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Bummer. 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 the
by nickjj 5y ago
Bummer. 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
- forgotmyoldacc 5y agoSupporting creators?
- myohmy 5y agoYeah exactly. I hate ads and 15$ is nothing to me. I'm not a poor college student anymore.
- penjelly 5y agoadblocker? exception being mobile..
- gpm 5y agoUblock origin + Firefox seems to block ads on mobile fine for me, the mobile browser interface to youtube does leave something to be desired though.
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoAnd TV
- ekianjo 5y agoNewPipe on Mobile all the way
- secondcoming 5y agoHonest question... why do you pay for Premium when you still get in-content ads?
- Retric 5y agoYou only get in content ads on specific streams which are easy to avoid unless you think the content is actually worth it.
- k4rli 5y agoSponsorblock with browser extension and on mobile with Vanced Youtube works quite well for more popular videos.
- djxfade 5y agoSponsorBlock
- paulirwin 5y agoI have Premium and watch almost daily and can't remember the last time I saw an ad. Isn't that the whole point of Premium?
- Sophistifunk 5y agoAt least host reads are usually somewhat related to the genre of the channel, and skippable.
- behnamoh 5y ago
- JetAlone 5y agoI've cancelled mine as well.
- arch-ninja 5y agoSame, companies can only be influenced by their financials these days. I even buy subscriptions I don't need with the intention of cancelling them 2-3 quarters later (need to make sure the money shows up on the books first).
- mcphage 5y agoSo basically if a company you don’t pay currently makes a decision you don’t like, then you send them 6-9 months worth of subscription fees? Then if they keep making decisions you don’t like, do you stay subscribed?
- yc12340 5y agoGoogle will just stop showing statistics on cancelled subscriptions during shareholder meetings.
- sMarsIntruder 5y agoBrilliant!
- anonu 5y agoSeems like a bit disproportionate reaction. Most of YouTube's value is in the videos.. not the dislike counter. Help me understand the trade-off here...
- rgrs 5y agoVideo's value is in dislike counter. It helps in assessing content from new/smaller studios.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoYeah, I'm actually behind this one. There's enough negativity on the internet, if youtube lose 0.25% of their premium subscribers they'll still be just fine. I doubt if much more than that will drop their subscriptions as the main value is lots less ads and premium-only content.
- MMS21 5y agoIf you cant deal with the negativity then stop making videos, its that simple.
- weeblewobble 5y agoBy the same token, if you can't deal with people who don't want to deal with negativity then stop using YouTube. It's that simple
- MMS21 5y agoHave you ever tried watching a tutorial and come across one that has a ton of dislikes? Its a clear indicator that the video is a waste of time. Removing this is going to waste peoples time.
- pwdisswordfish8 5y ago> Removing this is going to waste peoples time. The term of art is ‘increase engagement’.
- taylus 5y agoSame, subbed for years and just cancelled. Was hoping they’d ask why but they don’t care.
- bavell 5y agoSame here and agree 100%. Seeing ads again will help me spend less time on the platform. I almost cancelled earlier this year but this made it easy for me to pull the trigger.
- ren_engineer 5y agothe fact it isn't optional is the biggest red flag, why not just let channels choose if they want to show dislikes?
- jjice 5y agoAbsolutely. This is exactly the kind of thing that creators should be able to opt-in to, just like disabling comments. Very disappointed to see this shielding of everyone's eyes from videos. If a creator wanted to opt to hide it, sure, but flat out hiding it is unfortunate.
- MereInterest 5y agoWhy would be poster of a video receive special privilege for videos that they post? That would be like a seller being allowed to remove unfavorable reviews of their product. That the reviews are not under the control of the seller/poster is the only reason that they would be useful at all.
- jowsie 5y agoUploaders have had this ability for a while now already.
- MereInterest 5y agoAs others have pointed out, uploaders had the ability to block voting entirely, but couldn't adjust visibility of positive/negative votes separately. There's a huge difference between a video with +10k/-10 and a video with +10k/-100k. Displaying both identically gives a deliberately false equivalence.
- tempestn 5y agoI suppose we still have upvotes as a percentage of views to fill in some of the gap.
