoning is the main cause. I really don't think pointing out that the number of crazies is on the rise helps your point.
- grej 5y agoThere is a video on YouTube in which YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki received the Free Expression Award (which were sponsored by YouTube). At the time of the check I just did, that video currently has 227 upvotes and over 56,000 downvotes, making it the worst ratio’ed video on YouTube I have ever seen. That incident may have played a role in this decision.
- ehsankia 5y agoPeople keep giving these examples as ironic reasons for removing the dislike button, but to me, every one of these examples are perfect examples of how the dislike button is used more as a meme or bullying tactic than a real signal anyways.
- tester756 5y agoIndeed, Youtube gave voice to many people.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- scottmcdot 5y agoFor reference after they remove the downvote count: https://imgur.com/a/A0J0yKG https://imgur.com/a/A0J0yKG
- muzani 5y ago> wins Free Expression Award > gets downvoted > removes downvote button
- franciscop 5y agoOn a similar note: Youtube Rewind 2018: most disliked video on Youtube history Youtube Rewind 2019: top 10 of most disliked videos Youtube in 2020: no Rewind video Youtube in 2021: you know what? we are just gonna remove dislikes
- tester756 5y agoIt's popular take, yet I dont believe she cares about it, lol, why would she? Just unfortunely she won in contest that YT sponsored, or maybe I'm naive?
- ameyv 5y agoFor me dislike speaks volumes. Googles reasoning seems to misguide people to drive more ads. Plain simple and effective. Decision to protect content creator masquerading as earn more at the expense people times. Well now we need to create new Chrome addon something for this shit.
- azth 5y agoAh, they want to create a "safe and inclusive space", so all is good /s What's this world coming to?
- LanceH 5y agoThe infuriating thing is they don't even address the loss of the count as a tool to identify crap videos.
- blumomo 5y agoWho is afraid of what and why? Here's my view: Removing down voting is FAANG's (=big corps) and MSM's reaction of many users down voting (in my eyes rightfully so) videos from public institutions who spread nothing else than propaganda. FAANG and MSM are now afraid that this sentiment contaminates other citizens.
- uejfiweun 5y agoDing ding ding! This is right on the money. The next time that some admin hack comes out talking about "transitory inflation", there will be no high dislike count to undermine the message. It's all about keeping us unquestioning and obedient. Anyone who thinks this is remotely related to "protecting creators" is delusional.
- Covzire 5y agoFirst it was the complete corporate takeover of their search algorithm in the last few years, now they're removing the final way that users can express displeasure from political organizations and content creators. This is yet another nail in the coffin of Youtube, it's almost ready to go into the ground as Rumble and Odysee take off and Youtube slides into corporate/censorious irrelevance.
- 0des 5y agoIm curious if this has anything to do with the mountain of dislikes on anything COVID or US presidency related content.
- 1MachineElf 5y agoI also wonder if it has to do with the notorious Win11 announcement video: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Damage-control-Microsoft-deletes-all-comments-under-heavily-criticized-Windows-11-upgrade-video.553279.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Damage-control-Microsoft-delet...
- hammock 5y agoThere has been no clear evidence showing that to be the case, and an independent factchecker concluded that was misinformation. Please refer to youtube.com/help for the most accurate updates.
- Covzire 5y agoIs this non-ironic?
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoOf course it is.
- wpurvis1 5y agoIf anything I'd assume its about the YouTube rewind getting massively downvoted year after year
- qwertox 5y agoHmm. For me the dislike button was informative. If feels like they are trying to create a world where everything can only be good, better, even more better, which just doesn't represent reality. Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.
- notreallyserio 5y agoRemoving downvotes from SO seems like it would be a net good. Instead of downvoting, people could be more encouraged to post better and more correct solutions. A good intermediate solution would be to only record downvotes that come with a comment.
- politician 5y agoThere's no salvaging what SO has become - the place where good complex questions are promptly closed by uninformed moderators. The place where questions about new versions of software are closed as duplicates of questions about older obsolete versions whose answers are no longer relevant. The place where popular questions with hundreds of upvotes and strong discussions are closed as off-topic.
- manquer 5y agoIf you see SO as community for developers these are all problems yes, however if you see it as a high quality wiki or KB, most of these issues are not problems for readers[1] . All knowledge repositories go through this problem, Wikipedia sites are equally notorious for making it very hard to contribute. As a KB grows older and larger, it becomes hard to balance the need to keep the current KB clean and enable creation of new content. Typically administrators respond by making it harder for the contributors rather than taking risk of poorer quality for the users, to contribute you have to become effectively professional and abide by institutional rules you may not agree with. Distributed editing tools only solves part of the problem and cannot not solve how to keep generating professional quality content without paying. Strong moderation is what differentiates SO from Quora, I rather live with SO style rules as a contributor than suffer poor Quora type content quality as a user. [1] I am cognizant of outdated version problems you raised, my anecdotal experience is in general the quality of answers that are present for a reader has not dropped massively in last 10 years.
- 0xFreebie 5y agoA loose remaining proxy will be the ratio of like count to view count. Perhaps one of those will be axed next. I don't understand why complaining creators don't just turn off voting.
- hammock 5y agoOr, for those videos with comments enabled, comment count to view count (called "getting ratio'd" on Twitter, which also doesn't have dislikes)
- zamadatix 5y agoI don't think you can just turn it off. You can hide both likes and dislikes and disable comments e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdvidv6RXJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdvidv6RXJY but the buttons still function just without score. Of course most creator's don't want to do what you say anyways. Like's help them, dislikes don't. Dislike counts are (well were) for users.
- butler14 5y agoThis isn’t about small content creators. It’s almost certainly about big brands (advertisers) that hate it when their high budget movie/game/trailer/whatever gets publicly downvoted.
- wubbert 5y agoJust like when Netflix removed their star ratings with a only a thumbs up.
- adamc 5y agoA small part of why I stopped using Netflix... it became harder to assess what I wanted to watch.
- dhritzkiv 5y agoAnd a thumbs down, no? That being said, there is no globally-visible '%age of viewers like this' value on each title. Instead, thumbs up/down seems to be used as probably one of many signals in the '% match' (how likely are you to enjoy it) metric.
- tinalumfoil 5y agoThis could also be a pride thing for Youtube/Alphabet. For the past few years the Youtube Rewind video [0] has somewhat infamously gotten heavily downvoted, mostly I think as a reflection of how frustrated viewers are with Youtube and maybe Alphabet as well. I'm sure the executives feel some catharsis taking away an avenue for users to express that frustration. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJOTdZBX1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJOTdZBX1g
- deadmutex 5y agoMy take on it is that there is a number of diverse creators on the platform, and many YT users see a very different set of creators. E.g. You might see creators X, Y, Z and I might watch A, B, C for different topics. So, when it comes time to rewind, you can't please everyone since you'll have to pick a subset of creators. And then those who didn't see their favorite creators will be saying things like "Where was creator J? I watched so many of their videos, and they have a billion views, etc." And they might dislike the video, because they feel not represented. So, in my mind, the YT way to do rewind would be to do a custom rewind for each person (but there's no technology to automatically make a high quality video like that today). Of course, this is just my theory about a segmentation of the population. Then there are people with their own agenda, and will use the dislike button as a protest for other things. Then once it reaches some threshold, some people just like to hit the dislike button to see how far they can push it. Disclaimer: These are my own views, and not of my employer.
- post_break 5y agoSo now I can't quickly see if a video how-to is a complete waste of my time or not. Great.
- gpt5 5y agoThe likes to views ratio is still a useful indicator (although a less obvious one)
- throwuxiytayq 5y agoI need a FF extension that will display this to me visually.
- tentacleuno 5y agoThey've disabled the visual ratio bar for me. Wish I could get it back.
- thinkingemote 5y agoI think it will lead to less liking behaviour. They didn't test for this.
- miamiwebdesign 5y agoFeel like this is a necessary feature. A compromise would be to turn it off for ads but leave it on for everything else...I'm lost now, gonna be hard to quickly determine garbage from good insight.
- chilling 5y agoYou probably will have to check the comment section
- dylan604 5y ago<shudder> reaching into the bowels of YT comments is something i regularly try to avoid. "put on a helmet and pads, and get in there"
- shalmanese 5y agoThis feels like one of those changes where they already decided to do it and used an experiment to justify their decision. The binary choice between showing only raw dislikes or no dislikes as well tilts the table towards an extreme change. There's lots of interesting design choices they could have made of not encouraging dislike storms while still giving valuable info to viewers like highlighting if any video has an unusually high dislike to like ratio or attaching comments to dislikes and highlighting highly upvoted reasons why certain people are choosing to dislike a video etc.
- timdaub 5y agoI can't help but think that this is just corporate bullshit. Purely rationally speaking, I think whether or not a dislike amount is shown or not is not gonna be impactful for the things YouTube should optimize to become a better software product and company. In order to battle fake news, misinformation and fostering a happy and global community, much more fundamental changes are appropriate. But those are inherently incompatible with the liquidity model Youtube/Google/Alphabet have chosen: Increasing shareholder value & profit.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoSounds like a great use-case for a browser extension. Too bad YouTube and the biggest browser are owned by the same company…
- an9n 5y agoThere is a very good case for a superset of tools on top of YouTube that they are powerless to control.
- larinzod 5y agoI feel they should do the same with the Like button. There is cognitive bias towards crowd approval/disapproval. But they aren't likely to implement that since it would cut revenue from the "we'll I'll watch this suggestion since 100K people liked it" group. Where removing the Dislike just works in their favor.
- klipklop 5y agoOdd that a certain political party got a large amount of downvotes on all their videos and YouTube removes the publics ability to see them soon after.
- dekerta 5y agoMost pro-vaccine videos are also massively disliked on YouTube, despite the fact that the vast majority of people support vaccines. I'm guessing you're a conservative, and you don't want dislikes to go away because you think it's great that pro-democrat videos get downvoted, but you can't base real public opinion on YouTube dislikes. It's massively astroturfed
- vfclists 5y ago> Most pro-vaccine videos are also massively disliked on YouTube, despite the fact that the vast majority of people support vaccines. You mean the vast majority support vaccines because they will lose their jobs if they don't "support" them?
- nebula8804 5y agoWell the country clicked over to greater than 50% of people with at least one dose on May 25, 2021 so it seems like the majority did support vaccination before the mandates.
- dekerta 5y agoYou're living in a bubble if you think that people only support vaccines because of Mandates. Even in America, which is one of the more vaccine hesitant countries, the majority of adults got the vaccine long before any mandates were introduced
- systemvoltage 5y ago> I'm guessing you're a conservative Please stop. Most conservatives support vaccines. Your idea of conservatives has an insidious skew that's just plain wrong.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoNo doubt, both Kremlin and White House would be very happy about it.
- jackTheMan 5y agoDont forget Beijing
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoAFAIK YouTube is not available in China without VPN, so Beijing is likely not really concerned about it.
- WC3w6pXxgGd 5y agoChina has official YouTube channels where they pump out pro-CCP videos, like these classics about the CCP's Belt & Road project: - https://youtu.be/98RNh7rwyf8 https://youtu.be/98RNh7rwyf8 - https://youtu.be/M0lJc3PMNIg https://youtu.be/M0lJc3PMNIg
- yellowbanana 5y agoMaybe now they can consider allowing them. since they can disable comments and no dislikes, and get 1 billion likes.
- recursivedoubts 5y ago> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks. ah yes, google looking out for the little folks... someday, a technical solution like not allowing downvotes until a channel gets so many views or subscribers may be feasible, but until then, this will have to suffice
- phone8675309 5y agoWhich is bullshit - the reason they're removing it is _BRANDS_ that are sick of having their poorly thought out, poorly produced, cynical cash-grab trailers be disliked. Probably told Susan that they'd stop advertising and start suing unless they did this.
- WithinReason 5y agoStatistically speaking there are much more small creators than large ones, so "we heard directly from smaller creators" can be used in every situation!
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoReminds me of when Garth Brooks was pushing for laws that would ban the resale of CDs. After receiving a lot of criticism, he said it wasn't to protect his album sales but to keep struggling artists with a small number of CD sales from having to compete with used CD stores. Of course the odds that any given used CD store would have your favorite obscure band's CD were quite low but they were guaranteed to have all of the Garth Brooks CDs.
- asdffdsa 5y agoWhy someday? This is a simple solution.
- crmd 5y agoIt’s not clear from the article, and the linked manage your recommendations page, if and how dislikes affect the recommendation algorithm. I want the dislike button to send a negative signal to the recommendation algorithm, but it seems to act more like an elevator door close placebo button. [0] [0] https://www.quora.com/Does-the-close-door-button-in-U-S-elevators-actually-do-anything-If-not-why https://www.quora.com/Does-the-close-door-button-in-U-S-elev...
- capybara_2020 5y agoWhat about cases where the dislikes are against a gov figure and the count gives you confidence in numbers. Plus now authoritarian governments get to serve out even more propaganda talking about videos that are liked and the opposition has no way to see that the opposite also happens. So the opposition grows even more silent. Afraid to act because it might lead to negative repercussions and there is no scale of the dislike for a propaganda piece. Not to be conspiratorial but after Facebook's reaction to propaganda from certain parties in countries that are not America. It feels like Youtube is bowing to pressure but hiding it behind a "helping small creator" facade.
- dane-pgp 5y ago"And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced — its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing."
- cute_boi 5y agoAnd the sad thing is there are no competition to youtube. In facebook people at least can do angry reaction.
- gpt5 5y agoThere is definitely competition to YouTube. TikTok appeared out of nowhere and surpassed YouTube installation numbers. With that said, TikTok is even worse when it comes to dislikes.
- apostacy 5y ago> Plus now authoritarian governments get to serve out even more propaganda talking about videos that are liked and the opposition has no way to see that the opposite also happens. Well, yes, that is their agenda. The web as it was was not nearly as friendly for those with money and power. Now, authoritarian governments and scumbag celebrities will project power over us, just like in the real world. There are secret whitelists so that influencers like Logan Paul can fully monetize commuting crimes on YouTube (like desecrating a corpse)[2]. Celebrities are permitted to engage in targeted harassment or fraud, and people that call them out are banned.[1] And of course, governments can engage in all sorts of war crimes, and big tech will censor anyone that tries blowing the whistle[3]. Facebook is happy to censor anything for dictators, but perhaps they will soon go the extra mile and just report people directly to the secret police. They could have a nice dashboard that shows up for local death squads of anyone that questions the leader. And frankly, this is the future most of us welcomed. We defended all of this because muh private platforms. We consented to letting these big tech platforms set the rules. We welcomed anyone with an incongruent opinion banned. The internet used to be a domain where scumbag fatcats didn't control everything, and you had some chance of speaking truth to power. It will only get worse. Find out Dupont is dumping toxic waste in your back yard? Just a word from their PR dept and all of your accounts will be banned. Think you can speak directly to the people? Your domain name will be seized, your Cloudflare account closed, and any app permitted on peoples devices will have to ban you if they don't want to be removed. [1]: https://www.aroged.com/2021/10/09/whitelisted-streamers-found-among-leaked-twitch-files/ https://www.aroged.com/2021/10/09/whitelisted-streamers-foun... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42538495 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42538495 [3]: https://www.engadget.com/facebook-turkey-emails-200407588.html https://www.engadget.com/facebook-turkey-emails-200407588.ht...
- dartharva 5y agoIf they are so against brigading, why not remove Like counts as well?
- cute_boi 5y agoWhenever rich powerful people or companies says "Helping Small Creators", "Investing millions in small business", "Helping Small Companies", "Donate to support this cause" its almost a sign that something is shady. By removing the like count user will probably not engage that much which means loss of revue through adverts. However if they remove dislikes there is high probability of engagement because you don't know if the video is bad. And this feature is not even required AFAIK. Creators can simply disable like & dislike if they think they are being targeted.
- falcor84 5y agoOrthogonal to the article itself, I find it interesting how the word "Update" gradually came to be the official corporate-speak for "Cancel".
- bitwize 5y agoMarvel movies aren't generating the buzz they once were, and Disney is an important YouTube partner that has earnings expectations to met, so... gotta do something about the "review bombing from bigots".
- muglug 5y agoThe overwhelming sentiment to the decision here is negative, but I don't quite understand that reaction. If YouTube was just looking out for big brands and/or advertisers, they could have restricted the change incredibly simply. By making it a global change they're saying "ok now we understand how our UI actually led to some pretty bad outcomes in ways we failed to anticipate, and we're fixing that".
