12 ms·

I 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 sil

I 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 ago
In 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Politics 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.
  - tpoacher 5y ago
    > I don't see how removing the dislike count will in any way increase the click rate. The rationale is, Google noticed that people use the dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video. If you can't use dislikes to decide whether or not the video you're considering is actually worth watching, you're more likely to click simply to find out. In order to find out, you first need to watch the ads. That's all. Someone at Google simply just put two and two together and realised that the visible dislike count was costing them in ad clicks. Was it politically motivated? Probably not. Will it have profound political effects? Absolutely!
    - mach1ne 5y ago
      That's one argument, but on the other hand if you can't vet the videos by yourself before watching, the average quality of the videos you watch will drop, decreasing the incentive for you to spend time on the site.
- addingnumbers 5y ago
  > Remove negative counts, make people more likely to click on videos How were you seeing the dislike count before clicking videos before? I might be mistaken but I thought under normal circumstances you couldn't see the dislike count until the video was already starting anyway.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    You allow autoplay on videos you are not familiar? If I load a YT video page, I can see the stats before I push play.
    - addingnumbers 5y ago
      Isn't autoplay the normal, default setting? Do a significant percentage of users have autoplay disabled? Disabling autoplay on an ongoing basis isn't an option for me because I won't log into Google services, except to check who is still mailing my gmail address on the long tail of de-googling.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        >Isn't autoplay the normal, default setting? Not in my world it's not. I'm pretty sure FF has disabled autoplay as well as default. The only time autoplay is allowed is when listening a "full album" play list. But that's only after I've scrolled the list to make sure some asshat hasn't pushed in a rando video below the first page.
        addingnumbers 5y ago
        Well, to me it doesn't sound like you are a typical YouTube user.
        dylan604 5y ago
        I'm not a typical anything.
  - 5y ago
- saltminer 5y ago
  This...unfortunately makes sense. If I can tell just by the dislike count if a video is a fake tutorial or w/e, I'm likely to leave immediately. If I'm on my phone (don't have adblock), I'll have closed the video before the preroll ad even lets me skip it. Now, I'll have to sit through it and make youtube some money before I can determine if a video is any good or not. Edit: Think about all those scam channels on YT. Disabling likes/dislikes looks fishy, but now they don't have to worry about that since only the likes are visible. This is a massive win for the "GTA online free money"-type channels.
  - rabuse 5y ago
    This was such a terrible move for the way I sift through shit on Youtube to find a quality video for a topic I'm looking into.
- Guvante 5y ago
  You have to load the page to see the dislike count. They already got ad revenue by the time you see it. I am sure they have better data than anybody as to how often a video is loaded for the first time and disliked within a few seconds of starting. While once in a while this could be caused by a bad video start it probably mostly isn't caused by the content of the video. By looking at behavior of users and pattern matching it probably wasn't hard to see that certain users were "making the number big". Additionally as the article details they likely targeted those users with a new "don't show the number" feature and saw an improvement in the unwanted behavior (unnecessary dislikes). The reality is that while dislike is fantastic from a quality filter standpoint human behavior likes making numbers big and sometimes they do weird things you have to correct for.
- quotemstr 5y ago
