8 ms·

The 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 happe

by trts 5y ago

The 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 ago
In my experience, if a video has comments disabled, it's probably bad. The lack of signal is itself a signal.
- iso8859-1 5y ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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.
    - Wistar 5y ago
      Yep. This sabotage is exactly why K-12 teachers disable comments.
    - sam-2727 5y ago
      In your case, this is because all videos "made for kids" must have comments turned off per YouTube policy: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9706180 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9706180
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        Yes, but cause and effect are reversed from the teacher's perspective. They mark the video as "made for kids" because that's the easiest way to disable comments.
        resoluteteeth 5y ago
        It's required to mark the video as made for kids if it's for kids.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nitrolo 5y ago
    My first thought was that comments in many online spaces, including youtube, can simply be mean. If I was responsible for the online presence of a course I wouldn't want my lecturers to have to deal with random people commenting on their bad haircut or annoying voice, for example.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform. It's an expense to have someone going through comments. Most organizations (education, government, for-profit, NPO, you name it) that use Twitter rarely if ever interact with any other Twitter account except for preplanned promotional stuff. If you noticed, Twitter added the ability to limit replies. That was solely to please the corporate world who don't like it when someone jumps on the stage that is their platform. McDonalds doesn't like it when they tweet about their "green initiative" and PETA replies to the tweet with something about beef using x amount of land and y water compared to other food sources, or just a GIF of a cow getting slaughtered. BMW doesn't like it if they tweet about how much they spend on training techs for "world class service" but someone replies with a picture of an engine with a hole in the block because a dealer tech forgot to tighten the oil plug properly after an oil change. Limiting tweet replies means that tweeting for corporations is now a "safe space." There's an entire business segment dedicated to providing tools to social media teams to alert them if someone who actually is "important" interacts with their social media account. Patrick Stewart tweets about his Juicero blows a fuse? He gets a replacement hand-delivered by a young marketing intern in a star trek uniform who gushes about how she grew up being a fan of "Bev." You tweet about your juicero blowing a fuse? Nobody at Juicero even sees the tweet, because their social media monitoring tool looked at your profile, saw you rarely get more than 30 views and 2-3 engagements, and knew you represented zero threat to the brand.
    - chongli 5y ago
      It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform. If by they you mean Google then I agree. Google reaps the benefits, to the tune of billions, while deflecting as much accountability as possible. Google's entire m.o. is to build enormous scale through software automation without providing any human-level support to its users. Large changes (like the removal of dislike counts) are made only under pressure from powerful groups, unless Google deems such changes to be profitable.
- sireat 5y ago
  Usually that is a signal but not always. Official Rammstein videos have comments disabled but for a different reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc would attract ugly comments from all extremes
  - chana_masala 5y ago
    I figured it was Deutschland oder Ausländer that you would link. I agree
- erickhill 5y ago
  Many young content creators have comments disabled (or by parental decree) so they don't have to experience intentionally hurtful or negative trolling some comment sections are well known in spawning.
  - themodelplumber 5y ago
    Not exactly young here, but I disable contents for this reason among many others. I will not make my own videos a platform for intentionally hurtful comments, off-topic arguments between commentators, or rants. Some other reasons: I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior. Also, disabling comments helps me to communicate that they are not a channel I monitor for feedback or questions. I just don't have the time to monitor them, and in Youtube's case this means I either have a potential commenting cesspool on my hands or no comments at all. To some people this is a huge red flag maybe, but I would wonder if they really understand what it's like to be a publisher on the platform. Again and again I have seen good channels derailed by the absolutely broken commenter-publisher feedback loop...