- HappyMans 5y agoIt’s because they aren’t objectively bad outcomes. For the content creators it may be bad. But if the content creator is creating, say, authoritarian propaganda, the outcome for the audience is good when the dislike count goes through the roof and helps spread the message that whatever has been published is being rejected by the audience.
- whoknowswhat11 5y agoThe dislike count was useful to pick up on * clickbait headline videos that don't deliver - ie, content in thumbnail never shows * obviously some political content has been getting dislikes which is embarrassing and risks govt coming after them. Trump threatened this and dems are also now making noise here, so these platforms are vulnerable. * Dislikes were pretty rare, usually in my case I had to be really annoyed at something to dislike it. I didn't mind scams that were properly described, but some stuff is annoying because it's a bait and switch.
- tomklein 5y agoOfficial blog post: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-to-youtube/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-to-youtube/
- notjes 5y agoI am all for it. But they should also remove like counts and comments. The content should speak for itself.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- adamc 5y agoWell, it was a good way to get me to cancel youtube premium. It seems like a clear indicator that we are the product, and content creators the actual customers. No worries, there are always alternatives.
- subsubzero 5y agoThis still seems like a huge disconnect to what people use youtube for vs. what google thinks it should be used for. Google wants youtube to be all network and brands making content. ie. a future version of what TV is now. What actual people want is creator made videos(diy/review/podcast videos and everything else that make youtube wonderful). This disconnect has been happening since google bought youtube and this recent change only reflects google wanting to hide backlash/or dislike from who it sees should rightfully be on youtube, brands/networks/corporations.
- MrMember 5y agoYou could see that with how YouTube Rewind evolved over the years. It started out highlighting popular videos from original YouTube creators and at some point became Jimmy Kimmel doing Fortnite dances.
- ahahahahah 5y agoIt sounds like you read the headline and came to post your already held views on Google and Youtube hoping that it would be relevant. From the article: > We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks. Our experiment data confirmed that this behavior does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.
- pranau 5y agoSeems like a story they spun with cherry-picked data to justify the removal of the dislike count.
- scoopertrooper 5y agoIf that was truly their primary concern, why wouldn't they limit the scope of the change to smaller creators? Could it be that they were looking for a post-hoc justification for a desired policy change?
- jedimastert 5y ago
- jcun4128 5y agoAnnoying like how they won't show ratings on search results, particularly annoying on fake movie trailers or generally anything fake like fake spacex live streams with crypto scams on top.
- rektide 5y agoReducing what the worlds gets to see, what feedback/visibility we have, is going to be such a sad sad ongoing theme for this ultra-consumerized/consumptive information-technology. There's no reason to let us be informed consumers.
- AtNightWeCode 5y agoSo funny that a lot people still tries to pass down votes or dislikes as something essential. It is already more or less proven that it does not work the way it is sold in many contexts.
- nickjj 5y agoBummer. I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching. If I see a 3,000 up / 48 down video on a topic I'm interested in there's a really good chance the video is great. I'm a small time creator (~13.5k subs) and don't care at all about upvotes or downvotes being public. There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that. Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects.
- gadders 5y ago>> I'm a small time creator (~13.5k subs) and don't care at all about upvotes or downvotes being public. Yes, but you're not someone YouTube is trying to protect.
- throwuxiytayq 5y agoI just canceled my premium subscription. I'm not taking this lightly, YT has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. But at this point it feels like the responsibile thing to do is to vote with my wallet. Not that a change in course is likely; their leadership has been hell bent on ruining the platform for years.
- happytiger 5y agoSame.
- inChargeOfIT 5y agoI still see dislikes but will be cancelling my premium the second they go away.
- loudtieblahblah 5y agoWith YouTube Vanced, there's no reason for premium
- varelse 5y agoSounds like a call to duty to hit the dislike button if even slightly inclined to do so going forward.
- Supermancho 5y agoAs long as you don't mind how it will affect the suggestion algorithm. The most maddening thing is when a video is of the correct topic of my interest, but I know it includes misinformation as well. If I dislike, it biases against seeing more of this topic. If I like, it might bias toward the misinformation. In practice, regardless, it seems to default rely on "leftwing vs rightwing" tags until it gets confused enough it just doesn't recommend the topic at all. What a world we live in.
- varelse 5y agoI just installed an extension to block all the recommendations because it wouldn't stop recommending Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro videos to me. And they have nothing new to say to me. Edit: Oh no! I admitted that because I don't want to those videos I got rid of all recommendations. So off-topic I know!
- numpad0 5y agoJust mash that dislikes until there is no more content creators with anything remotely uncomfortable to you. Unsarcastically. Let the algorithm designers spend their life struggling to deduce what they could ask you in plain human language for immediate response. I'm guessing that is how engineer performance is measured and rewarded for there.
- varelse 5y agoWhy do you assume a priori that my youtube experience must include recommendations from a biased source and why are you against viewers taking matters into their own hands to craft the youtube experience they wish? They could craft a set of hot button keywords to deliver a much better experience (i.e. if I say I don't like sports, then don't recommend sports videos) but they choose otherwise and handwave a bunch of mumbo jumbo just like what you wrote. Imagine if you could no longer choose what to watch on your TV but instead it chose for you. Are you good with that?
- HappyMans 5y agoDoes there exist a Chrome (or otherwise) plugin that could keep track of its own like/dislike counts and display them on any given page? You could even have your own separate comment threads. Key everything out on video URL. Wouldn’t work on walled gardens, but would 100% on desktop.
- nonbirithm 5y agoMy take is that YouTube is intending for this to increase engagement, by removing signals that might push away viewers from consuming more content. If excessive social media use is correlated with damage to mental health, then framing this as beneficial sounds contradictory. Now that social media platforms have reached a critical mass, they should be judged not just for being toxic and user-hostile, but also for being too effective at accepting and retaining people for excessive amounts of time.
- godshatter 5y agoI'm usually of the opinion that the more information the better, but I also think that the dislike/downvote button adds a lot to the toxicity levels, mainly for comments. It's much better for a group to get excited about something and over-like it than for a group to get angry about something and over-dislike it. So I guess I'd rather see the dislike button be removed more than I would like to use that information to inform me about the video in question. I don't tend to even look at how many likes vs. dislikes something has, anyway. My tastes are different enough from the norm that it isn't really that helpful of a statistic for me.
- haunter 5y ago>It's much better for a group to get excited about something and over-like it than for a group to get angry about something and over-dislike it. Toxic positivity is not a good thing, and not "much better"
- godshatter 5y agoWhat are the downsides to toxic positivity?
- Nemrod67 5y agoFlanders from the Simpsons might be a good fictional exemple
- AdrienBrault 5y agoThat feels like a change that will help misinformation
- tjpnz 5y agoAnd crypto scams.
- kyle_martin1 5y agoAnd hide the White House's like to dislike ratio. Check out some videos-- the ratio is horrible: https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos
- louissan 5y agoDisney's been talking to them ....
- authed 5y agomight have been Biden... Do a Biden search and look at the like/dislike ratios if you don't believe me (I can still see the dislikes on Youtube, not sure when it starts)...
- vincentclee 5y agoThese videos have a lot of dislikes https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos
- godDLL 5y agoSo likes show you how popular something is. And dislikes don't show you how controversial it is, or perhaps how general Youtube audience reacts to being exposed to something. So that now if you want to make it known you have to leave a comment. And then some stats have to be done on the comments to understand the sentiment. On Youtube's shitty unforum, you have to do stats. Right. They just sealed it, all of their likes, dislikes, comments etc.; all of Youtube's non-streaming aspects are demonstrably useless, not just "feel useless", but actually are it. Time to support things like ogjre.com and reddit etc., for they provide what Youtube denies. Community. Forums. Thought. Orientation and discrimination. What is good, and who would think that it is. What is objectionable, and for whom.
- conradfr 5y agoBut reddit removed the upvote/downvote counter a long time ago? I guess the aggregate is better than just the upvotes but it still is not ideal as a post at +102/-101 is not the same as +2/-1.
- ghawk1ns 5y agoTwitter users solved this with the "ratio"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- SllX 5y agohttps://youtu.be/kxOuG8jMIgI https://youtu.be/kxOuG8jMIgI Direct link to the video if you want to “Dislike” it. Or “Like” it too I suppose. Also I can still see the count: as of this writing it is 2.8K up and 1.6K down.
- dmitrygr 5y agoI bet this is at least partially a result of their “awards show” where they awarded themselves all the awards getting a record amount of dislikes in record time, publicly embarrassing them.
- dmitrygr 5y agohttps://www.newsweek.com/youtube-ceo-susan-wojcicki-gets-freedom-expression-award-sponsored-youtube-1585147 https://www.newsweek.com/youtube-ceo-susan-wojcicki-gets-fre...
- spiznnx 5y agoThis seems like it could have unintended effects of making the experience worse for creators. Instead of getting dislikes, maybe now they'll get mean comments instead.
- _qbjt 5y ago[flagged]
- avs733 5y ago>Most YouTube users (and people on the Internet in general) do not conduct themselves respectfully or demonstrate any sort of intellectual curiosity when engaging with these sorts of feedback mechanisms. You nailed how I feel about this entire conversation. The author of the blog PopeHat summarized it really eloquently: Stop pretending bad faith is good faith for the purposes of “politeness” or “dialogue.” https://twitter.com/Popehat https://twitter.com/Popehat
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoOf course bad faith just coincidentally happens to be something my ideological opposites do and good faith is what people who agree with me do. Strange how it works out that way but I assure you, it has nothing to do with my ideological values and is merely a coincidence.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Jensson 5y ago> Stop pretending bad faith is good faith for the purposes of “politeness” or “dialogue.” Assuming others argue in bad faith is even worse than arguing in bad faith. If you argue at all you should assume that the other party argues in good faith, otherwise just stop as you only hurt your cause by assuming bad intentions in an argument.
- 999900000999 5y agoIt depends on the video. Say you and your band from college found one of your old recordings and posted it on YouTube. 5 years later a friend you lost contact with finds the video and comments, hey I saw you guys live. I
- pessimizer 5y agoThese businesses were built from pseudonymous comments (and posts) and open, lightly moderated discussion. The question is whether what Youtube is doing will kill the golden goose, which has somehow easily weathered the owner-demeaning attacks from its disgusting users for its entire existence.
- kyle_martin1 5y agoSounds like they're taking "you're not allowed to disagree" from 1984 to heart.
- louissan 5y agoI find this pathetic. As if the removal of the "dislike button" helps in any way, shape or form to create a more "inclusive" environment. This reeks of the silencing of what is perceived as dissident voices, is all. I've personally never hit a like or dislike button in my life, never will ... but found it interesting as a viewer to see the ratio. Even knowing this ratio is probably at least partially the outcome of bot farms and the like. Disney, DC Comics and the like must've complained about bad ratings/unfavourable like/dislike ratios I guess.. Let's try and see this as a tangent/bastard child of Newspeak. What better way too have people forget about something than to remove its linguistic manifestation from the dictionary? Same thing here, except people's way of expressing their approval/refusal. Google and the like are literally after the ultimate "macdonaldification" of people - cattle unable to say "NO". (edit typos :-) ) Have a great day all :-)
- tentacleuno 5y agoIn reality they have been moving towards this for a while. I've been hit by one of their A/B experiments that turns off the visual ratio bar, so it takes a second to figure out the ratio (if it's bad, I normally skim over the comments).
- tpoacher 5y agoI think you're probably reading too much into this. It's far less likely to be politically motivated, and much more likely to be profit-motivated. Quoting from the article: "We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video." Remove negative counts, make people more likely to click on videos, serve more accompanying ads, profit. Simples.
- mach1ne 5y agoPolitics and profit tend to go hand-in-hand. I don't see how removing the dislike count will in any way increase the click rate. Be the true reason whatever, but this is another concrete step into the direction of censorship initiated by the Big Tech during the pandemic.
- ryeguy_24 5y agoI will miss the ratio: likes / (likes + dislikes) I used this quite a lot for determining if a video was decent or not.
- kenjackson 5y agoI'm always surprised at how often dislike is used on YouTube. I don't think I've ever clicked it. I probably should more for clickbait videos, but it just doesn't seem like a big problem otherwise. Like, why do people click dislike on a Justin Bieber video. I'm confident that 95% of those are people that just hate Justin -- but why then even go to the video to watch it? Just to voice your displeasure?
- Maksadbek 5y agoDidn’t know that exists .youtube domain.
- resoluteteeth 5y agoThis is really unfortunate. Since pretty much any youtube video will have likes, seeing the corresponding number of dislikes is really the only thing that provides any meaningful information.
- tinyhouse 5y agoThat's not a feature we need. We need to know like/dislike ratio BEFORE clicking on a video so that we can avoid clicking on it. I end up clicking on so many spam videos cause Youtube doesn't tell you that simple number. For example, looking for sports highlights right after a game usually ends up with tens of spammy results with fake titles trying to take advantage of trendy topics.
- robmccoll 5y agoI don't think this is a good idea. To me one of the biggest problems with social media that propagates disinformation to large unquestioning audiences is that there are easy ways to reinforce the message and to see how much it resonates, but it is hard to gauge when an idea is controversial or if there are many people who disagree. It is worth way more to see dislike counts and ratios on dangerous content than to protect creators from the internet being mean at all costs.
- t-writescode 5y agoSo now I need to watch complete tutorial videos on obscure issues on YouTube to figure out if they're terrible or not? Tutorial videos, especially, benefited from the like-dislike ratio, because if 200 people saw a video on setting up some software and 7 people liked it, but 30 people disliked it, it's pretty easy to know that that 10 minute tutorial video isn't worth watching, as it's pacing is slow, or inaccurate or missing major steps or whatever. Neat.
- sofixa 5y agoThere will still be comments. On tutorial videos they're a great source of information.
- tinyhouse 5y agoThat's not a feature we need. We need to know like/dislike ratio BEFORE clicking on a video so that we can avoid clicking on it. I end up clicking on so many spam videos cause Youtube doesn't tell you that simple number. For example, looking for sports highlights right after a game usually ends up with tens of spammy results with fake titles trying to take advantage of trendy topics. I'm sure Youtube tries to down rank such videos but in practice it's still a big problem. I understand they are trying to protect creators from bad actors but negative feedback is usually more important than positive feedback.
- haunter 5y agoNice try but Amy Schumer still sucks
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zoidb 5y agoI suppose this means the neutral response https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ will no longer be a thing :(
- nimonian 5y agoThis is so sad. Sort the comments by newest first - people are lamenting the loss of the dislike count.
- gadrev 5y agoIt was useful, but they don't care. The same can be said about too many "changes" these days. Bah.
- savant_penguin 5y agoCNN must be loving this (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rYZTN5NkxmQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rYZTN5NkxmQ 11k / 70k)
- aclatuts 5y agoThere should have be an option for the content creator to enable or disable this. Just like how comments can be enabled or disabled per video or the whole channel. Since this change was for creators to reduce harassment on themselves.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- unpopularopp 5y ago>we believe this is the right thing to do for our platform, and to help create an inclusive and respectful environment I don't even know what does that mean. Just cringe
- austincheney 5y agoFrom reading the other comments I am clearly in the minority here, but this is absolutely the right way to go. It’s the first and most simple means of destroying echo chamber bombing. Visibility of voting only reinforces agreement ahead of any independent consideration.
- wolpoli 5y ago> We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video–still, we believe this is the right thing to do for our platform, and to help create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves. It's very sad that this is the only instance in the announcement where they mention viewers, and the reasons cited has nothing to do with viewers' interest.
- city41 5y agoYouTube has shown the viewers's interests are not very important to them. About a year ago they greatly increased the number of ads, and it does seem over the past few months they have tweaked the algorithm to merch more clickbaity/mainstream videos. Helping me find interesting content just doesn't seem to be what YouTube cares about at all.
- otrahuevada 5y agoI mean, if a multi-month, google-scale experiment says it helps, it... probably does? But I'd personally like to see more get done to the robot likes/dislikes thing than this. You know, that thing where a video has 100 views but 150 likes+dislikes? It's simply too annoying to me.
