Bummer. I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching. If I see a 3,000 up / 48 down video on a topic I'm interested in there's a really good chance the video is great.
I'm a small time creator (~13.5k subs) and don't care at all about upvotes or downvotes being public. There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that. Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects.
I always found this information rather useless myself, so I don't see it as a huge deal. More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content. In my experience it's more of a "controversial opinion" indicator than a "bad video" indicator.
>There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that.
My point exactly. So if I get what you say, most of your videos have a fairly inconsequential amount of downvotes, and those that do are not because they're poor quality but rather because it's been disliked by people who weren't your target audience.
If that's your experience as a content creator how can you, as a viewer, consider the like/dislike ratio a good indication of the quality of the content?
Howto videos have a wide range of qualities and the up/down ratio is indispensible so you aren't sitting through 18min of someone practicing their English or another rattling off a cocaine bender about washing cars.
Agreed. Here is a video titled "How a simple Django application works" that is 8 minutes long. It has 29 likes and 27 dislikes. It's a pretty poor quality video, in my opinion.
So if there was a similar video with the same views and likes but 0 downvotes you think it'd be significantly better? I'd guess the difference was noise.
I mean "maybe," right? It just seems like a sample-size problem rather than indicating any bias one way or another. And of course, as far as these things go, you only find out the quality after you watch some or all of it.
Perhaps youtube is the wrong medium for a lot of things and dislikes may not be the best way to express that.
Youtube is borderline stupid right now for most channels that don't have organic growth... what they should do is re-open monetization and live streaming to everyone as its creating its own hell hole if you ask me with the 9 minutes of smash the like button and 1 minute of content we're seeing on every channel that isn't organically growing or making money through other means.
They've changed the sidebar algo/design in the past six months or so and I tell ya, I used to actually use it, but not anymore at all. It's basically been remodeled into the same "front page" business case as Soundcloud, Amazon, and any other "choose from a variety of things that may or may not be sponsored (but almost always are) and only ever relate to your watch history by chance."
Ah, I guess it depends on the type of content you watch on youtube. I find video howtos/tutorial very annoying to watch because they're invariably too slow or too fast, I vastly prefer text-and-images-based guides for that stuff.
>More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content.
Like the new Nintendo Switch Online Expansion pack video.
There's a huge community, that instantly dislikes the video.
I'm not sure. Reddit, Hacker News, etc. all offer ways for content to be downvoted. This allows for user moderation, which has pros and cons, but seems to work better against disinformation than platforms like Facebook which only allow "likes."
I've always used the like / dislike ratio as a measure on the quality/controversiality of the video in question.
Removing it makes paid content so much more attractive for starters...
I am almost laughing as I'm writing this, but reality is moving towards 1984 much quicker that I ever imagined.
The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video.
Which obviously is the point. Damn Google got really evil real fast.
There are way too many 15 minute videos along the lines of "How to do X in Y" which should be 30 seconds long. The downvotes are telltale for these, then the most upvoted comment tends to be, "actual answer at 13:30".
Or the video just isn't what the clickbait title says.
I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk.
> There are way too many 15 minute videos along the lines of "How to do X in Y" which should be 30 seconds long.
This is why I stopped using YouTube a few years ago and heavily prefer text+image tutorials to videos nowadays. YouTube is pushing longer videos, because they show you more ads in the middle of them and creators are also rewarded with more money for longer videos + they can insert their "sponsor messages" a.k.a. even more ads.
> I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk.
Ans quite frankly, things being brigaded probably means it's a political hot take, that's even boring when you agree, and just stupid when you don't. If you remove those from the downvoted video list, you're probably left with only a few actually insightful and useful videos.
reality is moving towards 1984 much quicker that I ever imagined
Nothing says “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever” like removing the 'dislike' count from YouTube videos.
I'm not the one moving the goalpost—it started as "reality is moving towards 1984", then "they removed the ability to give negative feedback", and now it's "they removed the ability to see the negative feedback that others gave." That's a significant change.
> saying they didn't disable the button is only arguably true. The button no longer performs its primary function
I'm more sympathetic to this argument—that the primary purpose of the "dislike" button isn't to give the creator negative feedback, but as a "rating" system, with the only 2 possible ratings "+1" and "-1". The problem with that is that, "they changed the rating system" doesn't seem to merit all of the comparisons to 1984. And "more like 1984" vs. "less like 1984" seems a silly way to evaluate rating systems.
Edit: actually, the rating system changed from "+1", "-1", "no vote", to "+1", "no vote"—since you can see the # of views, then you can determine roughly how many "no votes" there are.
It works on Hacker news since the vast majority of people here share the same interests. The same is true in theory on reddit, where the voters on a single subreddit share the same interests, and importantly reddit has rules against brigading to at least try to enforce that limitation.
The basic problem is whether a downvote on a cat juggling video means "this is a bad example of juggling cats" or does it mean "I don't like cat juggling"? On YouTube, it's much more likely to mean the latter, but it's the former that's actually useful.
Ok well, you didn't answer the question, you just repeated something generic you've heard here, I guess. Whether it's true or not, who knows. I'm not sure what it means exactly. How would you go about testing whether that's actually true?
I dislike a fair percentage of the topics posted here regularly, or have no interest in them, and I suspect that's not uncommon. A survey on that subject would be fascinating.
I wouldn't say there is anything here that I personally 'dislike', stuff that doesn't interest me, sure, but then I just don't read about it. I don't feel the need to down vote it though.
Because Google steered users this way via their auto-play next video feature. I’ve avoided it like the plague it is so I’m not precisely sure where I saw it, but I’m absolutely sure there was language to the effect of “we pick the next videos automatically based on your likes and dislikes” which translates to “dislike means give me less of this” which means they’ve skewed the usefulness of the metric. It’s no longer clearly indicative of bad content, it’s now indicative of bad content or content users don’t want to see more out automatically.
This is an excellent point. A dislike value is a single number but represents a large variety of reasons, only some might relevant to if you would think the video is good, and you don't know the breakdown.
And what's the argument? Legitimately asking, I use it to downvote comments that are low quality in my opinion and I don't think that has a negative impact on HN at all.
I’ve noticed on occasion that comments that border on political speech can really go either way, even if they argue the same point in the same way. HN is, at least according to dang, an unusually diverse community, so leaving it up to a dice roll and timing for a comment to survive its first 10 minutes seems not great.
I often see completely factual comments get downvoted once (to 0), and since it then gets a little greyed out, people turn off their brain and blindly ram the downvote button on it. It just leads to bandwagoning.
I find the opposite. Fairly often one of my comments will get a quick downvote or two, but they quickly then get enough upvotes to get back into the black, I expect as reasonable people, who might not have bothered upvoting the comment otherwise, do so because they can see that it didn't deserve downvotes.
downvotes on HN are, by official policy, for disagreeing with ideas. They are not just for low quality posts. And, even on sites where downvotes are supposed to be for low quality/off topic, etc enough people still use them as "I don't like this idea and don't want you to spread it even if it's arguably valid".
Further, they're a form of violence against the poster. Not sure what other word to use to be told in a single click "You Suck!". It is or arguably can be a form of bullying.
> downvotes on HN are, by official policy, for disagreeing with ideas
Care to link to that policy? I was always of the impression that short low-quality comments that don’t further the discussion are prime examples of acceptable downvote targets here. Disagreeing with a constructively expressed idea is best done by expressing your own argument in a reply.
> I was always of the impression that short low-quality comments that don’t further the discussion are prime examples of acceptable downvote targets here. Disagreeing with a constructively expressed idea is best done by expressing your own argument in a reply.
Amen to that. Not how it always works around here though.
I personally upvote posts I disagree with that nonetheless improve my thoughts and productively challenge my assumptions. I prefer a voting convention that increases the probability that I give my attention to worthwhile content rather than trendy sentiment.
[clarification: I suspect you agree and do not mean to imply otherwise, though I do not know]
> Further, they're a form of violence against the poster. Not sure what other word to use to be told in a single click "You Suck!". It is or arguably can be a form of bullying.
Your point before that part was something I could engage with, but if you really see any form of disagreement as "violence" or a "form of bullying" then I don't understand how you can even function online.
Raw votes are pretty bad at moderation. Voting features are there primarily to help engage visitors so they will return.
HN and some subreddits avoid becoming tools of disinformation because they are managed by dedicated moderators who remove posts, comments, and participants who are acting in bad faith. (Facebook does not do this.)
Isn't that similar because the dislike value isn't related to the specific video but a person's opinion of the brand.
For example if you wanted to watch a video on how to setup WSL 2 on Windows 10 and you see one by Microsoft has 100000 dislikes however it's amazing video that doesn't help you.
> More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content.
Strongly agree. For example in HN itself if someone poses a fact-based positive opinion about China, it is down-voted whenever Americans are online and voting (does not happen when Europeans are online).
So dislike/down-vote has 0 value. In fact, majority of the comments in this thread are against Youtube, which tells me that Youtube has made the correct decision.
I just canceled my premium subscription. I'm not taking this lightly, YT has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. But at this point it feels like the responsibile thing to do is to vote with my wallet. Not that a change in course is likely; their leadership has been hell bent on ruining the platform for years.
On HN ? Unless you are a student you are making enough money to afford premium without thinking much about it and if you are using it enough to notice ads it makes sense to pay for services you use.
This is exactly why the internet is in the situation where it is - nobody wants to pay for stuff so they have to monetise tracking and advertising.
> This is exactly why the internet is in the situation where it is - nobody wants to pay for stuff so they have to monetise tracking and advertising.
This is just as oblivious as the "nobody wants to work" rhetoric that's currently popular. It ignores the fact that a lot of products wouldn't be used, and content wouldn't be consumed, if they weren't free.
No, the reason people wouldn't use Facebook if they had to pay for it isn't because they're cheapskates, it's because Facebook isn't offering a product that's actually worth paying for.
Netlfix et al. show that people are willing to pay for things on the internet if they're actually worth spending money on.
Besides, even when you pay for things on the internet, most companies will still show you ads and track you.
I'm imagining someone in 1990 hearing you say that being able to instantly start watching almost any music video or filmed lecture/talk ever made isn't "a product that's actually worth paying for". I would've given anything to have that.
>I'm imagining someone in 1990 hearing you say that being able to instantly start watching almost any music video or filmed lecture/talk ever made
Imagine going back and mentioning that this would also be a way for the company (Google) to snoop on your conversations and censor dissenting thougth.
A free way to stream any video sounds nice, but it doesn't once you mention the fact that it actually limits the type of content you are able to enjoy.
We should be trying to build a better infrastructure for FOSS video streaming instead of trying to rationalize shitty business models.
>any conversations that are snooped on are ones you allow to be snooped on by using a free service
I don't think the innocence of the people who don't know the difference between proprietary and free software should be the thing we attack here, specially since the company in question has gone through great efforts before to restrain the spread of the FSF.
That's debatable. Any company that analyses large amounts of data produced by you in the form of posts, likes/dislikes, follows etc are effectively reading your mind.
Someone in the 90s wouldnt have a clue about how much garbage there is to sift through, nor the narcissistic culture that all social media, but especially the type focused on videos, brings.
All the grifters, charlatans, anti-fact, political blowhard, fake, plastic, garbage that litters the whole site from left to right to non-political.
>It ignores the fact that a lot of products wouldn't be used, and content wouldn't be consumed, if they weren't free.
This is why I said we are on Hacker News. People here should probably value their time more than 15$/month if they spend nontrivial amount of time watching YT, yet still refuse to pay, freeloading is a common thing unfortunately.
I think you missed the point the person you are replying to is talking about - if you are watching youtube normally and seeing ads you aren't a freeloader. They are saying those that would use apps like vance or newpipe instead of just paying for premium are the freeloaders
Ah. You’re right and thanks. I had read that post, but from the use of the trademark assumed that YouTube Vanced was some other YouTube offering that I also didn’t care about, not that it was a 3rd party app that bypassed ads.
"On HN ? Unless you are a student you are making enough money to afford premium without thinking much about it and if you are using it enough to notice ads it makes sense to pay for services you use."
Not all HN users live in the West. I know YouTube Premium is available in some low-income locations as well, although I concede I don’t know how much they adjust the price.
So stop tracking and use good old-fashioned sleuth work like “he's watching a video about fixing plumbing, let's show him some tools or possibly DIY products for homeowners”.
People _want_ to pay for stuff in exchange for not being tracked. But the business of tracking users and selling their data is much more profitable. Even when small businesses and startups create attractive tools to gain market share, they are (sometimes unknowingly at the moment) following their main agenda which is to get users' data and sell it multiple times to other buyers.
> you are making enough money to afford premium without thinking much about it
This is a broad assumption, what makes you think everybody on this site can afford £12 a month for something they can get completely for free with uBlock Origin and YouTube Vanced?
This always comes back. It's supporting creators as much as the pennies creators get on Spotify. Only creators with millions of views make money. The rest, if you want to support them, you use alternative channels for that. The main profit maker is Youtube in any case.
That's not true. YouTube gets 45% of the money your videos generate and you get 55%. If a viewer buys a YouTube subscription then 55% of the price of that subscription gets shared among the channels that the viewer watches.
Subscriptions are not the same as Premium. Paying for YouTube Premium basically does nothing to help creators, so you have the extra layer of Subscriptions to individual channels and YouTube get you twice by expecting you to ALSO pay for Subscriptions.
No, YouTube premium revenue is also shared to the creator. As a creator you even get a breakdown of how much you earned from ads and how much from YouTube premium.
I actually forgot that YouTube had rolled out the Join button. You get 70% of the revenue of the Channel Membership (join button). YouTube gets 30%.
Yes, people click a button to indicate start and end of sponsored segments in a video. Those time markers are sent to a DB, and every subsequent viewer will use that to skip the ad portion.
no, it's not on them, it's on you for choosing to take money out of their pocket. They have chosen the monetization revenues that they are comfortable with, circumventing the way people make money while watching their content is highly unethical. You don't show up to a local course or theatre production and use a fake credit card because you dislike the fact that they use visa.
I only use a phone for watching stuff if I don't have a monitor or laptop around. That said newpipe is fantastic when mobile is the only available platform.
I'm aware. I simply prefer Newpipe because it has roughly the same functionality, is more lightweight and is open-source (+ it's on F-Droid so I can easily update it along with all my other apps).
The Patreon or buying merch route doesn't really work for wide scale though. I can do that for a handful of the very top channels I watch regularly but I can't chip in a buck a month for all 400ish channels I'm subscribed to. Supporting a few creators is easy but giving a trickle the a wide field is kind of the sweet spot for ads.
It'd be really nice to have a way to say spread say $10 a month among the channels I watch, with maybe some options to weight towards smaller channels too.
Yeah a way for me to not pay much, but still more than my measly ad views would be to a creator, without individually giving them a few pennies every month or a bit at the end of the year. A bit problem is this kind of micro payment is expensive to process unless you can aggregate them at the scale of a platform.
Seems like a bit disproportionate reaction. Most of YouTube's value is in the videos.. not the dislike counter. Help me understand the trade-off here...
Have you ever tried watching a tutorial and come across one that has a ton of dislikes? Its a clear indicator that the video is a waste of time. Removing this is going to waste peoples time.
Yeah, I'm actually behind this one. There's enough negativity on the internet, if youtube lose 0.25% of their premium subscribers they'll still be just fine. I doubt if much more than that will drop their subscriptions as the main value is lots less ads and premium-only content.
Same, companies can only be influenced by their financials these days. I even buy subscriptions I don't need with the intention of cancelling them 2-3 quarters later (need to make sure the money shows up on the books first).
Same here and agree 100%. Seeing ads again will help me spend less time on the platform. I almost cancelled earlier this year but this made it easy for me to pull the trigger.
It says in-content advertisement. Like the famous Squarespace advertisement. YouTube premium doesn't skip the in-content ads which content creator put in the videos.
so I can watch youtube on my ipad without ads every 3 minutes driving me crazy. It was either get premium or give up on youtube, or maybe the ipad.
I was already using google music, and then youtube music family (which sort of sucks at least in terms of app development), so this was more an incremental add-on.
Not the person you're asking, but I am a Premium subscriber. In the niche I mostly watch (classical music performances) in-video ads are still quite rare--thank goodness!. So the Premium sub is still a benefit, esp. b/c before I subscribed, ads would suddenly run in the middle of a concert, which was incredibly annoying.
Exactly, how will I figure now that a 20 min video has no content promised in the title?
How many times I looked for guidance on YouTube on some software, or cooking recipe or some rare clip, just to find out it was not what I was looking for by the dislikes?
Now I’ll have to watch ”fix your xxx with this easy trick” at 2x speed to know it was crap.
> Exactly, how will I figure now that a 20 min video has no content promised in the title?
Both Google and rights holders don't care. The more of the video you sit through, the more ads they get to shove in your face. It's a win-win situation for both parties.
is there a reliable way to block YT ads with a browser add-on?
I'm using Ublock + Umatrix and still seeing a huge surge in ads across all videos.
Youtube is also injecting pre-rolls at the beginning of content I've uploaded to a new youtube channel that is not monetized (I have no interest in putting ads in front of my content)...so I have zero interest in supporting their ad empire.
Enhancer for youtube which makes youtube much better in my opinion. Ironically there is now a large, prominent sponsor logo on the add-ons settings page.
are you subscribed to any unique lists? Ublock is the first thing I install and it's been on my machine for many many years, but the YT ads seem to be pushing through
I'm using a flavor of chromium, but have noticed no ads when watching of FF. It didn't click that Google made changes to restrict ad-blocking effectiveness on YouTube at the browser level; thanks
> I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching
You summarized why Youtube is doing it. Sure harassment is one aspect of it, but this drives up the clicks for Youtube and therefore the ad revenue. I'd be curious to see if people get overly annoyed by how many unworthy videos they watch and thereby reducing overall engagement.
Without the like vs dislike ratio, I'm less likely to use Youtube. I'm already using Bing and Google to search for videos b/c they absolutely botched their search experience.
The changes they've made over the years have made a huge difference in the amount I use it. I used to often spend a lot of time discovering new channels and videos and overall just enjoying entertaining content. Compared to today, I've uninstalled the YouTube app from my phone and when I visit the site in a browser I generally ignore the homepage and just search for updates on the content I'm interested in, watch one video if I can find anything that looks relevant and then close the page. If their goal is to show more ads, they're shooting themselves in the foot.
Absolutely. This is exactly the kind of thing that creators should be able to opt-in to, just like disabling comments. Very disappointed to see this shielding of everyone's eyes from videos. If a creator wanted to opt to hide it, sure, but flat out hiding it is unfortunate.
Why would be poster of a video receive special privilege for videos that they post? That would be like a seller being allowed to remove unfavorable reviews of their product. That the reviews are not under the control of the seller/poster is the only reason that they would be useful at all.
As others have pointed out, uploaders had the ability to block voting entirely, but couldn't adjust visibility of positive/negative votes separately. There's a huge difference between a video with +10k/-10 and a video with +10k/-100k. Displaying both identically gives a deliberately false equivalence.
> There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that.
Yes. People downvote based on their expectation. So you can have content that you would probably find bad that has a lot of upvotes because it has a niche that likes it, and my sense is that the excursions in dislike ratio are more often driven by distribution channel or brigading than the intrinsic value of the content.
> Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects.
Doesn't this directly contradict your experience as a creator? But if it was true, wouldn't it be a good thing that creators no longer feel as much pressure to conform to fan expectations, eg in pursuit of bigger opportunities/audiences?
They do it so the likes can be displayed while hiding the dislikes. This encourages controversial videos, which is good for youtube since "all engagement is good engagement".
> But if it was true, wouldn't it be a good thing that creators no longer feel as much pressure to conform to fan expectations, eg in pursuit of bigger opportunities/audiences?
I'm not sold on that idea personally. The videos I create are based on what I'm doing in my day to day as a developer or if someone comments with a video suggestion since that's almost always in my wheel house of video topics which I greatly appreciate when this happens. I don't really make videos with intent to optimize for views / upvotes or get upset when a video gets a few downvotes. Lots of them have 100% upvote ratios and almost all have 95%+.
YouTube does let video creators disable voting but whenever I see that on any video I almost always think the channel owner is trying to do something nefarious. Maybe they're trying to avoid transparency by hiding downvotes or they are super self conscious about making videos and my internal bias suggests the video will be worse quality when compared to others. That's not always the case but it's true more often than not, at least for my own subjective take on video preference (mainly tech and hardware, no news).
I always strive for maximum transparency and let the results figure themselves out naturally.
In the end, this is mainly a huge downgrade for consumers of videos. It sounds like the algorithm will still take downvotes into account and video creators can still see the downvotes. It's the viewers who can no longer use this as a metric to quickly gauge a video's quality. In a world with so many amazing videos to watch, losing this quick filter hurts a bit.
I wonder how correlated the like/view ratio is with the like/dislike ratio. If that correlation is very high we might not be losing much info. It'd just take an annoying extra second to calc the ratio.
This would be interesting to scrape together before that part of the API goes away in December. I wonder how correlated the like/dislike ratio is to the like/view ratio. I'd imagine not very. I don't like very many videos, but I don't know about others.
That's an interesting point. Why can this feature not be video or channel specific so that a creator who is being targetted could switch off the count if they wanted?
Plausible deniability. If a creator turns off dislikes on a particular video, that's a strong signal that they're producing propaganda or have a thin skin. If YT does it for them, for everyone, then affected creators can just shrug and pretend like they definitely would never turn off dislikes.
That's not the only reason for turning off downvotes... I'm a musician, and have dealt before with competing musicians downvoting me in hopes of driving my videos below theirs. Or occasionally someone can share a video publicly and initial response is based on brigading or just not well received. The display of lots of downvotes before views are properly accumulated can cause bias towards the content. Things were just fine when creators had the control over whether or not to show dislikes.
Many creators use Youtube for different purposes. Youtube does a big injustice because they don't fairly separate content based on the type of entity that's posting content enough (i.e. an indie music producer versus a big industry music company or indie vlogger living in their parent's house versus a well funded TV news channel).
Well there are also several individual niches where the competition can play out in very personal ways as well. I work within a specific sub genre of music, and more often than not that entire niche sometimes operates based on "small town" politics.
I still do it for the passion, not much profit has ever been there... har.
Sure friend, fair warning though, I'll probably delete this in a day or so to avoid an ID trail of people that might scan my posts later on... The Internet can be vengeful a times even if I am not so. :P
It depends, stuff like videos critical of foreign countries political regime end up spammed by politically sponsored griefers to delegitimize them, exactly playing to your heuristic.
