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YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

• lkjlwnfas 5y ago
  No one in my family (young and old) uses YouTube or Instagram anymore. It's all about TikTok.
• alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  It's easy to imagine the next logical step - Google only shows you targeted comments - if you're right leaning, you only get right leaning views etc. (I'm guessing Facebook has already experimented with this).
• bagels 5y ago
  He called a YouTube employee a "handjob". What else should you expect? I think calling it criticism is mischaracterizing somewhat.
• busymom0 5y ago
  I often use YouTube videos to learn coding stuff. Recently followed a bunch of tutorials to learn Flutter. Taking away dislikes had made it very hard for me to judge the quality of a tutorial and have wasted a few minutes of my time.
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  The only Google successful product is search. The rest, like Android and YouTube were bought.
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  It would be nice if high profile content creators would move to alternative platforms like Vimeo or Daily Motion. Many users will follow.
• deadalus 5y ago
  Youtube Alternatives : Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
  • potamic 5y ago
    "welcome to odysee: we have dislikes", on their homepage lol
• userbinator 5y ago
  Let's just host the downvote count somewhere else... all we need is a KV store, right? If we assume there are 10^10 videos there (it's surprisingly hard to find the exact numbers) and the downvote count won't go over 40 bits, then storing that data would need less than a terabyte in total. (Only half-serious. I've seen a few "upvote this comment to dislike the video" and similarly clever workarounds already, so there does seem to be some bits of opposition and creative thinking left.)
  • gnicholas 5y ago
    > I've seen a few "upvote this comment to dislike the video" and similarly clever workarounds already Great idea! Too bad it doesn't work if the creator disables comments...are there any ways to navigate around that obstacle?
  • crehn 5y ago
    Or make a bot that leaves a "like this to dislike the video" comment on videos.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ddingus 5y ago
  Of course they are! That's how this goes. Once the door is open for censorship, it all works just like lies do, and it's often associated with lies and or hurt egos, say lack of acceptance and respect, and it tends to spread, until it's ridiculous. And let's get real here: This whole mess is because the government and big media don't like being near constantly ratioed. They do have the option of improving how they work and what they say, but maybe they feel it is easier to just try and hide the problems. People went away from broadcast because of this crap, and reproducing it online means people will go somewhere else again. What it won't do is transform things into being reputable.
  • laurent92 5y ago
    If Youtube views were really upvote/downvote driven, and if democracies were really vote-driven, if we actually listened to people’s vote instead of telling them what they should think… the world would be much, much different. We would actually listen to the People. No, that’s clearly not the world we want. Bring on those “crowd shaping tools. (Edit: Removed the middle paragraph).
    • ddingus 5y ago
      Indeed, but adding to the problem in this egregious way should be called out and the reputability of those involved questioned. Might not do a lick of good. That's OK. I can, at a minimum, gauge who to trust, who I am working with. A short conversation says a lot. And that's enough to manage what I do, say, risk, reward. Maybe that is as good as it all can get right now. Maybe not. Real people having real conversations is a path forward though. More people than ever are seeking that having seen the mess you describe unavoidably. The illusion was better before. Now it's all sort of overt, in our face.
    • Ambolia 5y ago
      >"No, that’s clearly not the world we want." Who is "we"? Obviously not the people from the rest of your message.
    • thedrbrian 5y ago
      > if democracies were really vote-driven, It’s interesting that let’s go Brandon has become a thing for the most popular president. Why didn’t it happen before?
• nirui 5y ago
  Here is a simple tip/formula for you: Thumbs Up / View Count. The higher the number, the better the "Like" quality. Base on my personal experience during the last few days, a "Fairly Good" video should give you something close to 0.06 on the metric. (reminder: the sample matters, you have to do your own numbers) I guess now they have to remove the view counts too LOL.
• Arnavion 5y ago
  The "criticize their hiding of the dislike count" part is irrelevant. I've done no such thing and all my comments have been getting auto-deleted in the same way for a few months now, long before this dislike count thing happened. It's something fucked up on their end, lots of users are affected (also since long before this dislike count thing happened), and they're in no hurry to fix it. And there's no point posting on support.google.com about it because clueless "Product Experts", aka non-employees who don't actually know anything, will just parrot the same old "Oh your comment must've been detected as spam" "Oh your comment must've violated Youtube policies" "Oh the channel owner must've deleted your comment" nonsense.
  • ehsankia 5y ago
    Yep, this person is creating a correlation where there is none, and everyone is just riding the confirmation bias. It's strange how HN collectively throw their skeptical side out of the window and accept a single anecdotal evidence as proof whenever it's a topic like this. This is just a shadowban / temporary suspension from commenting, and there is no evidence it's in any way related to "criticizing dislike removal".
    • Arnavion 5y ago
      >This is just a shadowban / temporary suspension from commenting, and there is no evidence it's in any way related to "criticizing dislike removal". There's no evidence that it's "a shadowban / temporary suspension from commenting" either. It's not in my case, nor I doubt for all the other users I've seen complaining about it. It's a bug on Youtube's end, plain and simple.
    • bluecatswim 5y ago
      >there is no evidence it's in any way related to "criticizing dislike removal" That was the last thing he commented which strongly suggests it is. The other few comments he showed were innocent ones praising animations and stuff too.
      • ehsankia 5y ago
• racl101 5y ago
  YouTube has been deleting MANY, MANY, MANY kinds of comments for a LONG time.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  They're just copying HN in hiding ratings of UGC ... (Yes, Im still salty about comment ratings and still want them back.)
• anshumankmr 5y ago
  Honestly, this was bound to happen sooner or later. YouTube wants to become as mainstream as televisions are for households. It will do anything to please its corporate advertisers. Some people claim YouTube has done this due to various political reason, for example the ruling in Kyle Rittenhouse's case. I fail to understand why people think that's true. I see a far simpler explanation, which is that advertisers don't want people to know people think of their products. Let's just take the Juicero company\1 for example as we all know its product really "missed the mark" 2. Assume the fact that they released their juicer via a huge amount of digital ads. A lot of people would probably think their product is good just because they like their ads 3 as they seem to be competently made. But since we all know the product is extremely bad, people would probably give their ads a thumbs down on YouTube. However by removing the dislike button, determining if the product is good or bad by seeing the likes or dislikes on its video would become impossible.Of course over time the press would have shown the product as being a complete waste and word of mouth would be terrible, so the company would eventually implode as it did in real life. 1 I know its defunct 2 https://www.failory.com/cemetery/juicero https://www.failory.com/cemetery/juicero 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAsEEW7WUHA&ab_channel=Juicero\\ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAsEEW7WUHA&ab_channel=Juice...*
• bestnameever 5y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if auto-delete stops if OP deletes the offending video.
