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I'm really puzzled why anyone cares about this so passionately. I'm not a YouTube diehard but I use it pretty regularly to watch a handful of channels I like, m

I'm really puzzled why anyone cares about this so passionately. I'm not a YouTube diehard but I use it pretty regularly to watch a handful of channels I like, maybe 2-3 hours per week watching videos on the site. Occasionally I'll search for how to video and click on whatever is in the top few results on Google. I've seen several posts now across different sites lamenting this change, but I've yet to see anything remotely persuasive that this is a bad thing. Sometimes I think it's just people being grumpy about any change at all, the way some people will grumble about a logo change despite it having no real consequence of how things work. In my personal experience, I rarely even noticed the dislike count. Sometimes I'd wonder who the few unfortunate people were who disliked a video with about 1000x as many likes. It reminded me of the 1 star reviews you see on Amazon complaining about the postman for a product that otherwise has a stellar record. I just assume something is wrong with those peoples computers which made their video glitch out or something. I don't really trust negative feedback that much when it is paired with an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for the same thing. And I don't think I ever encountered a video with anywhere near the number of dislikes as likes, let alone more dislikes. I personally have never disliked a video. If I'm watching something new, I'll just watch part of the video myself, and decide if I want to watch the rest or click away to something else. When I heard the announcement of removing the count as an effort to combat brigading, it made a lot of sense to me. I've seen the growth of negativity across the internet in the last few years. People are actually addicted to outrage these days, so anything that can help eliminate that seems like a good idea to me. The fact they kept the button there and still show the count to the uploader seems like they've at least tried to appease the diehards who appreciate having that dislike button - pretty fair if you ask me. You may challenge the assumption that only diehards care about this, but I've just looked at a few videos in my feed to see the number of likes and it's abysmal. 40k likes for a video with 4M views. 18k likes for a video with 800k views. They're all like that. The like/dislike metric just doesn't have much engagement. While you predict dire consequences for YouTubes future and panic among their employees, I am thinking that casual users probably have not even noticed at all.

ford_o 5y ago
No idea what HOW TO videos you watch, but in my domain, 80% are garbage, where the dislike ratio saves me minutes of watch time on each.
caconym_ 5y ago
I'm with you. It baffles me how much people claim to care about a metric that seems only to be legitimately useful in the edgiest of edge cases, and has literally never been of any use to me. And, maybe I'm being unfair, but many of these people seem like exactly the sort of people who'd get involved in an ideologically-motivated downvote brigade. Ironically, all the signals I do trust to tell me which videos are worth watching are telling me that this one, even if it contains some grain(s) of truth, is probably heavily biased and not worth my time. The fairest critical take I've seen (not that I totally agree with it, but I respect his experience as a creator) is probably Linus' "rant": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN3ojSzyIG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN3ojSzyIG8
- handoflixue 5y ago
  > It baffles me how much people claim to care about a metric that seems only to be legitimately useful in the edgiest of edge cases, and has literally never been of any use to me. Different use cases for YouTube, presumably? If you're listening to music or watching well-established content creators, then dislikes are basically irrelevant. But if you're looking for a "how to" tutorial, dislikes and comments are the only way to quickly sort the good from the bad.
  - gary_0 5y ago
    I think comments are less useful since the channel owner can arbitrarily delete and filter them (correct me if I'm wrong). So part of the outrage is that dislikes were the last semi-reliable metric left to check for garbage/troll videos.
    - emkoemko 5y ago
      check out flat earth videos... they remove all comments that are critical and now with the dislike counter gone i guess the earth is flat.
  - caconym_ 5y ago
    > But if you're looking for a "how to" tutorial, dislikes and comments are the only way to quickly sort the good from the bad. This is the "edge case" (not the best term for it, but whatever) I'm talking about, but I still don't really buy it. There are a lot of signals for how worthwhile a video is going to be, and frankly I'd rank likes/dislikes as the least useful one, mostly because they provide no context and aren't normalized to the video's view count. If we see an epidemic of amateur electricians getting zapped, etcetera, I suppose YouTube will have some egg on its face. But somehow I don't think that's going to happen.
seeEllArr 5y ago
As a user who does not engage in the parts of youtube where "downvote brigades" happen, but does participate in parts of youtube where downvotes indicate lack of quality, the change is all downside for me. I absolutely frequently used dislikes as a signal of quality. Not just "there are dislikes, therefore bad" but also "there are almost no dislikes at all, this must be great content that is worth my time."
notJim 5y ago
I watch a lot of of diy/how-to videos and the dislike count is really key for knowing if the video is worth watching or a waste of time. I don’t want to sit through a 10 minute video where the person rambles for 9 minutes and then doesn’t answer any questions. Obviously for very popular videos, it’s not super meaningful, because the popularity of the video is already indicating the quality to some extent. But for more niche videos, it’s super useful to see that one video has 10 likes and 50 dislikes. Then I can move on.