  No, that's just not believable. YouTube (and Google more generally) are full of people who believe they need to control the public conversation for the public's own good. They've gone to the best schools, lived cosseted lives in safe, sparkly clean neighborhoods, and never had to shower after work instead of before work. They're totally out of touch with what regular people think, yet believe they know better than regular people and have not only a right, but a duty to guide the public conversation in what they see as the right direction. YouTube people have spent years censoring inconvenient thoughts (e.g. the lab leak hypothesis), juicing rankings in favor of mainstream media, and outright banning their ideological opponents. If they believe that they're just making the internet less "toxic", it's because they don't differentiate between people with different value systems and monsters to be silenced. There is zero chance this lately instance of censorship is profit driven. It's yet another favor Google is doing for an establishment that's rapidly losing credibility with the public and control of the narrative.
woah 5y ago
I know we're not supposed to tell people to RTFA on here... but i feel like i should tell you that they are not removing the dislike button
- IceDane 5y ago
  Maybe you are right and he didn't read the article, but I think his points still stand. This is a ridiculous decision. When someone puts something into the public space and everyone dislikes it, that should visible to anyone. This is just going to make ridiculous conspiracy videos and other harmful material like racist propaganda seem more legit than it is viewed by the rest of the public.
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    Don't be silly. Of course YouTube can be relied on to properly censor videos themselves. They will make sure you never see anything that may make you uncomfortable. Your complete lack of faith is astonishing. (sarcasm)
    - politician 5y ago
      Remember, discomfort is literally violence now.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    > that should visible to anyone. This is just going to make ridiculous conspiracy videos and other harmful material like racist propaganda seem more legit than it is viewed by the rest of the public. Report videos that violates Youtube's guidelines, and start your own platform if you take issue with the engagement tools they offer. Arguably, the data shows that outrage drives unhealthy engagement [1], and this appears to reduce outrage driven engagement, no different than HN flamewar detection and other mechanisms to encourage more civil discourse. EDIT: Youtube isn't the internet, nor "commons", it's a single web property. Lots of other forums for your speech (including your own Mastadon, Discourse, or Peertube instance). [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=outrage+drives+engagement https://www.google.com/search?q=outrage+drives+engagement
gadrev 5y ago
It is pathethic, I can't put it a better way.
bronzeage 5y ago
It's not Disney / DC comics, they have good ratios. This is coming from the white house and the FDA / CDC, which have horrible ratios, and which have been caught removing dislikes several times leading people to question YouTube. this is in my opinion violation of the first amendment if it really comes from the government - which makes it even worse.
josefresco 5y ago
From the article.. "What we learned from the experiment: 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. 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." It's not about appeasing Disney, it's about discouraging shitty behavior.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  "Dislike attack behavior" could just be a video that is widely disliked. It doesn't necessarily mean there's any sort of coordinated attack on it, so your "shitty behavior" comment doesn't really fly.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Brigading is a real thing that really happens.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      What part of my comment makes you think I'm saying anything different?
  - weego 5y ago
    So people watch it without the prejudgement and bias of knowing what the wider group thinks and dislike on their own judgement. That seems like a simple solution to coaching people into good curation patterns and behaviour. It will likely so give some good results in the background for YT and media partners but it is allowed to be both.
- gameman144 5y ago
