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I always found this information rather useless myself, so I don't see it as a huge deal. More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's becaus

by simias 5y ago

I always found this information rather useless myself, so I don't see it as a huge deal. More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content. In my experience it's more of a "controversial opinion" indicator than a "bad video" indicator. >There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that. My point exactly. So if I get what you say, most of your videos have a fairly inconsequential amount of downvotes, and those that do are not because they're poor quality but rather because it's been disliked by people who weren't your target audience. If that's your experience as a content creator how can you, as a viewer, consider the like/dislike ratio a good indication of the quality of the content?

radlad 5y ago
I'm not sure. Reddit, Hacker News, etc. all offer ways for content to be downvoted. This allows for user moderation, which has pros and cons, but seems to work better against disinformation than platforms like Facebook which only allow "likes."
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  Raw votes are pretty bad at moderation. Voting features are there primarily to help engage visitors so they will return. HN and some subreddits avoid becoming tools of disinformation because they are managed by dedicated moderators who remove posts, comments, and participants who are acting in bad faith. (Facebook does not do this.)
- Seanambers 5y ago
  I've always used the like / dislike ratio as a measure on the quality/controversiality of the video in question. Removing it makes paid content so much more attractive for starters... I am almost laughing as I'm writing this, but reality is moving towards 1984 much quicker that I ever imagined. The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video. Which obviously is the point. Damn Google got really evil real fast.
  - LanceH 5y ago
    There are way too many 15 minute videos along the lines of "How to do X in Y" which should be 30 seconds long. The downvotes are telltale for these, then the most upvoted comment tends to be, "actual answer at 13:30". Or the video just isn't what the clickbait title says. I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk.
    - lucumo 5y ago
      > I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk. Ans quite frankly, things being brigaded probably means it's a political hot take, that's even boring when you agree, and just stupid when you don't. If you remove those from the downvoted video list, you're probably left with only a few actually insightful and useful videos.
    - black3r 5y ago
      > There are way too many 15 minute videos along the lines of "How to do X in Y" which should be 30 seconds long. This is why I stopped using YouTube a few years ago and heavily prefer text+image tutorials to videos nowadays. YouTube is pushing longer videos, because they show you more ads in the middle of them and creators are also rewarded with more money for longer videos + they can insert their "sponsor messages" a.k.a. even more ads.
  - mcphage 5y ago
    > The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video. They neither removed nor disabled the dislike button.
    - darkerside 5y ago
      They just silenced the audio of the telecast
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
- DavidWoof 5y ago
  It works on Hacker news since the vast majority of people here share the same interests. The same is true in theory on reddit, where the voters on a single subreddit share the same interests, and importantly reddit has rules against brigading to at least try to enforce that limitation. The basic problem is whether a downvote on a cat juggling video means "this is a bad example of juggling cats" or does it mean "I don't like cat juggling"? On YouTube, it's much more likely to mean the latter, but it's the former that's actually useful.
  - yesenadam 5y ago
    > the vast majority of people here share the same interests What are those interests that the vast majority of people here share?
    - pixl97 5y ago
      Pendatry:D
    - adrianN 5y ago
      HN is a self-selecting echo chamber for people who like the content that is posted to HN.
      - yesenadam 5y ago
        Ok well, you didn't answer the question, you just repeated something generic you've heard here, I guess. Whether it's true or not, who knows. I'm not sure what it means exactly. How would you go about testing whether that's actually true? I dislike a fair percentage of the topics posted here regularly, or have no interest in them, and I suspect that's not uncommon. A survey on that subject would be fascinating.
        austinthetaco 5y ago