• gwhl 5y ago
  BREAKING: Private company does something to selfishly protect their profit!! More at 11
• questiondev 5y ago
  if their comments are apart search then this is considered tampering search results
• lota-putty 5y ago
  I'm not liking any videos right now. Not sure what to do with the videos on my 'liked list'. Only original & creative content that's impressive is spared from a dislike. Gathered it's subjective. My block-list & 'don't recommend channel' is growing faster now.
• SquareWheel 5y ago
  Did nobody watch the linked video? It's obvious he had comments restricted because his comment was deemed as abusive, and not because it was critical of "hiding dislikes". "That's not abusive at all", you may be thinking. But calling others names, even something as nonsensical as calling them a "handjob", can still easily fall under their terms of use. If you refer to the original video[1], people are nothing but critical of the change. Why aren't those being disappeared? Maybe because Youtube doesn't care what people post as long as they follow their terms of service. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxOuG8jMIgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxOuG8jMIgI
  • hn_throwaway_69 5y ago
    I also thought it was not helpful that he chose to include the word 'job' in the demonstration comment. Their systems could perceive it as an attempt to evade the filter.
  • skinkestek 5y ago
    You might very well be right and of so these are some good points, but there is a bigger theme here: Many of us who used to defend Google before now don't. Some because Reader. Some because the nymwars/Google+ (the single identity part). Some because Google shuttered Google+ after they had made it the only social network some of us ever liked. Some because Google is sucking the oxygen out of markets and then leaving. Some because of how eager they are to obey China. Some because of the James Damore story. Some because search has been more or less broken for a decade and nobody cares. Point is: there is a limit how many times and how badly you can disappoint/hurt users before even the most ardent fans gets tired of it.
    • pas 5y ago
      Google is a big boy/gal/firm, it can defend itself. And there are new fans of G who never ever heard of any of these.
      • skinkestek 5y ago
        Yep. But it must be weird to go from everyone supporting and cheering you forward to everyone suspecting you of having something foul in mind again.
• reactoe 5y ago
  Lets say that there is a video that says you can cure any cancer by eating specific food. Now, you will have people that believes this and you have video with 400-1k upvotes. Person sees the video and how liked it is. In the past he would have seen 3k dislikes and perhaps started to think, what's wrong with the content? Perhaps they would not buy my book.. But not anymore, now we can sell the ideas much easier. And if we think positively, buying likes is much cheaper now than before. No need to worry about those dislikes so much. Just buying enough of them for making the content more believable! Thank you YouTube for making these business practices easier.
• LuisMondragon 5y ago
  In the early days, the distinct feature of the web was bidirectionality. Unlike TV or radio, on the web the communication went both ways. The user could finally give their opinion and comment. We have gone full circle, with YouTube hiding dislikes, and even with some channels disabling comments, we have unidirectionality again.
• ddingus 5y ago
  There is a higher order evaluation in play here. There are content creators who make the occasional video that gets ratioed. And there are others who have a majority of their videos ratioed. When people see that, they ask why? And you look at big media, and government, and I think this removing dislikes doesn't make any sense from our point of view, but it does from theirs.
• Mikho 5y ago
  Before the dislikes purge I more or less had 80/20 proportion of interesting videos vs bad videos after I clicked to watch them. Dislikes highlighted bad videos and made the choice easier. After dislikes were removed the proportion flipped. Now 80% are bad videos and 20% interesting ones.
• akulbe 5y ago
  YouTube without showing dislike count feels like participation awards in school.
• mikestaub 5y ago
  https://github.com/Anarios/return-youtube-dislike https://github.com/Anarios/return-youtube-dislike
• gseattle 5y ago
  As of Dec 6, 2021, no changes for me, I'm still seeing dislike thumbs-down on youtube (and its count), I can click it and see the increment. They might only be removing it for individuals they don't want clicking dislike? Evidently that would be many of you. Why am I still allowed? I'll take a guess ... They like my dislikes since I frequently 'dislike' videos I actually like as a strategy, I do so specifically for truth-tellers that I figure youtube doesn't like, for two reasons: (1) I write algorithms and thus know it causes pain for YT algorithm writers, going ... crud, the pattern is not as easy as expected so now I have to write another exception/condition. Each one makes their code more complex of course and a little bit less maintainable. (2) To help protect the content creator from rising to top of the list for getting canceled as the higher the views combined with the ratio of likes/dislikes the more likely humans in the office will be talking about them and drool over dropping the axe. I'm subscribed to over 200 channels but many are truth-tellers. Others are science/engineering/computing but some are even lefties, and of those, when they are pushing the official narrative bull, sometimes I upvote (the opposite of what I really think). For 1+ years I've been saving my comments to be able to prove in court some day that I am civil yet often shadow-banned (2.48 MB today). Anyone can sue via the Sherman Antitrust Act etc etc in Federal court for collusion and so on. (YT likes people trying to viciously tear each other's throats out, good times, but posting intelligent informative content does not serve to create a wonderfully dumb underclass. Yesterday for example, someone had asked how to really understand voltage, was asking for help and my reply was deleted immediately).
  • gseattle 5y ago
    I'll take it one step further. I appears, surely, youtube's code is so refined now, when I am away from youtube for awhile they lure me back by making some older comments of mine visible to some people so likes from others occur. If I were not being shadow-banned, perhaps my comments would be rising up towards the top, can't have that as they are well-aware that I am one who disbelieves every narrative. I'm only aware of one comment of mine with more than a mere handful of likes. Currently at 3.9K, quoting the scientist in the video ... "Cats may purr for any number of reasons" Scientist code for: We weren't able to get a cat to purr to study it
• ragnot 5y ago
  To put my tinfoil hat on: I believe that the recent crackdown on the dislike count and the twitter rule change/bot purging has been orchestrated by the Biden administration in an attempt to combat a repeat of foreign interference via social media.
  • completelylegit 5y ago
    If foreign governments can have a discernible effect on America because of a dislike button - removing it wouldn’t make a difference. Removing the ability to _comment_ would be something different…
    • Focalise 5y ago
      I agree, Biden is regularly downvoted heavily. I would think primarily by Americans.
      • KerryJones 5y ago
        I would guess primarily by Right-wing Americans, the very Left-wing americans I know don't love him but wouldn't down vote him regularly.
        • Eelongate 5y ago
          The very left-wing Americans I know hated Trump a lot more than they love Biden. They have no particular love for Biden because Biden is not very left-wing at all. Biden comes from the old neoliberal contingent of the DNC, not the new lefty progressive camp. Biden is no Bernie or AOC and only has lukewarm support from very-left people, in my experience.