  > 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 How is this any different than users targeting a video with lots of likes to drive up its count, though? If YouTube were hiding both the public like and dislike counts, I wouldn't give this a second thought. But to say "seeing counts influences people" as a reason for hiding dislikes, and not extending that same argument to likes as well just seems a bit shallow. Public counts are useful because they provide a gauge of perceived quality. If I see a video with lots of likes and no dislikes, it's fair to assume I'll like that video. If I see a video with lots of likes and I can't see the dislikes, I have absolutely no idea whether I'll like it or not; maybe it's a really good video and everyone liked it, or maybe the majority of people disliked it but I just can't tell. If you're removing my ability to gauge quality anyway, then why not just remove the like count as well? This change is essentially shifting from "three out of five dentists prefer Trident" to "three dentists prefer Trident". The loss of information is so substantial that the remaining information is essentially useless.
Strom 5y ago
> Disney, DC Comics and the like must've complained about bad ratings/unfavourable like/dislike ratios I guess.. The most disliked video on YouTube happens to be a video made by YouTube themselves. [1] I guess they really didn't like that. -- [1] YouTube Rewind 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-disliked_YouTube_videos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-disliked_YouTube_...
felistoria 5y ago
The White House has one of the worst ratios. I would imagine thats likely why it happened.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  This is some next-level conspiracy. Like most, it's feasible and perhaps in the realm of possibility, but there are probably 30 explanations above it in the "that makes sense" queue. Notably, their rationale they posted. Isn't it possible that they both see a positive outcome for creators not to get votebombed, and remove negative publicity from corporate partners like Disney? I challenge anyone to tell me they do NOT think that brigading downvotes/dislikes is a thing on forums and Youtube.
  - ufmace 5y ago
    I 100% believe that high dislike counts on ideologically favored videos is the real reason. This includes both White House sources and official propaganda regarding Covid-19 and vaccines. (It is undoubtedly propaganda IMO, though note that that does not necessarily make it wrong) The question to ask is not what reasons could they have done this for, but why did they do it in this particular way at this exact time?
  - native_samples 5y ago
    It's because their explanation is nonsensical on its face. How is a dislike "harassment"? How are genuine groups of people downvoting something an "attack"? YouTube isn't like HN where likes and dislikes are summed. People disliking a video doesn't change how many people liked it, both are visible. This seems to come from a culture in which disliking someone, disagreeing with them or telling the they're wrong is the worst offense possible. In no way is it comparable to actual harassment, so of course people speculate about alternatives.
    - daveoc64 5y ago
      If someone seeks out content that they wouldn't ordinarily interact with just so that they can dislike/downvote it or post nasty comments - that's an attack. If someone gets recommended a video and they don't like it, disliking is then constructive criticism. But there are groups out there that actively look for particular types of content to dislike - without even watching it.
elondaits 5y ago
Actually it was Sony who recently had their trailers spammed with dislikes by Spider-Man stans complaining for the delay in the release of the second trailer for “Spider-Man: No Way Home”.
Barrin92 5y ago
as the post itself points out this has nothing to do with dissident voices but with preventing dislike attacks and 'ratio-ing' as is common on websites that have these mechanisms in place. Downvote bombing content if anything distorts discourse and makes it harder to figure out what people actually think. There's a reason this very website caps downvotes at -4. What I find cringeworthy is this keyboard warrior mentality of likening an incentive change on YouTube videos to dissident activity, as if downvoting some cat video on the internet is like publishing Samizdat in the underground of the Soviet Union, maybe pipe down a little bit
- dylan604 5y ago
  > maybe pipe down a little bit like downvoting a cat video is the only type of video being downvoted. If a "tutorial" is bad, people can downvote it. If the next view sees lots of downs, they can avoid it and go to the video saving them time, and no longer rewarding with ad share for a worthless video. > maybe pipe down a little bit