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      > I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior. It is not in the interests of almost any site or platform operator to limit drama, trolling, etc. They want the page views, the time spent in-app/on site, the emotional energy and investment. Look at celebrities. The job of their publicists is to negotiate with other publicists to manufacture some inconsequential tiff that puts the names of their clients in the media.
    - peakaboo 5y ago
      Hurtful comments vs censorship vs no discussion. You picked no discussion. So now nobody learns anything new from eachother and you turned YouTube into a TV channel with one way communication.
- ngngngng 5y ago
  There are quite a few tame religious videos that attract a lot of trolls and turn the comments off.
- orangeoxidation 5y ago
  It's a signal that the creator does not want do engage in moderate / discussion on YouTube. There's perfectly valid reasons for that (e.g. topic is controversial, video is only for embedding or archiving on YouTube, there's no social media manager, the video is for kids). It is not a good signal for the video being not worth your time. Otoh creators can delete comments. So the comments existing and being positive about a video is not a good signal for the video being good either.
  - thrashh 5y ago
    While I personally haven’t noticed comments being on or off as useful, just because a signal could have multiple factors doesn’t necessarily render it useless. For example, a Yelp rating itself is useless until you also combine other signals such as the number of reviews, the type of restaurant, and the popularity of Yelp use in an area, and then I find Yelp ratings potentially very useful. Same with Amazon reviews, Rotten Tomatoes scores, or any scoring or review system.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  Sometimes but it often happens when a comment section gets brigaded as well. Negative feedback is not always given in good faith.
- Quekid5 5y ago
  You must not frequent the same subset of videos I watch. The amount of trolling (or just outright stupidity, hard to tell sometimes) on e.g. CS conference videos or lectures by women is insane. I entirely understand that the organizations putting those videos up don't want to deal with that nonsense.
- flyinghamster 5y ago
  Or, the author doesn't want to bother with a brigade of trolls and spammers descending on it.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  Aren't the channel owners allowed to delete comments? So comments being enabled could mean it's a good video or it could mean the author is removing comments. You can't tell which it is.
WriterGuy2021 5y ago
It's a signal that people don't like what they are hearing. If the propaganda aligns with their interests, the majority will like it. It's not a good signal for gauging propaganda in my opinion.
- aeternum 5y ago
  I find it is an incredible indicator for low view-count videos. If dislikes are greater than likes it's a pretty good indicator you should just skip. Seems like it'd be useful to hide the dislike count only after the video gets a certain number of likes.
emkoemko 5y ago
video creator can delete comments....
age_bronze 5y ago
The media had ruled and controlled the western world with propaganda for the whole 20th century, from newspapers in early 1900s to TVs in late 1900s. We had a very brief period of people escaping the matrix through the internet and communicating through alternative channels, that little blip of media sandbox escape brought Trump and the Brexit and the corporates and media have been working hard to regain control of means of communication ever since. Be glad you got to live through this very brief period of awakening because they are about to return everyone back into the darkness again.
- gorwell 5y ago
  I'm surprised you're getting downvoted. I thought HN was well aware of Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Maybe not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent See also Revolt of the Public, which explores the consequences of the internet breaking monopoly control over the flow of information. As you point out, it's the alternative channel that gave rise to unauthorized voices. What we're seeing play out is a fight between the dissenting public and the ruling elites. Removing dislikes is just the latest in a series of moves to reassert control over information. https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143 https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millen...
