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The problem with the dislike button seems to be that nobody agrees on what it should be used for. In previous HN discussions, it's become apparent that some pe

The problem with the dislike button seems to be that nobody agrees on what it should be used for. In previous HN discussions, it's become apparent that some people use it to say "I am not interested in this video". That is of zero use to other users. The video isn't necessarily bad, it's just on a topic you don't care about. If you are instead using it to mean "this video is factually wrong" or "this video is obnoxious" that might be useful. If you are using it to say "I don't agree with this political viewpoint" or "I don't like this movie/superhero/game/TV franchise", then that's also probably not that helpful.

DiggyJohnson 4y ago
It’s not of zero use, even if it’s imperfect. The perspective shared in the comment you’re replying to is a great example of this, unless you deny the validity of their reasoning or experience.
cowtools 4y ago
I think the solution would be to just make the down-vote do nothing but increment the visible counter, and also make it so that users that can't comment if they already voted. This allows people to simply signal their disapproval without fighting repetitive flamewars in the comments or suppressing content they don't like. Or maybe if you're running a forum where you want to promote controversial content and hide boring content, just make the downvote act identical to the upvote, so users are incentivized to downvote and argue if they think it is argue-worthy and just ignore if they think it is too boring to discuss.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
If only we had a way to spend billions of $¥€ on putting the greatest minds in the World into a single company who could solve this at the drop of a hat. It has to be control, right, surely Google are competent to fix this overnight of they wished?
- taberiand 4y ago
  That implies that the current functionality is broken, for Google's purpose. My guess is, they calculate that they make more money with this configuration than the alternative.
seb1204 4y ago
Same arguments can be made for the like button. I do like it because, funny, informative, correct information etc. No use case defined = use as you see fit.
- esmon 4y ago
  I see a future in which there are no likes and dislikes but sentiment is inferred and weighed according to its objective importance.
Winsaucerer 4y ago
I would guess that for a given class of videos, there's going to be a fairly regular amount of dislikes that are going to be because of behaviour like "I am not interested in this video". So if you come across a video in that class of videos (e.g., car repairs), and it has a much higher ratio of dislikes to likes, it's probably a good indication that there's more to those dislikes than just "I'm not interested" -- more likely the video is factually wrong, poor quality, etc.
iopq 4y ago
If it's a "how-to" video the dislike counter would show that this method doesn't work anymore or never worked well in the first place Especially for software or websites, for some reason I can't find niche stuff easily on search engines, but there's an Indian guy that just tells you how to use a website. If the website doesn't work anymore I'd like to see a decreasing thumbs up ratio. I did find a website that let me watch a video with violence in it without logging in to youtube. It looks like they just mirror the video you access from youtube. But this kind of a site will easily get shut down with some legal notice from YouTube. I actually want a thumbs graph, to see if the video has been gaining likes or gaining dislikes recently.
agileAlligator 4y ago
The not interested option already exists, it's just buried. Maybe youtube could bring that to the surface..
- JohnFen 4y ago
  If, in fact, that option actually does anything. I'm far from sure that it does. It doesn't seem to affect anything for me.
Heyso 4y ago
Here is a third, I dislike when the video is clickbait, or far from what I expected.
qwertox 4y ago
Apparently you cared enough about it to start watching it after reading the title. A video with "Rust" and "Tokio" in the title will probably be unwatchable if it has a like to dislike ratio of 1 to 3, even if the title signals you that you want to see that video. But since there no longer exists this ratio, you'll have to watch it partially only to notice that it is bad. And then dislike it (and then have this dislike action have no effect whatsoever in future recommendations, apparently). I absolutely hate it that they removed the dislike counter, it was so valuable.
- john_alan 4y ago
  - praestigiare 4y ago
    I don't know what you think the decision making process was on that, but you're wrong.
    - john_alan 4y ago
      OK thanks for the clarity.
    - friendzis 4y ago
      Such decisions are not made on one single metric. these are multi faceted decisions. Could dislike counts/ratios per like/view/minute been part of the decision? Absolutely. Did certain topics were worse than others? Again, yes. Is this a whole story? No. Could this have been part of the decision process? It would be hard to convince me it wasn't at least due to human nature.
honkdaddy 4y ago
As an aggregate, having a largely positive or largely negative feeling about something still provides good information to whomever's asking. It may not be ALL the information, but it's still hugely valuable. It's not dissimilar to the buttons asking if you enjoyed your washroom visit. Sure, it seems vague and stupid, but if one of your 30 washrooms is suddenly reporting 50% "dislikes", you know something is wrong. I know people get upset about the political implications of She-Hulk or COVID or Rings of Power dislikes, but surely one would think the positive information for the content creator outweigh the negatives here. There were times when all of Justin Bieber's content sat at around 5%. This was probably an annoyance for his PR team, but I doubt many of them thought the feature should be removed entirely.
rasz 4y ago
The _only_ problem with dislike button was that if affected ad buyers (game/movie publishers) and YT corporate - the worst crime of all. >On December 13, 2018, YouTube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind became the most disliked video on the video sharing platform, with 15 million dislikes rapidly surpassed the music video for Justin Bieber's song "Baby" You can dislike random people, but Susan hearing her pupil star employees content is shit is where you cross the line. Especially when it happens again next year: "YouTube Rewind 2019: For the Record"
xani_ 4y ago
> In previous HN discussions, it's become apparent that some people use it to say "I am not interested in this video". THEY HAVE "NOT INTERESTED BUTTON" IT'S JUST FUCKING HIDDEN https://imgur.com/a/fXjiBCu https://imgur.com/a/fXjiBCu All they need to do is to put it beside dislikes
spaniard89277 4y ago
I'm ready to pay that prize for a functional site.
friendzis 4y ago
How much do these factors matter, though? Similar arguments can be made about uselessness of the like button. Some press it to indicate good, relevant content, some press it to support the topic, some like factual content, some use likes for later reference in "liked videos". If you pivot a bit to Facebook videos, you can see heavily "liked" videos where huge portion of top comments are literally some form of "waste of my time", "idiotic video" and so on.
dredmorbius 4y ago
In the spirit of POSIWOD, I suggest POBIHOU: the purpose of a button is how it's used. Designers may have an intention. People will apply their own needs and usage to features, in the spirit of desire paths. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path> If people are using "dislike" to indicate that they're not interested in content, particularly in a context in which there are few other ways to do so, then that is what the button means. You might extend that more broadly to any aspect of a UI/UX. In a past life I designed some elements of a content moderation / feedback system. Among the more amusing aspects of that was encountering people who told me that I was using the system I'd designed wrong.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  That should be POSIWID and POBIHIU, I suppose...
TheMode 4y ago
Fact is that it already worked well, no point in trying to find unnecessary confusions
Sir_Liigmaz 4y ago
I think that's part of the problem with black box algorithms controlling a large portion of the internet.
account42 4y ago
The exact same applies to the like button too but you don't see anyone removing that.