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    >If the next view sees lots of downs, they can avoid it the exact point is that this is terrible because the downvotes aren't representative of anything. two examples. Go to Youtube right now, pick a 5 minute daily covid update. I'm not talking about op-eds, just factual reporting about the stats. Chances are it has been downvoted 80% because there's a bunch of crazies on that site downvoting every news video. another example, Thandiwe Newton years ago made some political comments 4chan didn't like, so they started to bombard every westworld video with her in it. I saw those ratios and decided to not watch the show for months. Turns out is actually great and it was just some right-wing internet mob being angry about her. Nobody ever downvotes shitty tutorials, because the only people who passionately downvote youtube videos are crazy. I can't tell you how many crappy tutorials with wrong info in it i've seen, entirely upvoted.
    - dalmo3 5y ago
      > this is terrible because the downvotes aren't representative of anything Speak for yourself? I watch football highlights on YouTube. Due to copyright many videos are just clickbaits with perhaps a few seconds of real footage, or are missing games or whatever. The up/downvotes are a reliable measure in that niche.
winternett 5y ago
It's the exact same move that reddit made years ago, and it enabled a new era of online brigading and fake credibility/popularity for content shown on pages. If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be. It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others. The beginning of the end of being able to trust YouTube stats (as if that wasn't already an issue). Goodbye old useful web... sigh
- paulpauper 5y ago
  misleading/bad content can get up-votes too though
  - CamelCaseName 5y ago
    The key is the ratio between the votes. 5:1 upvotes to downvotes is a lot better than 25:21
    - blowski 5y ago
      That might tell you something, but it’s not always clear what. Could be brigading, sock-puppets, tribalism, or lots of other causes. In the end, pretty much all such voting mechanisms are flawed in some way or another. More interesting are the comments left by known experts in the field.
      - unclebucknasty 5y ago
        >pretty much all such voting mechanisms are flawed in some way or another. More interesting are the comments left by known experts in the field. Agree with this. I think downvoting is net-negative, as it encourages bad actors. Let relative upvotes determine quality. For disagreement, use comments. For content that violates terms or is misleading, etc, use flagging.
    - monkeybutton 5y ago
      Even with the same ratio, 5:1 can still be considered better than 50:10 because the confidence is lower and the true value could still be better: http://simplemlhacks.blogspot.com/2013/04/reddits-best-comment-scoring-algorithm.html?m=1 http://simplemlhacks.blogspot.com/2013/04/reddits-best-comme...
kingTug 5y ago
I haven't hit the like button since 2013 when I learned that it was publicly visible on my google account.
- noisem4ker 5y ago
  The activity feed is no more, I think, and liked videos only end up in a private playlist now.
havetocharge 5y ago
Hacker News does not have a downvote button for the majority of its users.
- dontcare007 5y ago
  which means the ones that do have it wield wield an inordinate inordinate amount of power
paganel 5y ago
> Disney, DC Comics and the like must've complained about bad ratings/unfavourable like/dislike ratios I guess.. I think it was mostly about politics.
- adminscoffee 5y ago
  you nailed it on the head. some players want to control public opinion rather than changing their business model or philosophy closer to what the people want
adolph 5y ago
The new ratio will become likes to views. I wonder if likes or views will be next to disappear?
- politician 5y ago
  Or upvotes on comments that contain the message "Dislike".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
louissan 5y ago
ha! dislike > /dev/null
duxup 5y ago
Is the dislike button "dissident voices"? That seems like an absurd idea. If your idea of being a dissident is a dislike button ... I don't know what to tell those folks. Those dislikes are pretty irrelevant.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tentacleuno 5y ago