    • ragnot 5y ago
      I think it does make a difference. Its a small one, but one that hits home. After all, when you see those videos online of the Biden admin with 1000s of dislikes...don't you feel that there is a segment of people out there that don't go along with the cultural zeitgeist of the internet? That maybe left-wing opinions (although dominant on the internet) may have some push back in the real world? When you lose that ability to voice opposition you get something not exactly dystopian but something marching closer to it.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  Dislikes still visible on incognito tab. Most fiction/speculative authors assumed tyranny would be from governments, not private companies. How wrong they were.
  • SQueeeeeL 5y ago
    "tyranny" Okay, I'm definitely not on YouTube/Google's side here, but calling this tyranny is legit hilarious
    • krapp 5y ago
      "first they came for the dislike buttons..."
    • gxs 5y ago
      Looking at this as a single instance of censorship as tyranny might provoke ridicule, but I see where OP is coming from. Taken in aggregate, in a world with multi-trillion dollar corporations censor their users, it's not ridiculous to talk about this as tyranny. There is no one tyrant, but every corporation rules like one and taken as a whole, the "world's government" (in this case the set of the most powerful corporations) is tyranny. Anyway, I'm neither here nor there on the argument, but I don't see what's so laughable about OPs offhand comment.
      • etchalon 5y ago
        I look forward to your treatise on how Taco Bell's removal of the Grilled Stuff Nacho was tyrannical overreach by an unaccountable food monopolist.
        • paulpauper 5y ago
          cuz if you don't like taco bell there are 2000 other choices that are also good or you can make your own tacos. the same cannot be said for Facebook or YouTube alternatives.
• BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I really hope this backfires spectacularly on YouTube and the zealots who pushed for this change are held professionally accountable. I already click on fewer videos in search results and recommendations because I can no longer gauge how worthwhile they are to try and watch. The end result? I'm sticking to my current channels. I can't be alone and knowing that YouTube takes recommended content so seriously, I have to imagine this is going to panic plenty of product managers at YouTube.
  • 1_player 5y ago
    Youtube doesn't f*** care. Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? Oh, they only upload on our platform? Thought so. They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user. In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view.
    • potamic 5y ago
      What's stopping publishers from publishing to multiple platforms? Publishing is free, why wouldn't you cast a wide net to increase reach as much as possible?
    • Nextgrid 5y ago
      > while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view. Over time this should put pressure on them to be open to a better platform and make the move as soon as such platform exists.
      • 1_player 5y ago
        No, I just explained that nobody will move out of the platform because everybody's there. Where are you going to watch your favourite USB gadget reviewer that only uploads on YT? Over time means nothing until there's actually competition, and there's nothing on the horizon that can compete to the scale of YouTube. Your content creator is not moving anywhere any time soon.
• SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  It's stunning how often things like this get wildly upvoted. The video shows nothing at all about "YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count"; the guy shows a comment of his that has nothing to do with the dislike count getting deleted, although he asserts without evidence that this is related to a different comment he made (which was not deleted) regarding the dislike count. A lot of people are successfully exploiting HN to spread false stories about controversial events.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    This one's funny because the actual behavior is egregious enough without having to be artificially inflated.
  • jafitc 5y ago
    Of course. You can't be 100% certain. You know what else you can't be 100% certain of? How many dislikes this video got. It's one thing how the comment disappears. It's a whole other thing how you are asked to "take a screenshot of the disappeared comment to investigate". If you feel this singles out Google, think twice. Yes, Google definitely wasn't afraid to meddle with its search results for its own gains before. But there are other companies having practices just as shady. Like "how the Apple Podcasts app went from a 1.8-star score all the way to 4.6 stars in a month without any actual fixes" https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791968/apple-podcasts-star-score-review-prompt https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791968/apple-podcasts-... Hiding dislikes, disappearing comments, tricking users into reviewing unrelated services. There is a broader issue unfolding recently about platforms and transparency.
  • Brian_K_White 5y ago
    Watch the first few seconds of the video again, and then it's your own comment which makes no sense.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    Tech companies get away with randomly and invisibly doing things to people which no one can verify or understand why. Yes of course we can't know why exactly this happened, but it's still youtube's fault for deleting all of these comments without explaining why.
• dynm 5y ago
  I find this debate a little strange. My position is that youtube is a private company, they should be allowed to do whatever they want, and people should be able to choose a video service that meets their needs. If you feel that youtube is so dominant that this is cramming a "no dislikes" policy on the whole world, isn't the problem really that you think youtube is a monopoly, not dislikes per se? Edit: I clearly didn't word this well, because people are responding to me with things I agree with. Let me try again. Certainly, everyone can and should complain about this if you want to! (You have my thanks in this case, I don't like it either.) I'm just saying that in a "normal" situation you'd be able to respond to this change by switching to a competitor. I don't think the complaints are strange but rather the lack of complaints about the fact that there are (sorta/kinda) no alternatives.
  • kunagi7 5y ago
    Pretty much, YouTube is for video watching what IE used to be for browsing back in the obscure IE6 times. Unless you live in China where it's blocked. Some countries (mostly of the EU) already try to enforce some control against this kind of monopolies but they are still too bland. And competition fails to appear thanks to the WhatsApp effect. If most of the content/friends are on it, its not easy to change to another platform unless something drastic happens (like the Great Firewall).
  • amelius 5y ago
    The problem is that network effects determine what video service we use, mostly, as internet users. Saying that you could choose an alternative service is like the old argument that you could move to another country if you don't like it here [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo
    • SQueeeeeL 5y ago
      Is this an argument for a centralized govt provided video platform?
      • josefx 5y ago
• judge2020 5y ago
  Sounds like his account has been put into some sort of shadowban mode, which is needed for the {human|bot} spammers out there (not that I know why it would be applied to them).
  • Nihilartikel 5y ago
    There's a chance that the individual was acting bot like.. perhaps they posted the same comment, verbatim, to multiple videos in a short time span.
    • rvnx 5y ago
      That's what he says, he goes to some small channels, and keep saying "Great content!" or "Great video!"
      • dylan604 5y ago
        Then it doesn't really sound like the world is missing much by not having that comment. Make a comment on HN like "Great thread!" and it'll drop like a stone. It's a useless comment. "Great thread/video! I really like ______" would at least tell someone why you think it is great and much more useful.
  • im3w1l 5y ago
    Bots and other un-persons.