DiggyJohnson 4y ago

It’s not of zero use, even if it’s imperfect. The perspective shared in the comment you’re replying to is a great example of this, unless you deny the validity of their reasoning or experience.

cowtools 4y ago

I think the solution would be to just make the down-vote do nothing but increment the visible counter, and also make it so that users that can't comment if they already voted. This allows people to simply signal their disapproval without fighting repetitive flamewars in the comments or suppressing content they don't like. Or maybe if you're running a forum where you want to promote controversial content and hide boring content, just make the downvote act identical to the upvote, so users are incentivized to downvote and argue if they think it is argue-worthy and just ignore if they think it is too boring to discuss.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago

If only we had a way to spend billions of $¥€ on putting the greatest minds in the World into a single company who could solve this at the drop of a hat. It has to be control, right, surely Google are competent to fix this overnight of they wished?

taberiand 4y ago
That implies that the current functionality is broken, for Google's purpose. My guess is, they calculate that they make more money with this configuration than the alternative.

seb1204 4y ago

Same arguments can be made for the like button. I do like it because, funny, informative, correct information etc. No use case defined = use as you see fit.

esmon 4y ago
I see a future in which there are no likes and dislikes but sentiment is inferred and weighed according to its objective importance.

Winsaucerer 4y ago

I would guess that for a given class of videos, there's going to be a fairly regular amount of dislikes that are going to be because of behaviour like "I am not interested in this video". So if you come across a video in that class of videos (e.g., car repairs), and it has a much higher ratio of dislikes to likes, it's probably a good indication that there's more to those dislikes than just "I'm not interested" -- more likely the video is factually wrong, poor quality, etc.

iopq 4y ago

If it's a "how-to" video the dislike counter would show that this method doesn't work anymore or never worked well in the first place Especially for software or websites, for some reason I can't find niche stuff easily on search engines, but there's an Indian guy that just tells you how to use a website. If the website doesn't work anymore I'd like to see a decreasing thumbs up ratio. I did find a website that let me watch a video with violence in it without logging in to youtube. It looks like they just mirror the video you access from youtube. But this kind of a site will easily get shut down with some legal notice from YouTube. I actually want a thumbs graph, to see if the video has been gaining likes or gaining dislikes recently.

agileAlligator 4y ago

The not interested option already exists, it's just buried. Maybe youtube could bring that to the surface..