I feel like the like-dislike button needs to be expanded instead to encompass various the nuances on why you might like or dislike a video.
Something I liked could be as trivial as an enjoyment of said content or a dislike because of it's presentation, or liking content that was presented in poor tastes yet recognizing it's comedic value.
That's not to say I don't recognize that the like-dislike ratio can also be gamed however.
Before facebook, reddit and such I imagined discussion platform where you'd have 3 options, upvote for agreeing with the content, downvote for disagreeing and third option for spam and incomprehensible things and things devoid of any value positive or negative.
Yes! No! Garbage!
System would recommend you the content based on your adjustable levels of tolerance for adversarial views, contoversy and tolerance for garbage.
I even considered supporting mixed vote by placing a dot in Yes! No! Garbage! triangle. Basically two axes, agreement and quality, with range of possible agreements narrowing down to zero as quality goes down.
Unfortunately, at least unfortunately for your preferences, YouTube (and the modern web broadly, perhaps) does not really prioritize ways for users to find content.
To me the point is to remove the negativity. They don't want to be the targets of the same criticism as FB. It's also seem to be a cultural trend in the US that only positive comments are accepted.
A lot of comments here already point out that YouTube’s own videos are regularly downvoted to oblivion. Also that in this very sensitive political climate across the western world gouvernements and big corporations don’t want to appear rejected by the opinion. I tend to think it was an important argument for this decision
Perhaps you could use views and the like count. If the video has 10M views, and only 10k likes, then perhaps it sucks? I dunno. You would really have to sit through it I suppose, which is the point of this move.
That said, it does not affect me much as I use YouTube exclusively for music. I used it for other videos as well, but Google is making YouTube a worse platform day by day.
Similarly, I also like watching videos that have a high dislike-to-like ratio because that tells me the video might be about something I'll appreciate that the rest of the public doesn't.
The problem is people also use it as a propaganda tool to bury videos they don’t politically agree with. Normies have much lowered like/dislike button engagement so it’s a disservice to the vast majority.
What fraction of videos on YouTube are political in nature? Seems like a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in this. Why should videos about replacing the alternator on a 1999 Ford Ranger have the Like/Dislike buttons removed because YouTube wants to protect a very small number of accounts from criticism?
The example you make is fantastic, because if such a video had 4 times more dislikes you know you’ll probably not find anything useful there, generally confirmed by skimming comments fast as “ this is a 1997 model “, etc.
In last months comments often just disappear randomly. Youtube outsourced their spam filter and it was messed up - randomly deletes comments on basis of poorly set machine learming model and wrongly set keywords.
It’s definitely not small. I’m not particularly political and anecdotally my recommendation bubble has atleast 30% of politically “triggering” videos. These videos don’t have to be explicitly political but just involve a person that can be considered a “trigger”. I mostly watch videos on wood and metal working.
What YouTube recommends to you is just that, their recommendations. It doesn't reflect the actual amount of content that exists, it reflects what YouTube wants you to watch to drive engagement. It might be 0.001% of content but make up 30% of the recommendations YouTube gives you.
> It doesn't reflect the actual amount of content that exists, it reflects what YouTube wants you to watch to drive engagement.
Exactly. And what drives engagement more than enraging political content? Of course they're going to shove politics in your face even if you've never watched a single one before.
Interestingly we have similar hobbies. I have to actively hit the don't recommend this to me button on all the political stuff. It generally works for a while and then I accidentally watch something close to controversial and I get another flood.
I too mostly watch woodworking/metalworking. If I ignore the “current events” row of videos that I haven’t clicked on in years (because they are incredibly boring and oversimplify complex topics), less than 1% of my recommendations are political. I wonder how YouTube decides which videos to allow in that special row. Most of them don’t have nearly as many views/hour as my usual recommendations.
It’s pretty incredible how hard the recommendation algorithm is trying to make me become right wing. It must assume I am because of my interests and watch history. Not interested, YT.
The fraction of political videos on Youtube is "definitely not small"?! I'd be surprised if it's more than 0.01%, i.e. if more than 1 in 10,000 videos are political.
Sure, but many "Normies" are aware of this dynamic and adjust their expectations accordingly. If some video critical of gamers, anime fans, or WoW players gets piled with downvotes it's no mystery. Same with political content. It's well understood that controversial things get more negative reactions.
How does it make the system useless? It simply means the bar for "should I watch this" re: [dis]like ratio changes at least in part based on video content. If I see a technical video with more than 10-15% dislikes, I probably won't watch it or will be skeptical. But a video about abortion can be 50/50 and still have great content.
It seems unlikely that giving someone more information makes something worthless.
This system is useless because it does not communicate the reasoning behind a downvote, nor is it objective in the first place. People downvote for many reasons, and quality is the seems usually to be the most likely. You could make the most informative and objective correct video, and toxic communities could downvote it because they feel triggered for some absurd reasons, or because it competes with their favored content-creator, or because of reasons which are independent of the video itself
You must be pretty deep inside the bubble of the topic, as also the bubble of the content-creator, to be able to evaluate the value of the rating. And that makes it worthless, because most people can't be that deep and follow everything. And the people who are, are more likely re-enforcing their own ignorance.
The Ratio is one of those tools which are making sense when they are fresh, but become corrupted over time, making it useless after a while.
Useless for controversial content maybe, not for non-controversial content. What percentage of content on YouTube is controversial do you think? Probably very little, so this "solution" seems like a serious overreach that removes something that's useful 90% of the time to appease some minority.
The system is fine. What if we applied this logic to elections? Just get rid of them altogether since they're prone to brigading.
There's plenty of clickbait videos that have horrible like to dislike ratios and you can save yourself time by seeing the dislike bar. This is just removing an important piece of functionality and making the site less functional and less user friendly.
> The system is fine. What if we applied this logic to elections? Just get rid of them altogether since they're prone to brigading.
Yes, elections suck, but that's their purpose. Mankind is not able to act smart on scale, but there is the interesting effect that we will act sane enough on scale. Elections usually aim to utilize this balance, because all other known solutions are sucking even more.
And not to forget, in a healthy working democracy, you can't game elections like you can do it with (dis)likes. With online-services, it's relative easy to get thousands of alt or hacked accounts, which you can use to manipulate the numbers as you like.
> There's plenty of clickbait videos that have horrible like to dislike ratios and you can save yourself time by seeing the dislike bar.
How do you know? How many of those horrible videos are you actually watching yourself to confirm their quality? And on how many of them does your own bias comes into play?
The same mechanics are at play when people don’t participate in the democratic process. It’s a vocal minority rule. This is why a certain political party in the US tries to disqualify so many people from voting. If we had a mandatory voting system in the US with a federal holiday our government would look very, very different.
There's another side to this too - downvote the authoritarian state propaganda. When I see a 99% disliked video and click a "Dislike", I feel that I am not alone. When all forms of political participation are verboten, you use what you have. Now we have even less.
Not everyone on HN lives in the US or EU. The views that are forbidden here are rule of law, democracy, political representation, freedom of speech, freedom of faith, human rights and so on. People who try to oppose this are regularly imprisoned, tortured, killed, repressed or forced to leave the country.
Whats the difference between the disenfranchised and a oppressed group trying to be heard? If you can answer that honestly you will see your own comment is hate speech.
But youtube isn't removing the button or the signal from their algorithms - they are just removing the optics of having a disliked video (which a lot of users including myself found useful)
It’s a business decision. Based on view count vs like/dislike ratio a lot of these videos are obviously brigaded. Most people aren’t engaged enough to represent themselves in the like/dislike ratio. It doesn’t make sense to bury them for the vast majority.
>Based on view count vs like/dislike ratio a lot of these videos are obviously brigaded.
That's your belief but you have no evidence to prove this. And even if true, why does the entirety of content of YouTube need to be punished for the undesired behavioral patterns that YouTube has cultivated on controversial videos they've pushed on everyone?
Can you please elaborate? You have a way to compare a raw metric (counts) against a ratio (like vs. dislike) that yields useful insights as to whether the like vs. dislike ratio was the product of brigading?
This makes me think of how steam does indeed have some smarts to warn users when a game may be getting review brigaded. I think it's a combination of volume of reviews by time, and perhaps the referrer (?). It does seem to work fairly well afaict.
Steam also allows a user to view the raw information if they want. At least the last time I looked. The option could definitely be more obvious though. Giving the user the ability to see the like/dislike data over time gives them their own ability to decide whether likes/dislikes come from an external source to the page. This information should include a graph of the total views over time as well as likes and dislikes over time in parallel.
Not giving users this information and removing like dislike counts just makes it so that a small number of people at YouTube have even more ability to control what is pushed on that site. With this change users have even less ability to check the validity of a video; validity means different things to different users here. People who stay at YouTube will just have to deal with the fact that they will have videos pushed to their screen for reasons that are hidden to them, that they don't have the ability to check out anything other people think about the video, and can't even signal that there is something wrong to them about the video (sure, they could comment, but any comment can be deleted by the video author and there is the fear of losing your Google account, which can include their email contact to everyone and authentication information also, which can have huge consequences for their ordinary life).
Like I mentioned somewhere else, for recommended videos I see two binary paradigms
- videos with >95% like ratios
- political videos that have obviously been brigaded
Assuming most normies don’t have great engagement rates with the like/dislike button based on view count, this change is doing the vast majority a service.
If it is easy to believe some videos get a natural >95% rating; isn't it just as likely some content would evoke a <5% rating without 'brigading'? I am not saying that this doesn't sometimes occur, but I also don't believe it's the only case.
Agreed, people made the same argument for removing 5 star ratings from Netflix ('people only ever vote 1 star or 5 stars'). If this were an input for the decision making, these platforms could very easily present that evidence.
And Google uses it as a propaganda tool to remove votes on unpopular videos they want to boost, whether there's actual money changing hands its an undeclared in-kind contribution.
It's not necessarily derogatory, it depends on the context.
"Normie" just means "ordinary", "average", or "uninitiated". It usually means someone with very conventional political or cultural views but it can also mean "someone who isn't part of a subculture or group" ie developers talking about laptops might say "normies don't usually need more than 8GB of memory but some development tasks require more to be comfortable". Other times it's used in a more derogatory sense to imply that someone is a bit too credulous towards the establishment of the day ie "normies think that corruption and inequality only exist in developing countries".
recent political pushes aren't being well received, with sentiment being very negative on WhiteHouse media pushes, mainstream narratives around vaccines and the like (on YT). Normies are swayed easily by dislike bar, so the elites at YT are trying to hide it -- just like reddit hid the downvote count, to enable astrotrufing campaigns and overall shill activity many years ago.
Yes, good move to increase view count. If you don't have a like/dislike ratio to judge, you're more likely to play it and watch at least a bit. Everyone wins (at Google): more ads, more money.
This is a damned shame. I use dislikes to gauge if a video is relevant to the topic at hand.
For example, I like fixing stuff and use Youtube for unfamiliar items. Often videos with a high number of dislikes are Spam (usually a bot reading text from some website), Videos where the person handwaves through the steps, videos where the fix is improper, or videos where the creator spends more time monetizing than working through the problem.
Same thoughts I had, the more niche the topic the more important this feature was for finding a workable solution. A year back I was fixing a microphone and 9 of the 10 videos I looked at on it were convoluted expensive or ineffective work-arounds while one actually showed how to fix the issue relatively easily.
Often time when I look up a pronunciation video, it's for a language I'm learning and I have a vague idea of how the word is supposed to sound, but not sure on things like tonality and stress.
So, if I were to look up how to say "ramen", I might not know if it's supposed to be ra-MEN or RA-men, but I'd know it's wrong if they say it like "r-amen".
I suppose it could be people checking multiple sources and coming back to downvote after assessing which is the right one. At least that's the world I want to live in. A guy can dream.
That's exactly when dislikes are so useful. This screams of a bad/easy product decision by someone who doesn't use YouTube this way. Facebook, ebay, etc went to this so I guess that's the future. No negative reviews to maximize time-on-site.
At least when you search for a video topic, you are likely to get a wide range in quality. Regularly surfaced content has a variable amount of dislikes, and almost always the dislike count is signal and not noise.
I rarely engage with YT recommended videos so I can't verify the accuracy of your claims. Either way, however, it sounds like reworking their recommendations algorithm would be a more reasonable way to deal with this issue than simply hiding the like/dislike ratio. How is this change going to meaningfully affect which videos show up as recommended?
This is part of a wider trend in the corporate internet of getting rid of visible user interaction to stop publicising user opinion. News publications have slowly gotten rid of comments sections, Google itself (an entity quite close to the USG) is following suit. Of course I suspect that the idea here is less about creator choice, since they can already hide and filter user interaction to their hearts content and more about some high profile channels of some importance being able to save face since manually disabling interactions looks worse for them.
I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube. I wonder if something like that would be viable, maybe with the addition of a like dislike bar.
Do you mean like Youtube's own Youtube Rewind 2018, which it became the most disliked video surpassing even Justin Bieber's Baby? To add extra irony, it was subtitled "Youtube Rewind 2018 - Everyone Controls Rewind". It seems that everyone controlling the dislike button was not appreciated, and while I find this downvote session brilliant I've been waiting since then for Youtube to remove the downvote button.
Isn't that a perfect example of Dislike button being used mostly as a meme or to bully / pile-on? Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on Youtube?
In most other websites and contexts anyway, like/dislike is used to share your taste with the algorithm or to the author, and neither of those are disrupted here. The only thing that is disrupted is the tribal action using the dislike button as a way of publicly and anonymously showing hatred towards content.
> Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on Youtube?
It was "EA pride and accomplishment" bad. A brainless self glorifying marketing piece that didn't spend a second to even acknowledge all the issues many channels suffered under.
> Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on YouTube?
The worst video on YouTube probably doesn't get actively promoted by Google or carry the weight of being made by Google.
It's funny you refer to Reddit because that's also historically well known for pile-on behavior. Why do you think features such as "hiding vote count for the first few hours" exist? It's been shown that the very first few votes you get can result in the same comment either being downvoted to hell or upvoted.
So if the EA accident was your reasoning for why having dislikes is a good idea, then you really just proved my point, as that too was mostly a meme and perfect proof of pile-on behavior.
Apparently you seem to be in agreement with the group piling on that the contents of the post were bad, otherwise why call it an accident?
> as that too was mostly a meme and perfect proof of pile-on behavior.
So you are saying if it hadn't been a meme most gamers would have up voted a post saying they should feel good from having to spend more on an already full price game?
> It was "EA pride and accomplishment" bad. A brainless self glorifying marketing piece that didn't spend a second to even acknowledge all the issues many channels suffered under.
What made the 2018 Rewind any worse than the Rewinds of previous years?
* 2018 constant commentary, including mentions on how good youtube/they are and how many good things they did with some music in between. Lead by non other than the man who made it all possible, Mr. Youtube himself: Will Smith.
That last part was sarcasm. There are breakdowns by people more into youtube culture that can point out in detail which inclusions didn't make sense, why music videos from 2016 seem misplaced in a 2018 rewind and how many high profile content creators youtube passed over in order to create the specific public image it wanted to present.
If I use a dislike button on a platform, it is typically because I want to warn other users away from that content, because its irrelevant, misleading, uninteresting etc. If likes and dislikes are primarily tools for personalising the algorithm to your taste then the platform may as well hide likes from public view as well.
And instead of trying to understand the reason that video had so many dislikes they decided the users and the dislike button are the problem, not anything related to the way they're running Youtube. And that reaction just reinforces the beliefs of people that dislike how Youtube is being run.
It might not be the worst video ever, but it was definitely among the most universally disliked. It's like downvotes here, you might disagree but it's meaningful signal.
It was an effective form of harmless electronic civil disobedience, a simple and albeit entertaining but still meaningful message of solidarity from the masses to a corporate entity.
I feel that the issue with the dislike button is its ambiguity, similar to star ratings. A Uber driver or Ebay seller with a many of 4-star ratings is clearly fine, but one with a moderate number of 1-star ratings is not, despite having the same average ranking. In the case of Uber/Ebay, the better question is a simple "Would you do business with this individual again?" For YouTube, the public dislike would be better replaced with something like "report content," followed by a choice of "clickbait/inaccurate content/hate speech."
> Or do you truly believe that video was somehow literally the worst video on Youtube?
It has the most downvotes but it definitely doesn't have the worst ratio. The many likes and many dislikes don't suggest "worst video", and it's not the worst video, so all's good there.
If you want to remove tribalism by hiding a counter, they will pile up in the comments, upvoting one of those that says “disliked it, who same?” to the top. Fighting with it is just naive. It’s all real people, so love them as they are.
Yes, Gab made their own browser called Dissenter that added a comment section to every page of the Internet. Interestingly, I can find very little when Googling for it now. I'm sure other projects have tried this too.
Yep. Corporations are working hard to turn the internet into broadcast TV, back when the broadcaster had all the power and you took what they gave you and you liked it because you didn't have a choice.
What is the average person going to do now that they have a dopamine response addiction to instant feedback and immediate knowledge at their fingertips? Read a book? Go for a walk where they're not constantly scouting for a situation where they can take a picture and receive happy brain chemicals from thousands of people?
> I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube.
Reddit is a comment section filled with insufferable morons who allowed their website to become a way of repackaging fun parts of the internet with astroturfing.
> I’ve seen some interesting projects in the past that were browser based and made the entire Internet be equipped with comments sections, including YouTube. I wonder if something like that would be viable, maybe with the addition of a like dislike bar.
If something like that ever took off, it would devastate independent publishers and a huge part of Internet culture by draining interactions out of websites. Google tried it before, and fortunately it failed. I think it's one of the worst possible things that could happen to the Web.
To be fair, comments _must_ be moderated or they turn into a cesspool in short order. A like-dislike count does not have that problem, though. And YouTube isn't removing the comments (yet).
Not every site is the same. News sites in the US turn off their comments because it's too difficult to moderate in the current political environment.
Hacker News isn't a content site, but is mainly created for commenting. It is less political than the news sites which removed comments. It can also handle the moderation more easily than news sites partly because it has a very strong ugliness and usability filter.
My experience is that in many scenarios, comments were an attempt to create sticky relationships when the comments themselves add very little.
Take a news site, an article about, say, Trump becomming President. Comments are likely to range from "I can't satnd the guy" though to "I'm so happy he got in". They aren't going to add much of any value to the conversation.
I am seeing more attempts now of people attempting to be "clever" in their comments and start dropping 'facts' taken from various places. Again, interesting at best but at worst it doesn't add anything.
Votes are perhaps less contentious but what are they really saying? I like the article because it is factually correct or I dislike the article because Trump is President?
Then again YouTube comments can be pretty funny and interesting these days. They're a nice way to interact with the content creators, and with other followers.
> They are only really doing this to hide political dissent against the current administration and provide some cover. Both the president and vp are polling at historic low approval ratings right now.
I disagree that this is the only reason; there are other reasons that make sense as well - for example, every political movement benefits from making their movement appear larger and more inclusive than it really is.
It's easier to stifle dissent by saying "If you don't agree with us you're in the minority" and then hide the actual headcount of your movement.
It's all very 1984-esque, TBH. You cannot form an opposition if you think you're the only one who opposes.
<<In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior 1.>>
Clearly a flawed conclusion. For the result of their experiment they deduced what they wanted it to say. Because we can easily say that the effect is not "dislike attacking" but other effects:
- shy people more afraid to give their opinion not knowing that others have done the same.
- the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it.
Imagine if you were voting for something but no one will give you the result of the votation.
Also, strangely they did not do the same experiment with the "like" button to see if there was not a "like attack".
So when I see something like that, I'm thinking that they are now in the dominant position where they don't have to care about their users anymore...
> Clearly a flawed conclusion. For the result of their experiment they deduced what they wanted it to say.
you know how when you navigate google drive on the web you have to double-click. like, what, a website, where you double click links to navigate? the internal study that justified that was 12 people; 6 of whom either immediately tried to double click (2 IIRC) or eventually tried to double click (4 IIRC). so, 50% didn't shit a brick when they were presented with a broken website interaction, so it was greenlit.
source: I was at google when this happened and I argued with the pm's when this happened.
Do you double click actual (hyper)links to navigate or folders? Because in the context of a file manager I think single click to select and double click to navigate is the only sane approach. How do you multi-select with something like a shift-click if single clicks navigate you away from the current page.
Single click to navigate in a file manager is what got us those laughably inefficient interfaces where you have check boxes beside every item and no reasonable way to multi-select.
Maybe those 6 people immediately double clicked because it's the only non-stupid way of doing it?
confusingly enough, in the google docs "browser", which is some limited interface to some subset of google drive, a single click is all that's needed to open a doc. but in google drive, opening the same doc takes two clicks.
> and no reasonable way to multi-select.
fwiw, I have absolutely no problem multi-selecting in google photos; another google-joint with single-click to open/interact/etc.
> Maybe those 6 people immediately double clicked
as I said, only two people immediately double clicked.
Completely agreed with this. If you make a feature less useful than before of course it will be engaged with less.
A radical approach in the similar vein would be to just turn off half your infra and add a ton of latency to YouTube. That would similarly solve the "dislike attacking behavior" altogether at the cost of having your existing users hate your product, with the added bonus of server cost savings.
I suspect their dataset was direct link dislikes. I.e. people who arrived at YouTube from another site at a specific video who dislike the video. That's the characteristic of a coordinated dislike campaign.
> the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it
That was exactly the point. They didn't want the attack mobs seeing the fruits of their labor, making it feel useless, making fewer people mob.
I honestly don't see a problem. If someone truly dislikes a video, they put in effort instead of encouraging a mob mentality by a high number of dislikes
Maybe Youtube can somehow incorporate the dislikes into "Likely to enjoy" score similar to how its set up on Google maps. It's pretty accurate from my experience.
This is a weak facade to enact a change they want for other reasons. The real question is what the underlying reason is. I imagine likes will also depart soon as youtube trends toward netflix. I wonder what platform will replace it then
Tiktok is already eating youtube's lunch. This is the act of a desperate animal trying to find some magic key to win its mindshare back. Which is a shame, because I like youtube's content a lot more than tiktok's.
"dislike attacking" is also a very loaded term. Technically it's only referring to the intent of the dislike, but it strongly implies that dislike cause harm.
The opening paragraph seems to equate these "dislike attacks" with "creator harassment" but I'm not seeing any data on dislike constituting a form of harassment.
Don't get me wrong, creators suffer a LOT of online harassment. I'm just very unconvinced dislike buttons are a primary tool of harassers.