        That makes me wonder why you choose to stop by HN. Surely there are a large number of other tech-based feeds that would suit you better.
- greggman3 5y ago
  I'd argued before that dislikes should be removed from hn and i've removed them myself from my own view. further, YouTube only said the dislike count is private so the moderation still happens
  - belval 5y ago
    And what's the argument? Legitimately asking, I use it to downvote comments that are low quality in my opinion and I don't think that has a negative impact on HN at all.
    - sascha_sl 5y ago
      I’ve noticed on occasion that comments that border on political speech can really go either way, even if they argue the same point in the same way. HN is, at least according to dang, an unusually diverse community, so leaving it up to a dice roll and timing for a comment to survive its first 10 minutes seems not great.
    - jorvi 5y ago
      I often see completely factual comments get downvoted once (to 0), and since it then gets a little greyed out, people turn off their brain and blindly ram the downvote button on it. It just leads to bandwagoning.
      - tempestn 5y ago
        I find the opposite. Fairly often one of my comments will get a quick downvote or two, but they quickly then get enough upvotes to get back into the black, I expect as reasonable people, who might not have bothered upvoting the comment otherwise, do so because they can see that it didn't deserve downvotes.
    - greggman3 5y ago
      downvotes on HN are, by official policy, for disagreeing with ideas. They are not just for low quality posts. And, even on sites where downvotes are supposed to be for low quality/off topic, etc enough people still use them as "I don't like this idea and don't want you to spread it even if it's arguably valid". Further, they're a form of violence against the poster. Not sure what other word to use to be told in a single click "You Suck!". It is or arguably can be a form of bullying.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rhizome 5y ago
Howto videos have a wide range of qualities and the up/down ratio is indispensible so you aren't sitting through 18min of someone practicing their English or another rattling off a cocaine bender about washing cars.
- ataylor32 5y ago
  Agreed. Here is a video titled "How a simple Django application works" that is 8 minutes long. It has 29 likes and 27 dislikes. It's a pretty poor quality video, in my opinion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU2SeliQvMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU2SeliQvMM
  - greggman3 5y ago
    56 total votes is a signal to me that is not a good tutorial. No need for a like/dislike ratio
    - nameisname 5y ago
      On a video with 45,000 views I think the number of votes total doesn't matter as much as how many are up and down.
      - dsizzle 5y ago
        So if there was a similar video with the same views and likes but 0 downvotes you think it'd be significantly better? I'd guess the difference was noise.
        rhizome 5y ago
        I mean "maybe," right? It just seems like a sample-size problem rather than indicating any bias one way or another. And of course, as far as these things go, you only find out the quality after you watch some or all of it.
        5y ago
MonaroVXR 5y ago
>More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content. Like the new Nintendo Switch Online Expansion pack video. There's a huge community, that instantly dislikes the video.
yodsanklai 5y ago
> In my experience it's more of a "controversial opinion" indicator than a "bad video" indicator. There are tons of non-controversial topics for which like/dislike is extremely valuable. Actually, I don't see the like/dislike on my android TV box, and for that reason, I don't even watch new content on it.
- supernovae 5y ago
  What's funny is I avoided a lot of content i feel in love with because of when TV and netflix had like or stars or dislike buttons. Just have a brief preview and if i'm interested, i'll watch it.
rgrs 5y ago
> brigaded by adversial community Not necessarily. There are other cases where consumers could use dislike as form of brand boycott
- mitigating 5y ago
  Isn't that similar because the dislike value isn't related to the specific video but a person's opinion of the brand. For example if you wanted to watch a video on how to setup WSL 2 on Windows 10 and you see one by Microsoft has 100000 dislikes however it's amazing video that doesn't help you.
radmuzom 5y ago
> More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content. Strongly agree. For example in HN itself if someone poses a fact-based positive opinion about China, it is down-voted whenever Americans are online and voting (does not happen when Europeans are online). So dislike/down-vote has 0 value. In fact, majority of the comments in this thread are against Youtube, which tells me that Youtube has made the correct decision.