- darth_avocado 5y ago> I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching You summarized why Youtube is doing it. Sure harassment is one aspect of it, but this drives up the clicks for Youtube and therefore the ad revenue. I'd be curious to see if people get overly annoyed by how many unworthy videos they watch and thereby reducing overall engagement.
- washadjeffmad 5y agoThen why not keep counts and ratios optional?
- flyingchipmann 5y agoThat's the f*** up part. It's already optional. The owner can choose not to show it
- epolanski 5y agoHarassment could be solved in way saner ways, like detecting unusual peaks of dislikes at some content.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> I'd be curious to see if people get overly annoyed by how many unworthy videos they watch and thereby reducing overall engagement. A popular streaming service inflates the ratings of the content offered on its service to the point that I'm hesitant to use it that much.
- chelical 5y agoWithout the like vs dislike ratio, I'm less likely to use Youtube. I'm already using Bing and Google to search for videos b/c they absolutely botched their search experience.
- pharke 5y agoI've started using Bing more and more as well. I never thought I'd see the day.
- csee 5y agoI wonder how correlated the like/view ratio is with the like/dislike ratio. If that correlation is very high we might not be losing much info. It'd just take an annoying extra second to calc the ratio.
- ollien 5y agoThis would be interesting to scrape together before that part of the API goes away in December. I wonder how correlated the like/dislike ratio is to the like/view ratio. I'd imagine not very. I don't like very many videos, but I don't know about others.
- closetohome 5y agoI use it for the same thing, though most videos seem to fall into one of three categories: -Millions of views, 99% liked -Videos without ridiculous view counts, where the like/dislike ratio actually helps -Brigaded with dislikes
- kingcharles 5y agoThat's an interesting point. Why can this feature not be video or channel specific so that a creator who is being targetted could switch off the count if they wanted?
- alpaca128 5y agoThat's already possible. Content creators can turn off comments and/or votes for any video.
- Aachen 5y agoNot just dislikes though, or?
- politician 5y agoPlausible deniability. If a creator turns off dislikes on a particular video, that's a strong signal that they're producing propaganda or have a thin skin. If YT does it for them, for everyone, then affected creators can just shrug and pretend like they definitely would never turn off dislikes.
- winternett 5y agoThat's not the only reason for turning off downvotes... I'm a musician, and have dealt before with competing musicians downvoting me in hopes of driving my videos below theirs. Or occasionally someone can share a video publicly and initial response is based on brigading or just not well received. The display of lots of downvotes before views are properly accumulated can cause bias towards the content. Things were just fine when creators had the control over whether or not to show dislikes. Many creators use Youtube for different purposes. Youtube does a big injustice because they don't fairly separate content based on the type of entity that's posting content enough (i.e. an indie music producer versus a big industry music company or indie vlogger living in their parent's house versus a well funded TV news channel).
- cruano 5y ago
- adminscoffee 5y agothat's exactly what i do, i think youtube is messing up big time. this is almost as bad as onlyfans trying to go completely wholesome
- ridaj 5y ago> 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. Yes. People downvote based on their expectation. So you can have content that you would probably find bad that has a lot of upvotes because it has a niche that likes it, and my sense is that the excursions in dislike ratio are more often driven by distribution channel or brigading than the intrinsic value of the content. > Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects. Doesn't this directly contradict your experience as a creator? But if it was true, wouldn't it be a good thing that creators no longer feel as much pressure to conform to fan expectations, eg in pursuit of bigger opportunities/audiences?
- oooooooooooow 5y agoYou have always been able to hide the like/dislike count on your published videos. Let's not be stupid about this. The only people benefitting from this change are the shady ones.