- yellowbanana 5y agoThis is attacking a problem that happens 1% of the time to ruin experience for the 99% of the time. => I mean, if a multi-month, google-scale experiment says it helps, it... probably does? Helps who? Youtube user incentives are not necessary alligned the with company incentives. If it helps by making you a "peaceful" consumer who can't assess on average how other people think. Maybe it is good for youtube but is it good for you.
- otrahuevada 5y agoGiven that they've decided to go ahead and remove it, I'd wager that the amount of people for which the public dislike count of a video is the one thing that makes their visit worthwhile is not huge. Also, publishers still get to see it, it's only viewers that won't. Which probably means we'll all have to engage a lot more with the algorithm to route around garbage, but I kind of do that already so I'm not convinced it's a dealbreaker. > Helps who? >> "Earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike count to see whether or not changes could help better protect creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks – where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos" Creators, apparently.
- princetman 5y agoAs a complete novice in life in everything that is not Tech, I rely on a lot of how-to videos on YouTube from small unknown creators. Likes and Dislikes ratio is one of the key filter to weed out less helpful or outright misinformed videos. This may be shrewd move for YouTube to boost engagement but at the greater cost of utility and UX. Very disappointing.
- beckman466 5y agowhy isn't YouTube a public utility yet? or forfeit it for stewardship by archive.org. having the power to monopolistically decide on the design and technical choices for billions of people using proprietary/black box tech is absurd.
- etchalon 5y agoIf the metric is "anything used by X people should be a public utility", we'll need to have a talk about nationalizing Coca Cola.
- chungy 5y agoCoca-Cola doesn't have the same sway as YouTube. You can drink it or not, and it ends there. YouTube is trying to manipulate people in order to remove dissent.
- etchalon 5y agoYou can watch videos on YouTube, or not, and it ends there. Nothing about this "removes dissent" since comments still exist. And you know, the entire mechanisms of government and public protest which predated YouTube. What it removes is the ability for people to gamify a metric. The metric still exists. It's still used for ranking and personalization. But a brigade of leftists swarming a button on a video that mentioned nuclear energy isn't useful.
- beckman466 5y agoyes you're right, who cares about our digital infrastructure, it's not like it is an industry where some of most valuable companies in the world are in, right? /s
- etchalon 5y agoThe problem isn't our digital infrastructure, it's people who think our digital infrastructure is a handful of websites.
- cwkoss 5y agoYoutube once again siding with IP hoarders, advertisers and propagandists over their audience.
- alex_c 5y agoThis change is very upsetting. Ever since becoming a parent, I've been baffled by a mystery. I noticed that - unlike most other popular content - children's videos on YouTube almost always have roughly a 2:1 like to dislike ratio no matter what channel or type of content. Why? Where do all the dislikes come from? Is it from kids mashing touch screens at random? Parents taking what small revenge they can at being subjected to the same songs on repeat thousands of times? Some shady underground power struggle between kids' content creators sabotaging each other? I always assumed I would eventually find an answer, but now if dislike counts are going away I am unlikely to ever find out. I will probably have to carry this unanswered mystery with me for the rest of my life. Thanks, YouTube.
- phh 5y agoMaybe the reality is all those votes are purely random, but somehow the dislike button has half the chance of random click than like button. Which would be pretty interesting.
- CamelCaseName 5y agoMy uneducated guess is that children's videos are a highly competitive category, and that buy disliking competitors, you can raise your own status.
- rrll22 5y agoMany kids knowingly hit dislike and many kids randomly hit either, to best of my knowledge.
- mahart 5y agoI have found videos that were marked disliked by me that I never intended to dislike. Pretty sure it was all from trying to scroll on mobile and a click accidentally getting registered.
- vhold 5y agoMy hunch is that it's because children tend to consume YouTube voraciously without much thought put into what video they select. I could scroll for a minute before I decide a video that feels worth spending my time on, I've seen kids select videos in less than half a second.
- kiryin 5y agoI wonder what likes and dislikes are even for. They don't generate income for channel owners afaik, nor do they affect the recommendation algorithm for users, also afaik. Only views "matter." Especially if the other half gets hidden now, they should just get rid of the whole thing. It doesn't seem to provide anyone with anything, except useless bandwagoning
- not2b 5y agoRead the article. They specifically say that they will still use "like" and "dislike" to help figure out recommendations for videos to recommend to you, and that the publisher of the video will still see the dislike count, so the creator gets the feedback.
- csee 5y ago> I wonder what likes and dislikes are even for It's useful for users to figure out if it's worth spending time watching the video. That usefulness degrades for politically charged content but holds for things like how-to guides, lectures, etc.
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- Mountain_Skies 5y agoTry finding reviews for older fitness equipment. 90% of them are generated by scripts pulling images and text from Amazon and image search. The other 10% are either old commercials from when the product was released or long term owners of the product doing real reviews. None of these videos get very many views so that's not a useful metric. The automated videos probably only get viewed for a minute or so before they exited but that's enough time to register a view. The automated videos tend to accumulate dislikes from people angry they got tricked into watching. Now that signal is gone and actual product reviews will no longer be able to rise above the automated ones by having a favorable Like/Dislike ratio. Because these reviews are for old products, even the legitimate reviews have only a small number of views and doesn't serve as a useful way to separate the clickbait from the actual content.
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- CodeGlitch 5y agoHonestly I think this will encourage people to post negative comments instead, which if you've seen YouTube comments can be pretty "colourful".
- whywhywhywhy 5y agoWhat's stopping me posting "Upvote to dislike this" as a comment on every video I dislike. Cowardly move that's being presented as one thing but really there is a deeper message here.
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- yellowbanana 5y agoThey can just disable comments ( the poster of the video )
- datenarsch 5y agoTheir comment system will bury or shadow ban your comment because it has the word dislike in it. That's why you only ever see positive, happy high-five comments under videos anymore. The dystopian crackdown started sometime after the 2016 US election.
- jackdh 5y agoI now only have strong feelings about this one way.
- wdb 5y agoWhy not protect the other creators which don't get so many likes compared to other creators and hide the like count too?
- dgudkov 5y agoIt solves nothing. They still need something to mark poor quality videos so that the viewers don't waste time figuring it out themselves. Oh, wait, the mighty algorithm gods of Google will again decide for you what you like.
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- cletus 5y agoI'm sure this is to appease brands and we can say a lot about that. But I want to focus on one big problem with dislikes and down votes. It applies to Youtube, Reddit, HN and probably everywhere you can dislike something: too often people use it simply because they disagree with the opinion expressed or simply dislike to creator or author. This really diminishes the value of downvoting (IMHO) and I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to address it by figuring out who these opinion downvoters are and just shadow banning them, specifically you let them interact with the UI elements but it doesn't do anything. My theory is you'd get a much better result. You also have people who review bomb things and I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's a way to express dissatisfaction with, say, company actions (eg ridiculous DRM) and that has value. You also see things like on restaurant reviews "giving one star because even though the food was excellent and we had a reservation for 4 at 7pm on Friday night, we had to wait 45 minutes when we turned up at 8pm with a party of 11". I am inclined to think that downvoting and dislikking actually has pretty limited value with the way people use it.
- drenvuk 5y agoSo now we have to trust their recommendation algos rather than other users to avoid trash content. This is stupid.
- etchalon 5y agoI've never found dislike counts to be any more useful than letting me know someone said something some partisan group is unhappy about. Like counts / view ratios tell me if a video is worth watching.
- dna_polymerase 5y agoI remember using dislike counts to identify math tutorials of low quality, wrong information. Now that's gone for future generations. Thanks YouTube.
- 3princip 5y agoI watch a lot of DIY and gardening videos. Occasionally a video gives bad or even dangerous advice and a high dislike ratio can at least indicate that something is off. Comments are also useful to figure out what the creator is doing wrong, but the dislike ratio is a big indicator. This is a terrible move.
- pricci 5y ago> You can apply for an exemption (to have dislike data on non-authenticated calls) as long as you don’t display or share dislike data with end your users. Peertube/NewPipe + own API key with the exception will be the way to go now.
- asciimov 5y agoThis is a damned shame. I use dislikes to gauge if a video is relevant to the topic at hand. For example, I like fixing stuff and use Youtube for unfamiliar items. Often videos with a high number of dislikes are Spam (usually a bot reading text from some website), Videos where the person handwaves through the steps, videos where the fix is improper, or videos where the creator spends more time monetizing than working through the problem.
- CorruptedArc 5y agoSame thoughts I had, the more niche the topic the more important this feature was for finding a workable solution. A year back I was fixing a microphone and 9 of the 10 videos I looked at on it were convoluted expensive or ineffective work-arounds while one actually showed how to fix the issue relatively easily. I'm really gonna miss this feature.
- lelandfe 5y agoAnother example of this: pronunciation videos. Downvotes are a massive indicator if a chosen video is inaccurate.
- sseagull 5y agoWhich is kind of funny when you think about it. Who would watch a pronunciation video if they already know how it’s pronounced? Not discounting what you said. Just found it amusing :)
- SomewhatLikely 5y agoI suppose it could be people checking multiple sources and coming back to downvote after assessing which is the right one. At least that's the world I want to live in. A guy can dream.
- hda2 5y ago> people checking multiple sources and coming back to downvote after assessing which is the right one I do this on stackoverflow. I wouldn't be surprised if this is what happened here as well.
- r5Khe 5y agoThis is sure going to make YouTube a whole lot less useful for gathering information about a subject. I can't tell you how many DIY home improvement and exercise form demonstration videos I've been protected from because a lot of dislikes pointed me to the fact that something is terribly amiss in the content. Who knows how much money those ratios have saved me over the years.
- blakewatson 5y agoI’m gonna miss dislike jokes (eg, "13 people just want to watch the world burn.")
- tialaramex 5y agoRight, this is actually the only remaining purpose "dislike" had on Youtube. It was nice to have a universal Youtube meme, if you post that the person who failed at Mario Kart "Never had the makings of a varsity athlete" nobody knows what you're talking about, or if you comment on a board game Let's Play video that "I didn't know this was a Red Coin level" again, straight over their heads. But everybody knows a number of dislikes reference. Whether it's "13 people just want to watch the world burn" or "9 Yoshis watched this video".
- blibble 5y agothat's fine, I'll just use "report" instead to express dislike
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- pricci 5y agoLet's create a browser extension to record dislikes then!
- amznbyebyebye 5y agoWe could all use a little more “thinking for yourself” in this age or social media. I laid the move. The dislike button should be used to share what I dislike and use that genuinely to recommend content that I will like. Seeing the number only biases me one way or the other and doesn’t even give me the opportunity to consider how I really feel in the first place.
- mvotesbesteever 5y agoSomeone posted the link here a long time ago but some intrepid person was scraping youtube likes/dislikes on all the whitehouse videos and proved that youtube was actively manipulating vote count, sometimes by a very large percentage. "Most popular president ever". Total rubbish. Trump is going to have to win for a third time now. Let's Go Brandon!!
- notzaler 5y agoThe like to dislike ratio is one of the best indicators of whether a video is clickbait or not. We are now at the stage where vies for our attention have become a zero-sum game. This will ultimately favour bad actors more than it will help out small creators.
- kypro 5y ago> We want to create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves. It's an interesting position because the assumption YouTube would have to be making here to do this is that their viewers opinion of the content they're watching is either wrong, or irrelevant. Also the only instances of dislike "harassment" and I am aware of has been because a content creator has been recently exposed for participating in some immoral activity such as a scam or sexual abuse. The only other time I see content heavily downvote is when it's disagreeable in some way. For example, a lot of content from mainstream media outlets is often downvoted, presumably not because people have any particular desire to harass news organisations, but because their content is often largely disapproved of. I must admit I've never seen a video get downvoted for no reason -- is this something anyone has observed on YouTube? The reason I ask is because I worry this move is more likely to be motivated by YouTube disagreeing with the viewers about what should and shouldn't be downvoted. For example, I very much doubt they care some white dude being "harassed" by the dislike button for expressing some racist ideas, but if a black women gets downvoted for expressing a controversial far-left political position that does seem to be viewed as more problematic and represented of "harassment" by silicon valley types these days.
- patycake 5y agoI’ve never personally seen the kind of “dislike harassment” you are talking about. There was the YouTube rewind video a few years ago but that became more of a joke after a while. However, I would not be surprised if this feature was accelerated after seeing twitch “hate raids” a few months ago. These definitely are a form of online harassment in my opinion. In YouTube’s competition with twitch they want to show they are a “safer” place for creators (whether someone believes this is up to them)
- dkdk8283 5y agoVery sad to see this move, pathetic.
- yakkityyak 5y agoLike/Dislike is a terrible indicator of quality. I'd rather they make public some sort of derivation from the video retention ratio. Wether or not people actually finished the video rather than smashed the like button (which is now an ask every creator has in their intro now) would be a way more useful indicator to me of quality.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoAt this point, Google can just add YouTube likes as an in-app purchase. 1000 likes for $10 or something like that.
- theHIDninja 5y agoOkay, so now there is no way for me to tell if a video is a waste of my time or not. Fuck Youtube. they need a competitor.
- WC3w6pXxgGd 5y agoOdysee is a great alternative.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deadalus 5y agoYoutube Alternatives : Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller, Gab TV Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
- sss111 5y agoSadly, none of them come even close to the amount of content on Youtube
- vgb2k18 5y agoYouTube Rewind <--- an annual video event with some of the highest dislike counts in the history of the platform. I feel like the timing on YouTube's decision here is suspiciously convenient.
- justintime2002 5y agoRewind was already cancelled, so the timing doesn't matter for that reason.
- mesozoic 5y agoAh follow Facebook's path so you can better brainwash your masses.
- oxplot 5y agoLooks like a very good fit for a ML model to filter out dislikes that are part of an attack based on frequency, age of the video, etc.
- summerlight 5y agoAs usual, HN users are making lots of interesting assumptions (some comments to a conspiracy level) on the intention here... But in the reality, there are many smaller creators who is frequently being harassed by trolls (have you heard about those young Chinese patriots trolling over Korean and Japanese channels?) and one of their tool is the dislike button. And creators have been complaining about this for many years, so I would say in fact YT was super lazy on this particular issue, but at least better late than never...
- albeebe1 5y agoBut creators have always been able to hide the like/dislike counts on their videos
- summerlight 5y agoThat's not really meaningful unless you can change the trolling dynamic as whole, which needs a platform level change.
- desmosxxx 5y agoWhy do you need you change the "trolling dynamic" for people that aren't affected by it / don't care? And how does this really even address the issue at hand, won't they just move to the comments?
- mike741 5y ago"trolling dynamic" is not really meaningful
- neop1x 5y agoNext step: Remove dislike button altogether and let our lives be positive, full of sunshine and joy only.
- markmark 5y agoI'm just surprised by how many people apparently looked at dislike counts. I read this headline and thought "who cares" then saw there were 900 comments and only came in to see what the controversy was.
- shadowgovt 5y agoWorth noting that this is merely an "update to." Were it "An update on," we'd know dislike counts were being deleted and every API that ever mentioned them would be breaking.
- adminscoffee 5y agowas this because all joe biden videos had more downvotes than upvotes? just kidding but all jokes aside i don't think getting rid of the dislikes is a good idea.
- sequel_database 5y agoThey're still mad about YouTube Rewind
- VanillaCafe 5y agoHilarious the visceral response here to the apparent and inevitable decline of YouTube content quality with the removal of a dislike count -- when Hacker News itself doesn't show a down vote count nor even a down vote button for a large portion of its population.
- breakfastduck 5y agoYou are missing the mark very, very widely on an obvious difference. Upvote and Downvote are NOT the same thing as Like and Dislike.
- kevinh 5y agoIn theory? Yes. In practice? I'd be very surprised if there was any distinction at all.
- Jensson 5y agoIf youtube gradually greyed out videos everywhere in the UI if they got a lot of dislikes instead of the current count then I don't think people would mind as much. But then dislike bombing would probably get even worse than now since greying out the content is a much more powerful signal to users.
- postalrat 5y agoHN does show if a comment has been downvoted enough. Does youtube?
- mach1ne 5y agoGoogle must have done A/B testing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think they mentioned an increase in total consumption in the article. If they did not mention it, the test results were likely not promising, meaning that implementing the move regardless is motivated by something else than an increase in ad revenue.
- Covzire 5y agoLike unpopular politicians or corporations who can't produce content people want anymore and lobbied for a leg up from Google/Alphabet to keep people ignorant and foolish.