  • dntrkv 5y ago
    As is the case 99% of the time someone makes stupid claims like this. You would think of all people, the users on HN would know this, but apparently not.
  • kristofferR 5y ago
    Shadowbanning is pretty useless for spammers, the pain they receive by getting one of their hundred bot accounts made invisible is nothing compared to the pain the real person gets. Shaddowbanning should be like the justice system, it is better to let a a hundred guilty go unpunished than to convict one innocent person.
• KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Is this youtube staff purposefully deleting critical comments? Or is it anti-spam algorithms getting triggered by people flooding the comments sections of videos with the same inane comments? And/or getting flagged by creators and other youtube users? Frankly, I can't see most creators wanting their youtube video comments full of "BRING BACK THE DISLIKE BUTTON", and I could see lots of their fans being annoyed by such comments as well. My guess is that 95%+ of youtube users are more annoyed by an extremely vocal minority disrupting things than they are the removal of the dislike button.
  • jafitc 5y ago
    Oh the dislike button is still there. It just does nothing anymore. Isn't that what we all supposed to be? Dumb and beautiful. What do you think about our product? interested? very interested? or very interested? which one? which one? which one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZJQDpS7ikc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZJQDpS7ikc With the dislike count gone you cannot make a quick judgement about what Youtube recommended to you. Less power to the people, more power to Youtube. It's a very subtle change. Also a monumental one.
  • TT-392 5y ago
    I think it is automatic, a similar thing happens to me every so often. I am don't think it is related to the content of the comment, I barely even use youtube in the browser anymore and I barely ever leave a comment. I don't think I have left any comments that could be seen as offensive. The only thing that I could think of is that my ip is setting off some kind of spam protection because I watch so much youtube, just through youtube-dl + mpv. Idk what it is exactly, but I can confirm that something like what is shown in the vid happens to people, and that it is really frustrating.
• topynate 5y ago
  Just in case someone in a position to do something about it is reading this, there's a graceful way out for Youtube. Leave dislike counts publicly available via the API. That way people who use the ratio to evaluate videos (very useful for reviews) can install a browser extension, but dislike mobbing will be minimized, seeing as most casual users will not bother installing such extensions.
  • _ea1k 5y ago
    The downside is that you'd end up with facebook memes showing all of the dislikes that "YouTube doesn't want you to see".
  • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    They don't need a "way out." Just put it back the way it was. It's like finding a street full of protesters and trying to figure out the best way to make sure nobody sees them. The problem isn't your method, it's your goal.
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    I mean really, if you want a downvote button, I'm sure there is or will be a browser plugin that you can install that will put the downvotes back in there. Then you know YT isn't messing with the counts as an added bonus (of course, you have to trust that the plugin maintainer isn't...)
  • BitwiseFool 5y ago
    Honestly I think the best solution should have been to let creators enable/disable dislike visibility on each of their *own* videos. Removing that for every single video on the platform is a supernova level of overkill.
    • t-writescode 5y ago
      They already have that. You can disable comments and voting, as far as I know.
• wnevets 5y ago
  Do people actually look at the votes before watching a video? I don't think I've ever done that on YouTube. The outrage over this just seems so manufactured to me.
  • pier25 5y ago
    Some times I do look at the votes while already watching the video, but that's it. Same with with the number of views. I have a feeling Youtubers are probably the segment most annoyed by the change, which happen to be the ones with the megaphone.
  • Toutouxc 5y ago
    Yes, I used to do that every single time, and I would Cmd+W out of it immediately if the like/dislike ratio looked suspicious. Plenty of other videos in the sea.
  • jasode 5y ago
    >Do people actually look at the votes before watching a video? Yes, lots of people do that to avoid wasting time on bad videos. Especially for product review videos or tutorials, the first thing I look at is the dislike count compared to the like count. If dislikes are high, it's because the reviewer didn't provide useful information. E.g. a "top 5 dash cams" where the video is simply a slide show of dashcams will have more dislikes than likes. Dislike counts may be unreliable for politics videos but it was an accurate indicator for other topics like DIY how-tos. With the dislikes gone, I now scroll through comments first before hitting play. (But some channels disable comments so that doesn't always work.) I hope Youtube brings the dislikes counter back as their policy change is very user hostile.
    • mitchdoogle 5y ago
      Is there actual data on this somewhere that shows how the number of likes and dislikes affect users likelihood to watch? You don't even see the number of likes or dislikes in the video listing page, right? My experience with how to videos is that I'll search on Google, it'll pull up a good video and take me directly to the point in the video that discusses what I want to know. Sometimes I use number of views or number of subs to judge whether a video is worth watching. I've only ever used the like button a handful of times when I want to quickly save a video. I've never used the dislike. I always thought of them more as a metric YouTube uses in their algorithm and not something people pay much attention to , which can still be the case when the numbers are hidden. Maybe I'm wrong though.
• LinuxBender 5y ago
  I can see why people would be annoyed at being shadow banned. Alternatively get your circle of friends to upload videos to your own site and manage the comments/spam as you see fit. I am not convinced by the arguments that Youtube is needed to handle bandwidth unless you are popular in which case you can probably afford throwing a few small CDN's at the problem. The harder part would be finding advertising partners and embedding code for sponsors but apparently some youtubers are finding ways to do it.
  • shadowgovt 5y ago
    A shadowban doesn't make it obvious to the target they're banned. This is something else... Probably a bug.
  • EarlKing 5y ago
    You really don't need Youtube for that. You need infrastructure and you need monetization. The former you can achieve today using any service provider with autoscaling (i.e. AWS, Rackspace, Linode, and a hundred others too numerous to list here). The latter you can achieve through any number of ad exchanges that handle pre-roll ads and banners. Youtube is handy primarily in being a one stop shop for both of those things and more. It allows the technically illiterate a place to vent their spleen without having to know anything about the internet works... including, I might add, how to actually market their works so they get eyeballs on them. If, however, you have an IQ higher than your shoe size and can manage the above, including figuring out how to circulate your content to places where potential viewers are so you don't need to rely on Youtube's algorithm, then you can make a go of it yourself and win. Youtube is betting, quite correctly, that most of you will never do that.
    • LinuxBender 5y ago
      I agree with all of this. That's why a small number of people and their circles won't be a threat to Youtube at all. Even the handful of popular Youtubers moving to self hosting probably won't get their attention for some time. And yeah, most non technical people won't be going down this path any time soon. That said if each small circle of people had a couple geeky friends and pool together some money they can do it. It's happening albeit it very slowly. Too slow for YT to notice or care about the insignificant churn-and-burn. I would not be surprised if there were also a chunk of youtubers that don't even want monetization.