There is a video on YouTube in which YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki received the Free Expression Award (which were sponsored by YouTube).
At the time of the check I just did, that video currently has 227 upvotes and over 56,000 downvotes, making it the worst ratio’ed video on YouTube I have ever seen.
That incident may have played a role in this decision.
People keep giving these examples as ironic reasons for removing the dislike button, but to me, every one of these examples are perfect examples of how the dislike button is used more as a meme or bullying tactic than a real signal anyways.
This will make the site useless for finding new content and content creators. And what's the point of a Like count without a Dislike count?
I'll just assume every video has as many, if not more, dislikes and will turn to other sources for finding quality content (if at all).
And they might as well get rid of the comments section too cause that's where people will voice their opinions.. but maybe that's part of the plan.
Anyway, I've been a paying premium member since the beginning but the second I stop seeing dislike counts is the second I find other things to do with my time. Sad, because I really enjoy surfing YouTube.
If someone tells you there's an election in some province of a country that you know nothing about, and they tell you there were two candidates A and B, and they tell you that candidate A received 17,652 votes, do you not need to know the total number of votes cast in order to assess the election results? I always thought you did.
Personally, I'd rather they keep the dislike count and dump the comments section.
I can probably count the number of times I've come across a comments section on YouTube that hasn't been a dumpster fire of idiocy on two hands (and I'm being generous).
I've found that the more the niche a video is, or the more "cultural" videos (what the masses might call "boring"), the better the comments are.
For example "Baumgartner Restoration" are decently popular at X00,000 views/video and comments are definitely civil, but it definitely doesn't target the typical youtube viewer. Game making tutorials in Godot are normally in the X,000-X0,000 range, which is "niche" for youtube, and they are normally not only civil but some times even contain useful tips!
Whoa now, steady on! The comments on YouTube are one of my favourite parts and I would miss them much more than the dislikes (don't really pay much attention to those but do seem useful).
I'm guessing you don't listen to much music on YouTube then? The great comments honestly at least double the enjoyment. E.g https://youtu.be/q4xKvHANqjk
So true!
The comments section feels like the people who shout or whistle while watching a movie in a theater.
Moreover, I find the videos which have commenting turned off much more enjoyable.
I read some comments for most videos I watch, especially Doom, standup comedy, music videos. YouTube seems to surface the funny comments and has cut down on the repetitive ones about what year it is.
HN doesn't show dislikes and it manages to surface content better than the vast majority of aggregators and forums out there. Subreddits that remove the dislike function have much better content and levels of discourse.
Removing dislikes (hiding them being step one) seems to be one of the better ways to improve the quality of content and commentary. Just for the fact that it removes the ability of a single group to brigade any content/creator they dislike or disagree with.
It shows total score though. Moderators and a community culture with quality control matters way more, there is no evidence that it increases quality. Just look at 4chan with no scores.
Except that on 4chan people adapts and mostly reads threads that already possess replies. The multiplicative effect it creates ensure that only the threads that are the most interesting get most of the views. And because it is an image board a similar effect happens for posts: the presence of an image and the length of a post give a quick proxy to evaluate the effort put in it.
Yes it will never be as effective as a karma / like system but imo it’s well suited to an anonymous imageboard, particularly for boards where threads without replies tends to get replaced quickly.
I disagree, many reply to trolling. General threads are large, often a graveyard of questions and in my experience the ones that have too much perceived effort looks like copypasta you didn’t read yet. Succinct, witty, usually somewhat negative comments that show incredibly concise insight, that distilled knowledge/wisdom are more appreciated, usually trolling someone by pointing out an obvious error in an insulting way.
It was funny when Baidu censored Winnie-the-Pooh memes. When YT censored "Let's go Brandon" videos, I chuckled, but the humor was darker.
Now they are hiding downvotes. On the US "National News" YT channel, almost all of the promoted videos are downvoted.
I'm always amazed at the discrepancy between what's promoted in the MSM and where popular opinion is. Meanwhile top podcasters routinely trounce MSM viewership ratings.
Perhaps these are the death throes of a dying propaganda machine?
>Perhaps these are the death throes of a dying propaganda machine?
This is my thought as well.
Its funny how quickly we've gone from people trying to redefine censorship, i.e.: "it's not censorship if a corporation does it!", to just blatantly pathetic attempts to squash dissent like this latest move.
It's running just fine, and will be well funded. You can count on that, even if the losses are sustained over a longer period of time.
And it's all about basic economic policy, and it's about the war machine. Ever increasing economic freedom using the miliary as a world police and defense system is very unpopular. People see it as unjust, unnecessary, and painfully expensive use of their hard work and tax dollars.
Back in the 70's as a grade school kid, we had a media week that I remember vividly. It was about bias in media and also understanding advertising as propaganda.
(I know, crazy to think about as a class room topic for young people today, right?)
We went through the various propaganda forms using ADS for context.
Plain Clothes
Bandwagon
Cherry picking
Etc...
We were required to find one AD for each form and explain how the propaganda is used to sell a product by advocating for it in what appears to be authoritative and favorable ways, but really is a lie, or at best, hiding of what would be obvious downsides.
In media, the idea of there always being bias was introduced, and I believe we had these weeks (and there were two, one for media, one for propaganda / ADS) in response to the controversial decision by President Reagan to repeal the fairness doctrine.
(That doctrine required equal time be given to opposing views and did not allow one point of view to dominate the broadcast and print media and this was seen as important to the concept of a public commons and a robust body politic.)
Yes, 8th grade discussions. Simplified from what I put here, but the core elements were definitely in the material. I was very interested and thought about this often as I grew up, but I digress.
The media part, this idea of their always being bias centered around the idea of objectivity and just how hard that is to actually do. It takes larger numbers of us, working together over a sustained time to be objective. A single person, or even small team however motivated and funded they may be will flat out have bias.
Secondly, that bias is?
OK!
Given how expensive and time consuming objective material is, the idea of us having to have it for the news and other public commons type discussions on policy, war, economics, and such does not make any sense.
So far so good, until some problems showed up, and those problems are:
Clarity - where fact and opinion are well differentiated and easy for the reader to discern
Honesty - where the bias of the piece is clear, authors disclose conflicts of interest
Side bar: A related thing is this concept of "always two sides to every story." and by including both sides the material is somehow more better!
It's not.
Fact is, there are the hard facts, who, what, where, when, why and how type stuff, and there is opinion as to what those facts might mean.
Sky is blue, many say it's orange, heads up debate tonight at 11! We report, you decide!
End side bar.
Back to the media and advertising weeks of education. Regarding media bias, we were required to find news media, written from different points of view, and to determine whether the stated bias, or point of view, is accurate.
To prep us for this activity, they gave us news paper clippings, magazine articles and mentioned broadcast media, radio and news programs we could watch as time permits and they highlighted various points of view as examples.
The big ones was labor / populist vs big business and State vs Local government.
What stuck with me was this statement from our teacher at the time:
"There is less from the labor point of view today and many expect that to continue." Was something along those lines anyway. I do not recall exactly, but I do recall the idea of labor being sidelined in the discussion and wondering why that is happening when so many do labor.
Today, we get almost zero news and commentary from big, corporate media written from the labor / populist point of view. Everything is business or state point of view framing. Nearly everything! I have watched it decline, until pretty much gone, and then the Internet happened!
One last thing to say on all this:
Big media branding is not accurate. FOX won in court asserting it's right to force journalists to lie and misrepresent. For profit news is not fair, does not serve the public interest, and frankly does not inform people very well at all!
Is there any wonder it's unpopular and widely disliked?
Similar dynamics are in play for government.
When people produce and deliver news and commentary from the labor / populist point of view, and it is at all reputable, the ratings flat out crush big media all day long.
When policy is floated out there to address basic issues seeing clear majority support are then walked back, mixed in with obscure, unpopular policy, disapproval spikes in a day almost.
These moves are almost laughable, if they were not so serious in nature.
We are moving into increasingly tough, authoritarian and potentially expensive, high risk times, in my view.
And back to my original point:
The machine is not dying at all!
Dissent is widespread yet seemingly appearing to be tepid and it's difficult for ordinary people to get an accurate view. In particular, minority, contrarian views are amplified consistently whether they have merit or not. A great example is the talking heads, where an otherwise obvious thing is literally debated into being questionable! All it takes is a few, or even two talking heads, one rational and one full bat shit put on repeat for a few weeks in a row and suddenly, "many say..." is a thing!
For decades now, long overdue policy has somehow failed in an amazing number of ways, leading people to believe our government is packed chock full of idiots, when the fact is more grim: those people are being paid to do what they are doing far more than they are simply bat shit, or wrong somehow. They understand what they are doing.
So no.
The machine is not dying, in my view. What we are seeing is a far more overt, aggressive move toward authoritarianism and fascism as clear evidence of it's ongoing success requiring more be done because having more people worse off every year tends to add right up.
The statement directly follows their observation that news videos on YouTube are "downvoted". It is the foundation for their "popular opinion" claim.
No, a tiny representation of excess idle time YouTube arrow clickers demonstrates nothing. We have seen many times throughout this very discussion that loads of people have gained the confused, self-destructive notion that it is a proxy for the public at large.
Mask mandates and vaccine mandates are supported by a majority to heavy majority of Americans (obviously varying by area, but over the country). What do you think the representation is on YouTube videos discussing the same? Now as homework, contemplate why that is.
Compare these statistics with the narrative promoted by the MSM sources featured on YT's "National News" channel.
Yes, those who downvote self-select as those who are willing to downvote. I find it illustrative that you need to dismiss them as, "excess idle time YouTube arrow clickers". Couldn't the same be said for the time you spent writing your comment here? Does your characterization of their idle time make their opinion less valid?
>profoundly deluded...
Perhaps instead of trying to dismiss this dissent as part of an echo-chamber, you might look in the mirror and ask if your perception of these issues is governed by your own echo-chamber?
It is a bit rich to step into this discussion on these terms. The topic is the MSM echo-chamber and how it is out of touch with a large portion of viewers. Removing downvotes is perceived as a defense of this failing paradigm.
I have no clue what your vice link is supposed to demonstrate, or how it is remotely relevant. Maybe you linked the wrong thing.
> Perhaps instead of trying to dismiss this dissent as part of an echo-chamber, you might look in the mirror and ask if your perception of these issues is governed by your own echo-chamber?
Throughout this thread there are a small number of people declaring that likes/dislikes lets you detect "propaganda", "misinformation", or demonstrates "public opinion". This is laughably, ridiculous untrue. Any actual poll has perilously little in common with the ratios seen on YouTube.
If 45% of the polled population doesn't believe the MSM narrative, per the "Vice News" (An outlet with a palatable bias) article doesn't that speak to your comment above?
Perhaps you could make the case that votes should follow the lines of the poll. That's a bit besides the point isn't it? The point is that coverage has become so egregiously out-of-touch that these downvotes are common.
I can understand and appreciate how someone who might agree with a large swath of the MSM propaganda bubble would have a hard time understanding this. This is of course, the purpose of propaganda.
Even if we think scientific fact changes based upon polling, "MSM" videos on YouTube aren't 55% positive, they're often < 5% positive. Because some people truly believe that clicking a little arrow on YouTube, or disagreeing with a "narrative", changes reality. A tiny minority, and ultimately the total engagement level is a rounding error generally, but throughout this discussion we've seen people take that tiny, self-selecting group and hold it as universal truth.
This is all besides the point, as I mentioned above.
The narrative promoted by YT and the MSM isn't accepted by around 50% of the US. Pick any contentious issue you feel is settled and take an honest look at the dissenting views. Consider any malign incentives of the claim you support. If you're not capable of this, then check your tooling.
Regardless of your attempts to lay claim to "objective truths" or "reality", there's a narrative surrounding these issues. Taking subjective perception and describing it as "reality" as you have above is going to be problematic. These are basic concepts that need to be dealt with before you can examine the natural world or media narratives.
>"The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best." Thomas Sowell
Perhaps these videos are downvoted because viewers find them to be egregious deceptions?
It is fine to imply that there should be a 50/50 split in YT votes, but this ignores the disgust factor. It also ignores how engaged proponents of these views may or may not be. A simple explanation might be that the level of disgust of the dissenters exceeds the halfhearted engagement of the proponents. Which again, is besides the point.
You speak of delusion before claiming an exclusive license on "reality", but at the same time you wish to discount the evidence before your very eyes, the vocal dissent here and elsewhere. That's your prerogative. You're free to believe what you will, but don't expect to sell others on it. Trying to dismiss dissent as delusion exceeds these concepts. Of course you are free to believe what you will, just as others are free to dissent. Again, a basic issue of logic.
I guess I've been pretty skeptical of these numbers. Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part but I am unconvinced that the like dislike ratio on a YouTube video is really reflective of public opinion writ large.
Yeah, this is pretty obvious. The government is getting very unpopular right now, just take a look at the like/dislike ratios for any vaccine related announcements or inflation related announcements. They are just gonna shut the whole party down if they can't spin it the way they want. Very authoritarian. It's not a huge change, but these things happen bit by bit - the US is slowly converging with China.
The other thread was deleted, but wanted to comment this:
Personally I wonder if it is even possible to meet all the demands being placed on governments. The country is composed of such different groups pulling in opposite directions... something could snap at some point.
The US's own intelligence apparatus is pessimistic about the ability of the government to adapt to these changes in the next 20 years. Check out the IC's Global Trends 2040 report[1] to see what I'm talking about: a particularly salient quote is as follows:
"At the state level, the relationships between societies and their governments in every region are likely to face persistent strains and tensions because of a growing mismatch between what publics need and expect and what governments can and will deliver. Populations in every region are increasingly equipped with the tools, capacity, and incentive to agitate for their preferred social and political goals and to place more demands on their governments to find solutions. At the same time that populations are increasingly empowered and demanding more, governments are coming under greater pressure from new challenges and more limited resources. This widening gap portends more political volatility, erosion of democracy, and expanding roles for alternative providers of governance. Over time, these dynamics might open the door to more
significant shifts in how people govern."
I think the key phrase here is "expanding roles for alternative providers of governance". It seems like these people expect parts of the government to wither away and for the free market to step in with solutions.
That info you linked dodges around a couple things, potentially more, but these two in particular are illuminating:
First: Washington Economic Consensus --And this is both parties being aligned with and giving priority to the interests of people and corporations of significant means. (more money and more command of resources)
Second, and root cause of the first: Money in politics. We allow transactions here that are called bribes in many nations, and that's just getting started. John Oliver did a segment on fundraising some while back. New Congress people brought into a grim room with desks and phones and books of people willing to fund their re-election, given just a few minor commitments
To sum up: We have a priority problem, and ordinary people just are not a priority.
He made a point and added some speculation. You made a cheap, ad hominem attack. You are breaking the rules here and you are the one that’s out of line.
I am not an anti vaxxer or anything, I am just stating what I have seen on youtube on these videos. For example this was after 10 sec of searching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0z3sLYvxX4
Thanks for the insult, though. Intolerant closed-minded assholes still exist on HN. Good reminder.
The fact that the number of crazy people who are voicing their opinions is surging is exactly why Google needed to dump the dislike button. The toxicity is clearly causing what will soon be irreparable harm, and political bandwagoning is the main cause.
I really don't think pointing out that the number of crazies is on the rise helps your point.
America has stopped working for 50% of the population, and they know it. The "toxicity" results from media and government telling these people to shut the fuck up and get back to work and stop trying to look behind the curtain.
Well the American people aren't falling for the myriad bullshit any longer.
The toxicity will go away when ultra-progressive politics aren't shoved down people's throats, when people can actually get a job working 40 hours a week that'll allow them to own a home and raise a family with the partner, and when members of the government stop lying not only to us, but even to Congress.
That's how you "fix" these problems... or it's at least a good start.
I think you are largely right, America is no longer a place where a white family can own a house and raise a family on a single blue collar income. We've returned to productivity levels on par with the rest of the world. Does that mean the government has stopped working? No, it means the the rest of the world caught up. The sooner rust belt types accept that they're no longer on top of the world the sooner we can start trying to solve problems that are actually solvable.
This is also a lazy take, in that it just assumes the marginalization constitutes a justification for lining up behind disinformation.
The problems you reference are real, and are indeed driving discontent. But echo chambers of red herrings and big lies do nothing to actually address the source of those problems - it's just another system of control, driven by a different wing of the same political class. And so if we care about discussing the real issues, rather than just cheering on societal destruction out of spite, we're right back to viewing disinformation promoters as a problem.
Tell me, have you been following the drastic divergence between the media reporting on the rittenhouse trial and the actual courtroom testimony that has been livestreamed from day one?
I bring this up in particular because it is an especially egregious display what is otherwise typical partisanship - and effectively these outlets have spread misinformation, with sophistry and by lying through omission, such that relying on their collusive reporting on the matter would completely obfuscate the fact that even ignoring the original videos of the incident (conveniently scrubbed from the polite corners of the internet), the prosecution had absolutely no case - not to mention their star witness was shown to have lied repeatedly in his testimony to police, withheld evidence, etc.
Point being that the word "disinformation" at this point is a manufactured buzzword designed to dishonestly suppress dissent - and if your views on any politically charged topic, including the "safe and effective" vaccines, align at all with the consent that these blatantly partisan outlets have been manufacturing, I would urge you to at least consider that you are the one who has been lining up so virtuously behind disinformation. At the very least you are participating in just as severe of an echo chamber as that which you perceive your opposition to be taking part in.
No, I haven't. The Rittenhouse trial is solidly in the political entertainment category, which I try to avoid. I would be surprised if there weren't massive distortions going on, since the core of the disinformation machinery is the political machine manufacturing wedges to drive engagement.
> being that the word "disinformation" at this point is a manufactured buzzword designed to dishonestly suppress dissent
Except that the term really does capture the dynamic. Based on your description of the Rittenhouse trial, would you not describe that reporting as disinformation? From what you've said, it sounds like people will be better informed if they don't tune into such reporting. Hence "disinformation".
I'm a libertarian who generally views both political machines as hostile entities. But what really destroyed my symmetrical view (suspension of disbelief of bad faith) is seeing the anti-mask disinformation bubble play out. Here is a topic that is directly applicable to everyone, easily understandable, and quite objective [0]. Yet the establishment party raised a political banner that directly contradicts common sense while harming its followers. And yet supporting that political movement is seemingly more important than self preservation (memes are a hell of a drug). That's objectively straight up "disinformation" - anybody spreading anti-mask nonsense is actively undermining our society in a very clear way.
Now of course this "disinformation" label can't help but be used with a bias, to further drive disinformation bubbles in either team's forums. On the original topic I do think hiding downvotes is a poor change (I'd love richer semantic criticism that doesn't just collapse a person's opinion into for/against). But my comment was addressing the self-righteous responses pigeonholing the entire dynamic as a political play by one team, ignoring the real objective reality being overridden.
[0] The only argument of substance I've seen against masks is that ersatz cloth masks don't do anything. Which would be a worthy critique to support wearing proper equipment instead. But instead it's being used to indict the entire concept of respiratory protection.
CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and friends produce tons of misinformation.
Part of this hiding of dislikes boils down to attempts to establish these and other sources as authoritative, and qualified to judge what is misinformation and what is not.
A lot of perfectly valid, informative dissent is being lumped in as disinformation, and it's not easy to differentiate. Said dissent often focuses on basic issues impacting many ordinary Americans, or more generally labor.
The authoritative sources, as defined by other authorities, all of whom are economically elite, simply do not produce information from the labor point of view. That same point of view has almost no meaningful representation in Congress due to how money in politics works right now too.
I do agree with you on calling out a different wing being unproductive.
I agree that the youtube like/dislike ratio is obviously not the best metric to gauge sentiment towards the government. I think it's better to look at opinion polls, which DO back up my point - for instance see https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/09/inflation-concerns-democrats... or many other similar articles.
I understand where you are coming from, I just wish there was a way to solve these issues other than censorship and removing functionality. Perhaps some sort of reputation score, that would weigh any vote according to your credentials and reputation to roll into some combined metascore... but that might be too close to social credit. Tough problems without obvious solutions.
Personally I wonder if it is even possible to meet all the demands being placed on governments. The country is composed of such different groups pulling in opposite directions... something could snap at some point.
The US's own intelligence apparatus is pessimistic about the ability of the government to adapt to these changes in the next 20 years. Check out the IC's Global Trends 2040 report[1] to see what I'm talking about: a particularly salient quote is as follows:
"At the state level, the relationships between societies and their governments in every region are likely to face persistent strains and tensions because of a growing mismatch between what publics need and expect and what governments can and will deliver. Populations in every region are increasingly equipped with the tools, capacity, and incentive to agitate for their preferred social and political goals and to place more demands on their governments to find solutions. At the same time that populations are increasingly empowered and demanding more, governments are coming under greater pressure from new challenges and more limited resources. This widening gap portends more political volatility, erosion of democracy, and expanding roles for alternative providers of governance. Over time, these dynamics might open the door to more
significant shifts in how people govern."
I think the key phrase here is "expanding roles for alternative providers of governance". It seems like these people expect parts of the government to wither away and for the free market to step in with solutions.
Free markets aren't really about solutions as much as they are as complete economic freedom as possible. Markets are regulated and business operates under license, and the intent is more "fair" markets than free ones.
Free markets are distinctive in that the economic freedom of all participants is maximized, regulation is minimized.
These markets, by definition are not fair due to inevitable outcomes where a few winners essentially rule and can exploit their favorable position in ways that prevent competition.
The single most valuable idea in markets is the idea of competition. Where it is robust and meaningful, a solid case can be made for buyers getting very high value for the dollar.
Having that condition be true means reducing economic freedom to a degree so competition cannot be avoided.
The idea of a free market runs in conflict with it being fair, and even more importantly, a market that serves us, not us being enslaved and exploited by it.
Insuring robust competition requires regulation and increasing regulation as well as reducing economic freedom mean fair markets are simply not free ones.
In addition to that, the idea of governing being markets is not universally applicable.
Government, and the Civic needs of the population are not the same as business, and running everything the same as business, actually does more harm than good in the areas of our society that are not appropriate for markets.
Let's see. 20 years ago you wouldn't have said this. Now you do. Did "a large percentage of our country" go "crazy" as you said two comments up, or "stupid" as you say now, in 20 years? When did this incredible phenomenon start? In 1992, with Bill Clinton's election? In 1994 with that year's Republican wave election? In 2000 with Bush's election? In 2006 with the Democrat wave election? In 2008 with Obama's election? In 2010 with that year's Republican wave election? In 2016 with Trump's election? ...