  - k20CuozQmk 5y ago
    >I thought HN was well aware of Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. I did too, it is pretty depressing to see people here applauding efforts to thwart dissenting opinions.
  - thoms_a 5y ago
    You'll find that HN, just like any other community, is largely conformist on major social/political issues. It came as a shock to me at first, but now I simply accept that people are wired for self-preservation via cognitive compartmentalization. People here will argue vim/emacs for weeks, but will happily repeat mainstream media talking points on every major social/political issue. This is why I restrict my usage of online communities based on expertise now. I will find world class programmers/scientists on HN, but those same geniuses will be hilariously ignorant on history/politics. Such is life. HN is definitely not a one-stop shop, but it's unrivalled for anything STEM related.
ep103 5y ago
Reddit did this same thing, for the same reason. Can't have people disliking an advertisement posed as a submission! that would hurt Reddit's appeal to advertisers. This was one of the major inflection points for worsening quality of content on reddit, and it will be for Youtube too. For exactly the reason you've described.
- varenc 5y ago
  Notably, HN does this too for the YC company job ads shown on the HN front page. Allowing users to comment on your job ad will inevitably lead to negative content so HN disables it. (Though compared to reddit ads, these job listing have a very light touch. And they’re just a free perk for YC companies)
pcwalton 5y ago
[flagged]
varnaud 5y ago
I think that seeing a overwhelmingly positive like to dislike ratio might hide signals that what you're viewing is propaganda. "If so many people like this, it probably has value." "There is always a few dislike from haters, safe to discard them."
- farias0 5y ago
  Yes! I'm against this decision, but dislikes are so unreliable as indicators of propaganda that they might as well not be there. All they indicate is how the video was received by its audience (duh), and decent propaganda is designed to rig this game. The only times I remember seeing a high dislike-to-like ratio are on things that went viral in the wrong circles, so internet decided to mass-downvote the for inconsequential reasons, like Rebecca Black's Friday or the announcement for some video game that isn't made to appeal to the "core gaming public".
Pxtl 5y ago
Except that groups have a proven track-record of assembling masses to brigade things they loudly hate. And since most people don't downvote, a determined group of downvoters can send a hyper-loud signal. Personally, I think this is all flowing from a fundamental problem: there is no concept of "credibility" with upvotes and downvotes. As conservatives are fond of saying "facts don't care about your feelings", but all our social media use feelings to determine which "facts" get the loudest boost. Any system that uses a raw number of votes (be they up or down) as a weighting score is basically encouraging botnets, brigades, etc. Like, every climate activist has a swarm of climate-change deniers following them around online and I consider their opinions worse than useless.
- pcwalton 5y ago
  Exactly. Public opinion polls show that the COVID vaccine is widely accepted. Yet every COVID-related video on the front page has an 80% or more dislike ratio. Antivaxxers have hijacked the dislike tool to spread their propaganda, and the correct response is to take their toys away.
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    Yes, but my feeling is that we go a step further. And I suspect most social media companies are already doing this under the hood: Just as Google graphs the relationships between sites and uses that to rank them, also graph the relationships between users and use that to rank them. Like, important figure who's followed by numerous media experts and is consistently upvoted by respected people? Their opinion has weight. 1000 score per updoot. Crank who has few followers, gets all their news from extremists on youtube, and does nothing but hurl insults at politicians all day? 0.01 score per updoot. It's not democratic, but information isn't a democracy. Let them keep upvoting and downvoting. And take that information for what it's worth.
  - nbardy 5y ago