- JadoJodo 5y ago> Our experiment data confirmed that this behavior does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels. Why not simply hide the vote count (either way) until a certain threshold of votes is reached? This could be set higher for channels that are just starting out. Below a certain vote count, I personally don’t see much value anyway.
- trts 5y agoThe dislike button on YouTube videos is one of the few remaining signals that what you are seeing is propaganda. It hadn't occurred to me that this would happen (although it seems obvious) and it is unexpectedly frightening to me. I suppose the fallback will be videos with comments enabled, where people can 'like' a comment who is saying something common sense and reasonable in response to the content.
- MichaelDickens 5y agoIn my experience, if a video has comments disabled, it's probably bad. The lack of signal is itself a signal.
- iso8859-1 5y agoI have seen a lot of education videos having comments disabled, e.g. Oregon Programming Languages Summer School. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9dO_XBt0k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9dO_XBt0k8 I believe it is because they see themselves as 'above' YouTube. They don't take the risk of having a Emacs/Vim flame war in the comments and detracting from the points in the video. By disabling comments, the conversation is kept civil, because it isn't there. They are not resourceful enough to curate a forum, so they prefer no forum at all.
- nitrogen 5y agoI know K-12 educators who post videos primarily for their students and fellow local teachers, and they disable comments and voting because bored kids will fill the comments with crap, and scammers will target the kids.
- renewiltord 5y agoThe interesting thing about this is that I'm clearly occupying a different demographic for YouTube. Brigading isn't a big deal for the kind of content I watch, but people often upload fake videos. I have an extension that displays the like/dislike ratio on recommended videos and search results and that helps filter out fake uploads. By fake uploads I mean reuploads that do not contain the actual example. For instance, I might want to watch a Brahmos or Oniks launch (I find the way the missile orients itself very entertaining) and there'll be a bunch of videos which are 'reaction' videos. They'll use a thumbnail of the content but mostly be some guy talking about the content. Or for a football goal, it's some guy recreating it in FIFA. I don't want to watch these things and the dislike bar warns me of the stuff. This is a pity.
- josteink 5y ago> As always, I’ll be monitoring questions and feedback in the comments below. -Meaghan, TeamYouTube Let me guess… Except for dissenting or disliking comments? This move is all about removing users ability to voice disapproval in a simple and effective way when big corporations stumble. Think PC movie remake-trailers, out of touch YouTube rewind videos, etc. All heavily disliked, and users were allowed to say that. I guess only corporate praise is allowed from now on?
- peakaboo 5y agoHahaha - I knew it was only a matter of time. So many videos the last year has been downvoted severely because people see through all the bullshit being peddled by the mass media. YouTube has been censoring and removing any content they can that is against the narrative being created by the mass media. Large news stations have disabled comments on their videos to try and prevent dissent from being publicly viewable. Some of those videos has so many downvotes, it's hilarious to watch how the users are no longer sleeping and instead reacting to the bullshit. And now, when censoring and disabling comments still can't hide the enormous dissent, they try to remove even the downvote button. That's where we are in 2021. Pathetic.
- schainks 5y agoGoogle switched to finance numbers-based management ages ago. This decision, while unpopular, is money driven, and they think it will make them money. Edit: I, too, use the ratio of likes/dislikes to make a decision about spending time watching something.
- nathias 5y agoI remember when Blizzard made their announcement of Diablo 4 youtube was erasing dislikes, but couldn't keep up.
- bevelwork 5y agoI have no strong feelings one way or the other. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxK_nA2iVXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxK_nA2iVXw
- roody15 5y agoReally quite dystopian. Just another move to blatantly try and shape/control the national narrative.
- bigyellow 5y agoPredicable after seeing downvote ratios on White House and other "official" channels. Another step closer to dystopia. Fuck YouTube.
- the42thdoctor 5y agoIt's sad to pay for a service, Youtube Premium, and see they pulling shit like this without no clear competitor to switch to.
- vlunkr 5y agoPeople are weirdly outraged here. Likes/Dislikes on really public platforms like reddit and youtube are just a game, they tell you nothing about the quality of something, only whether it matches the agreed upon view of the core audience. Barely anyone thinks about dislikes on youtube until there's a big event like youtube rewind.
- ncann 5y agoYou are wrong. Every now and then I need find and watch instruction video on how to do something, like how to install my old ancient printer on Windows 10, or how to disassemble my laptop, or how to flush my water heater. If I see a bad like/dislike ratio I can know right away the video is useless.
- spentu 5y agoI have same way of estimating tutorials and similar content. There are quite many people posting videos without real understanding what they are teaching..
- kf6nux 5y agoof the core voters* There's a Venn diagram of audience and voters. Hard to know how large any of the three are, but apparently YouTube thinks the group of non-audience voters is large enough to take action against.
- varispeed 5y agoWhat's next? Extra views for underrepresented YouTubers? Ad click air drops? Maybe if Google wants to do something good, they should stop avoiding paying right amount of tax for starters? How about anti-competitive behaviour? The fake virtue signalling from big co is nauseating...
- WriterGuy2021 5y agoStop using YouTube. Support smaller services while you still can. We don't need to keep feeding these monolithic beasts.
- scottmcdot 5y agoWould it be a breach of terms and conditions if a creator live streamed their down vote stats?
- kodah 5y agoI'm curious how useful voting really is. The usefulness of it really depends on if voters are disciplined enough to remove their opinion voting and vote based on an established, high-level framework. The latter still includes some opinion, but at least more rigorous and less opinionated. I can see a couple outcomes from such a system: - downvotes are guideline violations - upvotes indicate relativity, not necessarily agreeableness - no interaction would be common All of this is centric to a users thought. I don't think a machine could be taught these things.
- throwawaycuriou 5y agoI'd like to glean valuable context from voting ratios. It used to be possible. But my confidence in voting is dashed. There's too much money and power involved. Gaming the system is something I feel is (rightly or wrongly?) too easy to do. Facebook's introduction of a like button was a turning point in what the Internet is used for.
- NazakiAid 5y agoWas watching YT shorts, and all you see is the likes. Lots of likes, and I was thinking who watches this crap. Thankfully the comments made me realize I am not alone in this though. Wish I could have wasted less time by having the amount of dislikes listed. Now I am going to have to do the same method on YT videos as I do shorts, where I go look at the comments first which is unfortunate. Stupid move from YT but was warned it was going to happen.
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- darkhorn 5y agoIt was one of the best things about YouTube. This is very shitty move. YouTube is going to the next Facebook shit.
- rdiddly 5y agoAnyone else marveling at the amount of time/effort/thought spent on this vs. let's say (cliché incoming) curing cancer, or (slightly less cliché but quickly catching up) stopping/mitigating climate change?
- rdiddly 5y agoNo, huh? Everybody would rather re-hash all the same boring free speech vs. bullying/disinformation arguments again?
- ApolloFortyNine 5y agoI do sort of understand, similar to Reddit posts, if you post something factual that the 51% simply don't agree with, you'll likely have more dislikes than likes. It doesn't always mean it was a bad video, or that you didn't back up what you were saying with studies/facts, but just that the 51% personally disagreed. Now there's obviously a lot of videos that are just bad or full of lies that should be negative. But there's also plenty that sit negative for reasons entirely made of opinion.
- xg15 5y ago> Those in the experiment could still see and use the public dislike button, but because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior 1. I know it was for a halfway good cause this time, but does anyone else find it creepy with how much nonchalance they are talking about behaviour modification and nudging here? Google would like its users to more frequently show behaviour X, so they made some A/B tests, found which UI changes most effectively increase the prevalence of X and are now implementing the changes. No need anymore to actually communicate rules with your users if you can just manipulate them into showing a particular behaviour. It's not just Google doing this, however they are in a position to do this most effectively right now.
- dboshardy 5y agoI find the negative sentiment for this on a forum that also lacks a downvote/dislike option perplexing.
- gorwell 5y agoThis is another example of how the ruling class is trying to reassert control over the narrative and flow of information. Flag dissent as `misinformation`, remove comments, remove dislikes. Bit by bit, clamping down on the ability for the public to revolt.
- systemvoltage 5y agoI'll say this again, I want Google to go down along with the rest of FAANG. It has way too much control over US population and the rest of the world. It has started to abuse its position.
- oceanplexian 5y agoThey've also manipulated search results in the last few years. Before ~2018 if you searched for a political debate, the top result was likely to be an independent content creator or someone who was there, a vlog, or something like that. Now it's all.. FOX, NBC, ABC, CNN, etc. I wonder if the legacy media is paying Google behind the scenes to promote content.
- schleck8 5y agoDefinitely true, I also noticed this with the BLM protests. There were almost no uncommented videos, all just tv recordings from the large channels. And the few uncommented videos I found were from news stations as well.
- deadmutex 5y agoIsn't the bar higher for NBC, ABC, CNN, FOX, etc? I.e. If they say something false on purpose, they're likely to get sued out of existence. Whereas, some random guy can just say "oh, I was only joking, or this is just entertainment, or it's just freedom of speech man... YOU are responsible for checking my dis-info" after spreading lies on purpose. Personally, for these reasons, I trust the mainstream news sources MUCH more than the random person on the internet that may or may not be trying to sell me some snakeoil on the side (e.g. Alex Jones). Disclaimer: These are my own views, and not of my employer.
- ravenstine 5y agoThey wouldn't remove dislike counts across the board (seemingly with no opt-out?) if there wasn't a financial advantage to doing so. I don't believe this is because they think it's good for the community. Is it any coincidence that, in an era where establishment media frequently gets highly ratio'd (look content from the White House, MSM, films with political agendas), an organization that relies on advertising as well as government contracts makes it convenient for said establishment to perpetuate the illusion that there is no dissent? Let's put aside the possibility that getting brigaded with dislikes can be psychologically harmful to the individual. How will there ever be actual revolts against the establishment if everyone believes there are no other dissenters? That's the real trouble behind making it impossible to share any negative sentiment on the internet, which is a pattern that mainstream platforms like Google/YouTube are continually edging towards, and it's a darker pattern than most people understand. The simplest way to prevent threats to your regime is to make it difficult, if not impossible for people who agree on the wrong things to recognize that they are not alone. Hold on ravenstine... these are just dislikes on a bunch of dumb cat videos. You call that "dissent"? When a piece of media with a wide audience is overwhelmingly disapproved of by that audience, that tells you something about reality. Being selectively exposed to only approved opinions is a disconnection from reality. If you aren't connected with reality, at best your ability to make predictions is impaired, and at worst you can be controlled without even knowing it. If you think you're the only one that disagrees with CorpGov propaganda, you are much more likely to sit on your ass, never getting up to vote, never getting up to protest, never expressing your disagreement with the establishment, because what would be the point? All you could do is accept that you are the crazy one and go with the flow, which happens to be highly convenient for the power structure. Personally, I don't care that much in the case of YouTube because I believe it has peaked long ago and is begging for a serious replacement. But if all mainstream social media decides to go full speed ahead with this sort of reality manipulation YouTube is attempting today, then I think we are headed for trouble as a global/digital civilization.
- DeathArrow 5y agoGoogle learned from Facebook. Next they will remove the dislike button and introduce other reactions.
- teitoklien 5y agoI guess now , I’ll just consider views to like ratio as a new form of hinting at dislike Overall , this is a pretty bad move, If a creator feels harassed by dislikes , they should use it as a way of learning to grow thick skin, They need it anyways as public professionals. Instead what now went away, is information on how others in a community reacted to a video or content, Dislikes have always been a great way to detect misinformation or incorrect content or atleast give a hint that a topic needs more researching. Now, someone who’s new to all of this, Will see a youtube video on cleaning their desktop and wont understand why, Running “sudo rm -rf —no-preserve-root /“ Is a very bad idea .... (Pls dont run this command on your computer)
- bequanna 5y ago> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks Wow. Well, the politically motivated truth behind this change is pretty darn obvious, right? If you're confused what I mean, check any US mainstream media video with an obvious political slant but pretending to be "objective news" and look at the like/dislike ratio. The system is totally working...except it isn't working out well for the political party that YT would prefer. The more striking thing to me is how little effort they put into the cover excuse. IMO this just shows they don't really care about the optics of censoring speech or letting users flag propaganda. Quite brazen.
- irthomasthomas 5y agoIt's cute how many commenters are not aware of this. https://mobile.twitter.com/FRANK_SINATRA7/status/1458481838033416197 https://mobile.twitter.com/FRANK_SINATRA7/status/14584818380...
- tomstockmail 5y agoThis only proves the point to remove the dislikes as clearly those are coordinated dislike attacks. The subject matter in that video doesn't even have anything worth liking or disliking; it was pretty standard stuff. The screenshot you show has the person shown disliking it - whomever took the screenshot has an agenda. And that Twitter account speaks for itself.
- irthomasthomas 5y agoAny proof of that? I really can't see how google would be vulnerable to bots and brigading. I mean, you can't use vpns or tor on google apps without solving annoying puzzles.
- pcwalton 5y agoEvery video that correctly describes the benefits of the COVID vaccine and makes it to the front page is spammed with dislikes, and this constitutes a major threat to public health. No, this is actually a very important change.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- systemvoltage 5y agoThis kills YT for me. I use ratings-preview extension to tell me if the video is worth watching. I can't imagine using YT without it.
- dang 5y agoRelated: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-to-youtube/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-to-youtube/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29177460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29177460, but we merged that thread hither)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zthrowaway 5y agoI’m sure the White House videos getting disliked into oblivion influenced this.
- beezischillin 5y agoIt's interesting that the Internet took the YouTube Rewind dislike thing as a win, meanwhile YouTube themselves took it as an opportunity to learn about the negative side effects of their users' free will.
- jagged-chisel 5y agoI wonder whether the views-to-likes ratio can serve as a proxy for dislikes. If you watched it, then didn't like it (i.e. didn't click the like button), you [probably?] disliked it.
- soheil 5y agoI wonder how long it takes before there is a chrome ext that brings back likes/dislikes similar to AdBlock or SponsorBlock. It’s the ratio that I care about not the absolute numbers.
- irthomasthomas 5y agoIs this the reason? https://mobile.twitter.com/FRANK_SINATRA7/status/1458481838033416197 https://mobile.twitter.com/FRANK_SINATRA7/status/14584818380...
- geuis 5y agoAnother reason this is a terrible idea: Video creators have always been able to disable the upvote/downvote ratios and comments. Every single time I have encountered a video where the counts have been disabled by the creator, it’s because the video has something objectively wrong with it. It’s inaccurate, misleading, poor quality, offensive, or some has some other generally negative attribute. This happens less so with comments being disabled. Videos with high up to down vote ratios but with disabled comments are usually because the creator is being attacked by trolls. These videos are usually pretty interesting to watch. So yeah this is an incredibly short sighted change and is removing an important quality signal to viewers.
- smaryjerry 5y agoRemoving the dislike count is the worst possible thing YouTube could do. Youtube is not just people talking about their day or political content. It is practical content, like how-to videos, and entertainment. When you search how to do something the number one indicator it will be useful or helpful video is the dislikes. This is critical for sifting through all of the garbage videos that don’t work or aren’t related who are just trying to make a buck or get views. Even in entertainment dislikes offers the same feedback, and while it’s not a perfect measure, it absolutely provides a good indicator.
- tediousdemise 5y agoI am in support of dislike/downvote buttons being removed across all platforms, for the sole reason that people and groups misuse/abuse them. Legitimate opinions get silenced and squelched by the hivemind, or hidden by propaganda machines such as the JIDF. You can make the same argument that like/upvote buttons also get misused and abused, but the consequences are not the same. You might disagree with this and justify your opinion by saying that misinformation is dangerous. But that's why you have a brain, so that you can make that decision for yourself! When you censor an opinion by downvoting something, you are making an unfair decision for future viewers of that content who would rather make that decision on their own. Moderation/censorship of content that doesn't break the law should be illegal. Edit 1: I should clarify that I wasn't necessarily referring to YouTube here. Likes and dislikes on YouTube are just for measuring engagement and don't reduce access to content. On other platforms, such as HN, hitting the downvote threshold removes it view (or makes it otherwise more difficult to read). To me, this is a weak form of censorship, making it harder to view the content, if not impossible for some people who have poor eyesight or mobility skills. If you have to explicitly toggle on a setting (i.e. showdead) or use JavaScript hacks to make this content visible, I think that's a big problem. Edit 2: I'd love to continue contributing to the discussion, but ironically and unfortunately, I'm rate limited on this website by the moderators to 5 comments per day. So maybe now you can understand where I'm coming from with my seemingly absurd ideas. I don't even know why I continue to use a website that limits my ability to comment and use it effectively. Maybe I'll request deletion and become a permanent lurker, watching all you model citizens engage from a safe distance.
