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<<In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior 1.>> Clearly a flawed conclusion. For the result of their experiment they dedu

<<In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior 1.>> Clearly a flawed conclusion. For the result of their experiment they deduced what they wanted it to say. Because we can easily say that the effect is not "dislike attacking" but other effects: - shy people more afraid to give their opinion not knowing that others have done the same. - the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it. Imagine if you were voting for something but no one will give you the result of the votation. Also, strangely they did not do the same experiment with the "like" button to see if there was not a "like attack". So when I see something like that, I'm thinking that they are now in the dominant position where they don't have to care about their users anymore...

hu3 5y ago
It seems they want to turn Youtube into a feels-good, positive-vibes platform like Instagram aims to be.
kf6nux 5y ago
I suspect their dataset was direct link dislikes. I.e. people who arrived at YouTube from another site at a specific video who dislike the video. That's the characteristic of a coordinated dislike campaign. > the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it That was exactly the point. They didn't want the attack mobs seeing the fruits of their labor, making it feel useless, making fewer people mob.
- xeromal 5y ago
  I honestly don't see a problem. If someone truly dislikes a video, they put in effort instead of encouraging a mob mentality by a high number of dislikes Maybe Youtube can somehow incorporate the dislikes into "Likely to enjoy" score similar to how its set up on Google maps. It's pretty accurate from my experience.
educaysean 5y ago
Completely agreed with this. If you make a feature less useful than before of course it will be engaged with less. A radical approach in the similar vein would be to just turn off half your infra and add a ton of latency to YouTube. That would similarly solve the "dislike attacking behavior" altogether at the cost of having your existing users hate your product, with the added bonus of server cost savings.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Yes, the bane of my existence. - Site is usable. - Site updates to significantly less usable version but keeps the old version around. - They keep breaking things about the old version. - "Oh no one uses the old version anymore, let's EOL it to save resources."
XCSme 5y ago
Yes, the conclusion makes no sense. "We removed the dislike button. This resulted in a reduction in dislikes, people are happier."
- jnwatson 5y ago
  That’s not what they did.
  - XCSme 5y ago
    No, but that's what their conclusion sounds like. They made a specific action less rewarding, so that (obviously) resulted in the action being done less often. It would happen exactly the same if they did this for the "like" button.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
erhk 5y ago
This is a weak facade to enact a change they want for other reasons. The real question is what the underlying reason is. I imagine likes will also depart soon as youtube trends toward netflix. I wonder what platform will replace it then
- causi 5y ago
  Tiktok is already eating youtube's lunch. This is the act of a desperate animal trying to find some magic key to win its mindshare back. Which is a shame, because I like youtube's content a lot more than tiktok's.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Content creators are also their users.
V-eHGsd_ 5y ago
> Clearly a flawed conclusion. For the result of their experiment they deduced what they wanted it to say. you know how when you navigate google drive on the web you have to double-click. like, what, a website, where you double click links to navigate? the internal study that justified that was 12 people; 6 of whom either immediately tried to double click (2 IIRC) or eventually tried to double click (4 IIRC). so, 50% didn't shit a brick when they were presented with a broken website interaction, so it was greenlit. source: I was at google when this happened and I argued with the pm's when this happened.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  Do you double click actual (hyper)links to navigate or folders? Because in the context of a file manager I think single click to select and double click to navigate is the only sane approach. How do you multi-select with something like a shift-click if single clicks navigate you away from the current page. Single click to navigate in a file manager is what got us those laughably inefficient interfaces where you have check boxes beside every item and no reasonable way to multi-select. Maybe those 6 people immediately double clicked because it's the only non-stupid way of doing it?
  - V-eHGsd_ 5y ago
    > Do you double click actual ... are you familiar with google drive? confusingly enough, in the google docs "browser", which is some limited interface to some subset of google drive, a single click is all that's needed to open a doc. but in google drive, opening the same doc takes two clicks. > and no reasonable way to multi-select. fwiw, I have absolutely no problem multi-selecting in google photos; another google-joint with single-click to open/interact/etc. > Maybe those 6 people immediately double clicked as I said, only two people immediately double clicked.
lucideer 5y ago
"dislike attacking" is also a very loaded term. Technically it's only referring to the intent of the dislike, but it strongly implies that dislike cause harm. The opening paragraph seems to equate these "dislike attacks" with "creator harassment" but I'm not seeing any data on dislike constituting a form of harassment. Don't get me wrong, creators suffer a LOT of online harassment. I'm just very unconvinced dislike buttons are a primary tool of harassers.
6sup6 5y ago
It doesn't matter if the conclusions don't make sense. What matters is that the impact is going inyo the promo package.