Please tell us.
Or does it go back to 1980, 1976, 1968, ...? When did the country go nuts?
Or is it just that you dislike one very large set of the polity's opinions so much that you are willing to go to great lengths to have them quashed?
They were always stupid, they just didn't have people manipulating them to the same extent before. People being mislead by disinformation goes back at least to the spanish american war, and really much further. But now even more people have the megaphone, so even more people are buying into the disinformation. This comes back to the point of the thread, Youtube knows it is largely culpable for the division within this country, and dislike trolling is one reason why.
One is the Washington Economic Consensus. Very significant majorities of both parties have no interest in representing ordinary Americans, labor, populist interests. And to be clear, this means basics: wages, health care, housing, and the like.
Flat out, more Americans struggle every year. More.
The real conflict is class based, and class is simply not discussed well in American politics today. Hasn't been for quite a while.
Calling large numbers of us stupid, and then claiming they are too stupid to be trusted with the national policy debate is completely unproductive.
The second thing going on here is the actions of Reagan and Clinton. Reagan got rid of the fairness doctrine and Clinton deregulated media, both of things things allowing for the massive news networks we have today, as well as the idea of newstainment and one sided national coverage.
There's our struggle over what many believe to be a divided nation, when the reality is that division is quite shallow and would pack one heck of a lot less of a punch had we not allowed big corporate media to gobble news up and produce almost nothing from the labor / populist point of view and what they do publish is partisan, biased strongly for conflict and ratings.
Not being able to see the doctor is not a partisan issue.
Being unable to feed the kids is not a partisan issue.
Tepid wages for decades on end is not a partisan issue.
I could go on.
Until those same media giants got involved and decided they needed to be in first position on the likes of YouTube, far more reasonable voices, all doing much better journalism and less inflammatory commentary were wiping the floor with CNNFOXMSNBC and friends.
It's no contest!
The need for CNN to dominate You Tube, you know because god forbid people actually get some real news and not establishment drivel for profit, is driving a lot of this garbage.
CNN and friends get a ton of dislikes because their product is garbage and tons of people, and in particular younger people, know it! They know CNNFOXMSNBC are not speaking to them, about them, for them at all, and why bother liking that?
Who wants to like the people trying to make the Internet into yet another broadcast type thing?
Not me, and I've pushed that button many, many times hearing raw garbage, misinformation, and more.
That's who this is all about. Establishment, for profit media.
The same media who gets it wrong all the time. The same media who has proven in court it has the right to force it's journalists to lie. The same media brought to you by the same wealthy donors buying ads as we see buying government one election donation at a time.
The idea people are too stupid is an insult and I'm flat out embarrassed to read it.
Completely disagree. If this were true democrats would have complete control.
> Not being able to see the doctor is not a partisan issue.
> Being unable to feed the kids is not a partisan issue.
> Tepid wages for decades on end is not a partisan issue.
These actually all are partisan issues, democrats have plans to solve them, republicans don't. Democrats literally are weeks away from passing universal childcare and tax credits for kids.
The real conflict is the culture war. White Americans wish to remain superior to minorities and those in other countries, and are willing to sacrifice a lot to make that happen.
Dems were given complete control this last election.
The GOP has only the say Dems chose to grant them, and Dems chose to do that rather than take action on long overdue policy backed by majority American support.
That speaks volumes to Dems actually being about class, and even more about how Dems often run on class policy then govern well away from making any of it law and blame jaded voters, who have seen all this before, for those voters lack of trust, disapproval, and tepid vote turnout!
Those voters ask a simple question, "vote for what?" to which Dems have wagged fingers while giving non answers and lame excuses.
And let us be clear: the obstruction in play exists because Dems made bipartisan legislation a higher priority than those voters who gave them full control only to see it handed off like a hot potato.
"Willing to sacrifice"
Sorry, haven't seen it. At all.
Finally, the issues are not partisan at all. People of all political alignments are struggling. This is why populist solutions to these issues are enjoy majority support. Far too many people are impacted for it to be otherwise.
Neither party appears willing to act, and that is why we keep having change elections that result in basically no change.
I disagree. Youtube is about to face huge regulatory pressure along with Facebook. They need to get ahead of it if they want to come out unscathed. Sure, you can say that no one "has to" do anything, but this was absolutely something that will help them avoid regulation, which seems close enough to "has to" for me.
That's hand wavy, and definitely not a solid case for "had to."
And what regulatory pressure? The US Government has no business dealing with trolls. First Amendment.
This and other moves to get around limitations on regulating speech by using private agents is not going to do any real good, and will do considerable harm.
Valid, many would argue necessary, dissent is being suppressed in the same fashion, and all that happens to coincide with very high levels of government disapproval.
Anyone trying to make the case massive dislikes aimed at major news networks, POTUS and others has to also explain how doing that is not actually suppressing meaningful and justifiable disapproval. Hard case to make.
BTW: The demographics on morning TV are terrible under 60 years old.
Asking them to take the vaccine on a venue with a seriously dubious record is not going to be effective. A ton of dislikes happen because of how traditional media giants have used money, political influence and assistance from big tech to shove old school broadcast online as if somehow everyone ignoring them are the problem.
I tuned out years ago. I remember the day I saw, "the regime is the weapon of mass destruction" on the then spiffy FOX news scroller at the bottom of the screen.
Lies. War of choice for oil rooted in lies.
Things did not improve.
I began reading foreign press. Began reading indie journalism, and I began talking to others.
Every year since, the talking to others has improved. Understanding other people is very high value. Most of the division the same liars shove in the faces of anyone willing to watch is largely manufactured.
The reality is people have a lot in common. Their struggles are the same. We all run the same general way, and we all have the same basic needs.
One of the more serious reasons to very strongly dislike old media being propped up online is how they drive people to judge others, cultivate fear, blame and shame.
"Those other people"
"Teaching those other people a lesson"
"Both sides"
Controversy is often created too. Both sides is often used to justify putting someone, say a scientist, or doctor, up with a loon, or fear monger, idiot.
Then have a talking head get them yelling at one another...
Nobody needs them to do that and nobody is helped by them doing that.
Tons of people, wait for it...
Dislike them doing that.
Oh, and here is another one!
Objectivity. Neutral. Fair. Balance.
These, in addition to justifying manufactured controversy and "othering" to the point of otherwise reasonable people being unable to talk to one another, are all employed to help lie about bias.
The old media giants have a very clear economic bias and they lie about it, are not objective, and in general do not take feedback, or respond to fact checking by improving.
What they do is attack, use their position and economic weight to push critics off the stage... to own the conversation.
The bias in economic terms is generally neo liberal, neo conservative and aligned with the Washington Economic Consensus. They do not produce anything from the labor point of view. They do not amplify those voices.
Those points of view and voices are aligned with the interests of a majority of people.
Tons of reasons for dislikes and those giants could improve. They have not and are instead trying to push competition aside to garner and maintain the illusion of popularity and authority they trade on to produce "news" and commentary which is low value and not compelling or even helpful to a majority of people today.
Conflating trolls and crazies, zealots, and others with perfectly legitimate dissent, actual journalists doing actual journalism is all about manufacturing consent.
Reputable people publishing hard truths are being suppressed and that is no accident.
I could go on for pages here.
Given these things going on for decades, is there any wonder so many people dislike?
Nope.
And the worst?
That Surgeon General has made statements that undermine their own credence, on media that torched the public trust for years, and the people who called that out and who have used actual data from informed people doing real science and medicine get punished for "attacking" authorities, who are abusing their authority and squandering the public trust this whole mess we are told is necessary to improve on said public trust!
Did you see Jon Stewart do his new show?
He has access, is well liked, trusted, and has put these same people into a polite interview where he deftly gets them to say the quiet parts out loud.
Same thing the guy did years ago to Tucker Carlson.
I do not believe it will work now any better than it did then. Maybe the act gets polished up a bit, some particularly ugly stuff gets walked back and a few better conversations happen.
What it will do is get a new generation of people to question and amplify those who have been for some time now.
Good.
What we need here is not new and more spiffy ways to continue propagandizing people. Enough harm has been done.
What we need is non AD driven news and commentary that can speak to people, inform them, empower them and bring class awareness to action.
Big tech once presented that to the body politic. It was great. Necessary and very well liked because people saw and felt the value, understanding one another better and how corruption has gone unchecked for too long, doing too much harm.
Now that is over.
People looking for the next big thing need only follow this trail to find where the hearts and minds of good people will gather and talk about how to improve this mess for their families, themselves and that much better possible future out there.
Are you saying the administration itself was involved in getting this done, or that Google et al. are, of their own accord, interested in going out of their way to burn PR (and real premium subscriber dollars) to aid the administration?
> or that Google et al. are, of their own accord, interested in going out of their way to burn PR (and real premium subscriber dollars) to aid the administration?
Given that after Trump won in 2016, a video leaked of a Google meeting of higher-ups literally in tears that their side didn't win, I'm thinking it's this.
Whether this is good for creators is one thing, but it's definitely bad for viewers. Likes to dislikes is an indicator of the quality of the video, and how well it matches the title/description.
This will fundamentally change what I use YouTube for. If I can't determine the quality of a video without having to waste time watching it, I will just look somewhere else.
Whether it's good or bad for creator or viewers is irrelevant.
It's good for Google. That's all that matters. More crap videos will be clicked and more ads will be watched before the content starts and the user can judge wheather or not to watch.
I feel completely opposite about this. I have never (and I mean never) viewed the dislikes as an indicator of the quality of the video, or it’s content. It’s only ever been a number that some arbitrary set of people have incremented. To me the video’s quality is self evident, pretty quickly.
Have you ever done a DIY project around the house? There is a lot of trash out there, and the dislike to like ratio is a great way to quickly parse out the crap without 1) reading bottom barrel youtube comments or 2) watching 22 minutes of nonsense at 1.75x speed.
Not to mention the multitude of unsafe practices by inexperienced DIY youtubers, that are more often than not highlighted (and easily visible), in the like/dislike ratio.
Maybe they were trying to do a little something for the creators, so they stop complaining about the rampant abuse of Youtube's automated copyright systems. Seeing as YT is completely unwilling to curb copyright strike trolling, or if a queef accidentally sounds like a Danny Elfman score, the good people at YT can stuff that thumb button and call it a day's work. Yay.
> You can still dislike videos to further personalize and tune your recommendations.
If I come across a low-quality rip of Dark Side of the Moon and dislike it, will Youtube recommend to me less Pink Floyd or less low quality rips? What if I dislike that horrible Barenboim performance of Beethoven's Ninth? Will I get less Beethoven or less horrible performances? What about reports of Israel killing Gazan children, when the video footage clearly shows children killed when a Hamas projectile they were "guarding" prematurely detonated? Do I get less news or less lies? What about that idiot who knows a lot about cars and car history (Donut maybe) but screams and acts like he graduated from Animal House? Do I get less informative car videos or less puerile screaming and sentences composed of 15 cuts, sometimes right in the middle of a compound word?
I think that basing recommendations on a single dimension is flawed in its own right.
I just went to Youtube's homepage for the first time in ages, to see what it would recommend for me. I saw maybe a dozen suggested videos just to check it out.
And I would say that all but two had either a misleading title or a misleading thumbnail. These are things directly related to my interests: self defense, computer security, lockpicking, spaceflight, physics, automobiles. But other than the young man talking about SpaceX (Marcus House) and the Lock Picking Lawyer, every single video had either a title that misrepresented or completely lied about the content, or a very attractive thumbnail that was barely tangentially associated with the content.
Feel like this is a necessary feature. A compromise would be to turn it off for ads but leave it on for everything else...I'm lost now, gonna be hard to quickly determine garbage from good insight.
eh, I would guess it's more like one PM wanted to get a promo by making a high profile change, and by claiming they were protecting some victim their case became politically unassailable
well this will be good for flat Earthers videos, they always end up with lots of dislikes :) now more people can fall for the countless bs on youtube based on the like count and no counter showing dissent....
Oh no its better than that. All the downvotes count as engagement, so it will get recommended to other people who can only see that it has 100 likes and not 20000 dislikes.
Which means my videos can finally stop being brigaded by those damn round earthers! Spread the truth!
It might become an outlet for all the people who want to tell others whether they think a video is worth watching or not, making it harder to find comments with substance.
> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks.
ah yes, google looking out for the little folks...
someday, a technical solution like not allowing downvotes until a channel gets so many views or subscribers may be feasible, but until then, this will have to suffice
Reminds me of when Garth Brooks was pushing for laws that would ban the resale of CDs. After receiving a lot of criticism, he said it wasn't to protect his album sales but to keep struggling artists with a small number of CD sales from having to compete with used CD stores. Of course the odds that any given used CD store would have your favorite obscure band's CD were quite low but they were guaranteed to have all of the Garth Brooks CDs.
Which is bullshit - the reason they're removing it is _BRANDS_ that are sick of having their poorly thought out, poorly produced, cynical cash-grab trailers be disliked.
Probably told Susan that they'd stop advertising and start suing unless they did this.
Statistically speaking there are much more small creators than large ones, so "we heard directly from smaller creators" can be used in every situation!
Hmm. For me the dislike button was informative. If feels like they are trying to create a world where everything can only be good, better, even more better, which just doesn't represent reality.
Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.
Yup. If I'm watching a positive review of a [insert-object] I'm planning on buying and it has 10k likes visible while hiding 2k dislikes I'm probably going to get horribly misled.
While if it's a video of a political debate I would expect there to be a ton of dislikes by default, so I suppose it wouldn't matter much in that scenario.
And in howto/explanation-videos, if dislikes aren't shown, there's no signal for people telling them whether or not it's a good explanation.
I suppose you could devise a dislike count yourself by calculating the likes/views ratio. But why... people are deliberately putting their content up publicly for display and as such are opening themselves up for scrutiny/criticism/dislikes. It can't be all praise and hugs and kisses. That's how we treat children.
I guess we can make our own standard, someone should comment something like "This video is garbage." or simply "Dislike" and the amount of thumbs up on that comment can be taken as video dislikes.
I sometimes look for obscure how-to's, and I get garbage videos not even answering the question. If YouTube can get rid of all that garbage, then not having a dislike button is fine.
> someone should comment something like "This video is garbage." or simply "Dislike" and the amount of thumbs up on that comment can be taken as video dislikes.
The problem with Youtube as I see it is that these comments never rise to the top. It's always compliments and ass-kissing and high-fives that make it there.
> The problem with Youtube as I see it is that these comments never rise to the top. It's always compliments and ass-kissing and high-fives that make it there.
That's because they have engineered their comment system in a way that comments the AI perceives as negative are shadow-banned or buried deep down so people don't get a chance to read them.
I mostly agree with you, with the caveat of brigading being a very real thing that lowers the information value. But then why show upvotes either because positive brigading is just as damaging to the information as downvote brigades.
YT can counter brigades by giving viewers even more statistics about a video. Example: what’s the like to dislike ratio of a video in the past 7, 30, or 90 days, compared to all-time?
Steam (a video game store) does this already. They categorize reviews as either being recent (made in the last 30 days) or all-time. If a game has excellent all-time reviews, but mixed recent reviews, then you can suspect something has recently upset the playerbase.
You can't, however, determine if what upset the player base is "the game developer is a woman" or "the game developer is gay" or "a streamer with a toxic following got mad at the game".
It is low signal all the way through, and relegating likes and dislikes to a signal for recommendations is wise.
I don't want video game recommendations from someone that wants to sell me a video game, because they have a financial incentive to sell me a $60 game that I'll like instead of a $10 game that I'll love. No, I would much rather trust the opinions of people who have bought and played the game. I want to know if 99%, or 90%, or 65% of players gave it a good recommendation.
Long-time Netflix subscribers might be having déjà vu right now. Old Netflix had a ratings system, and users could filter content by average rating and see the top-rated movies and shows. Netflix later replaced that system with a recommendation engine. Not only does the recommendation engine not get my taste right, but it sure seems to recommend to me a lot of Netflix Originals.
"Total War: Rome 2 has suffered a Steam review bombing run over women characters and a recent update - but it turns out the game is working as intended.
"Creative Assembly's PC strategy game, which came out in 2013, saw hundreds of new negative Steam reviews this week over the frequency with which women generals show up in the game and related claims about historical accuracy."
"The reason behind the Chinese users' anger is the inclusion of a symbol banned in their country. On the main street of the game's Haven Springs setting is a shop called Treasures of Tibet, which displays a Tibetan flag prominently outside the store."
Valve has come out on more than one occasion to let customers and studios know that they are constantly working to mitigate brigading.
EDIT: While not the norm, as you were alluding, gamer toxicity and brigading can also be relatively mainstream. A popular website among such circles is
Neither of the articles claim what you're claiming though ("game dev is a woman/gay", etc). What assumption have I made that you think is incorrect? I just made an observation that in my extensive history on the platform I've never encountered what you stated.
Really though, my main point I actually care about making is that the steam review system is far superior to a simple like/dislike system which YT implements.
At the bottom of your first article:
> Meanwhile, Total War: Rome 2 has an "overwhelmingly negative" recent reviews rating, with a "mostly positive" overall rating.
Ahh, so it seems the steam rating system is working! Even though these games got "brigaded", users are still able to see the overall and historical ratings to get a better picture of what's going on.
This actually lets you see the rating before the brigade started. And if the game is actually good, the brigaded ratings will amount to a blip amongst the other reviews. Case in point, here is the current steam page for R:TW2, with "very positive " overall rating: https://store.steampowered.com/app/214950/Total_War_ROME_II_...
"Neither of the articles claim what you're claiming though ("game dev is a woman/gay", etc). What assumption have I made that you think is incorrect? I just made an observation that in my extensive history on the platform I've never encountered what you stated."
-- Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean that it didn't happen. My personal experience of using steam since its inception (HL2 launch on Steam, 2004), so roughly 17 years, is that I've come across this on a more than a few occasions. I tend to collect digital goods in a hoarding method, so I'm up to over 3700+ games in my library and I check a lot of them out when I can, even if I have no time to really play them anymore. The firs thing I read?
REVIEWS!
As mentioned - this is not the norm, and I agree with your general premise, but please don't dismiss what actually happened and what I witnessed (no, I don't have screenshots because I wasn't documenting it happening in real time when it occurred). The examples I brought up were illustrative of some gamers' groupthink mentality (including oneangrygamer.net, which has in mid-2021 disabled comments because they were ridiculously toxic - misogynistic, sexist, homophobic and racist)
Also - I'm not OP, FYI. I was backing OP's point.
I can't be bothered to respond to the rest of your post, unfortunately, because it comes across as vapidly dismissive.
Look up GamerGate if you'd like more information on brigading and misogynistic groupthink among related sub-communities.
How many times can you get away with this before steam wises up? My guess is not many. They also have your CC. Makes it a pain for anyone but criminals to successfully brigade en-masse.
Seems like a middle ground solution might be to restrict the display of downvotes to videos that meet a certain viewership threshold. That way organic voting would make brigading more difficult.
Steam has a useful chart which shows the votes/reviews over time with the ability to filter by language, purchase type, play time etc.
Youtube could implement something similar to help shine a light on brigading
The steam review graph is brilliant and an example of getting it right. YT seems to have succumbed to it's incumbent position in the market and has stopped innovating - it now seeks only to maintain the status quo and apparently thinks dislikes are a threat to that.
It looks like the creator is counting any decrease in dislikes over time as manipulation, without a firm understanding of how large scale systems work.
Say for example I used a batch of 100 HN accounts to mass downvote your comment. After a while an hourly job runs that looks at all those votes in aggregate and determines they were coordinated (for simplicity sake they all came from the same IP) and removes them. You'd see a large shift in the net score of your comment all of the sudden. This isn't HN manipulating anything, it is them doing their job to prevent abuse on the platform.
It's interesting data, but the obvious response from YouTube would be "we run sophisticated click fraud detection algorithms and periodically remove interactions determined to be from fraudulent accounts; given the current political climate White House videos attract more of these types of fraud than other videos on our platform and thus the effect is more pronounced on their videos". The numbers in question are small enough (~1k missing interactions) that it doesn't seem totally unreasonable.
I don't even buy YouTube's claim that "brigading" or "dislike attacks" is a real thing or a problem. If they have a minimum number of minutes that a video needs to be watched before a vote is counted, then that vote is legitimate, full stop. YouTube are simply unhappy about which videos users dislike, whether it's the White House's videos, important brands, or YT's own videos.
Agreed. Sometimes you know within a couple of seconds that a video isn't what the title and thumbnail claims it is, and that's a great reason to hit "dislike".
For instance, an hour-long video claiming to be what you're looking for, but actually consisting of a still image and a URL to a scam/spam site.
> I don't even buy YouTube's claim that "brigading" or "dislike attacks" is a real thing or a problem. If they have a minimum number of minutes that a video needs to be watched before a vote is counted, then that vote is legitimate, full stop.
I've seen dislike attacks happen. And if it takes a non-trivial procedure to make them count, people will document that procedure. For instance, hypothetically:
"Alright everybody, here's the link. Remember, mute the tab right away but don't mute the video itself; wait 2 minutes (the timer that starts when you click the link will go green to let you know), then click the dislike button."
I've seen much more complex instructions offered as part of gaming a poll, as well as sites built to help semi-automate or simplify the process.
The key distinction that would be useful for YouTube to measure: did you encounter the video and then dislike it, or did you visit a video you were referred to for the sole purpose of disliking it? I don't think hiding dislike counts serves that purpose, though.
Spikes don’t really mean anything. If a video ‘goes viral’ it will all of a sudden get a lot of responses. And sometimes those will all be bad if it’s a bad video or unpopular opinion. Interpreting that as bot voting or manipulation should have nothing to do with spikes.
Downvotes on Stack Overflow/Exchange require users to meet a reputation threshold (much like HN) and each downvote removes 1 reputation from the user that gives the downvote.
Dislikes on YouTube and similar platforms don't have any cost or barrier to entry.
I wish they'd cost reputation here too. Behavioral experiment after experiment has show people will engage in costly punishment to maintain norms, so don't need to worry about under-downvoting. But enabling downvoting to be costless (and anonymous) does have downsides.
Everyone can see the count on Stack Overflow, but there are several mechanisms in place to protect that count from all sorts of abuse (bots, tactical voting, second accounts etc.).
The same is simply not true of YouTube or any other kind of social media upvote/downvote system - anyone can sign up for an account, and their votes immediately count and have equal weighting.