- jeffalo 5y ago> Those in the experiment could still see and use the public dislike button, but because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. I don't understand this part. So, hiding the dislike count means less people will dislike. Then what's the point of disliking a video? It provides much less feedback to a creator than just commenting, it's more often used as a signal to other viewers. If it's hidden, there's really no point of including it at all. In fact, why not remove likes too? And while we're at it, let's remove the view count too. This is a really strange change, and I'm not sure that I'm happy about it.
- smitop 5y agoBTW, you appear to be shadowbanned: many of your comments and all but one submission show as [dead] to me (although some of your comments have been vouched for, which unkills them).
- manuelabeledo 5y agoPeople would rather watch whatever validate their biases, and would rarely dislike something that does not. And the engagement algorithm would work towards that. For those reasons, the dislike button is not going to be a great loss for anyone but those who were using it quite seldomly, and they are a minority.
- crackercrews 5y agoThis is like Amazon letting anyone review a product, but only showing you how many 5-star reviews there are. Completely useless.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Spivak 5y agoThe usefulness of data depends on its quality. If people are submitting lots of thoughtful 1-star reviews then yeah, it's a stupid move. But if when you looked at 1-star reviews, and they were basically the junk ramblings of trolls then you might get a better signal of quality buy just ignoring them.
- crackercrews 5y agoViewers can judge for themselves whether the downvotes are signal or noise. For me, it's been a clear signal. And this move is a clear signal also, of whose pocket Google are in.
- _qzu4 5y agoI used to not understand why videos had dislikes even when they haven't premiered yet. But then one day, I realized that in order for YouTube to stop recommending me some channels, I had to press the dislike button. YouTube recommendation is so bad. Even when you aren't interested in something, they keep on showing it until you click on it. For example, I watched a few Squid Game videos a few weeks ago. Suddenly, because Ben Shapiro did a video on Squid Game, it kept on showing me that thumbnail for days. The algorithm should have realized that his channel was much more about right wing news than Squid Game and shouldn't have shown it every single day on my recommendation. I don't watch any politics on YouTube. The worst part was if I clicked on the video, it would re-enforce the algorithm that I wanted right wing news. So the only option was to click the dislike button. It feel like I was force to click the button.
- goostavos 5y ago(fyi) The ... button has an "I'm not interested in this option / channel" which you can to remove the video without having to click on it + downvote.
- nowherebeen 5y agoI only see "Report" and "Open transcript". I don't see the button you are mentioning. I am using Firefox.
- crackercrews 5y agoAny chance we can make a browser extension that registers votes of and shows vote counts for installed users? Google would fight it. But we could always side-load if they do.
- frozenlettuce 5y agothat could work for any url, by the way. you could vote/downvote and discuss
- Zamicol 5y agoI'd be interested in helping if anyone is working on a project. I'd also like to see this done web-wide.
- crackercrews 5y agoIt would also be great to have an extension that does a twitter search on the current URL. It could run automatically every time you load the page or just run when you click it. And the results could be limited to people you follow/follow you or all results. Just a nice way to see what people are talking about. Not sure this belongs in the same extension. But both are manual fixes for social media problems.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- coolso 5y agoGillette / Proctor & Gamble are having a mega celebration today.
- silent_cal 5y agoI guess we are not allowed to dislike President Poopy Pants and Comrade Kamala
- solarkraft 5y agoOh fuck off.
- Pxtl 5y agoSo, to clarify how HN's moderation works: Disagreeing with people vociferously: you get told off and soft-blocked from HN. Rampant conspiracy theories? Totally hunky dory. Seriously, look at the mayhem in these comment threads. This is Q-level madness.
- Jensson 5y agoYou can't attack others in a discussion, no. About conspiracy theories, assuming that policies created by known democrat supporters are influenced by what issues democrats faces isn't any more far fetched than assuming that policies created by known republican supporters are influenced by what issues republicans faces.
- mike741 5y agoIt seems OK to me, care enough to give a specific example of a comment you'd prefer disallowed?
- slackfan 5y agoCan't let people see the plebs getting rowdy.
- Zamicol 5y agoThis is an astoundingly cowardly decision. It's akin to holding an election and only revealing the votes of the winner. Shame on Google. A far better solution would be allowing more metrics into downvotes. How many of the downvotes come from a Twitter or Reddit post? What's the age of the dislikers? The solution is more transparency, not the suppression of information. I hope there's new solutions, like browser extensions, to fill in the gap. Centralized and unilateral decisions like this only further prove online liberty must fundamentally empower individuals.
- jamesfe 5y agoTL;DR "People watch fewer videos if they see more dislikes which means we make less ad revenue, the result of this A/B test is we will continue to optimize for ad rev"
- FridayoLeary 5y agoA lot of comments seem to think that this is a malicious decision made by the upper management of google for a variety of sinister reasons. I might be naive but i wonder if this isn't just a poorly thought out decision by somebody, the only motivation being that no dislikes will encourage more creators and thus increase advertising revenue. The poorly thought out part of this is that they are treating their users like plastic bags, but i think users are allowing themselves to be treated like that anyway.
- rehhouari 5y agoso what indicator can we use to check whether a video is scam/pointless/have wrong information? The only one benifiting from this is Youtube itself since we'll have to watch entire videos wasting hours on useless content and they make more money. "dislike attacks" what an implausible argument.
- oleglustenko 5y agoWell it seems as a social group we must show the power of our union. So let's report this official announcement! Click 3 dot -> Report Abuse -> Submit Report. Maybe Hacker News effect could change it! Yes we can!
- supperburg 5y agoThis is terrible. The dislikes are often a source of ground truth and sometimes even comfort. Like when Gillette created an advertising campaign that promoted the idea of male original sin, the idea that men are intrinsically bad. Seeing that video in the wild might make you feel crazy but seeing that I was not alone in how I felt about that commercial made me feel like I wasn’t crazy.
- canjobear 5y agoMy experience is that lots of dislikes signals a video which is not what it is claimed to be. For example a video that advertises itself as relaxing sleep music and halfway through you suddenly hear a loud voice screaming "AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA!!!"
- TheFreim 5y ago> relaxing sleep music and halfway through you suddenly hear a loud voice screaming "AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA!!!" You're making it hard for me to be against this change, haha.
- oleglustenko 5y agoTo show power of our Hacker News community and the power of union. I suggest to report the post at Google page. So click 3 dot button -> Report Abuse -> Submit Report. These small 3 steps can show the power of our will! Yes we can!
- Spivak 5y agoI like this. It perfectly illustrates how when you give the public a negative signal it will be turned into a weapon for angry people to hurl at you whether it makes any sense or not.
- clusterfish 5y agoNo, that perfectly illustrates what happens when you censor free expression by only putting an upvote button on a post, and no downvote button.
- Spivak 5y agoYou take out your anger using whatever outlet you think you have available by spamming the report system? So in response to YT taking away downvotes because it’s abused by angry trolls and brigaders you decide to abuse and brigade a different system. Surely nobody can predict what will happen.
- clusterfish 5y agoGet off your high horse. I use the dislike button to inform other users that the video (usually tutorials) is poorly made and is not worth watching. I get huge value by other users doing the same. That's not trolling and that's not abuse. People hitting the company that censors them is not good or bad, it's inevitable. Also, a lot of people who used dislike will now resort to writing unflattering comments to express themselves. That is also inevitable. Let's see how that plays out. Surely the content creators' feelings will be spared. I don't do that, by the way, thanks for asking. I'm just saying it's utterly moronic to take away freedom of expression from all users and channels just because a small subset can't handle seeing a fucking dislike. Such policies should be opt-in for each channel / creator. But that won't help politicians and big brands to save face, so we can't have that. Sad.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ospzfmbbzr 5y agoYawn... who still uses Youtube? I don't even youtube-dl their crap any more. They are a joke. If I wanted to watch TV I would not have cancelled my cable in 2001.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoAlmost any video featuring Biden, the "most popular" president in history, gets disliked by a huge ratio. So Youtube is making it that you can't publicly dislike government propaganda now. Huge setback for civil rights and democracy. Government lies, and corporate media joining hands together yet again.
- OOPMan 5y agoI'm sure all the advertisers will be very happy when their ads for garbage content get downvoted.
- DonHopkins 5y agoThe more often a user dislikes videos, the less it should count.
- kwolff 5y agoIs there anyway to re-enable this on your own channel?
- smolder 5y agoThis is just stupid and their rationale is nonsense. Google demonstrates again how they are bad stewards of the web.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- frankzander 5y agoI cant eat as much as I want to vomit! rm -rf /google
- nitwit005 5y agoIt seems like YouTube just shuts off any interaction whenever a problem crops up. The "fix" for issues with comments on children's videos was to disable all comments on the videos. Which works, I suppose, but if you take it to it's logical conclusion we'll end up with there simply being no user interaction at all.
- Nition 5y agoI went back to look at when they first changed from star ratings to like/dislike, and it seems like they were thinking about going even further and removing the dislike option entirely even back then. They made some comments[1] before that change: > Seems like when it comes to ratings it's pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference. Thus, the ratings system is primarily being used as a seal of approval, not as an editorial indicator of what the community thinks about a video. Rating a video joins favoriting and sharing as a way to tell the world that this is something you love. > We're glad there are so many awesome videos on YouTube, but all of this begs the question: if the majority of videos are getting five stars, how useful is this system really? Would a thumbs up/thumbs down be more effective, or does favoriting do the trick of declaring your love for a video? [1]https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/five-stars-dominate-ratings/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/five-stars-dominate-rat...
- registeredcorn 5y agoI'm still disappointed that they removed that feature. The star rating was superior.
- imajoredinecon 5y agoAt least in my personal observation, it seems like star ratings elsewhere on the internet (I'm thinking particularly of Airbnb and Google Maps reviews) are probably pretty close to bimodal: by and large, people essentially use five stars as a "like" button and one star as a "dislike." Assuming this is the case, a rating of 4.8 stars is essentially a way of saying "95% liked this": why not just strip out the extra abstraction and complexity and instead use a simpler like/dislike model, just like that YT blog post argues? Of course, there are other situations where ratings between 1 and 5 stars _are_ informative: think critic reviews of movies, video, etc. But I think most crowdsourced reviews have kind of converged organically to a like/dislike model.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- adam12 5y agoI'm pretty sure this all started when the Biden campaign started using YouTube back in 2019. Boycott YouTube.
- EnlightenedBro 5y agoTime to switch to Rumble, everyone. https://rumble.com/ https://rumble.com/
- Decabytes 5y agoTake this with a grain of salt, but in one of Devon Nash's videos on YouTube, he mentioned (without a source) that YouTube did a study that looked at likes and dislikes. They tweaked the algorithm based on videos that were heavily liked or disliked, and what they found is that likes and dislikes don't matter (for them). It's all about engagement. So... People will hate watch someone they don't like, and comment on the video about how stupid that person is. These videos with high engagement end up serving lots of ads, and YouTube makes money either way. So my tinfoil hat is that when YouTube recommends a video, before if I saw the heavy dislike bar I might think, "Why is YouTube recommending this bad video to me?" But with dislikes private, I might just engage with the video and think less about why the algorithm recommended it to me.
- winternett 5y agoThe problem with promoting/ranking disliked content is that it may be disliked for valid reasons, like low production quality or annoying elements like bad music etc... I think that when it comes to engagement, Youtube should just police content fairly, apply countermeasures to prevent gaming the system, and allow valid/trusted user accounts to have merit in rating content. There is no easy answer ultimately.
- aijeq 5y agoSeems obvious: 1. Current administration's videos are downvoted heavily. These likely aren't brigades but rather upset constituents. 2. People don't want videos with low dislikes. (1) probably has to do with the white house being "in close contact with" social media, to paraphrase Psaki. (2) almost certainly has to do with ad revenue. Without a dislike count you're forced to watch some nominal amount of the video. I suppose we all saw this coming when Google bought Youtube. It became obvious after "covid misinformation" became the new way to censor anything and everything the ruling party does not like. edit: lmao downvotes you practically need a throwaway to post an opinion contrary to the lay masses.
- prvc 5y agoBy referring to the act of disliking the video as an "attack", they are framing this change as one which protects users, when in fact, only a small minority post videos, and a smaller portion among them are bothered by dislikes. In fact, the change is user-hostile, removing one channel for users to see whether a video is of low quality (inaccurate description, containing false information, etc.), and improving advertiser metrics artificially (this, by their own description).
- m0llusk 5y agoThat isn't what they said at all. They are talking about actual attacks where a group of people share their objections to a video and encourage everyone to click on dislike. Do you really think that this kind of group objection should be sponsored and enabled?
- ernst_10 5y agoSo criticism and encouraging people to consider the criticism? What is wrong with that?
- arrrg 5y agoClicking a dislike button is not, in any sense of the word, criticism.
- ernst_10 5y agoIt is in the english language. > the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes. Regardless the parent was talking about someone sharing more detailed criticism.
- cole-k 5y agoThe hope with youtube videos is that the likes/dislikes represent a random sampling from the ratings of everyone who would watch the video. A brigade is purposefully adding to the sample ratings from only one side. So from an objective standpoint it makes the like/dislike ratio lower quality. But from a less objective standpoint, it's just rude. Even if the rankings are purely cosmetic, why go out of your way to leave a dislike on one person's video if you wouldn't interact with it otherwise?
- TrianguloY 5y agoIn the past, people needed to learn to not take random negative opinions on the internet seriously. Now they don't allow them directly. More seriously: I can understand people feeling bad for negative opinions on their own content (it's hard and you need to feel it directly to be able to understand), however if they do want to protect creators which can't protect themselves, make it invisible for the creators themselves, like a button to "don't see dislikes on my own videos". Those creators will probably be unaware of the fact they are being disliked and learn from it, but at least viewers won't be disturbed.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoYou can't down vote Chinese leaders, and North Korean leaders speeches in their countries. Why should you be able to do in the West. Thanks Youtube, we can't do it here either now. Youtube, making the world a better place, and less embarrassing to our great leaders.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoI bet Google always keeps a few big but not particularly time-sensitive announcements like this in their back pocket so they can drop them as a distraction when some sizeable negative story about them breaks - say, when a $2.8B antritrust ruling goes against them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29175511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29175511)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mike741 5y agoSince it's about to be hidden and unverifiable: Susan Wojcicki's "Freedom of Expression Award" (sponsored by Youtube) video currently has 227 upvotes, 56000 downvotes, and 185000 views. That's a 99.6% downvote ratio.
- peter422 5y agoSo in defense of keeping the dislikes pubic you are pointing to a video in which the dislike count is gamed by an Internet mob?
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoWhy do you considered that ratio "gamed"? Seems like a normal reaction to deplorable behavior. Calling it "gamed" kind of proves the point that this is about silencing actual criticism of actual bad behavior rather than some poor innocent creator getting slammed by random internet mobs looking for scalps. How do you defend her buying herself an award in a transparent attempt to paste over her behavior?
- Zamicol 5y agoFor whatever reason, I see a large majority down voting a video. I can then use my own judgement to speculate on the reasoning. What's the "game"?
- jjcon 5y ago>gamed by an Internet mob What game? People almost universally didn't like a CEO giving herself an award.
- octocop 5y agoPerfect change that just so happen to help out large companies trying to avoid being criticized in the public eye. Just a coincidence that Google put out this change to help the everyday you-tubers receiving harassment online, it probably has nothing to do with large corporations wanting to silence peoples opinions. Lucky I guess
- Causality1 5y agoOh nice, I was just thinking this morning that YouTube isn't nearly "corporate bullshit" enough. /s
- poorjohnmacafee 5y agoThis is not what users want and it's not surprising having now observed multiple rounds of YT censorship campaigns. One way ppl fight back against annoying political narrative videos is to downvote them to the mantle. That also gives everyone solace to know that most everyone else believes the opposite of said political narrative videos. Make no doubt about it, YT and their partners have gotten as political as hell in recent years.
- CryptoLich 5y agowe can complain all we want about this but it's going to change nothing -- we'll get our frustration out here and then comply with whatever they decide to do to further their agenda
- mike741 5y agoSome have already cancelled their Premium subscriptions, others have discovered alternatives to Youtube such as Odysee. So complaining does lead to change, even if it isn't a change in Youtube's agenda.
