Again, your entire position is premised on a reliably non-troll abused and reasonably uniform usage of the dislike button, two things we have reason to believe

Again, your entire position is premised on a reliably non-troll abused and reasonably uniform usage of the dislike button, two things we have reason to believe aren't the case. >people watch the whole video waiting for the thumbnail's promise that never arrives. Partial view stats won't help in that case. Neither signal is perfect, but it's easy to simply smash the dislike button for any or no reason. OTOH, actually watching the video takes effort and commitment, which is in itself a signal. Many people will give up fairly quickly. So, the chances that the majority of people are watching entire vids waiting for the thumbnail to happen is IMO substantially less than the chances that people just effortlessly smash dislike. And, I think people get trained pretty quickly to avoid the "impossible" thumbnail with massive landsharks eating trains or whatever. >video released only 2 weeks ago might be high quality but low view count Relative like-to-view ratio is probably a better indicator than factoring in the oft-abused dislike button. >200 likes" but with possibly higher dislikes hidden from view. Again, YouTube should offer a flag button for scammy or otherwise disagreeable content, then moderate accordingly. That's far better than a generic dislike button. But, we're probably going to agree to disagree here.