In 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 ago

I 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 ago
Politics 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.
- tpoacher 5y ago
  > I don't see how removing the dislike count will in any way increase the click rate. The rationale is, Google noticed that people use the dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video. If you can't use dislikes to decide whether or not the video you're considering is actually worth watching, you're more likely to click simply to find out. In order to find out, you first need to watch the ads. That's all. Someone at Google simply just put two and two together and realised that the visible dislike count was costing them in ad clicks. Was it politically motivated? Probably not. Will it have profound political effects? Absolutely!
  - mach1ne 5y ago
    That's one argument, but on the other hand if you can't vet the videos by yourself before watching, the average quality of the videos you watch will drop, decreasing the incentive for you to spend time on the site.
addingnumbers 5y ago
> Remove negative counts, make people more likely to click on videos How were you seeing the dislike count before clicking videos before? I might be mistaken but I thought under normal circumstances you couldn't see the dislike count until the video was already starting anyway.
- dylan604 5y ago
  You allow autoplay on videos you are not familiar? If I load a YT video page, I can see the stats before I push play.
  - addingnumbers 5y ago
    Isn't autoplay the normal, default setting? Do a significant percentage of users have autoplay disabled? Disabling autoplay on an ongoing basis isn't an option for me because I won't log into Google services, except to check who is still mailing my gmail address on the long tail of de-googling.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      >Isn't autoplay the normal, default setting? Not in my world it's not. I'm pretty sure FF has disabled autoplay as well as default. The only time autoplay is allowed is when listening a "full album" play list. But that's only after I've scrolled the list to make sure some asshat hasn't pushed in a rando video below the first page.
      - addingnumbers 5y ago
        Well, to me it doesn't sound like you are a typical YouTube user.
        dylan604 5y ago
        I'm not a typical anything.
- 5y ago
saltminer 5y ago
This...unfortunately makes sense. If I can tell just by the dislike count if a video is a fake tutorial or w/e, I'm likely to leave immediately. If I'm on my phone (don't have adblock), I'll have closed the video before the preroll ad even lets me skip it. Now, I'll have to sit through it and make youtube some money before I can determine if a video is any good or not. Edit: Think about all those scam channels on YT. Disabling likes/dislikes looks fishy, but now they don't have to worry about that since only the likes are visible. This is a massive win for the "GTA online free money"-type channels.
- rabuse 5y ago
  This was such a terrible move for the way I sift through shit on Youtube to find a quality video for a topic I'm looking into.
Guvante 5y ago
You have to load the page to see the dislike count. They already got ad revenue by the time you see it. I am sure they have better data than anybody as to how often a video is loaded for the first time and disliked within a few seconds of starting. While once in a while this could be caused by a bad video start it probably mostly isn't caused by the content of the video. By looking at behavior of users and pattern matching it probably wasn't hard to see that certain users were "making the number big". Additionally as the article details they likely targeted those users with a new "don't show the number" feature and saw an improvement in the unwanted behavior (unnecessary dislikes). The reality is that while dislike is fantastic from a quality filter standpoint human behavior likes making numbers big and sometimes they do weird things you have to correct for.
quotemstr 5y ago
No, that's just not believable. YouTube (and Google more generally) are full of people who believe they need to control the public conversation for the public's own good. They've gone to the best schools, lived cosseted lives in safe, sparkly clean neighborhoods, and never had to shower after work instead of before work. They're totally out of touch with what regular people think, yet believe they know better than regular people and have not only a right, but a duty to guide the public conversation in what they see as the right direction. YouTube people have spent years censoring inconvenient thoughts (e.g. the lab leak hypothesis), juicing rankings in favor of mainstream media, and outright banning their ideological opponents. If they believe that they're just making the internet less "toxic", it's because they don't differentiate between people with different value systems and monsters to be silenced. There is zero chance this lately instance of censorship is profit driven. It's yet another favor Google is doing for an establishment that's rapidly losing credibility with the public and control of the narrative.

woah 5y ago

I know we're not supposed to tell people to RTFA on here... but i feel like i should tell you that they are not removing the dislike button

IceDane 5y ago
Maybe you are right and he didn't read the article, but I think his points still stand. This is a ridiculous decision. When someone puts something into the public space and everyone dislikes it, that should visible to anyone. This is just going to make ridiculous conspiracy videos and other harmful material like racist propaganda seem more legit than it is viewed by the rest of the public.
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  Don't be silly. Of course YouTube can be relied on to properly censor videos themselves. They will make sure you never see anything that may make you uncomfortable. Your complete lack of faith is astonishing. (sarcasm)
  - politician 5y ago
    Remember, discomfort is literally violence now.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  > that should visible to anyone. This is just going to make ridiculous conspiracy videos and other harmful material like racist propaganda seem more legit than it is viewed by the rest of the public. Report videos that violates Youtube's guidelines, and start your own platform if you take issue with the engagement tools they offer. Arguably, the data shows that outrage drives unhealthy engagement [1], and this appears to reduce outrage driven engagement, no different than HN flamewar detection and other mechanisms to encourage more civil discourse. EDIT: Youtube isn't the internet, nor "commons", it's a single web property. Lots of other forums for your speech (including your own Mastadon, Discourse, or Peertube instance). [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=outrage+drives+engagement https://www.google.com/search?q=outrage+drives+engagement

gadrev 5y ago

It is pathethic, I can't put it a better way.

bronzeage 5y ago

It's not Disney / DC comics, they have good ratios. This is coming from the white house and the FDA / CDC, which have horrible ratios, and which have been caught removing dislikes several times leading people to question YouTube. this is in my opinion violation of the first amendment if it really comes from the government - which makes it even worse.

josefresco 5y ago

From the article.. "What we learned from the experiment: 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. 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." It's not about appeasing Disney, it's about discouraging shitty behavior.

