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I'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

I'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 ago
In 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 ago
There 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 ago
I 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.

naiwenwt 5y ago

In 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 ago

There 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 ago

I 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.