• tenpoundhammer 5y ago
  There is a youtube alternative that some creators are using called odysee. https://odysee.com/ https://odysee.com/ . It still has the dislike button.
  • Drew_ 5y ago
    This site also has 100% CPU usage on idle for some reason.
    • dylan604 5y ago
      gotta earn money some how. if you can't make it with ads, put your viewers to work in other ways. just a guess
    • prox 5y ago
      Mining coin?
      • stjohnswarts 5y ago
        I don't think so, my cpu is fine, doesn't use any more than youtube uses. I think the poster must have something wrong with their browser. I've seen more than a couple of people who got kicked off youtube move to odysee as they are much less aggressive on removing content. They also have downvoting.
        • spiderice 5y ago
          As soon as I clicked on that link my computer fans got really loud. I closed the tab and they died down. Opened it again just to verify and they got loud again. I don't think it's just GGP.
• rob_c 5y ago
  Lol. Seems great from a board room, YouTube is too big to fail in 2years... But this is just a signal that the platform is decaying to the latest generation of artists/creators... Shame that for now they have a stranglehold on money and advertisers.
• TT-392 5y ago
  The youtube automatically deleting comments thing is strange, it happens to me quite often for no clear reason. I once left a commend on a veritasium vid where I got something wrong. Replies kept coming about what I got wrong. But anytime I edited the comment, or leaving a reply myself. The exact thing happened to my edits or replies as happened in the video. It is not like I can't leave comments anywhere like the guy in the vid, it just, sometimes happens with specific things, with no clear indication as to why it happens.
  • rvnx 5y ago
    It's likely that the reason the comments are deleted are due to the spam filter. I don't see the connection with a critic of the disappearance of dislikes.
    • ehsankia 5y ago
      Indeed, but HN/reddit is happy to throw away any logic/skepticism and give in to their confirmation bias as soon as it comes to a topic like this. All it takes a single anecdotal evidence in the form of a video.
  • ollien 5y ago
    Google does this as a whole, IME. A body shop did a really shoddy repair and when I went to check my review later, it was gone. I don't understand why; it shows when I'm logged into the original Google account, but not otherwise.
    • cbozeman 5y ago
      I guess that body shop bought the correct amount of Google AdWords.
    • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      There was a data-center that recently sent out an alert for a rather amusing sort of non service impacting issue but something that you'd want to warn anyone who'd need to visit about. I decided to leave a 5-star review that said they were great except for a comically worded reference to the issue and included a screenshot of the issue notification. Same story, only shows up when I'm logged in. I assume I used some key word that their AI didn't like.
• jcun4128 5y ago
  What gets me is the silent deletion. I generally don't post swear words but recently I posted "ass" and I refreshed it was gone. This could be on a personal user setting but still. It's funny though you could comment/not look at something again so does it matter that your comment stayed... idk. It doesn't tell you "that's not allowed" or something. It updates the UI so you think it went through but it actually didn't.
  • foxfluff 5y ago
    That happens even if you don't post anything rude.
  • nitrogen 5y ago
    Youtube has an option for channels to hold "potentially offensive" comments for review. If that's what you encountered, the channel can then decide whether to show or delete your comment.
• hirundo 5y ago
  Hacker News has a similar problem with comments: net_votes = up_votes - down_votes You need at least two of the above variables to get an idea of both the direction and magnitude of the voting. Hacker News provides only one: net_votes. YouTube used to provide up_votes and down_votes, effectively providing all three. Now YouTube has reduced its information to up_votes, so they're now down to one variable in the equation, as Hacker News has been all along. The difference between 102+/100- votes and 2+/0- votes is large, but invisible on this site. I think it would be better for HN to go to where YouTube was, giving us an idea of both the net vote and the level of activity. Like up/down or up/total or net/total.
  • polote 5y ago
    Because on HN there are only two possible states for comments. Flagged or visible. The upvotes and downvotes just help compute the order. This is better for freedom of expression and showing the split would be a bad idea imo. Comments who are more upvoted are also more downvoted because they are more visible (as they rank first)
    • Eelongate 5y ago
      > Because on HN there are only two possible states for comments. Flagged or visible. The upvotes and downvotes just help compute the order. That's an oversimplification; downvotes may also reduce the visibility of comments by making them an eyebleeding gray-on-white.
  • jjcon 5y ago
    I think that net votes is still far far better than just up votes. With net votes at least spam or misleading can at times be somewhat detectable.
  • r00fus 5y ago
    It's very interesting to ask what's gained by seeing downvotes in addition to upvotes, and whether that differs based on whether the content is video or commentary. HN comments can still be downvoted (if you have enough karma) so arguably you can still get signal quality from the sum of votes. Especially since in most cases, you can simply comment instead of downvote.
• rhegart 5y ago
  https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ So frustrating not having the dislike button
  • fsckboy 5y ago
    the content I watch (mostly intellectual or political conversations or lectures) rarely has a dislike rate of more than a few percent, so I don't understand what good the dislike button does. >So frustrating not having the dislike button I can understand the satisfaction of smashing the button on something you don't like... but does your frustration take a different form that translates into more/less usability? (I can also imagine that a dislike button might help in an overall rating system like Yelp or Rottentomatoes, but then those systems don't serve me particularly well either. If something is hugely popular, that means middlebrow tastes like it, which isn't that useful. I don't want to watch or read Stephen King, and after all, people vote with their dollars for McDonald's. I suppose this could be a useful metric on youtube for gaming livestreams or skating videos or something?)
    • tobiasSoftware 5y ago
      The dislike button is extremely useful to indicate scams and erroneous information. Even outside of outright scams its still useful. For example, there's a Numberphile video (a high quality channel that explains math to ordinary people) where they go off the rails and make a bunch of errors to claim that the sum of 1 to infinity is -1/12. It's based on real concepts but the way they present it is completely incorrect. It had a dislike ratio of 20% whereas most of their videos have a dislike ratio of about 1%. By seeing such a high number of dislikes, it alerts the user that something could be off about this video and that they should not take what is said at face value.
• 14 5y ago
  Has anyone built a browser plug in that we can down vote or up vote videos? Outside of Youtube?
  • spiderice 5y ago
    It wouldn’t help. Not enough people would use it to be helpful. The chances of someone with the extension installed having watched and voted on the obscure tutorial you’re about to watch is near zero.
    • 14 5y ago
      You make a good point. To bad there is no way to incentivize it. I hate wasting time on repair videos and get all the way through it and it really isn’t helpful. I hope we one day see people pivot away from YouTube.