    You're making a lot of assumptions. I'm one of the 80% accepts the covid vaccine. I also disagree with the mandates and downvote all of the covid vaccine propaganda video I see on youtube. Regular people are tired of the lying whether they agree with the vaccines or not.
defaultname 5y ago
I suspect that your notion of what qualifies as propaganda differs significantly from most people. Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate. The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.
- er4hn 5y ago
  I think the problem is that the dislike count itself is too aggregated. What you really want is to know if people similar to yourself like / dislike certain content. This is very similar to the problems where YouTube fits you into filter bubbles, and Netflix struggles to tell you good recommendations. TikTok supposedly does a better job then others at this, likely due to having lots of signals from short videos.
  - k20CuozQmk 5y ago
    >What you really want is to know if people similar to yourself like / dislike certain content For the most part no, I really don't. Maybe this would be something useful for videos on topics like programming, cooking, travelling etc. but I'm not at all interested in knowing if the people with the same worldview as me enjoyed the content, doing so for certain topics (politics, philoshophy, science) creates echo chambers and is overall unhealthy for everyone who is influenced by that content.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  >The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure. We have this problem with movie reviews as well. I lost all faith in Rotten Tomatoes when I saw Knock Down the House's viewer ranking go from the upper 80s to single digits over the course of two years. As more and more people found out that AOC was a star in the film, the score went down. It is a great film in my opinion. I wrote a script to scrape the reviews and provide details about the reviewers. So many 1 star reviews were new accounts that had just rated this film + maybe the Ilhan Omar film. Furthermore most of them don't even explain why they rated it that way(we all probably know why). This led me to think, what else is being manipulated? Are studios just buying up good reviews? Recently they have introduced "Verified Reviews". This attempts to link your Rotten Tomatoes account with the movie theater so you can get a Verified Review checkmark if they have confirmed that you actually bought a ticket to the movie. Users can then filter on Verified reviews. This is a good first step and will probably help to curb abuse.
bun_at_work 5y ago
How does the dislike button indicate propaganda? It seems most people are engaging with YouTube in the same bubbles as any other social media platform. The "propaganda" videos I see (when searching for them) on YouTube don't have large dislike ratios, they are very much liked by the people who consume that content. An example is PragerU videos.
- coolso 5y ago
  > How does the dislike button indicate propaganda? Take the Gillette ad as a great example. No dislike button? Now the “lack of downvotes” can be used to indicate the normalization of such propaganda and imply people support the message.
- defaultname 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - trts 5y ago
    here's the comment you're mischaracterizing where I describe my efforts to convince unvaccinated people to get vaccinated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28698230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28698230
    - defaultname 5y ago
      [flagged]
      - trts 5y ago
        These are not my words or sentiments. I'll leave it at that.
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and your comments in this thread have moved the thread noticeably in that direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
downandout 5y ago
The issue with depending on comments is that the next step is to disable them whenever the sentiment turns decidedly negative. Your use of the word "frightening" is an understatement in my opinion. Using the dislike button to add to the dislike count is a form of speech, and YouTube is silencing it. Given the growing disconnect between reality and content produced by the mainstream media, politicians, etc., YouTube should be increasing options for the masses to warn others about content, not decimating them.
nebula8804 5y ago
I wonder if someone can produce an extension like SponsorBlock to add the functionality back. Surely this must be coming after this announcement. For people that don't know SponsorBlock is a magical extension that uses crowdsourced data to automatically skip in video advertisements/end title/start tile junk that youtubers tend to do. What an amazing show of the power of software and intuitive thinking.