The same is not true of Stack Exchange or HN, where you have to put a lot of effort in with a community to be able to downvote something.
> The same is simply not true of YouTube or any other kind of social media upvote/downvote system - anyone can sign up for an account, and their votes immediately count and have equal weighting.
I don't think this is true for YouTube - you need a Google account, and you can't create a Google account without verifying your phone number. (Unless you can create numerous accounts with one phone number? But that seems like an easy loophole to close.)
Google does let you create multiple accounts with a single phone number. There's legitimate reasons to have multiple email addresses. I have a handful of different ones that I use for different identities I have online.
I've argued against it in the past (since it's very important context to any reader) but to no avail. An upvote and a downvote rarely cancel each other out. They have different units and shouldn't be summed together. A score of 25 could mean the answer is perfect but has only seen moderate traffic, or incredibly dangerous but has seen high traffic.
I really don't get this modern culture of positiveness, people cannot take a negative remark of any kind, kids should not play with anything that can hurt themselves, we are forbidden to say anything that can be interpreted in a negative way,...
I find it ironic that your comment is downvoted ;-)
I agree, this "toxic positivity" can't be good for society in the long term. The continued drive towards stupidity and unquestioning, docile populations is going to slowly turn into a massive dystopia.
Public dislike counts were opportunities for brands to own up to their ambition for authentic engagement. This is maybe the main thing lost here - without putting this at stake, and with full moderation powers on their video comments, brands basically only have a veneer of authenticity at this point. There's not as much at stake for them anymore, very limited downside / reason to care.
Facebook said it lowered engagement iirc, same reason why they removed likes count on Instagram, it reduced engagement, people posted less if they feared being judged by the number of likes.
I also found it informative. If I see a clip explaining something that has a large number of dislikes, I immediately back out and look for another one. Most of the time, those dislikes are warranted.
I honestly don't know if it's a generational thing or overall cultural shift, but it feels like negativity (at least in the workplace is where I've seen this) is either less tolerated or less shared. There's a bias towards being positive about everything, even for things that aren't... great. It feels like self censorship, and this isn't even for things that are political, just subjective.
My opinion on this, is that they should hide BOTH the counts, and only the creator can see it.
Keep the actual buttons, as they signal to YouTube what you do and do not want to see in future, but the actual counts only have use to the creator... and even then a simple ratio or percentage alongside the video in the Creator Studio is enough; there's no need for actuall numbers.
What's not been mentioned is that YouTube add a small % of fake clicks to the like/dislike buttons, and also hide the real counts for a while, if there's a rush on clicks (to dissuade click-bandwagoning).
> If feels like they are trying to create a world where everything can only be good, better, even more better, which just doesn't represent reality.
It's part of a trend towards fake, cloying, passive-aggressive forced positivity across the whole industry. It's a California thing.
Time was, if you didn't like a bit of code, you could say so. Nowadays, you have to wrap criticism in right zillion levels of disingenuous praise before you can even start getting to the point -- and the you get fake "thank you for the excellent feedback!!!!1!!" typed with gritted teeth and fantasies of backstabbing later on.
I've always found the in-your-face New York style more genuine, more honest, more efficient, and ultimately, kinder and more respectful.
No, thanks. I use Youtube for technical videos and videos pertaining to certain tasks and the dislike ratio is nearly always an indicator of whether or not the video is misleading, incorrect or uninformative.
Removing downvotes from SO seems like it would be a net good. Instead of downvoting, people could be more encouraged to post better and more correct solutions.
A good intermediate solution would be to only record downvotes that come with a comment.
There's no salvaging what SO has become - the place where good complex questions are promptly closed by uninformed moderators. The place where questions about new versions of software are closed as duplicates of questions about older obsolete versions whose answers are no longer relevant. The place where popular questions with hundreds of upvotes and strong discussions are closed as off-topic.
If you see SO as community for developers these are all problems yes, however if you see it as a high quality wiki or KB, most of these issues are not problems for readers[1] . All knowledge repositories go through this problem, Wikipedia sites are equally notorious for making it very hard to contribute. As a KB grows older and larger, it becomes hard to balance the need to keep the current KB clean and enable creation of new content.
Typically administrators respond by making it harder for the contributors rather than taking risk of poorer quality for the users, to contribute you have to become effectively professional and abide by institutional rules you may not agree with. Distributed editing tools only solves part of the problem and cannot not solve how to keep generating professional quality content without paying.
Strong moderation is what differentiates SO from Quora, I rather live with SO style rules as a contributor than suffer poor Quora type content quality as a user.
[1] I am cognizant of outdated version problems you raised, my anecdotal experience is in general the quality of answers that are present for a reader has not dropped massively in last 10 years.
If you see SO as a high quality anything, I'm not sure what to say. It's filled with people answering the question they wish was asked instead of ignoring the question they're not satisfied with.
I don't know a platform today that has better content than SO for technical questions.
My code throughput have reduced a lot in recent years with changing roles and I prefer reading the actual documentation, I am no longer solving a immediate/specific problem. Even then I still click search hits on SO few times a week, and most times after clicking through a few questions I can find what I need.
Your(others) experience will vary from my mine of course, but I don't see anyone attempting a better model or better content short of source documentation .
Like Google their main competitor is their former selves.
As the mix of us who knew early versions of Google and Stack overflow gets diluted year by year by new users who don't know how well these systems used to work this will become less and less of a problem for them so they can sleep well at work.
Until someone disrupts them. I'm happy to say it feels we are getting close to that moment now ;-)
The best use of SO for me is:
- Write an elaborate question about an apparently unsolvable problem
- Realise the mistake while trying to explain it to the SO crowd
- Close the website
At some point I wanted to have a high score to see if it would affect my daily rate (it didn't) or if I could use it somehow (same as having tons of stars on GitHub - another useless errand).
I started replying to a bunch of questions and the sheer stupidity of most of them made me realise I wasn't ready for that. Most of the content on SO is not great. There are definitely few gems in there and I certainly enjoyed "the <center> cannot hold", but most of the times the docs are better.
On a side note. I never understood people that copy code from Stack Overflow. I can understand people who are not familiar with a programming language - but surely if you're a minimum proficient it would be faster to just write what you need to do or look for a library to do it?
It is likely I may know enough to judge a proposed solution is wrong or inadequate etc but not enough to write a better one. Vast majority of users who can down-vote would come under this category.
Encouraging them to write their own solution or even a critique/comment is not necessarily better.
You can also down vote questions not only answers, a question could be poor but it does not mean I can come up with a better one.
IMO it's perfectly acceptable to not only not downvote but to ignore a question or answer if you don't know/don't want to put in more effort to figure it out. Maybe someone else has faced the problem and understands how the questioner came to write the question they did?
Many times it is not hard to figure out why the question was written in a bad way. Spending time in the review queue can give a good sense on bad types of content that are typical on the site.
Common issues I come across are very vague statements without an actual question, very broad advisory /opinionated questions, very specific solve this bug in my day job/code , no examples/illustrations added, or a big log or code dump - i.e. no effort to separate out the actual problem statement, do my homework kind of questions, typically there will already be comments asking for improvements without much impact.
I wouldn't down-vote a question that I don't fully understand ( I guess that is true for most users too), at the same time I want to make sure bad content is not encouraged. It is just internet points for both users, nothing to fret about.
>Removing downvotes from SO seems like it would be a net good. Instead of downvoting, people could be more encouraged to post better and more correct solutions.
How is that ironic? It's a well established spam prevention measure not a complete removal of a useful metric. It exists prominently on e.g. stack exchange sites and has been a common feature in general on reputation based forum software. What's perhaps ironic is that you can't see vote counts on HN comments _at all_ unless you're the author. So HN has already implemented this feature they just did it sensibly and included upvotes (on comments, at least) too. Most ironically, the front page shows only up-vote counts, something people are citing as a ruined experience in the case of YT removing the dislike count yet is par for the course for submissions on this very site.
Parent said full rights. Some rights must be earned or granted after some time period. A society that immediately gave children the right to drive and carry handguns would likely not stay civilized for long.
When is a thing merely a privilege, and not a right? Particularly when both can be conditional or qualified? I'm not sure this isn't playing a game of semantics--just because its called a privilege and not a right in the American context, does not mean that an argument that driving is not a right and merely a privilege.
Rights are restrictions people have placed on the government or has imposed on itself, as enumerated in say, a charter or constitution. These are not gifts from the government as list of things you can do, but a list of things they can’t do. Bestowed on birth, and infringed upon only when necessary as agreed upon by the people for reasons.
Privileges are features that may be taken for granted as rights but are not enumerated protections. You have no right to drive, it’s a privilege that we all agree is handy.
I don’t think you are playing with semantics, but this is not a difficult concept.
GP makes a completely baseless claim that you don’t have “full rights” until someone says you do. They are talking about privledges.
"Karma is meant to be spent" -which is a bit of a conundrum to me because I can't figure out how to "spend" karma without simply spamming every thread I see in hopes of getting up-votes (which I'm pretty sure is the opposite of what the karma system's intent is).
Same. It feels like a passive-aggressive elitism, and not simply an anti-abuse feature.
Given the site we're on, I don't have a problem as much with the elitism (I'm not the target demographic, after all -I'm older and not working in tech) as much as with the "passive-aggressive" part of the rhetoric behind withholding downvote capability.
It IS an anti-abuse / anti-sockpuppet feature. I can see why you think it is elitism since, in a way, it is. But I don't understand why you think it's "passive aggressive".
You should be able to downvote comments, since you have more than 501 karma. The analog for downvoting submissions is the "super downvote" of flagging (and in turn vouching), which requires 31 karma.
There's a significant difference - misleading/malicious content.
A fake trailer can for example be spotted by the number of negative votes. If the negative votes concept is gone, using a low number of positive votes as indicator is less effective.
i don't know. The more i look at hn the more i appreciate the thought that went into it. Stories are far more black and white- either they violate the guidelines or not. The only thing a downvote would do is to make the story float all over the front page as there is an inevitable vote war. I would even say that most users don't like any given news story, which would lead to the situation that everything would get downvoted into oblivion. Comments OTOH lend themselves far more to moderation by downvotes. Remember we still get the "nuclear option" of flagging a submission.
It is horrible, you just don’t know it it. There is always people like dang dedicating his life to fight all the spam. Look at “new” page and see how many dead links are being submitted each hour.
When you put dislike button, you are adding a degree of freedom in expressing an intent for the user. It is upto you, how you use this information. Most systems fail in this task and then they just remove the degree of freedom as their solution.
Yeah, and it seems like you'll still be able to flag videos on YouTube too. The change makes YouTube more like HN, which I personally feel is a good thing.
I went back to look at when they first changed from star ratings to like/dislike, and it seems like they were thinking about going even further and removing the dislike option entirely even back then.
They made some comments[1] before that change:
> Seems like when it comes to ratings it's pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference. Thus, the ratings system is primarily being used as a seal of approval, not as an editorial indicator of what the community thinks about a video. Rating a video joins favoriting and sharing as a way to tell the world that this is something you love.
> We're glad there are so many awesome videos on YouTube, but all of this begs the question: if the majority of videos are getting five stars, how useful is this system really? Would a thumbs up/thumbs down be more effective, or does favoriting do the trick of declaring your love for a video?
At least in my personal observation, it seems like star ratings elsewhere on the internet (I'm thinking particularly of Airbnb and Google Maps reviews) are probably pretty close to bimodal: by and large, people essentially use five stars as a "like" button and one star as a "dislike." Assuming this is the case, a rating of 4.8 stars is essentially a way of saying "95% liked this": why not just strip out the extra abstraction and complexity and instead use a simpler like/dislike model, just like that YT blog post argues?
Of course, there are other situations where ratings between 1 and 5 stars _are_ informative: think critic reviews of movies, video, etc. But I think most crowdsourced reviews have kind of converged organically to a like/dislike model.
Whenever I look at a product that I am in doubt about I look into the reviews that gave it two or three stars.
It's like a secret communication channel were you don't have to listen to the paid raters at 5 or the angry mob shouting about how it didn't <something completely irrelevant> or how it arrive late because of customs.
In the same way I write a two star rating when I really dislike something so other smart people can easily find my message ;-)
I think there's an interesting nugget of sociology in that. Perhaps segmenting populations (not necessarily through ML, just a star rating or a ladder ranking or Likert scale could be enough) when rating something offers better visibility to people in that cohort about their shared attitudes in the matter.
They've also manipulated search results in the last few years. Before ~2018 if you searched for a political debate, the top result was likely to be an independent content creator or someone who was there, a vlog, or something like that. Now it's all.. FOX, NBC, ABC, CNN, etc. I wonder if the legacy media is paying Google behind the scenes to promote content.
I.e. If they say something false on purpose, they're likely to get sued out of existence. Whereas, some random guy can just say "oh, I was only joking, or this is just entertainment, or it's just freedom of speech man... YOU are responsible for checking my dis-info" after spreading lies on purpose.
Personally, for these reasons, I trust the mainstream news sources MUCH more than the random person on the internet that may or may not be trying to sell me some snakeoil on the side (e.g. Alex Jones).
Disclaimer: These are my own views, and not of my employer.
Definitely true, I also noticed this with the BLM protests. There were almost no uncommented videos, all just tv recordings from the large channels. And the few uncommented videos I found were from news stations as well.
What's amazing to me is the intellectual hoops I see otherwise smart people go through to ignore this, and often when confronted, claim refuge in apathy... I really don't get the increase in servitudinal attitudes.
I'll say this again, I want Google to go down along with the rest of FAANG. It has way too much control over US population and the rest of the world. It has started to abuse its position.
This still seems like a huge disconnect to what people use youtube for vs. what google thinks it should be used for.
Google wants youtube to be all network and brands making content. ie. a future version of what TV is now. What actual people want is creator made videos(diy/review/podcast videos and everything else that make youtube wonderful).
This disconnect has been happening since google bought youtube and this recent change only reflects google wanting to hide backlash/or dislike from who it sees should rightfully be on youtube, brands/networks/corporations.
You could see that with how YouTube Rewind evolved over the years. It started out highlighting popular videos from original YouTube creators and at some point became Jimmy Kimmel doing Fortnite dances.
It's all about Wojcicki. The fact she runs YouTube never ceases to amaze me given that she ran Google Video, which failed largely because she was obsessed with 'professional' content and bet against user generated content. That bet was wrong to such a huge extent she was reduced to recommending Google buy her only competitor.
Somehow, despite this failure as an executive - a failure of the kind that got Vic Gundotra fired - she has not only not been fired but ended up running the site that beat her, where she has spent the last half decade trying to turn it back into Google Video.
100% agree, the only reason Wojcicki is still there is she is the sister of founder Sergey Brin's ex-wife and that family supplied the "garage" that started google.
I have a small child (14.8 kg) so I know a lot more about children's shows on Youtube than I want to. People use Youtube to publish lots of videos aimed at children. Some of which is inappropriate, BTW; keep an eye on what your kid is seeing.
In 2018 some TV executives with Disney ties founded Moonbug Entertainment, which proceeded to swallow up lots of the more popular channels. Sound familiar? Such as Little Baby Bum, Cocomelon and Blippi, the last two of which were $120 million. All excellent programming. This seems to be the way of the World.
My son also loves Vlad and Niki. They make cute, silly videos that gross millions of US dollars per month. There is serious money involved in this now.
It sounds like you read the headline and came to post your already held views on Google and Youtube hoping that it would be relevant.
From the article:
> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks. Our experiment data confirmed that this behavior does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.
If that was truly their primary concern, why wouldn't they limit the scope of the change to smaller creators? Could it be that they were looking for a post-hoc justification for a desired policy change?
Would you trust YT to define what a "small creator" is? It opens the door to other policies being applied only to "small creators" as well, and I don't personally like that thought
They already apply different rules to small creators. For instance, you must have 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time per a year in order to monetise videos.
My point was that your slippery slope argument was a bit bonkers because YouTube already has a mechanism to impose varying rules on channels based on size.
Couldn't smaller channels be getting hit by more dislikes because videos produced by smaller channels are actually just plain bad?
People who are just getting started on YouTube tend to have poor production quality and editing skills compared to established channels. That might have been acceptable in YouTube's early days when there were no standards, but now we're at a point where we've all seen thousands of videos on YouTube, and we all collectively expect high quality content.
Seems quite natural that smaller channels that are just getting started by people who are still learning will be disliked more often than large channels. Hardly a valid reason to eliminate the dislike button.
It sounds like you're very much predisposed to believing that all press releases are 100% truthful -- and you would never consider that they might be intentionally misleading.
For all we know, they could be making up bullshit to cover up the real reason; e.g. Disney/Marvel (a source of revenue) or the White House (with the threat of potential regulations or maybe just the political bias of YT staff) or YouTube themselves (YouTube Rewind) are very unhappy that their videos are so unpopular.
Since we can't access their data, we will never know one way or the other. We either have to trust their corporate PR, as you seem to have done, or analyze their possible motives for making a decision that is seemingly user-hostile.
You've framed a plausible hypothesis - which is the best any of us can do given a complete absence of any data - as "invent[ing] unfounded theories that can't be falsified". That's effective rhetoric, but it isn't really an argument.
Instead, "I uncritically accept corporate PR as objective analysis" is what I consider to be a stupid way to go through life.
Maybe your priors include "corporations always tell the truth", but mine don't.
That obviously doesn't mean we should accept some alternative conspiracy theory X as the truth, but it does mean we should be skeptical and open minded about other explanations, especially given the context in this particular case of: (i) zero supporting data provided by YT, (ii) a very plausible set of alternative explanations that would be political suicide for YT to publicly state, (iii) the apparent anecdotal user-hostility of this decision.
"Google is a bad faith actor, this is a PR piece, and so it is unwise to take them at face value on anything", on the other hand, is pretty reasonable.
I think there can be a difference between how people behave and what people want. Which means there is a huge difference between what people want to engage with and what they do engage with. For example, TikTok will aggressively optimize your feed based on what you watch. If you get hooked on a video which makes you angry or reactive (like a political take), TikTok will show you more of it. You end up engaging with that content despite not wanting to.
None of social media is optimized around what people like or enjoy watching. It is only optimized on one thing: engagement to drive ad revenue via addictive practices. Engagement != enjoyment. That especially includes YouTube.
Unlike with the "k" suffix for thousands that we have today, YouTube used to show the unabbreviated number of likes and dislikes even for larger numbers of votes.
This video was remarkable for the fact that it maintained pretty much a perfectly equal number of likes and dislikes for years (rarely off by more than 1). It was a tacit agreement among viewers: if you saw a mismatched count, it was your duty to vote towards restoring the balance.
The two numbers are probably off by several hundred these days.
>This video was remarkable for the fact that it maintained pretty much a perfectly equal number of likes and dislikes for years (rarely off by more than 1). It was a tacit agreement among viewers: if you saw a mismatched count, it was your duty to vote towards restoring the balance.
While this may seem pretty cool and fun to you and me, in Youtube's view this is an "attack".
I don't like this one, as each voter has decisively chosen one side. In aggregate, the voters are ambivalent rather than neutral. Better had it received no votes at all.
Yeah, that was hilarious the first 100 times I saw it. It seems now every "funny" comment is a template like the one you describe, and everyone is racing to be the first one to plug in the right values.
People objecting to the idea that someone might have pressed the dislike button for whatever reason, unable to handle the mild cognitive dissonance of divergent opinions always stood in stark contrast to the old mantra that graced the signatures of slashdot and other forum comments:
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
This seems one sided. Why not hide the “like” count too and make both like and dislike counts visible only to the creators while using the individual action of each viewer for recommendations?
I don’t understand why a dislike brigade could be harmful but a like brigade couldn’t be (like propaganda and/or misinformation). They seem to have considered only the impact on creators, who are a small percentage of the population, and not the impact on susceptible viewers, who are much larger in number.
Exactly. Hiding the like + dislike count would actually have an interesting impact on the experience, where you can choose to like/dislike based on your own opinion only. The result will be more relevant for algorithms and more meaningful for creators who will receive honest feedback.
It's like they took the advice from the book "Nudge" a little too seriously. Also, this is a great example of why using that advice doesn't work. It presumes known intent, prescriptive purpose, characterizable frame of mind, homogeneity of these attributes, and that you have perfect, infinite information without any externalities. Classic silicon valley-brain and a great example of how these approaches are limiting and self defeating with the same smell every time
> I don’t understand why a dislike brigade could be harmful but a like brigade couldn’t be (like propaganda and/or misinformation).
Likes or dislikes in isolation are pretty coarse metrics. Is it small, medium, big, or a huge number? Outside of that, it doesn't really matter.
The ratio, however, can be hugely misleading, and is most certainly one of the factors leading to ignorance bubbles. I just replied to another comment that held this ratio as a demonstration of "popular opinion", and this is a very common assumption.
It isn't popular opinion. It is the usually tiny, self-selecting group of individuals who seek out this information and then purposefully engage with it. The more engaged a bubble is, the more outsized this ratio will be.
Vaccination content is a great example. A heavy majority of the public is pro-vaccination, pro-mandates, pro-masking, etc. But they do it and go on with their life. They aren't watching videos and clicking little arrows hoping to change the world. Anti-vax people spend their days filling Facebook feeds, sharing memes, and clicking up and down arrows. So videos for the former tend to have terrible ratios, while the latter have great ratios. Despite being fringe beliefs. But then people come out of it deluded into thinking it's popular sentiment, and they're really just the "silent majority", etc.
> Creators: You’ll still be able to find your exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio for each video–only if you’d like to.
What creator that wants to produce high quality content wouldn’t want to see how their videos are performing? Total lunacy. All this in response to “dislike attacks” which are likely extremely uncommon.
> it’s an important step to reduce behavior that aims to silence and harass creators
Can someone legitimately get behind the fact that pushing a button that says you dislike the content is silencing or harassing the creator? If they had targeted specific comments that would maybe make sense but literally by pushing a button this is the case?
What I mean is that up and down votes are also speech.
If I call myself a baker and open up a bakery, my customers will either like my cakes, dislike my cakes, or not have a strong opinion either way. They will express their opinions in a variety of online and offline forums. Some of them might be cranks and trolls. Others might be discriminatory towards people who look like me. Those people are jerks, although it is sometimes hard to tell at first. It is even harder to have formal rules for fairly and efficiently filtering out the jerks.
But the point of having a public business is that you're putting yourself out there. If you don't want to get the feedback, maybe you should be able to disable the up/downvote feature on your videos, just like you can disable comments. And I completely get why some people disable comments on YouTube, for the same reason I get why some companies will want an active presence on Facebook and Twitter but not reddit.