jaywalk 5y ago
"Dislike attack behavior" could just be a video that is widely disliked. It doesn't necessarily mean there's any sort of coordinated attack on it, so your "shitty behavior" comment doesn't really fly.
- watwut 5y ago
  Brigading is a real thing that really happens.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    What part of my comment makes you think I'm saying anything different?
- weego 5y ago
  So people watch it without the prejudgement and bias of knowing what the wider group thinks and dislike on their own judgement. That seems like a simple solution to coaching people into good curation patterns and behaviour. It will likely so give some good results in the background for YT and media partners but it is allowed to be both.
gameman144 5y ago
> 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 How is this any different than users targeting a video with lots of likes to drive up its count, though? If YouTube were hiding both the public like and dislike counts, I wouldn't give this a second thought. But to say "seeing counts influences people" as a reason for hiding dislikes, and not extending that same argument to likes as well just seems a bit shallow. Public counts are useful because they provide a gauge of perceived quality. If I see a video with lots of likes and no dislikes, it's fair to assume I'll like that video. If I see a video with lots of likes and I can't see the dislikes, I have absolutely no idea whether I'll like it or not; maybe it's a really good video and everyone liked it, or maybe the majority of people disliked it but I just can't tell. If you're removing my ability to gauge quality anyway, then why not just remove the like count as well? This change is essentially shifting from "three out of five dentists prefer Trident" to "three dentists prefer Trident". The loss of information is so substantial that the remaining information is essentially useless.

Strom 5y ago

> Disney, DC Comics and the like must've complained about bad ratings/unfavourable like/dislike ratios I guess.. The most disliked video on YouTube happens to be a video made by YouTube themselves. [1] I guess they really didn't like that. -- [1] YouTube Rewind 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-disliked_YouTube_videos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-disliked_YouTube_...

felistoria 5y ago

The White House has one of the worst ratios. I would imagine thats likely why it happened.

unethical_ban 5y ago
This is some next-level conspiracy. Like most, it's feasible and perhaps in the realm of possibility, but there are probably 30 explanations above it in the "that makes sense" queue. Notably, their rationale they posted. Isn't it possible that they both see a positive outcome for creators not to get votebombed, and remove negative publicity from corporate partners like Disney? I challenge anyone to tell me they do NOT think that brigading downvotes/dislikes is a thing on forums and Youtube.
- ufmace 5y ago
  I 100% believe that high dislike counts on ideologically favored videos is the real reason. This includes both White House sources and official propaganda regarding Covid-19 and vaccines. (It is undoubtedly propaganda IMO, though note that that does not necessarily make it wrong) The question to ask is not what reasons could they have done this for, but why did they do it in this particular way at this exact time?
- native_samples 5y ago
  It's because their explanation is nonsensical on its face. How is a dislike "harassment"? How are genuine groups of people downvoting something an "attack"? YouTube isn't like HN where likes and dislikes are summed. People disliking a video doesn't change how many people liked it, both are visible. This seems to come from a culture in which disliking someone, disagreeing with them or telling the they're wrong is the worst offense possible. In no way is it comparable to actual harassment, so of course people speculate about alternatives.
  - daveoc64 5y ago
    If someone seeks out content that they wouldn't ordinarily interact with just so that they can dislike/downvote it or post nasty comments - that's an attack. If someone gets recommended a video and they don't like it, disliking is then constructive criticism. But there are groups out there that actively look for particular types of content to dislike - without even watching it.

elondaits 5y ago

Actually it was Sony who recently had their trailers spammed with dislikes by Spider-Man stans complaining for the delay in the release of the second trailer for “Spider-Man: No Way Home”.