ford_o 5y ago

No idea what HOW TO videos you watch, but in my domain, 80% are garbage, where the dislike ratio saves me minutes of watch time on each.

caconym_ 5y ago

I'm with you. It baffles me how much people claim to care about a metric that seems only to be legitimately useful in the edgiest of edge cases, and has literally never been of any use to me. And, maybe I'm being unfair, but many of these people seem like exactly the sort of people who'd get involved in an ideologically-motivated downvote brigade. Ironically, all the signals I do trust to tell me which videos are worth watching are telling me that this one, even if it contains some grain(s) of truth, is probably heavily biased and not worth my time. The fairest critical take I've seen (not that I totally agree with it, but I respect his experience as a creator) is probably Linus' "rant": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN3ojSzyIG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN3ojSzyIG8

handoflixue 5y ago
> It baffles me how much people claim to care about a metric that seems only to be legitimately useful in the edgiest of edge cases, and has literally never been of any use to me. Different use cases for YouTube, presumably? If you're listening to music or watching well-established content creators, then dislikes are basically irrelevant. But if you're looking for a "how to" tutorial, dislikes and comments are the only way to quickly sort the good from the bad.
- gary_0 5y ago
  I think comments are less useful since the channel owner can arbitrarily delete and filter them (correct me if I'm wrong). So part of the outrage is that dislikes were the last semi-reliable metric left to check for garbage/troll videos.
  - emkoemko 5y ago
    check out flat earth videos... they remove all comments that are critical and now with the dislike counter gone i guess the earth is flat.
- caconym_ 5y ago
  > But if you're looking for a "how to" tutorial, dislikes and comments are the only way to quickly sort the good from the bad. This is the "edge case" (not the best term for it, but whatever) I'm talking about, but I still don't really buy it. There are a lot of signals for how worthwhile a video is going to be, and frankly I'd rank likes/dislikes as the least useful one, mostly because they provide no context and aren't normalized to the video's view count. If we see an epidemic of amateur electricians getting zapped, etcetera, I suppose YouTube will have some egg on its face. But somehow I don't think that's going to happen.

seeEllArr 5y ago

As a user who does not engage in the parts of youtube where "downvote brigades" happen, but does participate in parts of youtube where downvotes indicate lack of quality, the change is all downside for me. I absolutely frequently used dislikes as a signal of quality. Not just "there are dislikes, therefore bad" but also "there are almost no dislikes at all, this must be great content that is worth my time."

notJim 5y ago

I watch a lot of of diy/how-to videos and the dislike count is really key for knowing if the video is worth watching or a waste of time. I don’t want to sit through a 10 minute video where the person rambles for 9 minutes and then doesn’t answer any questions. Obviously for very popular videos, it’s not super meaningful, because the popularity of the video is already indicating the quality to some extent. But for more niche videos, it’s super useful to see that one video has 10 likes and 50 dislikes. Then I can move on.