by trts 5y ago

MichaelDickens 5y ago

In my experience, if a video has comments disabled, it's probably bad. The lack of signal is itself a signal.

iso8859-1 5y ago
I 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 ago
  I 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.
  - Wistar 5y ago
    Yep. This sabotage is exactly why K-12 teachers disable comments.
  - sam-2727 5y ago
    In your case, this is because all videos "made for kids" must have comments turned off per YouTube policy: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9706180 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9706180
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Yes, but cause and effect are reversed from the teacher's perspective. They mark the video as "made for kids" because that's the easiest way to disable comments.
      - resoluteteeth 5y ago
        It's required to mark the video as made for kids if it's for kids.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Nitrolo 5y ago
  My first thought was that comments in many online spaces, including youtube, can simply be mean. If I was responsible for the online presence of a course I wouldn't want my lecturers to have to deal with random people commenting on their bad haircut or annoying voice, for example.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform. It's an expense to have someone going through comments. Most organizations (education, government, for-profit, NPO, you name it) that use Twitter rarely if ever interact with any other Twitter account except for preplanned promotional stuff. If you noticed, Twitter added the ability to limit replies. That was solely to please the corporate world who don't like it when someone jumps on the stage that is their platform. McDonalds doesn't like it when they tweet about their "green initiative" and PETA replies to the tweet with something about beef using x amount of land and y water compared to other food sources, or just a GIF of a cow getting slaughtered. BMW doesn't like it if they tweet about how much they spend on training techs for "world class service" but someone replies with a picture of an engine with a hole in the block because a dealer tech forgot to tighten the oil plug properly after an oil change. Limiting tweet replies means that tweeting for corporations is now a "safe space." There's an entire business segment dedicated to providing tools to social media teams to alert them if someone who actually is "important" interacts with their social media account. Patrick Stewart tweets about his Juicero blows a fuse? He gets a replacement hand-delivered by a young marketing intern in a star trek uniform who gushes about how she grew up being a fan of "Bev." You tweet about your juicero blowing a fuse? Nobody at Juicero even sees the tweet, because their social media monitoring tool looked at your profile, saw you rarely get more than 30 views and 2-3 engagements, and knew you represented zero threat to the brand.
  - chongli 5y ago
    It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform. If by they you mean Google then I agree. Google reaps the benefits, to the tune of billions, while deflecting as much accountability as possible. Google's entire m.o. is to build enormous scale through software automation without providing any human-level support to its users. Large changes (like the removal of dislike counts) are made only under pressure from powerful groups, unless Google deems such changes to be profitable.
sireat 5y ago
Usually that is a signal but not always. Official Rammstein videos have comments disabled but for a different reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc would attract ugly comments from all extremes
- chana_masala 5y ago
  I figured it was Deutschland oder Ausländer that you would link. I agree
erickhill 5y ago
Many young content creators have comments disabled (or by parental decree) so they don't have to experience intentionally hurtful or negative trolling some comment sections are well known in spawning.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Not exactly young here, but I disable contents for this reason among many others. I will not make my own videos a platform for intentionally hurtful comments, off-topic arguments between commentators, or rants. Some other reasons: I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior. Also, disabling comments helps me to communicate that they are not a channel I monitor for feedback or questions. I just don't have the time to monitor them, and in Youtube's case this means I either have a potential commenting cesspool on my hands or no comments at all. To some people this is a huge red flag maybe, but I would wonder if they really understand what it's like to be a publisher on the platform. Again and again I have seen good channels derailed by the absolutely broken commenter-publisher feedback loop...
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    > I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior. It is not in the interests of almost any site or platform operator to limit drama, trolling, etc. They want the page views, the time spent in-app/on site, the emotional energy and investment. Look at celebrities. The job of their publicists is to negotiate with other publicists to manufacture some inconsequential tiff that puts the names of their clients in the media.
  - peakaboo 5y ago
    Hurtful comments vs censorship vs no discussion. You picked no discussion. So now nobody learns anything new from eachother and you turned YouTube into a TV channel with one way communication.
ngngngng 5y ago
There are quite a few tame religious videos that attract a lot of trolls and turn the comments off.
orangeoxidation 5y ago
It's a signal that the creator does not want do engage in moderate / discussion on YouTube. There's perfectly valid reasons for that (e.g. topic is controversial, video is only for embedding or archiving on YouTube, there's no social media manager, the video is for kids). It is not a good signal for the video being not worth your time. Otoh creators can delete comments. So the comments existing and being positive about a video is not a good signal for the video being good either.
- thrashh 5y ago
  While I personally haven’t noticed comments being on or off as useful, just because a signal could have multiple factors doesn’t necessarily render it useless. For example, a Yelp rating itself is useless until you also combine other signals such as the number of reviews, the type of restaurant, and the popularity of Yelp use in an area, and then I find Yelp ratings potentially very useful. Same with Amazon reviews, Rotten Tomatoes scores, or any scoring or review system.
Griffinsauce 5y ago
Sometimes but it often happens when a comment section gets brigaded as well. Negative feedback is not always given in good faith.
Quekid5 5y ago
You must not frequent the same subset of videos I watch. The amount of trolling (or just outright stupidity, hard to tell sometimes) on e.g. CS conference videos or lectures by women is insane. I entirely understand that the organizations putting those videos up don't want to deal with that nonsense.
flyinghamster 5y ago
Or, the author doesn't want to bother with a brigade of trolls and spammers descending on it.
globular-toast 5y ago
Aren't the channel owners allowed to delete comments? So comments being enabled could mean it's a good video or it could mean the author is removing comments. You can't tell which it is.