Barrin92 5y ago

as the post itself points out this has nothing to do with dissident voices but with preventing dislike attacks and 'ratio-ing' as is common on websites that have these mechanisms in place. Downvote bombing content if anything distorts discourse and makes it harder to figure out what people actually think. There's a reason this very website caps downvotes at -4. What I find cringeworthy is this keyboard warrior mentality of likening an incentive change on YouTube videos to dissident activity, as if downvoting some cat video on the internet is like publishing Samizdat in the underground of the Soviet Union, maybe pipe down a little bit

dylan604 5y ago
> maybe pipe down a little bit like downvoting a cat video is the only type of video being downvoted. If a "tutorial" is bad, people can downvote it. If the next view sees lots of downs, they can avoid it and go to the video saving them time, and no longer rewarding with ad share for a worthless video. > maybe pipe down a little bit
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >If the next view sees lots of downs, they can avoid it the exact point is that this is terrible because the downvotes aren't representative of anything. two examples. Go to Youtube right now, pick a 5 minute daily covid update. I'm not talking about op-eds, just factual reporting about the stats. Chances are it has been downvoted 80% because there's a bunch of crazies on that site downvoting every news video. another example, Thandiwe Newton years ago made some political comments 4chan didn't like, so they started to bombard every westworld video with her in it. I saw those ratios and decided to not watch the show for months. Turns out is actually great and it was just some right-wing internet mob being angry about her. Nobody ever downvotes shitty tutorials, because the only people who passionately downvote youtube videos are crazy. I can't tell you how many crappy tutorials with wrong info in it i've seen, entirely upvoted.
  - dalmo3 5y ago
    > this is terrible because the downvotes aren't representative of anything Speak for yourself? I watch football highlights on YouTube. Due to copyright many videos are just clickbaits with perhaps a few seconds of real footage, or are missing games or whatever. The up/downvotes are a reliable measure in that niche.

winternett 5y ago

It's the exact same move that reddit made years ago, and it enabled a new era of online brigading and fake credibility/popularity for content shown on pages. If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be. It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others. The beginning of the end of being able to trust YouTube stats (as if that wasn't already an issue). Goodbye old useful web... sigh

paulpauper 5y ago
misleading/bad content can get up-votes too though
- CamelCaseName 5y ago
  The key is the ratio between the votes. 5:1 upvotes to downvotes is a lot better than 25:21
  - blowski 5y ago
    That might tell you something, but it’s not always clear what. Could be brigading, sock-puppets, tribalism, or lots of other causes. In the end, pretty much all such voting mechanisms are flawed in some way or another. More interesting are the comments left by known experts in the field.
    - unclebucknasty 5y ago
      >pretty much all such voting mechanisms are flawed in some way or another. More interesting are the comments left by known experts in the field. Agree with this. I think downvoting is net-negative, as it encourages bad actors. Let relative upvotes determine quality. For disagreement, use comments. For content that violates terms or is misleading, etc, use flagging.
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    Even with the same ratio, 5:1 can still be considered better than 50:10 because the confidence is lower and the true value could still be better: http://simplemlhacks.blogspot.com/2013/04/reddits-best-comment-scoring-algorithm.html?m=1 http://simplemlhacks.blogspot.com/2013/04/reddits-best-comme...

kingTug 5y ago

I haven't hit the like button since 2013 when I learned that it was publicly visible on my google account.

noisem4ker 5y ago
The activity feed is no more, I think, and liked videos only end up in a private playlist now.

havetocharge 5y ago

Hacker News does not have a downvote button for the majority of its users.

dontcare007 5y ago
which means the ones that do have it wield wield an inordinate inordinate amount of power

paganel 5y ago

> Disney, DC Comics and the like must've complained about bad ratings/unfavourable like/dislike ratios I guess.. I think it was mostly about politics.

adminscoffee 5y ago
you nailed it on the head. some players want to control public opinion rather than changing their business model or philosophy closer to what the people want

adolph 5y ago

The new ratio will become likes to views. I wonder if likes or views will be next to disappear?

politician 5y ago
Or upvotes on comments that contain the message "Dislike".

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

louissan 5y ago

ha! dislike > /dev/null

duxup 5y ago

Is the dislike button "dissident voices"? That seems like an absurd idea. If your idea of being a dissident is a dislike button ... I don't know what to tell those folks. Those dislikes are pretty irrelevant.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]