JohnFen 4y ago
If, in fact, that option actually does anything. I'm far from sure that it does. It doesn't seem to affect anything for me.

Heyso 4y ago

Here is a third, I dislike when the video is clickbait, or far from what I expected.

qwertox 4y ago

Apparently you cared enough about it to start watching it after reading the title. A video with "Rust" and "Tokio" in the title will probably be unwatchable if it has a like to dislike ratio of 1 to 3, even if the title signals you that you want to see that video. But since there no longer exists this ratio, you'll have to watch it partially only to notice that it is bad. And then dislike it (and then have this dislike action have no effect whatsoever in future recommendations, apparently). I absolutely hate it that they removed the dislike counter, it was so valuable.

john_alan 4y ago
- praestigiare 4y ago
  I don't know what you think the decision making process was on that, but you're wrong.
  - john_alan 4y ago
    OK thanks for the clarity.
  - friendzis 4y ago
    Such decisions are not made on one single metric. these are multi faceted decisions. Could dislike counts/ratios per like/view/minute been part of the decision? Absolutely. Did certain topics were worse than others? Again, yes. Is this a whole story? No. Could this have been part of the decision process? It would be hard to convince me it wasn't at least due to human nature.

honkdaddy 4y ago

As an aggregate, having a largely positive or largely negative feeling about something still provides good information to whomever's asking. It may not be ALL the information, but it's still hugely valuable. It's not dissimilar to the buttons asking if you enjoyed your washroom visit. Sure, it seems vague and stupid, but if one of your 30 washrooms is suddenly reporting 50% "dislikes", you know something is wrong. I know people get upset about the political implications of She-Hulk or COVID or Rings of Power dislikes, but surely one would think the positive information for the content creator outweigh the negatives here. There were times when all of Justin Bieber's content sat at around 5%. This was probably an annoyance for his PR team, but I doubt many of them thought the feature should be removed entirely.

rasz 4y ago

The _only_ problem with dislike button was that if affected ad buyers (game/movie publishers) and YT corporate - the worst crime of all. >On December 13, 2018, YouTube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind became the most disliked video on the video sharing platform, with 15 million dislikes rapidly surpassed the music video for Justin Bieber's song "Baby" You can dislike random people, but Susan hearing her pupil star employees content is shit is where you cross the line. Especially when it happens again next year: "YouTube Rewind 2019: For the Record"

xani_ 4y ago

> In previous HN discussions, it's become apparent that some people use it to say "I am not interested in this video". THEY HAVE "NOT INTERESTED BUTTON" IT'S JUST FUCKING HIDDEN https://imgur.com/a/fXjiBCu https://imgur.com/a/fXjiBCu All they need to do is to put it beside dislikes

spaniard89277 4y ago

I'm ready to pay that prize for a functional site.

friendzis 4y ago

How much do these factors matter, though? Similar arguments can be made about uselessness of the like button. Some press it to indicate good, relevant content, some press it to support the topic, some like factual content, some use likes for later reference in "liked videos". If you pivot a bit to Facebook videos, you can see heavily "liked" videos where huge portion of top comments are literally some form of "waste of my time", "idiotic video" and so on.

dredmorbius 4y ago

In the spirit of POSIWOD, I suggest POBIHOU: the purpose of a button is how it's used. Designers may have an intention. People will apply their own needs and usage to features, in the spirit of desire paths. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path> If people are using "dislike" to indicate that they're not interested in content, particularly in a context in which there are few other ways to do so, then that is what the button means. You might extend that more broadly to any aspect of a UI/UX. In a past life I designed some elements of a content moderation / feedback system. Among the more amusing aspects of that was encountering people who told me that I was using the system I'd designed wrong.

dredmorbius 4y ago
That should be POSIWID and POBIHIU, I suppose...

TheMode 4y ago

Fact is that it already worked well, no point in trying to find unnecessary confusions

Sir_Liigmaz 4y ago

I think that's part of the problem with black box algorithms controlling a large portion of the internet.

account42 4y ago

The exact same applies to the like button too but you don't see anyone removing that.