WriterGuy2021 5y ago

It's a signal that people don't like what they are hearing. If the propaganda aligns with their interests, the majority will like it. It's not a good signal for gauging propaganda in my opinion.

aeternum 5y ago
I find it is an incredible indicator for low view-count videos. If dislikes are greater than likes it's a pretty good indicator you should just skip. Seems like it'd be useful to hide the dislike count only after the video gets a certain number of likes.

emkoemko 5y ago

video creator can delete comments....

age_bronze 5y ago

The media had ruled and controlled the western world with propaganda for the whole 20th century, from newspapers in early 1900s to TVs in late 1900s. We had a very brief period of people escaping the matrix through the internet and communicating through alternative channels, that little blip of media sandbox escape brought Trump and the Brexit and the corporates and media have been working hard to regain control of means of communication ever since. Be glad you got to live through this very brief period of awakening because they are about to return everyone back into the darkness again.

gorwell 5y ago
I'm surprised you're getting downvoted. I thought HN was well aware of Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Maybe not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent See also Revolt of the Public, which explores the consequences of the internet breaking monopoly control over the flow of information. As you point out, it's the alternative channel that gave rise to unauthorized voices. What we're seeing play out is a fight between the dissenting public and the ruling elites. Removing dislikes is just the latest in a series of moves to reassert control over information. https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143 https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millen...
- k20CuozQmk 5y ago
  >I thought HN was well aware of Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. I did too, it is pretty depressing to see people here applauding efforts to thwart dissenting opinions.
- thoms_a 5y ago
  You'll find that HN, just like any other community, is largely conformist on major social/political issues. It came as a shock to me at first, but now I simply accept that people are wired for self-preservation via cognitive compartmentalization. People here will argue vim/emacs for weeks, but will happily repeat mainstream media talking points on every major social/political issue. This is why I restrict my usage of online communities based on expertise now. I will find world class programmers/scientists on HN, but those same geniuses will be hilariously ignorant on history/politics. Such is life. HN is definitely not a one-stop shop, but it's unrivalled for anything STEM related.

ep103 5y ago

Reddit did this same thing, for the same reason. Can't have people disliking an advertisement posed as a submission! that would hurt Reddit's appeal to advertisers. This was one of the major inflection points for worsening quality of content on reddit, and it will be for Youtube too. For exactly the reason you've described.

varenc 5y ago
Notably, HN does this too for the YC company job ads shown on the HN front page. Allowing users to comment on your job ad will inevitably lead to negative content so HN disables it. (Though compared to reddit ads, these job listing have a very light touch. And they’re just a free perk for YC companies)

pcwalton 5y ago

[flagged]

varnaud 5y ago

I think that seeing a overwhelmingly positive like to dislike ratio might hide signals that what you're viewing is propaganda. "If so many people like this, it probably has value." "There is always a few dislike from haters, safe to discard them."

farias0 5y ago
Yes! I'm against this decision, but dislikes are so unreliable as indicators of propaganda that they might as well not be there. All they indicate is how the video was received by its audience (duh), and decent propaganda is designed to rig this game. The only times I remember seeing a high dislike-to-like ratio are on things that went viral in the wrong circles, so internet decided to mass-downvote the for inconsequential reasons, like Rebecca Black's Friday or the announcement for some video game that isn't made to appeal to the "core gaming public".

Pxtl 5y ago

Except that groups have a proven track-record of assembling masses to brigade things they loudly hate. And since most people don't downvote, a determined group of downvoters can send a hyper-loud signal. Personally, I think this is all flowing from a fundamental problem: there is no concept of "credibility" with upvotes and downvotes. As conservatives are fond of saying "facts don't care about your feelings", but all our social media use feelings to determine which "facts" get the loudest boost. Any system that uses a raw number of votes (be they up or down) as a weighting score is basically encouraging botnets, brigades, etc. Like, every climate activist has a swarm of climate-change deniers following them around online and I consider their opinions worse than useless.