But if you're going to take away up/downvotes site-wide, then YouTube's same rationale should apply to disabling comments site-wide. The harm that you can commit through paragraphs of text is so much more than you can in a single bit. Coordinated harassment campaigns can use comments to doxx, to spread misinformation, to send viruses and malware, and more.
And you know what, we need to get rid of elections too. That's just a single bit you flip for a candidate or an issue. If the concern isn't the harm of the downvote but the danger of compressing discussion into such a lossy format (like how people critique Twitter's character limits as to why it is a bad platform for nuanced discussion), then voting for elections seems to be just a problematic, right?
I think you're right, YouTube will probably disable comments by default in the future as well.
> The harm that you can commit through paragraphs of text is so much more than you can in a single bit.
That's whataboutism. It's an important topic as well, but not what's being discussed.
I'm not sure why you raise elections, but the premise ("if the concern isn't the harm of the downvote") is antithetical to the discussion (which is concerning the harm of targeted downvote campaigns).
> pushing a button that says you dislike the content is silencing or harassing the creator?
Part of the toxic positivity movement recently has been to re-frame everything disagreeable as a personal attack against them, using words like "silence" and "invalidate" to manufacture outrage. It's concerning to see this terminology permeate into corporate lingo now too...
Also, how does this stop "dislike attacks"? If someone wants to bulk-dislike a video, the button is still there and can still affect the recommendation system.
As usual, HN users are making lots of interesting assumptions (some comments to a conspiracy level) on the intention here...
But in the reality, there are many smaller creators who is frequently being harassed by trolls (have you heard about those young Chinese patriots trolling over Korean and Japanese channels?) and one of their tool is the dislike button. And creators have been complaining about this for many years, so I would say in fact YT was super lazy on this particular issue, but at least better late than never...
As I stated in a follow up comment, this change explicitly targets the trolling dynamic as whole, not just giving individual some controls. Most creators (and trolls as well) don't even know that option exists, so that option alone doesn't do anything meaningful. As always, the default option is what really matters.
I personally suspect that this is a step toward removing the dislike button at all (which is an obvious way to eliminate this attack vector) but they're just not ready to remove the button due to some other factors.
> Most creators (and trolls as well) don't even know that option exists, so that option alone doesn't do anything meaningful.
So we're going to fix a UI fail by censoring dislikes on every video? How about just making the option more apparent as your posting a video? Why should everyone be deprived of a feature just because some people don't know another feature exists? This logic is baffling to me.
> I personally suspect that this is a step toward removing the dislike button at all (which is an obvious way to eliminate this attack vector) but they're just not ready to remove the button due to some other factors.
And now you just admitted you don't think it's just because people don't know that option exists. I honestly don't know what you're position is besides that whatever Google does must be right.
> How about just making the option more apparent as your posting a video?
Of course, the option will still have a default setting even with that modification. That doesn't change anything. I'll say again; in an amortized platform level, only default option matters. Other "choice" won't make any dent. One counterfactual scenario: YT decided to make # of dislike visible only for creators who opts in and now 99.999% of videos don't show it. If you're 100% happy with that situation, then I can respect your opinion.
> Why should everyone be deprived of a feature just because some people don't know another feature exists?
It's not because some people don't know some feature exists. It's because the platform is the one who make the overall incentive structure for user behaviors. YT completely failed in this area and now they're trying to fix that. Of course you have your right to complain, but to me the trade-off seems obvious given that creators have been being harassed for years while you have a minor inconvenience.
> And now you just admitted you don't think it's just because people don't know that option exists
Where does this baffling logical jump come from? In many studies, dislike buttons have been proven to be a strong source of negative user behaviors, so it's a fairly natural conjecture that YT is trying to get rid of that button in the end state. And the fact that most users don't really know or care about the visible dislike # options simply refutes "but they had a choice and it's their choice!" argument. I don't know what you're trying to achieve by connecting two logically unrelated sentences. Isn't this a textbook example of straw man fallacy?
> I honestly don't know what you're position is besides that whatever Google does must be right.
Obviously this is something I would expect from HN comments, but outside of HN please don't make this kind of low level mockery on someone else you don't really know. It only makes you miserable, especially when you demonstratively don't understand my arguments.
The problem with that is, as mentioned in other comments here, most of the people who hide likes/dislikes are just propaganda outlets and fragile jerks whose videos are crap. YouTube is a success because normally the system works.
But, unfortunately, the system doesn't always work, and when it fails, it's usually because you're being actively targeted and the system isn't doing anything to stop it. So you're stuck between "leave the like bar visible, and nobody watches my videos because state actors are using bots to dislike my videos" and "hide the like bar, and nobody watches my videos because most people who hide their like bar are asshats." Either way, nobody watches your videos, and it doesn't necessarily mean your videos suck.
In other words, nobody hides the like bar unless they are either being massively downvoted, or they expect to be massively downvoted. Which means that a hidden like bar might as well be 100% red.
> "hide the like bar, and nobody watches my videos because most people who hide their like bar are asshats."
Why do you think that is the case? It's probably because the actual cases of people being dislike mobbed are *way* rarer than the case of people wanting to hide that their content is garbage.
> As usual, HN users are making lots of interesting assumptions (some comments to a conspiracy level) on the intention here...
> But in the reality, there are many smaller creators who is frequently being harassed by trolls (have you heard about those young Chinese patriots trolling over Korean and Japanese channels?) and one of their tool is the dislike button. And creators have been complaining about this for many years, so I would say in fact YT was super lazy on this particular issue, but at least better late than never...
That would be an escuse.
The solution to that problem is not changing that option for the whole platform
Make targeted changes but not just change everywhere.
Removing the ability to assess how other people think of all the videos is big
this ain't the solution.... because some people where effected we need to disable a feature used by everyone ? now what? we have to waste time watching a video to find out that it teaches your bs? flat earth is now 5k likes, Earth is now flat guys.. no dissent
I can understand the frustration about being affected by a change that feels like "punishing the class" but sometimes there aren't really any better options. The problem is that the existence of a button that hurts the creator means that there is a natural incentive for people to weaponize it as such. Every forum has had to come up with a solution to brigading and review bombing are there are really only two answers -- identify and police downvote brigades and review bombs or eliminate downvotes altogether.
The forces that push a platform to the latter is there being a constant stream of outrage when platforms identify a brigade and delete their votes to avoid poising the the data. It's easier to just change the system to eliminate the problem entirely. This isn't really an isolated incident, even in the tech space people have been rallying for "removing comment sections" because they've been a cesspool since their inception. YouTube is one of the last platforms to make this change.
I'm just surprised by how many people apparently looked at dislike counts. I read this headline and thought "who cares" then saw there were 900 comments and only came in to see what the controversy was.
Sometimes people say mean things to me. I guess the solution is to revoke everybody's ability to speak, because that could be used to hurt my feelings.
People keep complaining about harassment at work. I guess the solution is to revoke the ability to file complaints.
The results of elections will now be hidden, because knowing one person got more votes than another might hurt the losing party's feelings.
Seriously, the level of conspiracy-theory replies to this post is shocking. Like, this is below-reddit-level discourse. This is borderline Q stuff. And I know HN has moderation because I've been told off for flamewars. What gives?
What you’re seeing could be a sign that the audience of HN has changed, or it could be that what you are referring to as “conspiracy theories” aren’t that.
Hacker News has been like this for a while now, maybe a little less than a year, and it's getting rapidly worse every day. I've found myself spending significantly less time here as a result, hacker news seems like it's not for me anymore.
They'll notice if you complain about it, chide you for "sneering at the community"and imply that you're simply falling prey to some cognitive bias or prejudice.
> The shift seems pretty fast, to me.
I've seen it gradually picking up speed ever since Snowden and the death of Aaron Swartz. Trump and Biden's elections were inflection points as well, pointing to a large influx in alt-right and conspiratorial posters from 4chan and Reddit.
I'd strongly suggest getting a plugin or userscript that lets you block users, and start doing so aggressively. Confronting the problem, or even pointing it out, falls afoul of the guidelines (at the very least it isn't considered "substantive") and will only eventually get you filtered or banned.
Next time you see someone talk about how high quality the discussion is at HN and how it isn't like the rest of the internet.... Just remember this thread.
You're allowed to be batshit insane on Hacker News so long as you maintain a civil tone, and don't bore the mods (don't be crazy and repetitive - be a quirky new kind of crazy every time you rant about whatever triggers you.)
To use dang words, not only your comment didn’t bring anything new to the discussion but you also took the best example possible for starting a flame war.
Not sure when HN took such a turn to the conspiratorial. The signal to noise ratio is getting really low these days, might finally be time to give up on this site, because dang seems uninterested in the problem.
This is sure going to make YouTube a whole lot less useful for gathering information about a subject. I can't tell you how many DIY home improvement and exercise form demonstration videos I've been protected from because a lot of dislikes pointed me to the fact that something is terribly amiss in the content. Who knows how much money those ratios have saved me over the years.
Other users click like button on comment a ton of times...
Next official move?
Making comments visible to subscribers and premium users only...
Google is going against basic human nature here and it's Orwellian as fuck.
Next unofficial move?
Censor comments containing, "DISLIKE" because the ones doing it will stand right out same as they did before and having them not stand out is what is being attempted here.
And?
Yeah, DISLIKE
Edit:
I realize this is part of a bigger trend and that is to avoid mass signaling of any kind.
The major players do not want large numbers of people communicating because those lead to large actions, which are expensive and risky from their point of view. While this is perfectly understandable, a functional society allows for these things and it bears those costs and risk because of the even greater costs and risks associated with clamping down on dissent like this.
I was trying to put this into words and I like your explanation. People don't seem to realize that yes as long as you can trust the mediating party it may be a net benefit to avoid negative signaling, but the problem is once those precedents are in place it only takes one bad actor to send it all crashing.
It will, and the ones who allow it will stand out just as they do now by allowing comments when others do not. Fact is most creators actually delivering value stand to gain from both robust comments and feedback. It's just not a big deal.
In a more general sense, it's turning a comms medium into broadcast. In broadcast nobody really gives a fuck what ordinary viewers, listeners have to say. Their job is to eat ADS and shit CASH.
How is it a "trend"?
Facebook never had dislike. So does instagram.
Even Twitter never had a downvote as far I can remember.
Issue is that Google is removing it after entire YouTube culture was built around it.
The issue is it being removed for hand wavy reasons.
The trend is increased control through corporations and a reduced mass signal potential. This action is but one of many. Reddit modified r/All a while back to avoid mass signalling and or prioritize "authoritative" front page material.
Others have done similar things.
Twitter put features in for "authorities" to be marked in ways, verified users. Also, provided for broadcast only type posts, where comments are limited to a select few, or not at all allowed.
It's worth a deeper look back too:
Prior to the Internet, and prior to the actions of Reagan and Clinton to deregulate media, we had many independent publishers doing news, commentary (with fairness requirements on said commentary), and other works. No one was allowed to own a significant portion of all that, and the check and balance was all the peers questioning one another as well as the targets of their journalism.
Additionally, news was done as a public service, in the public interest, and that's what broadcast licenses were all about. They get a magic money machine in return for helping us all in a civic way by doing news.
After Reagan repealed the fairness doctrine, we got the likes of Rush Limbaugh.
Side bar: Limbaugh was an exemplary broadcaster. His unusual talent essentially unbridled by the lack of the fairness doctrine allowed for intoxicatingly good political talk. Just saying, his own skill was a factor in all this. End side bar.
After Clinton relaxed ownership rules, mega networks were born, and very quickly gobbled up a lot of news networks and also began doing news for profit, made possible by the larger network size as well as no need to be fair, or even accurate in news and or commentary.
Side bar: Fox won in court when challenged on it's right to force journalists to lie and or produce material they themselves do not believe in. This can and is a condition of employment. End side bar.
With the rise of the Internet came "new media" and the most striking quality was the population once again getting news and commentary produced from a labor, or populist point of view. This has naturally proven quite popular, and quite painful for big corporate media who is not used to having to deal with both feed back and competition not playing by the same rules it plays by.
Populists shot right to the top of the charts and captured younger media consumers, starting with a lot of Gen X and younger. Corporate media, big networks saw aging demographics, and the trend was clear.
They either need to find a way to compete, or new media was gonna have to be handicapped before it was too late!
And that's one trend, biasing mass signaling away from that which could challenge, or dissent from the establishment narrative.
Removing likes is straight up hiding the fact that big media being called authoritative, allowed to fact check without itself being fact checked to the same standards, or by those it has some authority over, is all very unpopular and not trusted very well at all and the demographics on that extend all the way up through old age today.
The young people don't even bother watching. Older people are questioning it all with increased frequency.
Putting it all on You Tube went like most of us thought it would: Yawn.
Bundling it with entertainment pulled the numbers up a little.
Modifying the recommendation algorithm pulled numbers up a bit more, while at the same time stunting the growth of new media in a painfully obvious way.
Still? No joy.
Now, hiding the data needed for the general public to understand those things along with increased censorship and rule changes intended to further hobble popular news and commentary that challenges the establishment is common and growing increasingly overt.
This brings us to present day "trends" and I hope a bit of context helps to understand what I am getting at here.
Tiktok pushed the passive user experience further, and youtube is following. The ideal is user launches app, the app takes care of everything else. Looking at the downvote count is just an extra thing the user can, might or should do. The trend is to reduce these. Youtube's being trendy.
That's a charitable interpretation. I posit these products are actually designed to further diminish the range of thought and serve to eliminate discontent, resistance and ultimately political opposition.
And dislikes don't show you how controversial it is, or perhaps how general Youtube audience reacts to being exposed to something.
So that now if you want to make it known you have to leave a comment. And then some stats have to be done on the comments to understand the sentiment. On Youtube's shitty unforum, you have to do stats. Right.
They just sealed it, all of their likes, dislikes, comments etc.; all of Youtube's non-streaming aspects are demonstrably useless, not just "feel useless", but actually are it.
Time to support things like ogjre.com and reddit etc., for they provide what Youtube denies.
Community. Forums. Thought. Orientation and discrimination. What is good, and who would think that it is. What is objectionable, and for whom.
Removing the dislike count is the worst possible thing YouTube could do. Youtube is not just people talking about their day or political content. It is practical content, like how-to videos, and entertainment. When you search how to do something the number one indicator it will be useful or helpful video is the dislikes. This is critical for sifting through all of the garbage videos that don’t work or aren’t related who are just trying to make a buck or get views. Even in entertainment dislikes offers the same feedback, and while it’s not a perfect measure, it absolutely provides a good indicator.
> But that's why you have a brain, so that you can make that decision for yourself! When you censor an opinion by downvoting something, you are making an unfair decision for future viewers of that content who would rather make that decision on their own.
Would you make the same argument in favor of getting rid of upvotes?
Also, expressing disagreement isn't censorship. The availability of the content is unchanged. YouTube doesn't eliminate content from their platform based on some number of downvotes.
Here on HN, downvoted comments become so hard to read I don't even bother. That's effectively censorship. On Reddit, they become automatically hidden and subject to removal. On YT, I'm not sure what happens, but it's possible downvoted videos get treated less favorably by the recommendation and search algorithms.
I enjoy 4chans model of posts with more replies generally attracting more attention (similar to sorting by controversial on Reddit). I also like that the dialogue graph there isn't necassarily 'tree shaped' and it's easier to reply to comments across a thread.
On HN, if you click on the timestamp -- voila -- it's perfectly readable again, no matter how greyed out.
They grey it out because they don't show the count. They used to, back in the early days, and it just promoted stupid arguments.
Greying it out is an elegant solution that plays well with local culture where some people will provide corrective upvotes if they think the comment doesn't deserve that.
I didn't know that, thanks. It does still require following the link to view it plainly, which is a slight deterrent, but that's a lot more balanced than I initially thought.
Downvoting on HN is poorly implemented. It should take an hour or so after the initial flood of votes before showing to the rest whether it is upvoted or downvoted. It is essentially encouraging 'bandwagoning' phenomenon - "Others have thought this out for me, I'll just downvote it and move on" instead of giving the comment a fair chance especially if it is disagreeing with constructivism and civility.
The most eggregious abuse on HN is flagging things that don't deserve it. Comments about inflation a few months ago were being flagged constantly or categorized as 'right-wing'. That's straight up censorship since the content disappears for most users who don't know the show-dead option in settings.
Flagging is great for spam and rude comments - I am down for that.
edit: Sorry for the rambling, I've just had too much gin, but this stuff has been bothering me lately.
Agree across the board. Given that internet dialogue hugely influences our thoughts today, I think the importance of the tools, platforms and/or form used to discuss things is an underrated consideration. Especially with 'misinformation' or truth wars taking place today. I think that's gonna be one of the biggest problems that needs to be solved but no ones talking about it.
I would love to somehow live in a world where the information delivered to me and others was true and not misleading, only trying to accurately convey the info at hand, and not cherrypicking or manipulating. Essentially life without propaganda or lies. I don't want to spend life either sorting through propaganda to find obfuscated truth or simply accepting the dominant consensus. Sadly I don't know how someone could ever solve this without deciding who the (corruptible) arbiters of truth are. I wish we lived in a world where our individual incentives aligned with what brings out the best both ourselves and others. I have been getting sad lately feeling like there will always be a monopoly on truth and violence, a monopoly on reality, and it will never have our best interest at the center of its heart.
'Science' is seen as the answer, the ultimate objective arbiter of truth but sadly it's an abused buzzword and has become an authority figure with followers that obey its consensus. The scientific process is diametrically opposed to accepting consensus and is about falsifying hypothesis. Today studies are sponsored by corporations that have already defined what they want to conclude and this is accepted in the public sphere as a source of truth, despite the infamous 'replication crisis' also being known in the public sphere. How do you trust experts that don't trust themselves, or have incentives that work against you?
I just feel like I've lost all hope until I see a reasonable solution on the horizon.
> When you censor an opinion by downvoting something, you are making an unfair decision for future viewers of that content who would rather make that decision on their own.
The value of the downvotes on HN, Reddit and YouTube is to save time when trying to find signal among the noise.
Still, I agree that some people may end up unfairly not being heard/seen.
But removing downvotes seem one step closer to surrendering to The Algortihm.
Then again, perhaps that is the general idea. And perhaps it will work out. YouTube can transparently use watch time instead of vote counts when deciding how to rank stuff. That’s what TikTok does, from what I understand. Maybe YouTube already does as wel. And in that sense, video content is a bit different from text.
So even though my initial impression of this change was negative, I think it may work out when we consider the difference between HN, Reddit on one side and video streaming services like YouTube and TikTok on the other side. (Also, I am aware that Reddit hosts videos too, but I am talking about the text and external link content here).
A counterpoint is that at least on reddit the downvote button is rarely well used. It's always a "I disagree" button, so both bad and controversial things are pushed down. It's not the case here in general I think, but I actually think this is a good argument in favor of removing dislikes. It filters some bad things but also just controversial things for one reason or another.
What definition of "censor" are you using, which allows downvotes to be framed as censorship, yet the concealment or elimination of downvotes to escape that branding?
First: So anything that can be misused or abused should be abolished? That's your argument? I think I would prefer a more nuanced view and a more nuanced response.
Second: You claim here that downvoting an opinion "censors" it. All I can say to that is, you need to look up "censor" in the dictionary.
Third: You are seriously arguing that moderation should be illegal? Please tell me that was a joke.
Yeah this doesn't make sense. I don't know if they don't understand how YouTube works, but downvoting something doesn't remove the content from view. On sites like reddit and hackernews downvoted comments become less visible but they are still there. I don't think anywhere that implements downvoting ends up "censoring" that content based on just downvotes.
Making it harder to read is tantamount to censorship. It also erodes the user experience. Why do I need to highlight or squint at something a ton of ignorant people disagreed with?
Okay but we are talking about YouTube. YouTube doesn't even do this. Nothing changes about your experience watching a video if it has a lot of dislikes.
A) you can click on the time / hours ago to link to the comment without lightening
B) text selection
C) I think HN is one of the least ignorant communities out there on the net. Occasionally downvoted comments are merely controversial or against the grain, but more often then not, they are flawed in some way. In fact their rarity makes them neat to read (high surprisal) if only to understand where they might be coming from.
Deciding which content to promote and which to bury is censorship however you do it. There's more content than human attention, if you promote one piece of content, whether you choose to do it chronologically or with updoots or Google bosses deciding what's true, you're "censoring" something else by crowding it out.
Yes, although it could be mitigated, by having different sort order options and allowing users to adjust scoring options, including to accept or disable scores put in by others. (Local scoring is something often done in NNTP. Some NNTP clients also support global scoring, although a better more simplified and general format suitable for many programs might be helpful, and must ensure that users can easily disable that feature if it is not wanted, as well as to adjust weights that apply to it.)
You seem to be yet another person who needs to get a lot more acquainted with the definition of "censorship". Words have meanings. Comparing the mere promotion of some content over other content with "censorship" is gravely ignorant, for starters, and also, it's an insult to all those who have suffered from actual censorship.
Please learn the difference and don't gaslight people about this.
Are you aware that dislikes have the same effect as likes on YouTube? Both of them increase exposure- dislikes don't decrease visibility of a video at all, much to the contrary actually.
My experience is that lots of dislikes signals a video which is not what it is claimed to be. For example a video that advertises itself as relaxing sleep music and halfway through you suddenly hear a loud voice screaming "AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA!!!"
> In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior
"attacking behavior"? This tone is giving me some weird feelings.
Here is a constructive opinion: Add it as an optional feature. Let the publisher select "Display both like and dislike counts", "Display only like counts" and "Don't display both count". YouTube has already implemented the "Display both" and "Hide both" option in their "Studio"/video manage page, they just need to add a new one.
> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks.
How do they know that? I hate to be rude but what if people genuinely don't like the content? Of course maybe someone said upfront "I am dislike bombing this video with my 100 youtube accounts" but otherwise it's not clear to me how people are differentiating between an attack and a genuine expression of opinion (though an admittedly rather coarse one).
This will not work, because then people will assume that everyone who disables dislikes does it for reasons of bad content, not because of cybermobbing or similar reasons. Disabling it for all is a social solution to protect everyone together.
Hilarious the visceral response here to the apparent and inevitable decline of YouTube content quality with the removal of a dislike count -- when Hacker News itself doesn't show a down vote count nor even a down vote button for a large portion of its population.
If youtube gradually greyed out videos everywhere in the UI if they got a lot of dislikes instead of the current count then I don't think people would mind as much. But then dislike bombing would probably get even worse than now since greying out the content is a much more powerful signal to users.