- xtat 5y agoYoutube is over
- truly 5y agoI am really just starting out my channel, so I am not sure I really understand what is the (real) purpose of this change. A dislike hurts somewhat, but it is unavoidable this to happen when you have a large public. I have not seen dislike attacks (not to say they don't exist), but I'm pretty sure they can be avoided with other tactics. I suspect that not showing the dislikes drives up engagement, but in my experience as a user I rarely look at the number of dislikes to judge a video.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jjice 5y agoThe like:dislike ratio is so important when picking a tutorial video. If I see a video on replacing my headlights has an awful ratio, I'm going to save myself the time and find a different video. YouTube has been disappointing me for years now, mostly with their hiding of things. Subscriptions don't work the same as they used to and recommended videos take precedence over everything else. The issue is that it's so critical to learning these days, and so much of the entertainment I consume comes from it. Can't say I'm surprised though. Social media has it's positives and enjoyable properties, but in the end, they will manipulate the platform in the most fiscally advantageous way.
- devwastaken 5y agoWhen people are unable to express their disagreement with something in a civil way, they become uncivil. There is plenty of bad content on youtube that may not be against the law, but youtube allows it. I can quickly know if something is controversial by the like and dislikes.
- dameyawn 5y agoIn response to their reasoning, why not instead hide dislikes only for smaller creators then? Once you reach a certain threshold of views/subscribers, it becomes visible again.
- happynacho 5y agoProtecting the white house legendary ratios.
- ghalvatzakis 5y agoNow they can successfully release this youtube rewind video that everyone disliked!
- thenews 5y agojust in time for youtube rewind, although they did mention they were not going to do it this year
- josh_today 5y agoWhen videos counter to their narrative are disliked… dislike must be hidden. Time to give their algo some fun and massively like random videos
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- netcan 5y agoThe trend continues... Tiktok pushed the passive user experience further, and youtube is following. The ideal is user launches app, the app takes care of everything else. Looking at the downvote count is just an extra thing the user can, might or should do. The trend is to reduce these. Youtube's being trendy.
- bigyellow 5y agoThat's a charitable interpretation. I posit these products are actually designed to further diminish the range of thought and serve to eliminate discontent, resistance and ultimately political opposition.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sharklazer 5y agoThe only videos I have seen with downvotes that outweigh upvotes are politically controversial. I’m surprised they didn’t do this sooner to be honest, thought they’ve been letting news outlets turn them off for some time now.
- azth 5y agoLook at the downvotes on videos from the white house. It's obvious what's going on.
- gitgud 5y agoIt's not a huge deal in my opinion, it's the same decision Hacker News arrived at right?
- leppr 5y agoIt's not needed on Hacker News since it displays comments in order based on score, and greys-out comments with negative scores.
- DevKoala 5y agoYou have to protect the emperor’s new clothes.
- axiom92 5y agoAll is not lost, as the dislike count is not independent of the number of views and the like count. Specifically, if a popular video has a small number of likes, one can safely assume that it has a large number of dislikes.
- quantumsequoia 5y agoThat is not a safe assumption at all. You're assuming the total number of votes is proportional to the view count. But a more provocative video will prompt more people to vote A video that makes people angry might encourage people to vote who otherwise wouldn't have voted
- axiom92 5y agoI think a popular video will attract votes one way or the other. A video that makes people angry will encourage people to dislike the video, and thus eat into the total vote share. I agree that this likely only covers videos with a large number of views (~millions). There's a long tail where the view count/vote count is not enough to comment on the number of dislikes.
- phatfish 5y agoLiking is overloaded, you "like" a video and it also adds it to your favourites. Which if public could be a reason not to "like". Dislike has no other effect that I am aware of. For this reason it was always broken as far as I'm concerned.
- 1270018080 5y agoSubscriber count is unfettered capitalism The dislike button is for the people
- oblak 5y agoCan't even remember the last time I looked at likes/dislikes of any video I watched. Play count stopped having meaning (to me) at least a decade ago. That said, a couple of years ago I somehow ended up on a channel with literally hundreds of videos. I swear, the average view count of this woman's session was way below one. I just wonder how is that even possible. Spent about 10 minutes clicking on random videos and well, it was sad. Real sad. I wonder if she would've kept going if numbers were hidden. I think she would've bailed long time ago.
- gwbas1c 5y agoI very rarely hit dislike; I mainly do it for misinformation or clear manipulation.
- topspin 5y agoI've found myself doing it for clickbait; lots of videos claiming to be one thing and are instead something else.
- _nothing 5y ago> We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video – still, we believe this is the right thing to do for our platform So basically, "We understand that this feature is useful in helping you determine where to spend your time and attention, but we're going to do it anyway because it benefits us." > and to help create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves. "Because we need our creators to get views and keep making content regardless of whether or not our users think it's worth watching."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rStar 5y agoding ding ding. this is the correct lens through which to view this situation. for anyone who honestly doesn’t understand how straightforward and devastating this argument is, read it again and learn something.
- rossy 5y ago> and reduce dislike attacks – where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos. Why not just hide dislikes from people until they've seen a certain percentage of the video?
- vjancik 5y agoNext, they'll come after sarcastic comments and they won't stop until everybody in the world is smiling and happy :) :) :).
- vjancik 5y agoWorkaround: Create a top comment saying: "Upvote this comment if you disliked this video:"
- cortexio 5y agoprobably because youtube their own videos are mostly downvoted for 90% because everyone recognises they make propaganda videos and people dont like it. But, in general this is bad. How is it any different than north korea, where you can only show your praise to the leader but not the dislike? sigh..
- inChargeOfIT 5y agoThis will make the site useless for finding new content and content creators. And what's the point of a Like count without a Dislike count? I'll just assume every video has as many, if not more, dislikes and will turn to other sources for finding quality content (if at all). And they might as well get rid of the comments section too cause that's where people will voice their opinions.. but maybe that's part of the plan. Anyway, I've been a paying premium member since the beginning but the second I stop seeing dislike counts is the second I find other things to do with my time. Sad, because I really enjoy surfing YouTube.
- ryanisnan 5y agoCompletely - What does 13,478 likes mean if 1,000,000,000 people have viewed the video, and 20,104,189 people disliked it. Batshit stupid.
- da39a3ee 5y agoThis comment is the key isn't it? If someone tells you there's an election in some province of a country that you know nothing about, and they tell you there were two candidates A and B, and they tell you that candidate A received 17,652 votes, do you not need to know the total number of votes cast in order to assess the election results? I always thought you did.
- bsder 5y agoPersonally, I'd rather they keep the dislike count and dump the comments section. I can probably count the number of times I've come across a comments section on YouTube that hasn't been a dumpster fire of idiocy on two hands (and I'm being generous).
- sojournerc 5y agoReally depends on the content. I love surfing comments on a lot of videos (even dash cam vids, hehe). I see a lot of positive comments for my favorite creators too. Would hate to get rid of the encouragement.
- 5y ago
- nfRfqX5n 5y agopurely for engagement
- symlinkk 5y agoJust consume the content, slave. Do not question it, do not resist it, just consume and move on.
- passerby1 5y agoHow to turn off YT recommendations completely? Any FF/chromium extension for that?
- m0zg 5y agoTo be re-introduced once a Republican president is elected in 2024. /s
- inChargeOfIT 5y agoThe like to dislike ratio on their video is exactly why we need to see the counts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxOuG8jMIgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxOuG8jMIgI
- joemaller1 5y agoRIP Neutral Response. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ A brilliant example of very-large-scale spontaneous cooperation: 12 years and 10.4M views, and the like/dislike ratio has been at equilibrium the whole time.
- alexeiz 5y agoI guess Brandon must be getting too many dislikes.
- ncfausti 5y agoI wonder if Likes / Views is a good proxy for dislikes?
- stjo 5y agoIt doesn't differentiate between unengaging and "bad".
- Brian_K_White 5y agoCould someone make an external index and review site for yt videos? yt doing this is essentially yt putting their thumb on the scale, telling you that their product is good, and hiding anyone saying it's not. Generally, you must always have an outside party to review and judge a thing, not the thing itself. Probably yt would try every trademark and copyright legal attack in the book to take down any such site, but it seems obvious that in common sense terms, the only possible way to have reviews of yt videos is for them to be provided by anyone other than any Alphabet property.
- nojs 5y ago> Could someone make an external index and review site for yt videos? Yes, but gaining any sort of widespread traction would be really hard. The vast majority of YT viewers won’t have your chrome extension or whatever installed and without a critical mass of ratings on the long tail of low-view videos, people will lose interest fast. Maybe if you seeded it with scraped vote counts now people would use it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Brian_K_White 5y agoIf the reason was honestly for the stated reason, then why isn't this feature selectable by creator or even by video? The stated reason, as ever, is bullshit.
- swayvil 5y agoYT's aim, with this move, is to make a friendlier environment for propagandists, advertisers and anybody else who's pushing an ideology. They are the #1 source of cash after all. For comparison, Reddit posts advertising that looks exactly like a user post. With voting and discussion turned off.
- buhrmi 5y agoIf that post was a YouTube video it would only have dislikes
- wffurr 5y agoWhat a disaster all the top-level comments are both here and on the article.
- karaterobot 5y agoThey performed an experiment to see if removing the dislike button would mitigate brigade voting, or mob voting, especially against small creators. The results of their experiment, they say, is that it did address this issue. That sounds like a great result! The problem would be if they did not test any other side effect of removing the dislike button. For example, if the only thing they tested was whether it prevented mob downvoting in a small number of cases, and not whether it negatively affected the experience for a majority of users, the results of the experiment would not mean much. Based on the reaction, I am guessing this what they actually did. (If they published their methodology and results somewhere, I apologize: I looked but did not find anything like this). That's the problem with product research: it's often poorly designed, when it's not just designed to confirm a prior decision and back it up with some data.
- nikolayasdf123 5y agocancelling my premium too. screw this.
- dprophecyguy 5y agoThey are removing it before Youtube rewind. Hmmm what could be the reason ???
- jonny_eh 5y agohttps://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22714550/youtube-rewind-canceled-controversy-creators-annual-recap https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/7/22714550/youtube-rewind-c...
- dprophecyguy 5y agomy bad.
- penjelly 5y agowow even developers lose access to this data. i cant say om thrilled with this. "for our platform" seems so odd when youtube is by far the most popular streaming video website.
- hstan4 5y ago> Creators: You’ll still be able to find your exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio for each video–only if you’d like to. What creator that wants to produce high quality content wouldn’t want to see how their videos are performing? Total lunacy. All this in response to “dislike attacks” which are likely extremely uncommon. > it’s an important step to reduce behavior that aims to silence and harass creators Can someone legitimately get behind the fact that pushing a button that says you dislike the content is silencing or harassing the creator? If they had targeted specific comments that would maybe make sense but literally by pushing a button this is the case?
- kf6nux 5y ago> [can you reasonably say rallying a mob against someone harasses or silences that person?] Metrics would support that. A large number of humans speak less when they see their speech is unpopular.
- humanistbot 5y ago> A large number of humans speak less when they see their speech is unpopular. This is a good thing. Some videos are bad. People who make content in the public sphere should expect others to engage with it.
- kf6nux 5y ago> This is a good thing That's controversial. Determining correctness by popularity is one of the most common logical fallacies. What isn't controversial is that allowing targeted harassment of creators is bad for YouTube.
- humanistbot 5y agoWhat I mean is that up and down votes are also speech. If I call myself a baker and open up a bakery, my customers will either like my cakes, dislike my cakes, or not have a strong opinion either way. They will express their opinions in a variety of online and offline forums. Some of them might be cranks and trolls. Others might be discriminatory towards people who look like me. Those people are jerks, although it is sometimes hard to tell at first. It is even harder to have formal rules for fairly and efficiently filtering out the jerks. But the point of having a public business is that you're putting yourself out there. If you don't want to get the feedback, maybe you should be able to disable the up/downvote feature on your videos, just like you can disable comments. And I completely get why some people disable comments on YouTube, for the same reason I get why some companies will want an active presence on Facebook and Twitter but not reddit. But if you're going to take away up/downvotes site-wide, then YouTube's same rationale should apply to disabling comments site-wide. The harm that you can commit through paragraphs of text is so much more than you can in a single bit. Coordinated harassment campaigns can use comments to doxx, to spread misinformation, to send viruses and malware, and more. And you know what, we need to get rid of elections too. That's just a single bit you flip for a candidate or an issue. If the concern isn't the harm of the downvote but the danger of compressing discussion into such a lossy format (like how people critique Twitter's character limits as to why it is a bad platform for nuanced discussion), then voting for elections seems to be just a problematic, right?
- entaroadun123 5y agoHa... They pretend like this affects small creators when really it’s to prevent people from voicing dissent with state propaganda.
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- unknownOrigin 5y agoEnd of the site. There were many changes but this one will kill it in the long run. Aaaanyways, there competitors brewing up. Recently I visited Rumble, thinking "meh, one of these youtube clones again" only to be shocked that plenty of videos seem to be getting hundreds of thousands of views there. Odysee and Bitchute seem to be doing OK too? I don't know. On one hand it's sad to see Youtube go just because of Google disliking (no pun intended) that people can dislike their corporate messaging (rewind... anything biden related etc.), on the other hand Google can go to hell.
- Hermel 5y agoWhat a surprise: if you disable a feature, the abuse of that feature is reduced... For a balanced assessment, you also need to take the destroyed value of disabling the feature into account.
- hndamien 5y agoWhy not just hide it from accounts that show dislike attacking behaviour? Surely this is trivial to detect from Google AI/Deep Mind?
- swayvil 5y agoA browser plugin that fills in the missing functionality. Surely that exists.
- thread_id 5y agoFunny thing about that.... I never pay any attention to the likes or dislikes or even the comments. I sample the video and if I like it I watch and if not move on to the next. Can't be even the leaset bit bothered by the social interaction noise. I'm surprised to here that others actually take meaning from it. So I read through the comments more and many deal with quality of content - for example instructions that are flat out wrong. I viewed a video on how to change spark plugs in Honda 6 cylinder car. The content creator gave the instruction to put dielectric grease right on the tip of the spark plug. I found a comment that pointed out how utterly stupid this was. Yet the comment was pushed lower by many comments praising the contect creator for his helpful video. So I have to conclude that down votes are a usefull tool. Even if they are misused.
- dvhh 5y agoI think there is an opportunity here for a browser extension to rate content.
- hstan4 5y agoIf people want to actually argue that a creator can be harassed by a dislike button, why not give the creator the option to disable dislikes for that specific video rather than pushing this onto every video out there?
- kf6nux 5y agoThat's a great point. Hiding the number is a sensible default, but allowing the creators to show it sounds good too. Especially for the common use-case of "how to" videos where a creator may be proud of the ratio.
- mard 5y agoIt was never about creators or dislike attacks. There's a reason why they didn't adopt an opt-in solution. It's about corporations complaining about their ads running on unpopular content. It's about making people waste more time on low quality content, scam and disinformation across the platform. What you hear from them are pure PR lies. They don't care about small creators and they never did. All they want is to make you watch more ads at the expense of your time and welfare.
- nigrioid 5y agoThis is because of all the COVID-19 mainstream media videos with far more dislikes than likes.
- narrator 5y agoI always said that youtube is too successful and is looking for ways to get rid of users. Peak youtube, as far as pure power for users, was probably the late 2000s. 2016 was when things started to go downhill. We have a lot of problems where our society has been too successful at its technological goal. Inequality, climate change, gun control. All areas where capitalist economics has produced wild success and enormous effort is diverted from other useful goals to control that success.
- kf6nux 5y agoI'm a little surprised no one reached for the obvious humor here: Google spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn humans will create mobs. This was such an obvious/good change to make. Viewers will still be able to use views:upvotes ratio for determining a video's popularity/worth. A mob won't want to attack that ratio because a high view count could encourage more views. Judging by what's bubbling up on HN, I guess I'm in the minority on this one.
- greatgib 5y ago<<In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior 1.>> Clearly a flawed conclusion. For the result of their experiment they deduced what they wanted it to say. Because we can easily say that the effect is not "dislike attacking" but other effects: - shy people more afraid to give their opinion not knowing that others have done the same. - the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it. Imagine if you were voting for something but no one will give you the result of the votation. Also, strangely they did not do the same experiment with the "like" button to see if there was not a "like attack". So when I see something like that, I'm thinking that they are now in the dominant position where they don't have to care about their users anymore...