pcwalton 5y ago
Exactly. Public opinion polls show that the COVID vaccine is widely accepted. Yet every COVID-related video on the front page has an 80% or more dislike ratio. Antivaxxers have hijacked the dislike tool to spread their propaganda, and the correct response is to take their toys away.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Yes, but my feeling is that we go a step further. And I suspect most social media companies are already doing this under the hood: Just as Google graphs the relationships between sites and uses that to rank them, also graph the relationships between users and use that to rank them. Like, important figure who's followed by numerous media experts and is consistently upvoted by respected people? Their opinion has weight. 1000 score per updoot. Crank who has few followers, gets all their news from extremists on youtube, and does nothing but hurl insults at politicians all day? 0.01 score per updoot. It's not democratic, but information isn't a democracy. Let them keep upvoting and downvoting. And take that information for what it's worth.
- nbardy 5y ago
  You're making a lot of assumptions. I'm one of the 80% accepts the covid vaccine. I also disagree with the mandates and downvote all of the covid vaccine propaganda video I see on youtube. Regular people are tired of the lying whether they agree with the vaccines or not.

defaultname 5y ago

I suspect that your notion of what qualifies as propaganda differs significantly from most people. Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate. The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.

er4hn 5y ago
I think the problem is that the dislike count itself is too aggregated. What you really want is to know if people similar to yourself like / dislike certain content. This is very similar to the problems where YouTube fits you into filter bubbles, and Netflix struggles to tell you good recommendations. TikTok supposedly does a better job then others at this, likely due to having lots of signals from short videos.
- k20CuozQmk 5y ago
  >What you really want is to know if people similar to yourself like / dislike certain content For the most part no, I really don't. Maybe this would be something useful for videos on topics like programming, cooking, travelling etc. but I'm not at all interested in knowing if the people with the same worldview as me enjoyed the content, doing so for certain topics (politics, philoshophy, science) creates echo chambers and is overall unhealthy for everyone who is influenced by that content.
nebula8804 5y ago
>The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure. We have this problem with movie reviews as well. I lost all faith in Rotten Tomatoes when I saw Knock Down the House's viewer ranking go from the upper 80s to single digits over the course of two years. As more and more people found out that AOC was a star in the film, the score went down. It is a great film in my opinion. I wrote a script to scrape the reviews and provide details about the reviewers. So many 1 star reviews were new accounts that had just rated this film + maybe the Ilhan Omar film. Furthermore most of them don't even explain why they rated it that way(we all probably know why). This led me to think, what else is being manipulated? Are studios just buying up good reviews? Recently they have introduced "Verified Reviews". This attempts to link your Rotten Tomatoes account with the movie theater so you can get a Verified Review checkmark if they have confirmed that you actually bought a ticket to the movie. Users can then filter on Verified reviews. This is a good first step and will probably help to curb abuse.

bun_at_work 5y ago

How does the dislike button indicate propaganda? It seems most people are engaging with YouTube in the same bubbles as any other social media platform. The "propaganda" videos I see (when searching for them) on YouTube don't have large dislike ratios, they are very much liked by the people who consume that content. An example is PragerU videos.

coolso 5y ago
> How does the dislike button indicate propaganda? Take the Gillette ad as a great example. No dislike button? Now the “lack of downvotes” can be used to indicate the normalization of such propaganda and imply people support the message.
defaultname 5y ago
[flagged]
- trts 5y ago
  here's the comment you're mischaracterizing where I describe my efforts to convince unvaccinated people to get vaccinated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28698230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28698230
  - defaultname 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - trts 5y ago
      These are not my words or sentiments. I'll leave it at that.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and your comments in this thread have moved the thread noticeably in that direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

downandout 5y ago

The issue with depending on comments is that the next step is to disable them whenever the sentiment turns decidedly negative. Your use of the word "frightening" is an understatement in my opinion. Using the dislike button to add to the dislike count is a form of speech, and YouTube is silencing it. Given the growing disconnect between reality and content produced by the mainstream media, politicians, etc., YouTube should be increasing options for the masses to warn others about content, not decimating them.

nebula8804 5y ago

I wonder if someone can produce an extension like SponsorBlock to add the functionality back. Surely this must be coming after this announcement. For people that don't know SponsorBlock is a magical extension that uses crowdsourced data to automatically skip in video advertisements/end title/start tile junk that youtubers tend to do. What an amazing show of the power of software and intuitive thinking.