• AtNightWeCode 5y ago
  This path is kinda the obvious path to go down if you have a large public site 2021. It is what the data says. Even for small sites with 1M users this is obvious. HN would benefit a lot from going down the same path too to avoid premiering all the zealots. Edit: Landed well as expected. Maybe HN could provide a service where users could battle about facts in different areas. So all the useless fatty Americans could show their true credentials.
• mikewarot 5y ago
  This is evidence that YouTube breaks the user's trust.
• eddof13 5y ago
  I adblock youtube now and I cancelled premium due to their censorship
• ordiel 5y ago
  I am more than ready to degoogle myself, if only my pinephone were fully functional :/. I need a phone that can support ANY OS of my choosing, not the one the vendor provides/allows, I am a paying google customer, drive and youtube, the former mostly due to the music, I guess its time to go back to the good old days. ARRGH!!! ;)
• isoskeles 5y ago
  Why not make this an opt-in feature? That way, big media companies with a YouTube presence who constantly have often post videos with high dislike ratios can hide the fact (although, we'll know this because of the hidden dislikes). It's quite annoying when I'm looking at neutral, nonpolitical content, and I can't get a sense of whether or not other viewers hate it. I look at a decent amount of tutorial content for various things, and the like-dislike ratio is fairly indicative of whether or not the content is wrong or if I should even continue watching it.
  • notriddle 5y ago
    > although, we'll know this because of the hidden dislikes That’s exactly the problem, though. Nobody hides the like bar unless they expect a bad rating, so a hidden like bar might as well just be all red (people tend to assume the worst). No matter what your view is on this (harassment or genuine negative sentiment, it doesn’t matter) an optional like bar might as well be mandatory for all the good it does.
  • Manuel_D 5y ago
    That already exists. You could disable likes on a video.
• snug 5y ago
  So Youtube let him make a video but not make a comment? Something doesn't add up here...
• butz 5y ago
  Next update: removed comments.
  • stiltzkin 5y ago
    Big companies need comments for astroturfing, Google will keep them.
  • notriddle 5y ago
    I support such a move. YouTube comments have always been trash.
    • booleandilemma 5y ago
      I find a lot of them hilariously funny actually.
  • gadrev 5y ago
    Only sponsored comments!
• hojjat12000 5y ago
  The same thing is happening to me right now. Maybe something is wrong in Youtube! My comments are about Youtube and it's under a video that the person is angry that their views are going down (JayzTwoCents). But I can see it being deleted! I have seen multiple content creators also mentioning something like "if you leave a comment and it gets deleted it's not me, youtube is doing it and I don't know why" in the past week.
• teawrecks 5y ago
  What do people want? On the one hand you have misinformation and psychological harm that social media causes people and all the people complaining about that, and on the other hand you have heavily curated/censored content to try and craft a specific experience on a platform, and all the people complaining about that. So what actually do people want social media companies to do? Hands off or hands on? You can't have both.
• simonsarris 5y ago
  Looking at a lot of timber framing technique videos this week and realized how badly I miss the dislike as a signal that the video-taker is doing something wrong or dangerous.
  • spiderice 5y ago
    Same. The like count is completely useless without the dislike count. They may as well have just gotten rid of both.
  • uh_uh 5y ago
    It's frightening to think that this decision from YouTube might literally end up killing some people. Given the userbase of YouTube, I don't think this is a hyperbole, as unlikely events become likely once the number of samples is high enough.
    • simonsarris 5y ago
      Yeah, for chain-sawing videos it was VERY helpful. Although in egregious cases usually there are a few comments warning the viewer as well.
• barbazoo 5y ago
  The real travesty here is him using the context menu to refresh the page.
• kazinator 5y ago
  The submission topic is misleading. The issue is that someone is complaining that Youtube is auto-deleting their comments. Unless you know someone inside Youtube who has the technical knowledge and access to dig into this there is no way to know exactly what happened to your account: how your account's auto-deletion state got triggered. It could be due to some completely different reason not related to the content of their posts being remarks against the Youtube change with regard to downvotes. Maybe the comments were simply too repetitive in their content, and triggered a mechanism against repetitive posts (being predicated on the hypothesis that repetitiveness is an earmark of spam). Or maybe the comments used offensive language; could be that YT has some mechanism to put serial posters of comments that use certain words on ice for a while. If you look into the Youtube support forum, a large number of people have or have had this problem. It may resolve itself if that person just stops commenting for about a week.
• polote 5y ago
  My bet is that people will start posting a comment saying "upvote this comment if you want to downvote", the comment will rank first and it will be as if you have a public dislike count
  • cellularmitosis 5y ago
    The tiktok community has adopted a similar strategy for voting on comments. Someone will post a spicy comment, which gets a certain number of likes, then someone will reply with the comment "L" (as in "take the L, you lose"), which competes for likes.
  • fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    I doubt YouTube’s comment ranking would put this at the top, since it looks a lot like the type of brigading that they are trying to reduce with this change.
  • notatoad 5y ago
    they might, but chances are that if you force people to move their dislikes into the comments, they're going to provide more information than just "downvote", and the top comment will be some variaton of * "the information in this video is wrong" * "i don't like the person who made this video" * "this isn't the content i expect from this channel" all of which is vastly more useful than just a downvote.
    • kortex 5y ago
      Task failed successfully. I would love for this to come to pass. I don't think that was their intent. Unfortunately comments are less indelible (more delible?) than downvotes. As evidenced by the shadowban in OP.
  • slig 5y ago
    Then they'll get shadowbanned exactly like OP's video.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• godshatter 5y ago
  Likes and dislikes are a horrible way to judge a video, ime. I don't know who liked or disliked a video or for what reasons. A like by someone may be a good reason for me to watch the video where a like by someone else might be an excellent reason not to watch it. Similar for dislikes. Of the two, I guess I prefer likes. People who dislike videos are usually upset about something specific, often things I don't really care much about. People who like something generally actually like it, as far as I've seen. When I'm considering whether I might like to watch a video, I do the unthinkable and just give it a go for a few minutes if it looks like it might be interesting or entertaining. I don't really need aggregated opinions from random people on the internet to help me make my decision on whether I like it or not. I couldn't, for example, tell you if I'm currently seeing dislikes on videos even though I've watched a fair few of them recently.
  • bargl 5y ago
    The metric I use in hn is votes to comments. When I want a good non controversial read I go for a low ratio of comments to votes. When I want a more controversial topic I find the things with more comments to votes. It's just additional signal on the content in a world where I just can't read it all.