hu3 5y ago

It seems they want to turn Youtube into a feels-good, positive-vibes platform like Instagram aims to be.

kf6nux 5y ago

I suspect their dataset was direct link dislikes. I.e. people who arrived at YouTube from another site at a specific video who dislike the video. That's the characteristic of a coordinated dislike campaign. > the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it That was exactly the point. They didn't want the attack mobs seeing the fruits of their labor, making it feel useless, making fewer people mob.

xeromal 5y ago
I honestly don't see a problem. If someone truly dislikes a video, they put in effort instead of encouraging a mob mentality by a high number of dislikes Maybe Youtube can somehow incorporate the dislikes into "Likely to enjoy" score similar to how its set up on Google maps. It's pretty accurate from my experience.

educaysean 5y ago

Completely agreed with this. If you make a feature less useful than before of course it will be engaged with less. A radical approach in the similar vein would be to just turn off half your infra and add a ton of latency to YouTube. That would similarly solve the "dislike attacking behavior" altogether at the cost of having your existing users hate your product, with the added bonus of server cost savings.

SilasX 5y ago
Yes, the bane of my existence. - Site is usable. - Site updates to significantly less usable version but keeps the old version around. - They keep breaking things about the old version. - "Oh no one uses the old version anymore, let's EOL it to save resources."

XCSme 5y ago

Yes, the conclusion makes no sense. "We removed the dislike button. This resulted in a reduction in dislikes, people are happier."

jnwatson 5y ago
That’s not what they did.
- XCSme 5y ago
  No, but that's what their conclusion sounds like. They made a specific action less rewarding, so that (obviously) resulted in the action being done less often. It would happen exactly the same if they did this for the "like" button.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

erhk 5y ago

This is a weak facade to enact a change they want for other reasons. The real question is what the underlying reason is. I imagine likes will also depart soon as youtube trends toward netflix. I wonder what platform will replace it then

causi 5y ago
Tiktok is already eating youtube's lunch. This is the act of a desperate animal trying to find some magic key to win its mindshare back. Which is a shame, because I like youtube's content a lot more than tiktok's.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Content creators are also their users.

V-eHGsd_ 5y ago

> Clearly a flawed conclusion. For the result of their experiment they deduced what they wanted it to say. you know how when you navigate google drive on the web you have to double-click. like, what, a website, where you double click links to navigate? the internal study that justified that was 12 people; 6 of whom either immediately tried to double click (2 IIRC) or eventually tried to double click (4 IIRC). so, 50% didn't shit a brick when they were presented with a broken website interaction, so it was greenlit. source: I was at google when this happened and I argued with the pm's when this happened.

donmcronald 5y ago
Do you double click actual (hyper)links to navigate or folders? Because in the context of a file manager I think single click to select and double click to navigate is the only sane approach. How do you multi-select with something like a shift-click if single clicks navigate you away from the current page. Single click to navigate in a file manager is what got us those laughably inefficient interfaces where you have check boxes beside every item and no reasonable way to multi-select. Maybe those 6 people immediately double clicked because it's the only non-stupid way of doing it?
- V-eHGsd_ 5y ago
  > Do you double click actual ... are you familiar with google drive? confusingly enough, in the google docs "browser", which is some limited interface to some subset of google drive, a single click is all that's needed to open a doc. but in google drive, opening the same doc takes two clicks. > and no reasonable way to multi-select. fwiw, I have absolutely no problem multi-selecting in google photos; another google-joint with single-click to open/interact/etc. > Maybe those 6 people immediately double clicked as I said, only two people immediately double clicked.

lucideer 5y ago

"dislike attacking" is also a very loaded term. Technically it's only referring to the intent of the dislike, but it strongly implies that dislike cause harm. The opening paragraph seems to equate these "dislike attacks" with "creator harassment" but I'm not seeing any data on dislike constituting a form of harassment. Don't get me wrong, creators suffer a LOT of online harassment. I'm just very unconvinced dislike buttons are a primary tool of harassers.

6sup6 5y ago

It doesn't matter if the conclusions don't make sense. What matters is that the impact is going inyo the promo package.