- nickjj 5y ago> But if it was true, wouldn't it be a good thing that creators no longer feel as much pressure to conform to fan expectations, eg in pursuit of bigger opportunities/audiences? I'm not sold on that idea personally. The videos I create are based on what I'm doing in my day to day as a developer or if someone comments with a video suggestion since that's almost always in my wheel house of video topics which I greatly appreciate when this happens. I don't really make videos with intent to optimize for views / upvotes or get upset when a video gets a few downvotes. Lots of them have 100% upvote ratios and almost all have 95%+. YouTube does let video creators disable voting but whenever I see that on any video I almost always think the channel owner is trying to do something nefarious. Maybe they're trying to avoid transparency by hiding downvotes or they are super self conscious about making videos and my internal bias suggests the video will be worse quality when compared to others. That's not always the case but it's true more often than not, at least for my own subjective take on video preference (mainly tech and hardware, no news). I always strive for maximum transparency and let the results figure themselves out naturally. In the end, this is mainly a huge downgrade for consumers of videos. It sounds like the algorithm will still take downvotes into account and video creators can still see the downvotes. It's the viewers who can no longer use this as a metric to quickly gauge a video's quality. In a world with so many amazing videos to watch, losing this quick filter hurts a bit.
- bserge 5y agoYes, good move to increase view count. If you don't have a like/dislike ratio to judge, you're more likely to play it and watch at least a bit. Everyone wins (at Google): more ads, more money.
- netcan 5y agoUnfortunately, at least unfortunately for your preferences, YouTube (and the modern web broadly, perhaps) does not really prioritize ways for users to find content. They're committed to recommendation and such.
- sixothree 5y agoDon't you worry about that metric to help you decide what to watch. Let google worry about it for you. /s
- AYBABTME 5y agoIt depends, stuff like videos critical of foreign countries political regime end up spammed by politically sponsored griefers to delegitimize them, exactly playing to your heuristic. edit: :^)
- totalZero 5y agoCanada is no paradise, but I haven't seen any indication that sponsored agents are gaming the system on videos critical of them.
- mjcohen 5y agoNo, no, no! They are referring to Cambodia or Catalonia or Castlevania. Maybe even California or Carcinoma.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- avodonosov 5y agoUnless a different county was meant. Although I've been thinking for a minute - nothing except Canada came to mind.
- nindalf 5y agoThat’s a serious charge to level against Cuba. Could you share evidence of it?
- beepbooptheory 5y agoOk found it! Everyone can mark off 'China' on their HN bingo cards.
- avodonosov 5y agoChina starts from Ch, it's not intuitive to say, for me at least, it starts from C. Single consonant sound Ch.
- gremloni 5y agoThe problem is people also use it as a propaganda tool to bury videos they don’t politically agree with. Normies have much lowered like/dislike button engagement so it’s a disservice to the vast majority.
- propogandist 5y agorecent political pushes aren't being well received, with sentiment being very negative on WhiteHouse media pushes, mainstream narratives around vaccines and the like (on YT). Normies are swayed easily by dislike bar, so the elites at YT are trying to hide it -- just like reddit hid the downvote count, to enable astrotrufing campaigns and overall shill activity many years ago.
- oscribinn 5y agoThis site is also pretty retarded and shill-friendly with its "you can downvote if you've accumulated enough good boy points" setup
- jjcon 5y agoBut youtube isn't removing the button or the signal from their algorithms - they are just removing the optics of having a disliked video (which a lot of users including myself found useful)
- gremloni 5y agoLike I mentioned somewhere else, for recommended videos I see two binary paradigms - videos with >95% like ratios - political videos that have obviously been brigaded Assuming most normies don’t have great engagement rates with the like/dislike button based on view count, this change is doing the vast majority a service.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hulahoof 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ape4 5y agoWhat about... number of views : number of likes ... ratio
- yodsanklai 5y agoAnd for people who are sensitive to downvotes, there's already the option to make them private. I really don't understand this move... this will seriously limit our ability to filter bad content. I hope that they'll provide an alternative.
- mysterydip 5y ago> I really don't understand this move... this will seriously limit our ability to filter bad content. I think that is entirely the point.
- yodsanklai 5y agoTo me the point is to remove the negativity. They don't want to be the targets of the same criticism as FB. It's also seem to be a cultural trend in the US that only positive comments are accepted.
- Nesco 5y agoA lot of comments here already point out that YouTube’s own videos are regularly downvoted to oblivion. Also that in this very sensitive political climate across the western world gouvernements and big corporations don’t want to appear rejected by the opinion. I tend to think it was an important argument for this decision
- iszomer 5y agoI feel like the like-dislike button needs to be expanded instead to encompass various the nuances on why you might like or dislike a video. Something I liked could be as trivial as an enjoyment of said content or a dislike because of it's presentation, or liking content that was presented in poor tastes yet recognizing it's comedic value. That's not to say I don't recognize that the like-dislike ratio can also be gamed however.