- hu3 5y agoIt seems they want to turn Youtube into a feels-good, positive-vibes platform like Instagram aims to be.
- kf6nux 5y agoI suspect their dataset was direct link dislikes. I.e. people who arrived at YouTube from another site at a specific video who dislike the video. That's the characteristic of a coordinated dislike campaign. > the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it That was exactly the point. They didn't want the attack mobs seeing the fruits of their labor, making it feel useless, making fewer people mob.
- xeromal 5y agoI honestly don't see a problem. If someone truly dislikes a video, they put in effort instead of encouraging a mob mentality by a high number of dislikes Maybe Youtube can somehow incorporate the dislikes into "Likely to enjoy" score similar to how its set up on Google maps. It's pretty accurate from my experience.
- educaysean 5y agoCompletely agreed with this. If you make a feature less useful than before of course it will be engaged with less. A radical approach in the similar vein would be to just turn off half your infra and add a ton of latency to YouTube. That would similarly solve the "dislike attacking behavior" altogether at the cost of having your existing users hate your product, with the added bonus of server cost savings.
- nickstinemates 5y agoI don't think I've ever looked at likes/dislikes for a youtube video. I also don't engage in most up/downvote systems on average. I am not sure how much of an outlier I am, but I wouldn't notice this being gone at all.
- avsteele 5y agoWhy not just make sure the person has watched >X% of the video before allowing like/dislike? Its like they haven't though this through...
- pshushereba 5y agoRebecca Black from 10 years ago would've liked this.
- arwhatever 5y agoMake the like names invisible across Twitter.
- nobody0 5y agohidden negativity is depressing. "Sans la liberté de blâmer, il n'est point d'éloge flatteur"
- tmule 5y agoI’m pretty cynical. There are a number of deeply unpopular progressive causes for which dislikes would dominate likes on YouTube. My sense is that YouTube wants to mask such information. That’s a good way to not reveal the chasm between elite opinion and popular opinion.
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- tetrahedr0n 5y agoBrilliant. People will often watch something they dislike with more intensity than something they like. The number of dislikes isn't the reason they want to watch it, it's the idea the title or cover image brings to mind. And those ideas and images are curated by Google. Take the number of dislikes out of visibility and you strip the noise away from the signal that makes them money; views. And who knows, the user might end up watching something that they wouldn't normally due to dislikes and, surprise, they like it. More exposure, less echo chamber-like. Less potential influence over a viewer's opinion of the content.
- sjwalter 5y agoNot brilliant at all. This is yet another move to make YouTube friendly to the same powers that be everywhere. This is a tool for centralized control, not a platform for everyone. The reason they're doing this is the whitehouse is a joke. It's harder to convince the proles they should continue to be as easily mollified as they are when the proles aren't aware of how angry everyone else is. It's hard to convince the world that what the TV people are paid to say is correct when it's clear that the vast majority disagree.
- qu4ku 5y agoMinistry of Truth found dislike button not helpful.
- voldacar 5y agoMakes a little more sense when you consider what the #1 disliked video is. Clearly google is really in touch with their audience and their desires here
- docmars 5y agoWhitehouse can't handle criticism, bummer.
- missinfo 5y agoCheck out the downvotes and top comments on their announcement video. Frankly I'm surprised they didn't disable comments yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxOuG8jMIgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxOuG8jMIgI "Great to see YouTube finally protecting creators like Pepsi and Gillette" "This is the most offensively dishonest thing you've posted even for your standard. Dislike counts were essential to spot scams, fake/bad tutorials, clickbaits and were especially important as a tool to fight back against horrible megacorporation announcements." "To protect creators that suck, like politicians, big corporations that sponsor us, and astroturfed talentless on demand era hacks, we're preventing you from seeing how unpopular they are." “We want everyone to have a voice, unless those voices are valid criticism or go against our agenda.” "No one wants this other than the corporations who are getting shamed for putting out awful content that the public dislike. You are removing a key protection people have from scamming, dangerous or misleading content and are protecting no one. Stop hiding behind 'small creators mental health' like you think you're doing anything. We can all still see how many dislikes our video got. Our mental health is not protected in any fashion. The only thing you change is the public facing, and we know why you did this." "When I was 12, my videos were dislike bombed. Not many liked them. Sure, it hurt, but I matured since then. I matured, because I was able to respond to the negative feedback my content was receiving. If not it, I would be falsely convinced of my perceived non-existant greatness. Dislikes are key to personal and content growth."
- qwerty456127 5y agoDislikes should be shown for government-affiliated political videos, e.g. speeches of politicians.
- TeeMassive 5y agoGoogle is currently undergoing antitrust legislation proceedings against them. YouTube has removed dislikes from White House videos in the past: https://cnnbc.com/youtube-deleted-2-5-million-dislikes-from-biden-white-house-videos https://cnnbc.com/youtube-deleted-2-5-million-dislikes-from-... Connect the dots.
- eftychis 5y agoIf they are worried about dislike attacks why don't they blind the data with delayed effects?? Like update of a dislike appears days later but you can still see a ratio of likes vs dislikes for the last year or so...
- spicyramen 5y agoI'm a big soccer fan, dislike button is the best metric to gauge a game summary
- emodendroket 5y agoSurprised it's held on this long.
- joshsyn 5y agoBye bye youtube. Wokeism ruining everything.
- bagacrap 5y agowill Google remove ratings under 4 stars from Places to protect new restauranteurs from 2-star attacks?
- newbie2020 5y agoLol cause Biden’s videos have so many dislikes . So funny how much Trump and his movement have affected tech policy these last few years.
- cardosof 5y agoThis is bad for us users because we will get less information and won't know what contents are being rejected and what's being accepted. This is good for their ad business department because more users will click on play, incrementing the view count and generating more ad impressions. This is good for their PR/Law departments because famous people and politicians will be less likely to complain about mass rejection.
- twirlock 5y agoEveryone understands that this is to protect corporate news from negative feedback. Everyone understands this.
- rootsudo 5y agoI really dislike how the world is going to a "forced like" model - can't show any dissenting view, argue, debate or have personal opinions. It even goes to some facebook groups, discords and more. Say anything that's against the grain and immediate kick and ban. What a change from the old days, where through debate you found great middle ground, or just fun chat/time waste on IRC.
- Drblessing 5y agoTerrible decision as someone who uses YouTube a lot…high dislike rate is a key signal for creators lying or shenanigans in a video…guess people are going to start leaving more negative comments. Thanks YouTube!
- ddingus 5y agoAlso, coming soon: User comment: DISLIKE Other users click like button on comment a ton of times... Next official move? Making comments visible to subscribers and premium users only... Google is going against basic human nature here and it's Orwellian as fuck. Next unofficial move? Censor comments containing, "DISLIKE" because the ones doing it will stand right out same as they did before and having them not stand out is what is being attempted here. And? Yeah, DISLIKE Edit: I realize this is part of a bigger trend and that is to avoid mass signaling of any kind. The major players do not want large numbers of people communicating because those lead to large actions, which are expensive and risky from their point of view. While this is perfectly understandable, a functional society allows for these things and it bears those costs and risk because of the even greater costs and risks associated with clamping down on dissent like this.
- TheFreim 5y agoVideo creators can censor comment sections as they wish, so this really won't work.
- ddingus 5y agoSee edit: It will, and the ones who allow it will stand out just as they do now by allowing comments when others do not. Fact is most creators actually delivering value stand to gain from both robust comments and feedback. It's just not a big deal. In a more general sense, it's turning a comms medium into broadcast. In broadcast nobody really gives a fuck what ordinary viewers, listeners have to say. Their job is to eat ADS and shit CASH.
- geitir 5y agoI was trying to put this into words and I like your explanation. People don't seem to realize that yes as long as you can trust the mediating party it may be a net benefit to avoid negative signaling, but the problem is once those precedents are in place it only takes one bad actor to send it all crashing.
- cyberpsybin 5y agoHow is it a "trend"? Facebook never had dislike. So does instagram. Even Twitter never had a downvote as far I can remember. Issue is that Google is removing it after entire YouTube culture was built around it.
- davewasthere 5y agoWhat's stupid, is (as long as comments are enabled) all someone needs to say is "I dislike/hate/loathe this video" and everyone who would have previously disliked the video, upvotes that comment (perhaps as well as...). Although I guess it all counts as engagement, so win-win as far as YT are concerned.
- AnonC 5y agoThis seems one sided. Why not hide the “like” count too and make both like and dislike counts visible only to the creators while using the individual action of each viewer for recommendations? I don’t understand why a dislike brigade could be harmful but a like brigade couldn’t be (like propaganda and/or misinformation). They seem to have considered only the impact on creators, who are a small percentage of the population, and not the impact on susceptible viewers, who are much larger in number.
- mrpopo 5y agoExactly. Hiding the like + dislike count would actually have an interesting impact on the experience, where you can choose to like/dislike based on your own opinion only. The result will be more relevant for algorithms and more meaningful for creators who will receive honest feedback.
- kristopolous 5y agoIt's like they took the advice from the book "Nudge" a little too seriously. Also, this is a great example of why using that advice doesn't work. It presumes known intent, prescriptive purpose, characterizable frame of mind, homogeneity of these attributes, and that you have perfect, infinite information without any externalities. Classic silicon valley-brain and a great example of how these approaches are limiting and self defeating with the same smell every time
- defaultname 5y ago> I don’t understand why a dislike brigade could be harmful but a like brigade couldn’t be (like propaganda and/or misinformation). Likes or dislikes in isolation are pretty coarse metrics. Is it small, medium, big, or a huge number? Outside of that, it doesn't really matter. The ratio, however, can be hugely misleading, and is most certainly one of the factors leading to ignorance bubbles. I just replied to another comment that held this ratio as a demonstration of "popular opinion", and this is a very common assumption. It isn't popular opinion. It is the usually tiny, self-selecting group of individuals who seek out this information and then purposefully engage with it. The more engaged a bubble is, the more outsized this ratio will be. Vaccination content is a great example. A heavy majority of the public is pro-vaccination, pro-mandates, pro-masking, etc. But they do it and go on with their life. They aren't watching videos and clicking little arrows hoping to change the world. Anti-vax people spend their days filling Facebook feeds, sharing memes, and clicking up and down arrows. So videos for the former tend to have terrible ratios, while the latter have great ratios. Despite being fringe beliefs. But then people come out of it deluded into thinking it's popular sentiment, and they're really just the "silent majority", etc.
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- fartcannon 5y agoUnfortunately, like Facebook before it, this change signals to me that YouTube is for an older generation now and is on its way to being irrelevant in the future. It was a nice ride, though.
- dmalvarado 5y agoWHAT. The like / dislike ratio is EXTREMELY useful. I'm very disappointed that they would do this. I expect it will be much harder to avoid useless content with this removed.
- flippinburgers 5y agoWith each year the internet becomes less and less about individual voices being heard. Dystopia here we come.
- mythrwy 5y agoMaybe the end goal was always the control of information and advertising was just a sideline. Same with Facebook.
- xbmcuser 5y agoI personally rarely vote up or down nor do I notice the voting numbers. So I don't feel this will make a difference to me.
- hnburnsy 5y agoYouTube used to have 5 star ratings, they got rid of that in 2010 [1]. If stars and dislikes are so bad, why do they have them in the Play Store. I wonder if Trip Advisor and Yelp are next with only likes. [1] - https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/five-stars-dominate-ratings/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/five-stars-dominate-rat...
- aww 5y agoI have never ever looked at the dislike counts to judge a video. I am baffled by most of the top comments here, that express frustration or outright anger about this. I don't think like counts are relevant to me either. When I consume YouTube (and I have a premium membership which I am happy with) I either know the creator well or I have to trust the search and recommendation algorithms to give me good content for my current interest. I don't find it hard to skim a video and judge for myself if it is worth my time. I'm betting I'm part of the silent majority on this. You can interpret these like and dislike interactions in two ways: in absolute terms or in personal terms. "Is this video good?" or "Is this video good for me right now?" We can debate what most users are trying to express* or if they are brigading, but it is mostly irrelevant. As soon as the platform stops showing everybody the same videos or at least random videos and it starts recommending specific videos to specific users then like/dislike interactions are a function of how well the algorithm is working, not some absolute measure of sentiment. Dislikes just indicate that the video was recommended to the wrong people. Netflix doesn't show the number of likes and dislikes and I haven't heard of anyone demanding that this change. * The label "like" certainly suggests a personal judgment. On the other hand, the like/dislike placement and other feedback options suggest an absolute judgement. When I have (very rarely) used the dislike button it was more about a bad recommendation. Often the video wasn't bad in any absolute sense. In my experience I have to go looking for videos I truly dislike in some absolute sense. YouTube does occasionally ask me to rate a recommendation and there is a "Not Interested" option which are alternatives that are even more explicitly about recommendations. Unfortunately these are only offered before you even try to watch a video or if you are very intentional about returning to your recommendations feed and finding "Not Interested" in the three dots menu.
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- throwawaywindev 5y agoAgreed, my first thought was why don’t they remove the Like button too?
- bsdetector 5y ago
- calimac 5y agoLook at how hard wh.gov got ratio’d https://www.reddit.com/r/TheBidenshitshow/comments/qr2bfg/youtube_to_hide_dislike_counts_starting_december/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/TheBidenshitshow/comments/qr2bfg/yo...
- TedShiller 5y agoBrandon must be pleased
- gverrilla 5y agoMaybe Zuck payed for it? His meta videos had quite a high ratio of dislikes.
- frankfrankfrank 5y agoWell, at least they didn't blame the weather for this. The levels of dishonesty are just rather breathtaking at this point … and really concerning, because nothing at all good ever comes from dishonesty. Anyone who has paid any attention at all knows exactly why they are doing away with the down vote count and it has nothing really to do with any sham experiment that is post hoc rationalization for a foregone conclusion.
- anonu 5y agoI like the concept of chrome extensions as overlays on pages, adding a new dimension to the page. Seems like one would be useful in this case...
- TheFreim 5y agoReminds me of Gab's "dissenter" extension which added comments and live chat to any web page. I don't know if it still exists since it got removed from extension marketplaces.
- grae_QED 5y agoI understand the incentives, however, I think the biggest consequence of this is that it will give a false sense of support on conspiratorial videos and other forms of misinformation. Some people think that the more likes a video has, the more the community agrees with it's message, and therefore the more truth the video contains. The classic appeal to the majority fallacy. This is only going to strengthen those communities and empower them further.
- ordiel 5y agoOh! the maximum expression of irony comes by seen how many dislikes that shit is getting...
- throwaway2077 5y agoit is unacceptable that goodthink content that promotes correct opinions gets ratioed and ridiculed. the writing was on the wall for a while. this was probably the final nail in the coffin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDcvPf78g1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDcvPf78g1k kudos to our billionaire overlords, celebrities and their first world cosmopolitan yuppie congregation for looking out for us unwashed, uneducated plebeians. without their guidance, we'd be lost.
- buhd 5y agoThe true tragedy in all of this is that the Neutral Response will no longer be True Neutral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ
- throwaway879080 5y agoApparently someone's feelings got hurt by dislikes lol #LetsGoBrandon
- randomperson_24 5y agoEven HN doesn't show the number of downvotes publicly. So why this much hate?
- htoweur234 5y agoSnowflakes want to spout lies day in day out, but don't want to be accountable for it, or be called out on their lies. Twitter and now Google. Par for course I guess.
- rpz 5y agoNavigate to the cdc's youtube channel and click through their recent videos, most of them have more dislikes than likes, especially if the video is related to the covid vaccines. Search "covid vaccine" and have a look through those as well. Plenty of them have many more dislikes than likes, especially if the video is about mandates and or from MSM.
- lenkite 5y agoLooks like there is a lot of heavy political pressure to remove dislikes. We are now rapidly moving to a post-orwellian society.
- Gentil 5y agoAs much as I would love to give the benefit of the doubt, this is purely about increasing engagement. Disliking something was a very easy way to say I don't like this. When something controversial happens from now onwards, you will have engage in the comment section. Humans cannot just move on when they have strong feelings about something like Politics or Climate change for example. With the dislike button gone, most people will feel the need to say you don't like/agree with a video. How do you do that? Comments. The negative engagement makes Youtube/Google money. This has been a known fact for a long time. This way they can cash on it more with increased engagement.