  • ford_o 5y ago
    There are better ways to prevent downvote brigades than removing dislikes altogether. Not to mention that keeping likes around doesn't solve anything, as it can be exploited in the same way by upvote brigades! As long as you don't start to actively detect fake accounts and don't limit the number of upvotes / downvotes per day a person can give, it will always be possible to game the upvote metric by a small group of people / bots.
  • uh_uh 5y ago
    > I do the unthinkable and just give it a go for a few minutes You do this on a societal level and you waste centuries. There's no need for thousands of people to watch a few minutes of a bad DIY video to conclude that it's crap.
    • 5y ago
• supperburg 5y ago
  As a shallow person who likes shallow content, YouTube sucks. Their recommendations suck. They literally offer the same things over and over. There’s a billion videos and nothing to watch…
• franczesko 5y ago
  The majority of YouTube traffic comes from mobile devices (this can be observed in Google Ads for any video campaign), which is losing market share because of Tictoc. Google will do whatever it takes to monetize every inch of their investment. By turning off dislikes, users will be forced to engage with additional content. This is also visible on the other side of the spectrum - Google is pushing heavily integrated campaign products (e.g. Performance Max Campaigns), which include non-performing channels as display and video (in comparison to search), which can't be turned off. At this point they can, as they are a monopoly, but I hope they will get burned, as they are introducing more and more dark patterns, which result in lower than poor user experience. My take on this - AdBlock relentlessly, support creators directly. Switch platforms eventually - there's choice out there.
  • ddingus 5y ago
    "forced" It is still a big Internet out there. All it takes is an up and coming platform to steer people elsewhere. YT is big, and yeah they will carry on via inertia, but for things like news, organizing, commentary? Yeah, people will seek it elsewhere.
    • sieabah 5y ago
      You have never dealt with bandwidth costs for video, have you.
      • ddingus 5y ago
        Nope, but they are off the charts!! Others will figure this out. The value is high enough for users to fund it. I would for sure. In fact, funding that via small money from people is likely the best model. AD driven stuff has too many conflicts of interest.
        • sieabah 5y ago
          Oh I absolutely agree, I think once R2 becomes GA it will be a game changer for a lot of VOD content or youtube-like platforms. Amazon, Google, and Azure are holding back an entire industry because of the price gouging they have on bandwidth.
• paxcoder 5y ago
  My account is completely shadowbanned and I don't know why. Googling around gives an impression that that doesn't happen. My comments aren't removed, they're just invisible. Oh I'm also banned on here so yay for me
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  I'm still struggling trying to understand why YouTube decided to hide the dislike count. What does it achieve?
  • shadowgovt 5y ago
    Anti-brigading social engineering. Without the Pavlovian feedback of seeing the dislike count go up, people are less incentivized to downvote because other people are downvoting instead of because they personally dislike the video. That's the theory anyway. No idea if it works, but YouTube's not the only network to adopt this approach.
• nsoonhui 5y ago
  The irony of criticizing YouTube deleting comments in a video posted on YouTube does not escape me.
• summerlight 5y ago
  I personally think there's a good compromise to prevent "dislike" campaigns while keeping roughly same amount of information (putting quality labels with simple anti spam modeling would work fine), but still it looks like YT wants to get rid of the button itself ultimately? Otherwise it's hard to explain why they didn't even try such middle ground first.
  • ng12 5y ago
    Because dislike campaigns are a lame excuse. Don't forget the most disliked video of all time was published by Youtube itself. Now it's just a video with 220M views and 3M likes.
    • shadowgovt 5y ago
      That's an awful lot of views for something people "dislike.' Hate-watching?
      • ng12 5y ago
        It became a meme in it's own right and is still referenced fairly often 3 years later. It was downvoted heavily because it's a particularly laughable example of how out-of-touch corporations can be. I think this is the most likely reason why YouTube is removing dislikes: they need to protect their advertising dollars. Here's the video, for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJOTdZBX1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJOTdZBX1g
• freeflight 5y ago
  It's just flabbergasting how much YouTube has regressed. I remember when YouTube comments still had a neat and convenient little "translate" feature. Made it actually possible to practically cross the language barriers in comment discussions. That lead to many interesting insights and discussions, and then, it was suddenly just gone. Which in practice meant that a whole bunch of people that used to be able to communicate with each other, crossing language barriers (How wonderful!), now suddenly couldn't anymore.. It's like the exact opposite to what the web was supposed to do, and the trend has been steadily keeping up. Removing the downvotes is also removing a form of signaling, and thus communication. And the trend is not just reserved to YouTube, it's even more and more of a thing in places where it absolutely doesn't belong; Many modern video games do not have an "all talk" function anymore, out of fear nasty things might be written and then read by too many people, possibly leading to controversy in the bored "gaming press". At this rate I wouldn't be surprised to even see YouTube comments go away for good.
  • willis936 5y ago
    I still miss annotations all these years later. Completely senseless removal of a wonderful feature with no technical drawbacks.
  • bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    Speaking of translations.. the last few days I've been wondering why some YouTube videos are titled in English although the people in it are talking German, and I'm in a German-speaking country (but using YouTube with the English interface). So, apparently YouTube have started auto-translating titles. Or maybe, since the videos have English subtitles, they're using the creator-provided translated title. But there is no option to turn this automatism off... and this automatic changing of shit is totally pissing me off.
    • mostlylurks 5y ago
      That particular feature has been in place for years, at least for me, just for some subset of videos (maybe those which have been provided with translations for the title?). Luckily I've been seeing it less often recently, whereas when I first started seeing it it was popping up constantly, so maybe that subset of videos has grown smaller. It is indeed infuriating to have titles translated behind your back. But even worse is the fact that the feature assumes that people only speak one language. Most of the world, myself included, speaks several languages. I don't want video titles translated, but I especially don't want them translated when they're in a language I speak fluently. You'd think that the mindset of inclusivity, which is perhaps the most valued in the places where these tech giants reside, would perhaps allow them to consider that telling people on the other side of the planet how they should use a thing as fundamental and personal as language might be a bad idea, and that their monolingual bubble is the exception, not the norm.
• marcodiego 5y ago
  https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/
• cwojno 5y ago
  So... wait... YT is deleting all his comments... except the one that criticized the Dislike button? Wouldn't they just delete that comment? Something is amiss here.
  • soheil 5y ago
    They probably use a different mechanism to suppress that comment as to reduce the possibility of users finding out that their comments are being deleted. Or at least reduce the impact of that particular user if they are going to keep posting similar comments multiple times.
• bArray 5y ago
  > "Please take a screenshot of the comments that are missing so that we can use it as samples for investigation." I cracked up. This is the hell world we have been pushing for - it's arrived. I have a similar IRL situation where I live. I need a vaccine passport to go into places where I can request an ID (which can only be done in person). I need an ID to apply for a vaccine passport. One has to wonder whether these systems are broken by design.