- scotty79 5y agoBefore facebook, reddit and such I imagined discussion platform where you'd have 3 options, upvote for agreeing with the content, downvote for disagreeing and third option for spam and incomprehensible things and things devoid of any value positive or negative. Yes! No! Garbage! System would recommend you the content based on your adjustable levels of tolerance for adversarial views, contoversy and tolerance for garbage. I even considered supporting mixed vote by placing a dot in Yes! No! Garbage! triangle. Basically two axes, agreement and quality, with range of possible agreements narrowing down to zero as quality goes down.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- epolanski 5y agoExactly, how will I figure now that a 20 min video has no content promised in the title? How many times I looked for guidance on YouTube on some software, or cooking recipe or some rare clip, just to find out it was not what I was looking for by the dislikes? Now I’ll have to watch ”fix your xxx with this easy trick” at 2x speed to know it was crap.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> Exactly, how will I figure now that a 20 min video has no content promised in the title? Both Google and rights holders don't care. The more of the video you sit through, the more ads they get to shove in your face. It's a win-win situation for both parties.
- gadrev 5y agoShut up and swallow some more ads!
- propogandist 5y agois there a reliable way to block YT ads with a browser add-on? I'm using Ublock + Umatrix and still seeing a huge surge in ads across all videos. Youtube is also injecting pre-rolls at the beginning of content I've uploaded to a new youtube channel that is not monetized (I have no interest in putting ads in front of my content)...so I have zero interest in supporting their ad empire.
- 3np 5y agoPiped + Privacy Redirect
- travoc 5y agoAdGuard on iOS or Brave on Windows reliably removes YouTube ads for me.
- bhrgunatha 5y agoEnhancer for youtube which makes youtube much better in my opinion. Ironically there is now a large, prominent sponsor logo on the add-ons settings page. https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube
- simias 5y agoI always found this information rather useless myself, so I don't see it as a huge deal. More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content. In my experience it's more of a "controversial opinion" indicator than a "bad video" indicator. >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. My point exactly. So if I get what you say, most of your videos have a fairly inconsequential amount of downvotes, and those that do are not because they're poor quality but rather because it's been disliked by people who weren't your target audience. If that's your experience as a content creator how can you, as a viewer, consider the like/dislike ratio a good indication of the quality of the content?
- radlad 5y agoI'm not sure. Reddit, Hacker News, etc. all offer ways for content to be downvoted. This allows for user moderation, which has pros and cons, but seems to work better against disinformation than platforms like Facebook which only allow "likes."
- snowwrestler 5y agoRaw votes are pretty bad at moderation. Voting features are there primarily to help engage visitors so they will return. HN and some subreddits avoid becoming tools of disinformation because they are managed by dedicated moderators who remove posts, comments, and participants who are acting in bad faith. (Facebook does not do this.)
- Seanambers 5y agoI've always used the like / dislike ratio as a measure on the quality/controversiality of the video in question. Removing it makes paid content so much more attractive for starters... I am almost laughing as I'm writing this, but reality is moving towards 1984 much quicker that I ever imagined. The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video. Which obviously is the point. Damn Google got really evil real fast.
- ravenstine 5y agoSimilarly, I also like watching videos that have a high dislike-to-like ratio because that tells me the video might be about something I'll appreciate that the rest of the public doesn't.
- grammarnazzzi 5y ago> I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching. That's the problem. You had a tool to judge a video was worth watching without having to watching the ads. Now you have to watch ads to find out if the video is crap. This is a very good thing. for Google
- johnisgood 5y agoPerhaps you could use views and the like count. If the video has 10M views, and only 10k likes, then perhaps it sucks? I dunno. You would really have to sit through it I suppose, which is the point of this move. That said, it does not affect me much as I use YouTube exclusively for music. I used it for other videos as well, but Google is making YouTube a worse platform day by day.
- jtwebman 5y agoFrom what they said it is to protect creators as groups go around creating games to dislike different small creator videos.
- niutech 5y agoNow you can use likes / views ratio. The higher the score, the better the video.