- tootahe45 5y agoI think everybody expected this. Big corp/biden news has struggled to keep up the facade lately. Look at the dislike counts here https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos
- latitudan 5y agoThere were videos with a exact issue I am searching for in the title. When the ratio to dislike to like is huge I can know that they didn't address the issue properly in the video. When they take away this functionality, I have to watch and waste my time or refer comments(if the creator didn't disable that, which is another red flag)
- annadane 5y agoHey, Google/Youtube product managers. If you're here, read the comments and see how wrong you are and how much people will detest this change
- dotancohen 5y ago> You can still dislike videos to further personalize and tune your recommendations. If I come across a low-quality rip of Dark Side of the Moon and dislike it, will Youtube recommend to me less Pink Floyd or less low quality rips? What if I dislike that horrible Barenboim performance of Beethoven's Ninth? Will I get less Beethoven or less horrible performances? What about reports of Israel killing Gazan children, when the video footage clearly shows children killed when a Hamas projectile they were "guarding" prematurely detonated? Do I get less news or less lies? What about that idiot who knows a lot about cars and car history (Donut maybe) but screams and acts like he graduated from Animal House? Do I get less informative car videos or less puerile screaming and sentences composed of 15 cuts, sometimes right in the middle of a compound word? I think that basing recommendations on a single dimension is flawed in its own right.
- dotancohen 5y agoI just went to Youtube's homepage for the first time in ages, to see what it would recommend for me. I saw maybe a dozen suggested videos just to check it out. And I would say that all but two had either a misleading title or a misleading thumbnail. These are things directly related to my interests: self defense, computer security, lockpicking, spaceflight, physics, automobiles. But other than the young man talking about SpaceX (Marcus House) and the Lock Picking Lawyer, every single video had either a title that misrepresented or completely lied about the content, or a very attractive thumbnail that was barely tangentially associated with the content.
- josteink 5y agoWelcome to monetised platforms with a “infinite” global reach. People are going to game it. They are going to cheat. Especially when the platform itself allows it. But hey! “Small creators!”, right?
- dusted 5y agoI actually thing this is a fair idea. Preserving the button so I can tell the algorithm (and video author) that it's not something I want to see is a good thing. Hiding the number of dislikes makes me unable to be biased towards what I've seen and forces me more directly to form my own opinion. I think it would be a good idea to do the same with the Likes count.
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoSo, now it is same like Instagram there is only like, how do we stop toxic/click-bait videos spreading?
- beezischillin 5y agoThis is part of a wider trend in the corporate internet of getting rid of visible user interaction to stop publicising user opinion. News publications have slowly gotten rid of comments sections, Google itself (an entity quite close to the USG) is following suit. Of course I suspect that the idea here is less about creator choice, since they can already hide and filter user interaction to their hearts content and more about some high profile channels of some importance being able to save face since manually disabling interactions looks worse for them. I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube. I wonder if something like that would be viable, maybe with the addition of a like dislike bar.
- Thorentis 5y agoYes, Gab made their own browser called Dissenter that added a comment section to every page of the Internet. Interestingly, I can find very little when Googling for it now. I'm sure other projects have tried this too.
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- rStar 5y agothis is obviously so advertisers don’t have to deal with ratio’d videos. advertisers like phizer who pay for content on all advertising platforms, and who pay for content like rachel maddow, tucker carlson and meet the press. that content must be seen as legitimate by users who don’t already know that it isn’t. it’s mind control, and it’s at the behest of the monied interests so good luck with your toddlers all you parents. as someone who escaped/survived a cult i figured out a way around mind control, but that’s beyond the ability of most people. I’m Glad I Don’t Have Kids.
- Inu 5y agoYears ago on zeit.de, the online version of the German newspaper, you could sort the user comments by upvotes. But the most upvoted comments often happened to be quite critical of the articles or what might be called the political mainstream. Then at some point the button for sorting by upvotes was removed, and has been absent ever since. I felt somewhat reminded of this sudden disappearence.
- bamboozled 5y agoPotential useful idea: a third party like / dislike extension?
- artdigital 5y agoSo I have never clicked a like nor dislike button on YouTube after they switched from stars to the thumbs. I always wondered who actually puts in the extra few seconds to do so, but I'd guess it's people that have a very strong opinion. Especially the "Don't forget to smash that like button below" became so much noise that it's getting auto-filtered in my head This change feels like the next step of positioning YouTube as something like a TV alternative, encouraging more long-form content and series over one-off videos.
- truthwhisperer 5y agoa lot of EU propaganda videos like illegal immigrants or climate got a lot of dislikes. First they played the Russian Card but as that general public did not accept this they now hide the dislikes because they want to force people to like climate actions and welcome immigrants.
- yanis_t 5y agoSo who's the first to implement a Chrome extension that brings the dislike button back?
- Richard_Kayala 5y agoHoly shit, who even asked for this? A bunch of woke adult cry babies who are concerned about hurting people's feelings? Who want to dodge criticism at every turn? Hmmm... what political leaning could they have? I wonder what kind of ideology this favors.... perhaps a certain belief that preaches that one sex is equal to another whilst doing everything they can to harm one of the sides and prevent them from speaking out? Also if YT really did care about their creators, how about they stop allowing hate raids to occur? People mass dislike and report a video when it hurts their feelings and this is more detrimental to creators since not only does the creator get hit with the same impact as the dislike button, their livelihoods also get threatened. Literally a bucket of marketing and 0 impact.
- rullelito 5y agoIn 10 years we will have forgotten that internet was mostly bidirectional.
- dotancohen 5y agoFrom the fine article: > You can still dislike videos to further personalize and tune your recommendations. 2016 Dislike button: Feature to inform other users that a video is not worth watching. 2021 Dislike button: Feature to inform google to show _you_ other content. Google is hijacking user interface concepts to slowly train users to train the machine about how to train them.
- nirui 5y ago> In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior "attacking behavior"? This tone is giving me some weird feelings. Here is a constructive opinion: Add it as an optional feature. Let the publisher select "Display both like and dislike counts", "Display only like counts" and "Don't display both count". YouTube has already implemented the "Display both" and "Hide both" option in their "Studio"/video manage page, they just need to add a new one.
- slightwinder 5y agoThis will not work, because then people will assume that everyone who disables dislikes does it for reasons of bad content, not because of cybermobbing or similar reasons. Disabling it for all is a social solution to protect everyone together.
- resonious 5y agoI had the exact same reaction after reading > We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks. How do they know that? I hate to be rude but what if people genuinely don't like the content? Of course maybe someone said upfront "I am dislike bombing this video with my 100 youtube accounts" but otherwise it's not clear to me how people are differentiating between an attack and a genuine expression of opinion (though an admittedly rather coarse one).
- lloydatkinson 5y agoThis is insane.
- canbus 5y agoCool, now I can't dislike a video, instead I'll just commment "this video sucks" on every video that I don't find useful. Surely this change doesn't solve anything?
- nextlevelwizard 5y agoThey should also remove comments at this point.
- maxehmookau 5y agoTalk about tinkering around the edges. How about making an effort to remove polical and health misinformation?
- throwaway2077 5y agothe writing was on the wall for a while. this was probably the final nail in the coffin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDcvPf78g1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDcvPf78g1k go glimpse it in all its glory before it gets memoryholed
- Tucanix 5y agoThis is a terrible decision. It also feels very undemocratic and a way to undermine trust and hide public opinion on a topic. Like a company made a screw up, before it was easy to see public opinion on the matter, but this just allows companies to hide everything, it feels like this decision was only made for companies and people with a controversial opinion like the feminist movement or a racist right wing movement. I mean read the text "dislike attacks", this reads deeply like some disgruntled femminist who's community keeps getting dislikes because they have extremely controversial opinions. The femminist/SJW community really dislikes democracy and want more censorship it's no joke they are called "Feminazis". I deeply dislike this decision and I feel like there is some hidden money or power or intent behind this decision to undermine democracy, this is deeply concerning.
- AHappyCamper 5y agoAKA: We need to stop a metric that puts Democrats, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris in such a bad (horrible) light. This has nothing to do with content creators or audience. This is all about elections, politics, and most of all Joe Biden/Kamala Harris.
- greenimpala 5y agoNo matter whether you agree or disagree with this change (good reasons for both sides in the comments), what does it say about our society that a minute UI change on a website by a private company can potentially cause huge consequence
- lucideer 5y agoThis seems like an odd thing to target. I haven't found dislikes to be problematic in the context of YouTube videos: in fact they're usually an indicator of something in the content itself (I've only ever seen high dislikes either on videos that were themselves problematic or harmful, or on unpopular corporate announcements). For "creators" on YouTube the real problems seem to come from the contents of comments. This[0] recent video rant has some interesting insights toward the end of the video where other popular YouTubers are interviewed on how negative comments impacted them. What I found thought provoking was how much of a negative impact some particular types of comments that seemed in good intent-e.g. commenters stating their preference for a previous video format "I preferred when you ___". Feels like Google/social media sites could do something around sentiment heuristics; I know Twitter has started some stuff like this. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVCpKfedfok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVCpKfedfok
- ArcCompArthur 5y agoIn my opinion this is a bad move. The dislike counter helps me optimize my time and help me avoid bad information. For example if I see a tutorial or some other video with many dislikes I can sometimes predict that the steps in the video aren’t reproducible. In several cases the creator of a video tutorial has linked malicious software in the video as part of the steps of the tutorial and I’ve caught that by first noticing the dislike counter.
- streamofdigits 5y agoIts a simplistic solution to a serious problem that plagues all social platforms. If anything we need more qualifiers not fewer: The like/dislike choice is creating an artificial binarity that doesn't exist in real life. Organized like/dislike campaigns motivated by whatever commercial or political or other reasons are facilitated by a sense of impunity and unaccountability.
- u-rate 5y ago„I sm your dislike button“ comments shall return
- rickspencer3 5y agoI read this as an example of my belief that unfettered engagement without a strong Code of Conduct enforced by human moderates always leads to a toxic community. Removing degrees of freedom in expression is necessary without such efforts to have and enforce standards. For example, if you use Nintendo products, you can see that they rarely allow unfettered communication. For example, you can choose from a list of things to say, or you can choose an emotion to express, but you can't type whatever you want to other players on their network (usually).
- cmaggiulli 5y agoThis is another big tech bubble wrap initiative. There is no “disapprove” option left. Everyone needs to be positive about everything at all times
- alias_neo 5y agoI'm listening to a "Spaces" chat about this on Twitter right now, and I tend to disagree with the consensus, but I don't have a voice there. As a viewer, who uses YouTube for educational/learning reasons, dislike ratio is really important for me to know whether I should or should not spend the hour or sometimes more to watch it, rather than go find something else which may be better. The pessimist in me sees this as a way for YouTube to take away that knowledge you'd have up front, forcing you to watch a video (and the adverts it contains) before you can decide whether it was worth your time. The pragmatist in me however believes that if we're going to remove dislike counts, we should remove like counts, but again, the pessimist sees this as something that wouldn't benefit YouTube. Ultimately, given that people are being abused through the counter, I accept the removal of its utility and will probably just bounce out of videos that may or may not have been suitable much more quickly. For the record, I believe I may have _clicked_ dislike, no more than a handful of times ever for really, truly poor "content".
- AcerbicZero 5y agoSoooo I guess I just write a quick grease monkey script to just show views/upvote ratio? It’s not ideal as upvote/downvote for filtering trash, but it should still help.
- Ellipse0934 5y agoMy comment on their post: (Nobody will read it there but you fine folk might) > Just letting you know that I have unsubscribed from youtube premium and will actively be looking for youtube alternatives for content consumption (and creation in the future ?). While the dislike button has potential for abuse there is also potential for abuse by having no feedback mechanism. There are tons of DIY/informative videos on youtube where the information is wrong and can hurt viewers, what happens when someone unsuspecting installs a virus on their computer or gets scammed ? What happens when someone buys a product whose quality is extremely poor ? Does youtube take responsibility ? No, because you are a platform and had no role. I don't mind if you want to monitor the dislikes for abuse but this is taking it too far. I also don't mind creators manually switching off the bar for their videos. At the end of the day you are manufacturing consent for your users as per the demands of your corporation friends and advertisers. You want a happy place where everything is happy and joyful with no abuse and attacking but alas that is not the world in which we live. Have fun and make profits hacking the brains of the viewers you "say" you care about for your advertisers and corporate friends. Peace out!
- cs702 5y agodang -- have you guys experimented with not graying out downvoted comments?
- tristor 5y agoI don't understand the rationale? I spend a lot of time (probably more than I should) on YouTube, since it's full of interesting videos that teach me new skills. My experience has been that mass dislikes only happens on videos that are 1. bad quality in multiple dimensions 2. false / misinformation 3. politically contentious. For most videos, they have a positive like/dislike ratio, and you can use this as a strong signal about quality on the topic in the description/title. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that a dislike is "harassment" or an "attack". This really reads to me like Google is upset by the politically contentious videos that do get ratioed, and this is politically motivated on their part. Generally speaking, YouTube content creators trend left on US political issues, but YouTube's audience reflects the mainstream and trends slightly to the right on US political issues, which means that left-leaning politically contentious videos tend to get ratioed, and that includes left-adjacent issues that aren't strictly political but have been politicized. Either YouTube is a place for creators to put themselves out there and engage with their audiences... or it's another place that is corporately whitewashed to be as inoffensive (and thus uninteresting and shallow) as possible. Historically it's been the former, and I see this as another in a long string of moves by Google to turn it into the latter... despite that being exactly what people fled from when they started spending more hours watching YouTube than they did television. It seems Google doesn't know or doesn't care what their audiences actually want.
- zahrc 5y agoGreat, now I have to trust this wonderful algorithm.
- garfieldnate 5y agoI dislike the information asymmetry this creates between the poster of a video and its viewers. 100K likes serves implicitly as a kind of social proof; no one but the poster gets to know if it also has 80K dislikes. So it's quite easy and natural to look at a video and think that it has some kind of societal approval. It would have been better to hide the number of likes, too.
- da39a3ee 5y agoI'm confused. How do you judge the results of an election between two candidates if you know the number of votes cast for candidate A, but not the total number of votes?
- phendrenad2 5y agoPeople are talking about how this will make it difficult to get good information. And that is true. No one will downvote videos now, because publicly expressing your disapproval was the only reason to do so. Now, the only people who will downvote are people who are technically savvy enough to realize that downvoting will help YouTube recommend better videos to them. It's a shame, YouTube is one of the last platforms where publicly expressing your disapproval via a voting system is possible. And I think this has an effect on the nature of internet discourse. Look at the difference in conversations on Twitter vs Reddit. On Twitter, if you see something that you disagree with, you leave an (often ad hominem) comment. On Reddit, you just downvote, and feel equally satisfied.
- ahtaarra 5y agoI think the danger of such a shift is that people will no longer have the same level of incentive to make 'good' videos but rather clickbait-y ones that go viral
- Gelob 5y agoI'm go glad THIS is what youtube is doing to promote inclusion and respect across youtube. not you know the hate videos, comments, and unfairness in how they apply and enforce their policies
- lindwhi 5y agoThis helps if the video is just a victim of a dislike bandwagon. Some videos are quite interesting, yet just because people saw many dislikes, they also tend to press the dislike button.
- Ichijoe 5y agoIt's simple... We turn the Upvote into the Down vote, and vote down to vote up. No it's not helpful in the short term but, hopefully Mama Susan will get the message.
- RattleyCooper 5y agoAn attempt to hide public opinion regarding certain topics/people. Because google wants to control public perception, and the entire public conversation about EVERYTHING
- passivate 5y ago>Earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike count to see whether or not changes could help better protect creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks I'd like to see the actual data. What metric was used to determine whether or not this change resulted in '[..] better protect creators from harassment'? Hopefully it wasn't something weak like opinion polls. A data oriented company not sharing data from a scientific experiment makes me suspicious.
- footlose_3815 5y agoless content more ads, CONSUME
- tonoto 5y agoThis is not to support its users. Suddenly it is way harder to avoid the bad quality videos there is. Perhaps someone has a good curator page/filter where only the good (perhaps 1000 / 50 ratio or so) videos are linked? I am a current premium user but find no use at all for this kind of policies and I find it rather annoying.