This change is very upsetting. Ever since becoming a parent, I've been baffled by a mystery.
I noticed that - unlike most other popular content - children's videos on YouTube almost always have roughly a 2:1 like to dislike ratio no matter what channel or type of content. Why? Where do all the dislikes come from?
Is it from kids mashing touch screens at random? Parents taking what small revenge they can at being subjected to the same songs on repeat thousands of times? Some shady underground power struggle between kids' content creators sabotaging each other?
I always assumed I would eventually find an answer, but now if dislike counts are going away I am unlikely to ever find out. I will probably have to carry this unanswered mystery with me for the rest of my life.
Maybe the reality is all those votes are purely random, but somehow the dislike button has half the chance of random click than like button. Which would be pretty interesting.
I have found videos that were marked disliked by me that I never intended to dislike. Pretty sure it was all from trying to scroll on mobile and a click accidentally getting registered.
My hunch is that it's because children tend to consume YouTube voraciously without much thought put into what video they select. I could scroll for a minute before I decide a video that feels worth spending my time on, I've seen kids select videos in less than half a second.
"Great to see YouTube finally protecting creators like Pepsi and Gillette"
"This is the most offensively dishonest thing you've posted even for your standard. Dislike counts were essential to spot scams, fake/bad tutorials, clickbaits and were especially important as a tool to fight back against horrible megacorporation announcements."
"To protect creators that suck, like politicians, big corporations that sponsor us, and astroturfed talentless on demand era hacks, we're preventing you from seeing how unpopular they are."
“We want everyone to have a voice, unless those voices are valid criticism or go against our agenda.”
"No one wants this other than the corporations who are getting shamed for putting out awful content that the public dislike. You are removing a key protection people have from scamming, dangerous or misleading content and are protecting no one. Stop hiding behind 'small creators mental health' like you think you're doing anything. We can all still see how many dislikes our video got. Our mental health is not protected in any fashion. The only thing you change is the public facing, and we know why you did this."
"When I was 12, my videos were dislike bombed. Not many liked them. Sure, it hurt, but I matured since then. I matured, because I was able to respond to the negative feedback my content was receiving. If not it, I would be falsely convinced of my perceived non-existant greatness. Dislikes are key to personal and content growth."
This is an astoundingly cowardly decision. It's akin to holding an election and only revealing the votes of the winner. Shame on Google.
A far better solution would be allowing more metrics into downvotes. How many of the downvotes come from a Twitter or Reddit post? What's the age of the dislikers? The solution is more transparency, not the suppression of information.
I hope there's new solutions, like browser extensions, to fill in the gap. Centralized and unilateral decisions like this only further prove online liberty must fundamentally empower individuals.
> We want to create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves.
It's an interesting position because the assumption YouTube would have to be making here to do this is that their viewers opinion of the content they're watching is either wrong, or irrelevant.
Also the only instances of dislike "harassment" and I am aware of has been because a content creator has been recently exposed for participating in some immoral activity such as a scam or sexual abuse.
The only other time I see content heavily downvote is when it's disagreeable in some way. For example, a lot of content from mainstream media outlets is often downvoted, presumably not because people have any particular desire to harass news organisations, but because their content is often largely disapproved of.
I must admit I've never seen a video get downvoted for no reason -- is this something anyone has observed on YouTube? The reason I ask is because I worry this move is more likely to be motivated by YouTube disagreeing with the viewers about what should and shouldn't be downvoted. For example, I very much doubt they care some white dude being "harassed" by the dislike button for expressing some racist ideas, but if a black women gets downvoted for expressing a controversial far-left political position that does seem to be viewed as more problematic and represented of "harassment" by silicon valley types these days.
I’ve never personally seen the kind of “dislike harassment” you are talking about. There was the YouTube rewind video a few years ago but that became more of a joke after a while.
However, I would not be surprised if this feature was accelerated after seeing twitch “hate raids” a few months ago. These definitely are a form of online harassment in my opinion. In YouTube’s competition with twitch they want to show they are a “safer” place for creators (whether someone believes this is up to them)
Wildly disappointing but not surprising. The dislike count is the most helpful indicator for users to know if a video is a scam, complete clickbait, a fake tutorial, etc. I'm sure it's also very inconvenient for large media corporations and powerful groups when their videos get disliked into the ground.
This seems like it could have unintended effects of making the experience worse for creators. Instead of getting dislikes, maybe now they'll get mean comments instead.
I have never ever looked at the dislike counts to judge a video. I am baffled by most of the top comments here, that express frustration or outright anger about this. I don't think like counts are relevant to me either. When I consume YouTube (and I have a premium membership which I am happy with) I either know the creator well or I have to trust the search and recommendation algorithms to give me good content for my current interest. I don't find it hard to skim a video and judge for myself if it is worth my time. I'm betting I'm part of the silent majority on this.
You can interpret these like and dislike interactions in two ways: in absolute terms or in personal terms. "Is this video good?" or "Is this video good for me right now?" We can debate what most users are trying to express* or if they are brigading, but it is mostly irrelevant. As soon as the platform stops showing everybody the same videos or at least random videos and it starts recommending specific videos to specific users then like/dislike interactions are a function of how well the algorithm is working, not some absolute measure of sentiment. Dislikes just indicate that the video was recommended to the wrong people. Netflix doesn't show the number of likes and dislikes and I haven't heard of anyone demanding that this change.
* The label "like" certainly suggests a personal judgment. On the other hand, the like/dislike placement and other feedback options suggest an absolute judgement. When I have (very rarely) used the dislike button it was more about a bad recommendation. Often the video wasn't bad in any absolute sense. In my experience I have to go looking for videos I truly dislike in some absolute sense. YouTube does occasionally ask me to rate a recommendation and there is a "Not Interested" option which are alternatives that are even more explicitly about recommendations. Unfortunately these are only offered before you even try to watch a video or if you are very intentional about returning to your recommendations feed and finding "Not Interested" in the three dots menu.
You must watch very simple, popular content, in which case, yes, you're part of the majority. Congrats.
I rarely watch videos, but when I do, it's complex technical material relating to a niche subject. A high dislike-to-like ratio is a clear indication that the content is inaccurate. Not offensive or boring or too long, just inaccurate. And because the content is complex, I can't just skim it and identify inaccuracies.
This is exactly my experience and I also have a YouTube premium account. I use YouTube religiously and have my own system of improving the algorithm so that the vast majority of content recommended is something I might watch.
If I don't like a video, I hit dislike and will maybe even remove it from my watch history.
I suspect that most who are against this change are not heavy YouTube users.
Previously if you were linked their videos it might have 1000 upvotes and 100,000 downvotes, and it would be obviously terrible. Now you just see 1000 upvotes and it would look like it has substantial support.
Google can and does remove videos they simply dislike by using nebulous policies against 'hate' or 'meanness' or similar. Removing dislike then, by and large, helps push those unpopular views that Google themselves approve of.
Does removing likes let them accomplish that? They can still remove videos that trigger them, but without a like count they can't push their ideology with the appearance of support.
I believe this is the actual reason why they will show upvotes but not downvotes, and as prediction I expect them to remove total views since that allows for estimating the viewer sentiment based on likes per view (or make it useless for estimation, for example replacing a count with big buckets like "thousands" or "millions").
For the viewers (us), this is the opposite of what they should do. For us, they should be showing the up/down count ratio on the video preview link itself so we could easily identify the garbage videos without even having to click on them.
Of course this would reduce the amount of ads and pages they would serve to users, so it's in their interest to do everything they can to prevent users from being warned of time-wasting content.
The corollary is that wasting users time more aggressively is more likely to instill resentment and platform abandonment. Definitely a two edged sword.
Indeed it does instill resentment, but as with many other big companies there's really no alternative. Someday youtube will fall second to a service that better meets the users' needs, but I suspect that will be many years from now.
I think a lot of the behaviors companies exhibit like this are related to US stock markets and the fixation on quarterly earnings per share. So much executive compensation is stock/options that it's a wiser bet for execs to optimize for the short term. Planning for 5+ years is no longer reasonable from their perspective because even with the best intentions, unplanned events can ruin everything. They might as well do whatever they can to cash in as quickly as possible.
I don't see this changing for any reason. So what will happen is that every 5-10 years some upstart company will gain enough funding to replace the tired old leader, and then within 5-10 years it will become that same tired old leader.
People are weirdly outraged here. Likes/Dislikes on really public platforms like reddit and youtube are just a game, they tell you nothing about the quality of something, only whether it matches the agreed upon view of the core audience. Barely anyone thinks about dislikes on youtube until there's a big event like youtube rewind.
You are wrong. Every now and then I need find and watch instruction video on how to do something, like how to install my old ancient printer on Windows 10, or how to disassemble my laptop, or how to flush my water heater. If I see a bad like/dislike ratio I can know right away the video is useless.
I have same way of estimating tutorials and similar content. There are quite many people posting videos without real understanding what they are teaching..
There's a Venn diagram of audience and voters. Hard to know how large any of the three are, but apparently YouTube thinks the group of non-audience voters is large enough to take action against.
First it was the complete corporate takeover of their search algorithm in the last few years, now they're removing the final way that users can express displeasure from political organizations and content creators.
This is yet another nail in the coffin of Youtube, it's almost ready to go into the ground as Rumble and Odysee take off and Youtube slides into corporate/censorious irrelevance.
There has been no clear evidence showing that to be the case, and an independent factchecker concluded that was misinformation. Please refer to youtube.com/help for the most accurate updates.
By referring to the act of disliking the video as an "attack", they are framing this change as one which protects users, when in fact, only a small minority post videos, and a smaller portion among them are bothered by dislikes. In fact, the change is user-hostile, removing one channel for users to see whether a video is of low quality (inaccurate description, containing false information, etc.), and improving advertiser metrics artificially (this, by their own description).
That isn't what they said at all. They are talking about actual attacks where a group of people share their objections to a video and encourage everyone to click on dislike. Do you really think that this kind of group objection should be sponsored and enabled?
Absolutely. Getting ratio'd is one of the few ways users have to express displeasure. They took away video replies, comments are often disabled, but they can't pretend everyone likes their video. At least they couldn't until now. That Verge PC build that would destroy your parts if you followed it? That horrible soulless YouTube Rewind? Logan Paul's "sorry I exploited suicide victims for views" video? Dislikes are a force for good. I can count the videos I've seen unfairly disliked on one hand.
The hope with youtube videos is that the likes/dislikes represent a random sampling from the ratings of everyone who would watch the video. A brigade is purposefully adding to the sample ratings from only one side. So from an objective standpoint it makes the like/dislike ratio lower quality.
But from a less objective standpoint, it's just rude. Even if the rankings are purely cosmetic, why go out of your way to leave a dislike on one person's video if you wouldn't interact with it otherwise?
There is always bias in the userbase, people usually watch content on their side of the political agenda for example. How do you know the so-called "brigade" isn't actually bringing things closer to public opinion?
Also are we talking about global opinion? A lot of people outside of the western world aren't as big fans of LGBT for example, so if we want to make things more objective those videos should have even more downvotes and hateful messages. And if we're being consistent with what google currently does, these videos should be banned sometimes for hurting others (ex. religious) feelings. People are ok with downvotes and banning, but only if it panders to their current subjective moral fashions.
> There is always bias in the userbase, people usually watch content on their side of the political agenda for example.
I agree, but as a user I am used to assuming a baseline of support for a video coming from the channel's subscribers. So even if the pie-in-the-sky random sampling is biased, I can usually account for that. What I would like to be able to assume is that likes and dislikes come from the "usual" traffic a video receives.
> Also are we talking about global opinion?
No. I think it can be assumed (like you said) that videos typically receive views from certain people. My point is more that brigades disrupt the helpfulness of ratings for viewers like myself. I think we should not offend the sensibilities of the homophobes in this world (lmao) by asking them to watch LGBT-friendly videos. Conversely, I think said homophobes should refrain from brigading such a video just because they dislike LGBT people.
I also will reiterate my claim that it is rude for the hypothetical homophobe to exercise targeted downvotes on LGBT videos.
As for myself, I'm not all too pleased with downvotes being straight up removed from Google (edit: YT). But acting like brigades are constructive and normal use of the platform is silly to me.
YouTube complicated things by having the dislike button double as a literal "I don't like this" and an "I don't want to be recommended videos like this in the future." When you dislike a video, it stamps it with a public seal of disapproval, even if you're just trying to avoid a recommended piece of music on YouTube Music.
It's a clunky, confusing UX that gave rise to the inevitable highly upvoted "Who in the world would dislike this?" threads on so many popular videos.
I feel they should do the same with the Like button. There is cognitive bias towards crowd approval/disapproval. But they aren't likely to implement that since it would cut revenue from the "we'll I'll watch this suggestion since 100K people liked it" group. Where removing the Dislike just works in their favor.
This is a terrible decision. It also feels very undemocratic and a way to undermine trust and hide public opinion on a topic. Like a company made a screw up, before it was easy to see public opinion on the matter, but this just allows companies to hide everything, it feels like this decision was only made for companies and people with a controversial opinion like the feminist movement or a racist right wing movement.
I mean read the text "dislike attacks", this reads deeply like some disgruntled femminist who's community keeps getting dislikes because they have extremely controversial opinions. The femminist/SJW community really dislikes democracy and want more censorship it's no joke they are called "Feminazis".
I deeply dislike this decision and I feel like there is some hidden money or power or intent behind this decision to undermine democracy, this is deeply concerning.
Well, it was a good way to get me to cancel youtube premium. It seems like a clear indicator that we are the product, and content creators the actual customers.
What about cases where the dislikes are against a gov figure and the count gives you confidence in numbers. Plus now authoritarian governments get to serve out even more propaganda talking about videos that are liked and the opposition has no way to see that the opposite also happens.
So the opposition grows even more silent. Afraid to act because it might lead to negative repercussions and there is no scale of the dislike for a propaganda piece.
Not to be conspiratorial but after Facebook's reaction to propaganda from certain parties in countries that are not America. It feels like Youtube is bowing to pressure but hiding it behind a "helping small creator" facade.
> Plus now authoritarian governments get to serve out even more propaganda talking about videos that are liked and the opposition has no way to see that the opposite also happens.
Well, yes, that is their agenda. The web as it was was not nearly as friendly for those with money and power.
Now, authoritarian governments and scumbag celebrities will project power over us, just like in the real world.
There are secret whitelists so that influencers like Logan Paul can fully monetize commuting crimes on YouTube (like desecrating a corpse)[2].
Celebrities are permitted to engage in targeted harassment or fraud, and people that call them out are banned.[1]
And of course, governments can engage in all sorts of war crimes, and big tech will censor anyone that tries blowing the whistle[3].
Facebook is happy to censor anything for dictators, but perhaps they will soon go the extra mile and just report people directly to the secret police. They could have a nice dashboard that shows up for local death squads of anyone that questions the leader.
And frankly, this is the future most of us welcomed. We defended all of this because muh private platforms. We consented to letting these big tech platforms set the rules. We welcomed anyone with an incongruent opinion banned.
The internet used to be a domain where scumbag fatcats didn't control everything, and you had some chance of speaking truth to power.
It will only get worse. Find out Dupont is dumping toxic waste in your back yard? Just a word from their PR dept and all of your accounts will be banned. Think you can speak directly to the people? Your domain name will be seized, your Cloudflare account closed, and any app permitted on peoples devices will have to ban you if they don't want to be removed.
"And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced — its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing."
If an opposition needs google videos dislike buttons to exist, it's already too late and already too silent.
What they can do is make opposition videos and get their own support, it'll be just as useless but it wont be brigaded visibly by the massive dictatorial support.
There is definitely competition to YouTube. TikTok appeared out of nowhere and surpassed YouTube installation numbers.
With that said, TikTok is even worse when it comes to dislikes.
actually, facebook would rather not censor. they have to do so because Google and Apple makes them. if both of those companies ban facebook ap, FB is gone, completely. if just 1 of the two ban fb, facebook is barely alive.
Could someone make an external index and review site for yt videos?
yt doing this is essentially yt putting their thumb on the scale, telling you that their product is good, and hiding anyone saying it's not.
Generally, you must always have an outside party to review and judge a thing, not the thing itself.
Probably yt would try every trademark and copyright legal attack in the book to take down any such site, but it seems obvious that in common sense terms, the only possible way to have reviews of yt videos is for them to be provided by anyone other than any Alphabet property.
> Could someone make an external index and review site for yt videos?
Yes, but gaining any sort of widespread traction would be really hard. The vast majority of YT viewers won’t have your chrome extension or whatever installed and without a critical mass of ratings on the long tail of low-view videos, people will lose interest fast.
Maybe if you seeded it with scraped vote counts now people would use it.
The usefulness of data depends on its quality. If people are submitting lots of thoughtful 1-star reviews then yeah, it's a stupid move.
But if when you looked at 1-star reviews, and they were basically the junk ramblings of trolls then you might get a better signal of quality buy just ignoring them.
Perfect change that just so happen to help out large companies trying to avoid being criticized in the public eye. Just a coincidence that Google put out this change to help the everyday you-tubers receiving harassment online, it probably has nothing to do with large corporations wanting to silence peoples opinions. Lucky I guess
In my opinion this is a bad move. The dislike counter helps me optimize my time and help me avoid bad information. For example if I see a tutorial or some other video with many dislikes I can sometimes predict that the steps in the video aren’t reproducible. In several cases the creator of a video tutorial has linked malicious software in the video as part of the steps of the tutorial and I’ve caught that by first noticing the dislike counter.
So now I need to watch complete tutorial videos on obscure issues on YouTube to figure out if they're terrible or not?
Tutorial videos, especially, benefited from the like-dislike ratio, because if 200 people saw a video on setting up some software and 7 people liked it, but 30 people disliked it, it's pretty easy to know that that 10 minute tutorial video isn't worth watching, as it's pacing is slow, or inaccurate or missing major steps or whatever.
How this is useful to people wanting to watch meaningful content? Like many wannabes post football games highlights that just turn out to be some fake content. I can quickly figure that out by seeing 95% dislike ratio. Now I'll be forced to experience it by myself (and watch ads before it of course)
what about all the crazy stuff on Youtube? conspiracies? fake bs etc etc now it will just have likes? sounds like a good idea :) and lots of people watch Youtube on smart tvs with no way to see comments, what on earth is Google doing
That's not a feature we need. We need to know like/dislike ratio BEFORE clicking on a video so that we can avoid clicking on it. I end up clicking on so many spam videos cause Youtube doesn't tell you that simple number. For example, looking for sports highlights right after a game usually ends up with tens of spammy results with fake titles trying to take advantage of trendy topics.
I'm sure Youtube tries to down rank such videos but in practice it's still a big problem. I understand they are trying to protect creators from bad actors but negative feedback is usually more important than positive feedback.
This seems like an odd thing to target. I haven't found dislikes to be problematic in the context of YouTube videos: in fact they're usually an indicator of something in the content itself (I've only ever seen high dislikes either on videos that were themselves problematic or harmful, or on unpopular corporate announcements).
For "creators" on YouTube the real problems seem to come from the contents of comments.
This[0] recent video rant has some interesting insights toward the end of the video where other popular YouTubers are interviewed on how negative comments impacted them. What I found thought provoking was how much of a negative impact some particular types of comments that seemed in good intent-e.g. commenters stating their preference for a previous video format "I preferred when you ___". Feels like Google/social media sites could do something around sentiment heuristics; I know Twitter has started some stuff like this.
> We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video – still, we believe this is the right thing to do for our platform
So basically, "We understand that this feature is useful in helping you determine where to spend your time and attention, but we're going to do it anyway because it benefits us."
> and to help create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves.
"Because we need our creators to get views and keep making content regardless of whether or not our users think it's worth watching."
ding ding ding. this is the correct lens through which to view this situation. for anyone who honestly doesn’t understand how straightforward and devastating this argument is, read it again and learn something.
Does there exist a Chrome (or otherwise) plugin that could keep track of its own like/dislike counts and display them on any given page? You could even have your own separate comment threads. Key everything out on video URL. Wouldn’t work on walled gardens, but would 100% on desktop.
If people want to actually argue that a creator can be harassed by a dislike button, why not give the creator the option to disable dislikes for that specific video rather than pushing this onto every video out there?
That's a great point. Hiding the number is a sensible default, but allowing the creators to show it sounds good too. Especially for the common use-case of "how to" videos where a creator may be proud of the ratio.
It was never about creators or dislike attacks. There's a reason why they didn't adopt an opt-in solution.
It's about corporations complaining about their ads running on unpopular content. It's about making people waste more time on low quality content, scam and disinformation across the platform.
What you hear from them are pure PR lies. They don't care about small creators and they never did. All they want is to make you watch more ads at the expense of your time and welfare.
I am very ambivalent about this decision. I have saved multiple hours just by watching ratio of like and dislikes. At least show us the ratio and better hide the like count too. (but we know they wont hide like count because they want to keep user engaged to earn more advertising $$$)
Just to appease few creator taking away the functionality just seem abysmal to me.
I'm not even ambivalent. It is clearly hostile toward the viewers, but helps content creators (or some content creators).
Google is an ad-supported company. They are there to sell you soap, and have no more morality than P&G or Walmart. Their slogan might as well be "Evil for a buck".
I bet Google always keeps a few big but not particularly time-sensitive announcements like this in their back pocket so they can drop them as a distraction when some sizeable negative story about them breaks - say, when a $2.8B antritrust ruling goes against them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29175511)
I've never understood why they even have a downvote feature. It's almost always like 10,000 likes to 43 dislikes. What information is that getting across? Even if it were 10k to 1k, that doesn't even indicate anything real because of so many people disliking stuff because the host is a woman or they were told to by some other Youtuber.
There are tons of "product review" videos that are little more than an automated voice reading scraped product descriptions along with a slideshow of images from a web search for the item. They have nearly no value but for products with few video reviews, view count is not a useful metric. These faux review videos get downvoted and it serves as a good signal that the video isn't worth watching.
The people who make these automated videos aren't looking for millions of hits per video, they're looking for a few hundred, which when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of this type of video, means millions of clicks for them. Since actual reviews of older products have a small number of views, the automated ones float to the top of search results. Dislikes was a way of separating the two. Few people click Like for the good videos but there were enough clicking Dislike on the shovelware videos to help filter them out. Expect to see an increase in these automated garbage videos as they're now allowed to drown out actual content.
In my experience the information getting across is just a pulse check of how others feel about the content. Tells you something about what to expect from the video.