• soheil 5y ago
  If anyone wants to restore the dislike count there is this chrome ext that works great https://github.com/Anarios/return-youtube-dislike https://github.com/Anarios/return-youtube-dislike
• soheil 5y ago
  I don't think this is so bad. Overtime users will find a way to cope. There are also a number of secretive things YT is doing that users will never become aware of. Focusing on just the thing that gets publicity creates bias. YT is what it is and it will evolve the way Google wants it to. Either use it or not. Giving this much attention to one feature makes Google even more careful next time they make a change that negatively impacts users to do it in a more hidden way. Kind of like the more a weak person's immune system deals with a virus the more mutation the virus makes and in the end the stronger it becomes.
• jholman 5y ago
  This whole conversation has been baffling to me. I am a huge fan of YouTube, and I consume way too much YouTube. I mean, there's also problems with YT, make no mistake, but I'm admitting my bias, and also proclaiming my experience level. A year or more ago, someone alleged to me that the like:dislike ratio is informative, and I've been watching it since then on videos that I was watching anyway. I've also been watching it especially closely since they announced this any people said they value the ratio. Nearly every video I see on YT has near the same ratio, about 90:1. 30:1 is extremely rare, 150:1 is even more rare. I don't doubt that there are worse videos out there than 30:1, but YT never shows them to me. When I want to just binge on woodworking crafting videos, they suggest good stuff in my feed. With a 90:1 ratio. When I want to teach myself something, I search for that specific topic and they suggest good stuff. With a 90:1 ratio. And when they do suggest crap, like often my feed will contain some "how to do basic web dev" video that is full of distortions or outright errors (as a moderately senior web dev, this is an area where I am not subject to Gell-Mann error), those videos STILL have the same damn like:dislike ratio, so how could I use that ratio to protect me from errors? How the hell are other people allegedly finding these videos with dislike numbers as high as 10%? (I mean, before this month. Obviously now you cannot do the experiment I've been doing.) As a side note, my Dislike Count only went away a few days ago. I dunno when it went away for other people.
  • notfed 5y ago
    I see videos with more dislikes than likes pretty regularly when searching for tutorials or DIY videos. Avoiding those has surely saved me a lot of time.
  • docmars 5y ago
    Videos from corporate news media are frequently in this position. They've lost their grip on reality, and the majority of viewers understand that and show their distaste towards their non-stop lying and gaslighting, while they brazenly push narratives funded by billionaire philanthropists in spite of their abysmal, spiraling ratings.
  • kypro 5y ago
    You clearly don't watch any political videos if the ratios you're seeing are universally that favourable. Almost all mainstream news content was heavily downvoted. More recently content promoting vaccines, LGBT politics, diversity / BLM related topics, etc have all come under significant fire from viewers and is very often downvoted. I strongly suspect YouTube is having the same problem rotten tomatoes has been having in recent years... In their case we've seen films such as Captain Marvel do very poorly with audiences, while largely receiving praise from critics. What's the problem with that? Well, if you happen to land on a certain side of the culture wars you may start asking if the film's audience review is actually a reflection of the films quality or if it's just a reflection of it being vote bombed by misogynistic trolls. If you think it's the latter then you might feel the need to take action, and in the case of rotten tomatoes you might start altering and deleting audience reviews to ensure the audience score is conforming with what you know to be their true opinion of the film. I'm not saying YouTube did remove the dislike button for political reasons, but their reasoning for doing so certainly doesn't make any sense. If creators are being harassed by the dislike button they can just disable it as many creators had been doing. And if you disable the dislike button you're only encouraging hate in the comments, which is probably worse for a creators mental health, and already enough of a problem on YouTube as it is. The timing of this move is also extremely suspicious. Nowadays my YouTube homepage seems to be full of mainstream news channels which I haven't subbed too often pushing the mainstream narrative in regards to COVID vaccines or some other hot culture war issue. Right now I have 6 mainstream media videos being shown on my homepage none of which I have subbed to, 5 of which are COVID related and the other is about Ghislaine Maxwell. I have absolutely no interest in this content, in fact I actively try to avoid the news but YouTube for whatever reason has been pushing these videos onto my feed recently and therefore if I do end up watching them I'm likely not going to enjoy it much and am probably quite likely to downvote them. I guess I'm not saying big tech have an interest in controlling what information you see and how you perceive it, but it certainly looks a bit suspicious.
• hsod 5y ago
  This whole controversy strikes me as a sign of intellectual rot. YouTube has so many levers to control what you watch that getting mad about this is like getting mad the captain of the titanic won’t tell you how many deck chairs there are as the boat is going down. It simply doesn’t matter. It’s just one more in the long line of tweaks and AB tests YouTube uses to increase engagement. The learned debate club you’re looking for on YouTube is a mirage. If you find a video via YouTube search or recommendations you’ve already lost. If you find a video through a link from a trusted friend the dislike count doesn’t matter. Please, I’m begging you, find something important to care about
• docmars 5y ago
  Their desperation never smelled so good. YouTube shoots itself in the foot time and time again. It's seriously a shame.
• selfhifive 5y ago
  I've noticed that the number of likes on videos have fallen since the dislike count was hidden.
• Epitom3 5y ago
  YOU WILL WATCH ALL VIDEOS AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY
• errcorrectcode 5y ago
  Just don't use YouTube regularly for infinite scrolling. I stopped 2 years ago and only head over for a specific video or two. I don't engage at all.
• maxdout 5y ago
  Just grab an extension or userscript to reveal them, Here's a good browser extension That is working as of today- https://returnyoutubedislike.com https://returnyoutubedislike.com I absolutely oppose heavy censorship but some is required otherwise it would turn into crazyshit.com, the only way to have a censor free platform is to be rid of the scum bags that post scams, child porn etc.... Its unfortunate politicians managed to creep their way into youtube and impose biased censorship but its no surprise with how Google is already under the governments thumb with how biased their search results are. Youtube will never be what it was before and I doubt an alternative can take its place without the same thing happening. Thats part of living in a corrupt society, where Wallstreet reigns supreme,the rich exploit and profit off loopholes in our laws instead of doing the right thing, politicians are allowed to be bought through campaign donations and the media isnt held accountable for blatant tabloid like lies. Things will get substantially worse when Meta goes live and studies its users as they go on VR. On the bright side it could be worse, at least were not in a police state like China, Iran where they are trying to ban pets since its Haram or a country with no widespread internet access like North Korea.