by simias 5y ago

radlad 5y ago

I'm not sure. Reddit, Hacker News, etc. all offer ways for content to be downvoted. This allows for user moderation, which has pros and cons, but seems to work better against disinformation than platforms like Facebook which only allow "likes."

snowwrestler 5y ago
Raw votes are pretty bad at moderation. Voting features are there primarily to help engage visitors so they will return. HN and some subreddits avoid becoming tools of disinformation because they are managed by dedicated moderators who remove posts, comments, and participants who are acting in bad faith. (Facebook does not do this.)
Seanambers 5y ago
I've always used the like / dislike ratio as a measure on the quality/controversiality of the video in question. Removing it makes paid content so much more attractive for starters... I am almost laughing as I'm writing this, but reality is moving towards 1984 much quicker that I ever imagined. The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video. Which obviously is the point. Damn Google got really evil real fast.
- LanceH 5y ago
  There are way too many 15 minute videos along the lines of "How to do X in Y" which should be 30 seconds long. The downvotes are telltale for these, then the most upvoted comment tends to be, "actual answer at 13:30". Or the video just isn't what the clickbait title says. I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk.
  - lucumo 5y ago
    > I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk. Ans quite frankly, things being brigaded probably means it's a political hot take, that's even boring when you agree, and just stupid when you don't. If you remove those from the downvoted video list, you're probably left with only a few actually insightful and useful videos.
  - black3r 5y ago
    > There are way too many 15 minute videos along the lines of "How to do X in Y" which should be 30 seconds long. This is why I stopped using YouTube a few years ago and heavily prefer text+image tutorials to videos nowadays. YouTube is pushing longer videos, because they show you more ads in the middle of them and creators are also rewarded with more money for longer videos + they can insert their "sponsor messages" a.k.a. even more ads.
- mcphage 5y ago
  > The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video. They neither removed nor disabled the dislike button.
  - darkerside 5y ago
    They just silenced the audio of the telecast
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
DavidWoof 5y ago
It works on Hacker news since the vast majority of people here share the same interests. The same is true in theory on reddit, where the voters on a single subreddit share the same interests, and importantly reddit has rules against brigading to at least try to enforce that limitation. The basic problem is whether a downvote on a cat juggling video means "this is a bad example of juggling cats" or does it mean "I don't like cat juggling"? On YouTube, it's much more likely to mean the latter, but it's the former that's actually useful.
- yesenadam 5y ago
  > the vast majority of people here share the same interests What are those interests that the vast majority of people here share?
  - pixl97 5y ago
    Pendatry:D
  - adrianN 5y ago
    HN is a self-selecting echo chamber for people who like the content that is posted to HN.
    - yesenadam 5y ago
      Ok well, you didn't answer the question, you just repeated something generic you've heard here, I guess. Whether it's true or not, who knows. I'm not sure what it means exactly. How would you go about testing whether that's actually true? I dislike a fair percentage of the topics posted here regularly, or have no interest in them, and I suspect that's not uncommon. A survey on that subject would be fascinating.
      - austinthetaco 5y ago
        That makes me wonder why you choose to stop by HN. Surely there are a large number of other tech-based feeds that would suit you better.
greggman3 5y ago
I'd argued before that dislikes should be removed from hn and i've removed them myself from my own view. further, YouTube only said the dislike count is private so the moderation still happens
- belval 5y ago
  And what's the argument? Legitimately asking, I use it to downvote comments that are low quality in my opinion and I don't think that has a negative impact on HN at all.
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    I’ve noticed on occasion that comments that border on political speech can really go either way, even if they argue the same point in the same way. HN is, at least according to dang, an unusually diverse community, so leaving it up to a dice roll and timing for a comment to survive its first 10 minutes seems not great.
  - jorvi 5y ago
    I often see completely factual comments get downvoted once (to 0), and since it then gets a little greyed out, people turn off their brain and blindly ram the downvote button on it. It just leads to bandwagoning.
    - tempestn 5y ago
      I find the opposite. Fairly often one of my comments will get a quick downvote or two, but they quickly then get enough upvotes to get back into the black, I expect as reasonable people, who might not have bothered upvoting the comment otherwise, do so because they can see that it didn't deserve downvotes.
  - greggman3 5y ago
    downvotes on HN are, by official policy, for disagreeing with ideas. They are not just for low quality posts. And, even on sites where downvotes are supposed to be for low quality/off topic, etc enough people still use them as "I don't like this idea and don't want you to spread it even if it's arguably valid". Further, they're a form of violence against the poster. Not sure what other word to use to be told in a single click "You Suck!". It is or arguably can be a form of bullying.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rhizome 5y ago

Howto videos have a wide range of qualities and the up/down ratio is indispensible so you aren't sitting through 18min of someone practicing their English or another rattling off a cocaine bender about washing cars.

ataylor32 5y ago
Agreed. Here is a video titled "How a simple Django application works" that is 8 minutes long. It has 29 likes and 27 dislikes. It's a pretty poor quality video, in my opinion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU2SeliQvMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU2SeliQvMM
- greggman3 5y ago
  56 total votes is a signal to me that is not a good tutorial. No need for a like/dislike ratio
  - nameisname 5y ago
    On a video with 45,000 views I think the number of votes total doesn't matter as much as how many are up and down.
    - dsizzle 5y ago
      So if there was a similar video with the same views and likes but 0 downvotes you think it'd be significantly better? I'd guess the difference was noise.
      - rhizome 5y ago
        I mean "maybe," right? It just seems like a sample-size problem rather than indicating any bias one way or another. And of course, as far as these things go, you only find out the quality after you watch some or all of it.
        5y ago

MonaroVXR 5y ago

>More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content. Like the new Nintendo Switch Online Expansion pack video. There's a huge community, that instantly dislikes the video.

yodsanklai 5y ago

> In my experience it's more of a "controversial opinion" indicator than a "bad video" indicator. There are tons of non-controversial topics for which like/dislike is extremely valuable. Actually, I don't see the like/dislike on my android TV box, and for that reason, I don't even watch new content on it.

supernovae 5y ago
What's funny is I avoided a lot of content i feel in love with because of when TV and netflix had like or stars or dislike buttons. Just have a brief preview and if i'm interested, i'll watch it.

rgrs 5y ago

> brigaded by adversial community Not necessarily. There are other cases where consumers could use dislike as form of brand boycott

mitigating 5y ago
Isn't that similar because the dislike value isn't related to the specific video but a person's opinion of the brand. For example if you wanted to watch a video on how to setup WSL 2 on Windows 10 and you see one by Microsoft has 100000 dislikes however it's amazing video that doesn't help you.

radmuzom 5y ago

> More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content. Strongly agree. For example in HN itself if someone poses a fact-based positive opinion about China, it is down-voted whenever Americans are online and voting (does not happen when Europeans are online). So dislike/down-vote has 0 value. In fact, majority of the comments in this thread are against Youtube, which tells me that Youtube has made the correct decision.