I think recommendation centric architecture that YouTube has changes meaning of upvotes/downvotes from a global content value judgement into a clustering signal. The platform can correlate that signal to the content to cluster users, creators, content, into groups and cohorts. Those characterizations can be further used to optimize platform for ad clicks.
It's funny how differently people react to things. I look at this and think "there is nothing about Youtube that I find more useless than the dislike count, and I think this probably - on balance - a Good Thing." Everybody else seems to think it's an attack on the fundamental essence of all that is Right, Good, and Just in our universe. Weird... I never would have expected so much consternation about a dislike count.
Here is an easy example to understand the utility of the dislike count:
Imagine you are looking for a How-To video on something very common but specific, such as changing a car part or Windows setting, and that when you search for this you are given dozens of options. All of these options are 20 to 30 minutes long and 90% of them are either inaccurate, out-dated, or automated click-bait. This lower 90% will have a disproportionate number of dislikes. Each time you click one of these videos the dislike ratio can save 20+ minutes of your life and this benefit is multiplied by dozens of videos and tens of thousands of viewers.
I don't have any problem understanding that some people find it useful. I'm just surprised that so many people seem so worked up over this, given the comparison to my own subjective experience, which is that the dislike count has almost zero utility. I suppose it comes down to the nature of how one uses YT. Relative to the things I watch, I can't remember a single time I ever used the dislike count to influence whether or not to watch a given video. shrug
Not saying those other people are wrong mind you. Your lived experience is your lived experience and no one really has any standing to contradict that. Just expressing surprise at the degree of just how differently different people are reacting to this.
I didn't say it was useless, I said that I find it useless. Not the same thing at all.
It's not my intent here to comment on the utility of the feature in any universal sense - my comment is about the disparity between the reactions of different people. And it's just a casual observation, I'm not trying to argue for any thesis or anything here.
Reducing what the worlds gets to see, what feedback/visibility we have, is going to be such a sad sad ongoing theme for this ultra-consumerized/consumptive information-technology. There's no reason to let us be informed consumers.
Whenever rich powerful people or companies says "Helping Small Creators", "Investing millions in small business", "Helping Small Companies", "Donate to support this cause" its almost a sign that something is shady. By removing the like count user will probably not engage that much which means loss of revue through adverts. However if they remove dislikes there is high probability of engagement because you don't know if the video is bad.
And this feature is not even required AFAIK. Creators can simply disable like & dislike if they think they are being targeted.
It solves nothing. They still need something to mark poor quality videos so that the viewers don't waste time figuring it out themselves. Oh, wait, the mighty algorithm gods of Google will again decide for you what you like.
Marvel movies aren't generating the buzz they once were, and Disney is an important YouTube partner that has earnings expectations to met, so... gotta do something about the "review bombing from bigots".
Like/Dislike is a terrible indicator of quality. I'd rather they make public some sort of derivation from the video retention ratio. Wether or not people actually finished the video rather than smashed the like button (which is now an ask every creator has in their intro now) would be a way more useful indicator to me of quality.
A loose remaining proxy will be the ratio of like count to view count. Perhaps one of those will be axed next. I don't understand why complaining creators don't just turn off voting.
I don't think you can just turn it off. You can hide both likes and dislikes and disable comments e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdvidv6RXJY but the buttons still function just without score.
Of course most creator's don't want to do what you say anyways. Like's help them, dislikes don't. Dislike counts are (well were) for users.
This is really unfortunate. Since pretty much any youtube video will have likes, seeing the corresponding number of dislikes is really the only thing that provides any meaningful information.
Their comment system will bury or shadow ban your comment because it has the word dislike in it.
That's why you only ever see positive, happy high-five comments under videos anymore. The dystopian crackdown started sometime after the 2016 US election.
Google must have done A/B testing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think they mentioned an increase in total consumption in the article.
If they did not mention it, the test results were likely not promising, meaning that implementing the move regardless is motivated by something else than an increase in ad revenue.
Like unpopular politicians or corporations who can't produce content people want anymore and lobbied for a leg up from Google/Alphabet to keep people ignorant and foolish.
> Those in the experiment could still see and use the public dislike button, but because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior 1.
I know it was for a halfway good cause this time, but does anyone else find it creepy with how much nonchalance they are talking about behaviour modification and nudging here?
Google would like its users to more frequently show behaviour X, so they made some A/B tests, found which UI changes most effectively increase the prevalence of X and are now implementing the changes.
No need anymore to actually communicate rules with your users if you can just manipulate them into showing a particular behaviour.
It's not just Google doing this, however they are in a position to do this most effectively right now.
The interesting thing about this is that I'm clearly occupying a different demographic for YouTube. Brigading isn't a big deal for the kind of content I watch, but people often upload fake videos. I have an extension that displays the like/dislike ratio on recommended videos and search results and that helps filter out fake uploads.
By fake uploads I mean reuploads that do not contain the actual example. For instance, I might want to watch a Brahmos or Oniks launch (I find the way the missile orients itself very entertaining) and there'll be a bunch of videos which are 'reaction' videos. They'll use a thumbnail of the content but mostly be some guy talking about the content. Or for a football goal, it's some guy recreating it in FIFA. I don't want to watch these things and the dislike bar warns me of the stuff.
I think everybody expected this. Big corp/biden news has struggled to keep up the facade lately. Look at the dislike counts here https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos
The like / dislike ratio is EXTREMELY useful. I'm very disappointed that they would do this. I expect it will be much harder to avoid useless content with this removed.
It would also be great to have an extension that does a twitter search on the current URL. It could run automatically every time you load the page or just run when you click it.
And the results could be limited to people you follow/follow you or all results. Just a nice way to see what people are talking about.
Not sure this belongs in the same extension. But both are manual fixes for social media problems.
I’m pretty cynical. There are a number of deeply unpopular progressive causes for which dislikes would dominate likes on YouTube. My sense is that YouTube wants to mask such information. That’s a good way to not reveal the chasm between elite opinion and popular opinion.
Makes a little more sense when you consider what the #1 disliked video is. Clearly google is really in touch with their audience and their desires here
The like to dislike ratio is one of the best indicators of whether a video is clickbait or not. We are now at the stage where vies for our attention have become a zero-sum game. This will ultimately favour bad actors more than it will help out small creators.
Video creators have always been able to disable the upvote/downvote ratios and comments.
Every single time I have encountered a video where the counts have been disabled by the creator, it’s because the video has something objectively wrong with it. It’s inaccurate, misleading, poor quality, offensive, or some has some other generally negative attribute.
This happens less so with comments being disabled. Videos with high up to down vote ratios but with disabled comments are usually because the creator is being attacked by trolls. These videos are usually pretty interesting to watch.
So yeah this is an incredibly short sighted change and is removing an important quality signal to viewers.
Since it's about to be hidden and unverifiable: Susan Wojcicki's "Freedom of Expression Award" (sponsored by Youtube) video currently has 227 upvotes, 56000 downvotes, and 185000 views. That's a 99.6% downvote ratio.
Why do you considered that ratio "gamed"? Seems like a normal reaction to deplorable behavior. Calling it "gamed" kind of proves the point that this is about silencing actual criticism of actual bad behavior rather than some poor innocent creator getting slammed by random internet mobs looking for scalps. How do you defend her buying herself an award in a transparent attempt to paste over her behavior?
The dislike button on YouTube videos is one of the few remaining signals that what you are seeing is propaganda.
It hadn't occurred to me that this would happen (although it seems obvious) and it is unexpectedly frightening to me.
I suppose the fallback will be videos with comments enabled, where people can 'like' a comment who is saying something common sense and reasonable in response to the content.
I believe it is because they see themselves as 'above' YouTube. They don't take the risk of having a Emacs/Vim flame war in the comments and detracting from the points in the video. By disabling comments, the conversation is kept civil, because it isn't there.
They are not resourceful enough to curate a forum, so they prefer no forum at all.
I know K-12 educators who post videos primarily for their students and fellow local teachers, and they disable comments and voting because bored kids will fill the comments with crap, and scammers will target the kids.
Yes, but cause and effect are reversed from the teacher's perspective. They mark the video as "made for kids" because that's the easiest way to disable comments.
My first thought was that comments in many online spaces, including youtube, can simply be mean. If I was responsible for the online presence of a course I wouldn't want my lecturers to have to deal with random people commenting on their bad haircut or annoying voice, for example.
It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform. It's an expense to have someone going through comments.
Most organizations (education, government, for-profit, NPO, you name it) that use Twitter rarely if ever interact with any other Twitter account except for preplanned promotional stuff. If you noticed, Twitter added the ability to limit replies. That was solely to please the corporate world who don't like it when someone jumps on the stage that is their platform.
McDonalds doesn't like it when they tweet about their "green initiative" and PETA replies to the tweet with something about beef using x amount of land and y water compared to other food sources, or just a GIF of a cow getting slaughtered. BMW doesn't like it if they tweet about how much they spend on training techs for "world class service" but someone replies with a picture of an engine with a hole in the block because a dealer tech forgot to tighten the oil plug properly after an oil change. Limiting tweet replies means that tweeting for corporations is now a "safe space."
There's an entire business segment dedicated to providing tools to social media teams to alert them if someone who actually is "important" interacts with their social media account. Patrick Stewart tweets about his Juicero blows a fuse? He gets a replacement hand-delivered by a young marketing intern in a star trek uniform who gushes about how she grew up being a fan of "Bev."
You tweet about your juicero blowing a fuse? Nobody at Juicero even sees the tweet, because their social media monitoring tool looked at your profile, saw you rarely get more than 30 views and 2-3 engagements, and knew you represented zero threat to the brand.
It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform.
If by they you mean Google then I agree. Google reaps the benefits, to the tune of billions, while deflecting as much accountability as possible. Google's entire m.o. is to build enormous scale through software automation without providing any human-level support to its users. Large changes (like the removal of dislike counts) are made only under pressure from powerful groups, unless Google deems such changes to be profitable.
It's a signal that the creator does not want do engage in moderate / discussion on YouTube. There's perfectly valid reasons for that (e.g. topic is controversial, video is only for embedding or archiving on YouTube, there's no social media manager, the video is for kids). It is not a good signal for the video being not worth your time.
Otoh creators can delete comments. So the comments existing and being positive about a video is not a good signal for the video being good either.
While I personally haven’t noticed comments being on or off as useful, just because a signal could have multiple factors doesn’t necessarily render it useless.
For example, a Yelp rating itself is useless until you also combine other signals such as the number of reviews, the type of restaurant, and the popularity of Yelp use in an area, and then I find Yelp ratings potentially very useful. Same with Amazon reviews, Rotten Tomatoes scores, or any scoring or review system.
Many young content creators have comments disabled (or by parental decree) so they don't have to experience intentionally hurtful or negative trolling some comment sections are well known in spawning.
Not exactly young here, but I disable contents for this reason among many others. I will not make my own videos a platform for intentionally hurtful comments, off-topic arguments between commentators, or rants.
Some other reasons:
I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior.
Also, disabling comments helps me to communicate that they are not a channel I monitor for feedback or questions. I just don't have the time to monitor them, and in Youtube's case this means I either have a potential commenting cesspool on my hands or no comments at all.
To some people this is a huge red flag maybe, but I would wonder if they really understand what it's like to be a publisher on the platform. Again and again I have seen good channels derailed by the absolutely broken commenter-publisher feedback loop...
> I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior.
It is not in the interests of almost any site or platform operator to limit drama, trolling, etc. They want the page views, the time spent in-app/on site, the emotional energy and investment.
Look at celebrities. The job of their publicists is to negotiate with other publicists to manufacture some inconsequential tiff that puts the names of their clients in the media.
You say this like it's a bad thing, and not a person setting boundaries for how they are willing to interact with an audience.
But you drop "censorship" front and center about some random dude's YouTube channel and you're doing some sterling fearmongering throughout the thread in general so I'm going to be honest, I gotta think this is less about any sort of freedom to speech and rather about the privilege of being granted time on somebody else's soapbox--the demand to listened to.
You must not frequent the same subset of videos I watch.
The amount of trolling (or just outright stupidity, hard to tell sometimes) on e.g. CS conference videos or lectures by women is insane. I entirely understand that the organizations putting those videos up don't want to deal with that nonsense.
Aren't the channel owners allowed to delete comments? So comments being enabled could mean it's a good video or it could mean the author is removing comments. You can't tell which it is.
I suspect that your notion of what qualifies as propaganda differs significantly from most people.
Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate.
The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.
I think the problem is that the dislike count itself is too aggregated. What you really want is to know if people similar to yourself like / dislike certain content.
This is very similar to the problems where YouTube fits you into filter bubbles, and Netflix struggles to tell you good recommendations. TikTok supposedly does a better job then others at this, likely due to having lots of signals from short videos.
>The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.
We have this problem with movie reviews as well. I lost all faith in Rotten Tomatoes when I saw Knock Down the House's viewer ranking go from the upper 80s to single digits over the course of two years. As more and more people found out that AOC was a star in the film, the score went down. It is a great film in my opinion. I wrote a script to scrape the reviews and provide details about the reviewers. So many 1 star reviews were new accounts that had just rated this film + maybe the Ilhan Omar film. Furthermore most of them don't even explain why they rated it that way(we all probably know why). This led me to think, what else is being manipulated? Are studios just buying up good reviews?
Recently they have introduced "Verified Reviews". This attempts to link your Rotten Tomatoes account with the movie theater so you can get a Verified Review checkmark if they have confirmed that you actually bought a ticket to the movie. Users can then filter on Verified reviews. This is a good first step and will probably help to curb abuse.
> Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate.
And who exactly are these nebulous people? This sounds like something O'Brien from 1984 would say about Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers.
Any asymmetrically engaged group is going to lead to metrics that aren't generally useful. In little bubbles, sure, but to everyone else it's just digital pollution.
Imagine that there was a group that really, really hated the color green, and they're so passionate that they fly "We Hate Green" flags outside their house, completely tie their identity with hating green, go to we hate green rallies (imagine having that little respect for your own time?), wear we hate green shirts, make up childish "We Hate Green" code words (e.g. Let's Go Purple!) for when they are among the greenies, and these people seemed to have endless idle time to sit brigading every bit of content to downvote it or leave nasty comments because something in the video was green. That is just noise to everyone else. Everyone else -- the majority of the public -- finds no value in their hyper-polarized, agenda-driven contributions.
And I'm not just talking about people who like green, but people who are indifferent or even anti-green but they don't find any value in having a review bombed because this idle group was mad that they thought it was "green woke".
Reddit did this same thing, for the same reason. Can't have people disliking an advertisement posed as a submission! that would hurt Reddit's appeal to advertisers.
This was one of the major inflection points for worsening quality of content on reddit, and it will be for Youtube too. For exactly the reason you've described.
Notably, HN does this too for the YC company job ads shown on the HN front page. Allowing users to comment on your job ad will inevitably lead to negative content so HN disables it.
(Though compared to reddit ads, these job listing have a very light touch. And they’re just a free perk for YC companies)
It's a signal that people don't like what they are hearing. If the propaganda aligns with their interests, the majority will like it. It's not a good signal for gauging propaganda in my opinion.
It seems most people are engaging with YouTube in the same bubbles as any other social media platform.
The "propaganda" videos I see (when searching for them) on YouTube don't have large dislike ratios, they are very much liked by the people who consume that content. An example is PragerU videos.
> How does the dislike button indicate propaganda?
Take the Gillette ad as a great example. No dislike button? Now the “lack of downvotes” can be used to indicate the normalization of such propaganda and imply people support the message.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and your comments in this thread have moved the thread noticeably in that direction.
Fair enough, though I'm a little confused at the gigantic threads that have remained unflagged that basically make the same statement (albeit from the "other side" - that YouTube is defending Democrats, the White House, etc).
It is impossible to discuss this without it becoming ideological, and the asymmetry is exactly why it is a massive problem.
I'm not sure which threads you're talking about, but it's probably a combination of (a) they're not breaking the site guidelines as much and/or (b) they haven't gotten moderator attention (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) - we don't come close to seeing everything and we don't necessarily read the threads in sequence.
The "you made me do this!" tactic is as old as time. In your case, the claim is that YouTube not hosting ignorant anti-vax content, and Biden making a factual claim about the unvaccinated, made people (at least proxies that substantiate your story) not get vaccinated. Therefore, YouTube and Biden are actually to blame!
Nonsense.
I was going to put the cart back in the corral, but then I saw the sign asking me to put the cart back and that offended me because now it's a demand and not a courtesy! The store is to blame that I left it rolling in the lot.
Whatever terrible, selfish thing people do, there is an argument they make where actually it is everyone else's fault.
The issue with depending on comments is that the next step is to disable them whenever the sentiment turns decidedly negative.
Your use of the word "frightening" is an understatement in my opinion. Using the dislike button to add to the dislike count is a form of speech, and YouTube is silencing it. Given the growing disconnect between reality and content produced by the mainstream media, politicians, etc., YouTube should be increasing options for the masses to warn others about content, not decimating them.
Yes! I'm against this decision, but dislikes are so unreliable as indicators of propaganda that they might as well not be there. All they indicate is how the video was received by its audience (duh), and decent propaganda is designed to rig this game.
The only times I remember seeing a high dislike-to-like ratio are on things that went viral in the wrong circles, so internet decided to mass-downvote the for inconsequential reasons, like Rebecca Black's Friday or the announcement for some video game that isn't made to appeal to the "core gaming public".
The media had ruled and controlled the western world with propaganda for the whole 20th century, from newspapers in early 1900s to TVs in late 1900s. We had a very brief period of people escaping the matrix through the internet and communicating through alternative channels, that little blip of media sandbox escape brought Trump and the Brexit and the corporates and media have been working hard to regain control of means of communication ever since.
Be glad you got to live through this very brief period of awakening because they are about to return everyone back into the darkness again.
See also Revolt of the Public, which explores the consequences of the internet breaking monopoly control over the flow of information. As you point out, it's the alternative channel that gave rise to unauthorized voices. What we're seeing play out is a fight between the dissenting public and the ruling elites. Removing dislikes is just the latest in a series of moves to reassert control over information.
You'll find that HN, just like any other community, is largely conformist on major social/political issues.
It came as a shock to me at first, but now I simply accept that people are wired for self-preservation via cognitive compartmentalization.
People here will argue vim/emacs for weeks, but will happily repeat mainstream media talking points on every major social/political issue.
This is why I restrict my usage of online communities based on expertise now. I will find world class programmers/scientists on HN, but those same geniuses will be hilariously ignorant on history/politics.
Such is life. HN is definitely not a one-stop shop, but it's unrivalled for anything STEM related.
I wonder if someone can produce an extension like SponsorBlock to add the functionality back. Surely this must be coming after this announcement.
For people that don't know SponsorBlock is a magical extension that uses crowdsourced data to automatically skip in video advertisements/end title/start tile junk that youtubers tend to do. What an amazing show of the power of software and intuitive thinking.
Except that groups have a proven track-record of assembling masses to brigade things they loudly hate. And since most people don't downvote, a determined group of downvoters can send a hyper-loud signal.
Personally, I think this is all flowing from a fundamental problem: there is no concept of "credibility" with upvotes and downvotes. As conservatives are fond of saying "facts don't care about your feelings", but all our social media use feelings to determine which "facts" get the loudest boost.
Any system that uses a raw number of votes (be they up or down) as a weighting score is basically encouraging botnets, brigades, etc. Like, every climate activist has a swarm of climate-change deniers following them around online and I consider their opinions worse than useless.
Exactly. Public opinion polls show that the COVID vaccine is widely accepted. Yet every COVID-related video on the front page has an 80% or more dislike ratio. Antivaxxers have hijacked the dislike tool to spread their propaganda, and the correct response is to take their toys away.
Yes, but my feeling is that we go a step further. And I suspect most social media companies are already doing this under the hood:
Just as Google graphs the relationships between sites and uses that to rank them, also graph the relationships between users and use that to rank them.
Like, important figure who's followed by numerous media experts and is consistently upvoted by respected people? Their opinion has weight. 1000 score per updoot.
Crank who has few followers, gets all their news from extremists on youtube, and does nothing but hurl insults at politicians all day? 0.01 score per updoot.
It's not democratic, but information isn't a democracy.
Let them keep upvoting and downvoting. And take that information for what it's worth.
Controversial videos, or those by controversial creators, are the ones that get brigaded. If you're inside a filter bubble and can't see a dislike count how will you know what you're looking at is controversial? Yes, the ratio is not representative of the general population but it's the signal that matters.
Would you rather not know something is controversial?
What mechanism would you prefer for nudging people outside of filter bubbles?
I'm happy to be generous and consider all videos with heavy dislike ratios as victims of brigading and not of public sentiment.
What does that even mean? What makes you think saying yes to vaccine but no to vaccine mandates means they don't "accept the vaccine"?
> Additionally, most people agree with the mandates
From the latest poll [1] (conducted between 11/05-11/07):
> Table POL11: Even if neither is exactly correct, which of the following comes closest to your opinion? Government mandates to receive a COVID-19 vaccine
44% of registered voters say they violate the rights of Americans
45% of registered voters say they protect the rights of Americans
> What does that even mean? What makes you think saying yes to vaccine but no to vaccine mandates means they don't "accept the vaccine"?
Most videos about the COVID vaccine that we're talking about are simply stating that the vaccines are effective and safe. Calling those "propaganda" and "lying" is not accepting the truth about the vaccine.
> From the latest poll [1] (conducted between 11/05-11/07):
Vaccine mandate support is ahead by 1 point in this poll, yet COVID videos with correct information about the vaccine on YouTube are 80%+ dislikes. Precisely my point.
> The dislike button on YouTube videos is one of the few remaining signals that what you are seeing is propaganda.
It is a dangerously noisy signal and this change is long overdue. Every COVID-related video on the front page of YouTube is spammed to high heaven with dislikes and "PLANDEMIC"s and "let's go Brandon!"s from right-wing antivaxxers. It's gotten to the point where YouTube is the premier distributor of antivax propaganda—only YouTube puts it one click away from the top of the fold even when not logged in—and it's a major threat to public health.
In the past, people needed to learn to not take random negative opinions on the internet seriously. Now they don't allow them directly.
More seriously: I can understand people feeling bad for negative opinions on their own content (it's hard and you need to feel it directly to be able to understand), however if they do want to protect creators which can't protect themselves, make it invisible for the creators themselves, like a button to "don't see dislikes on my own videos". Those creators will probably be unaware of the fact they are being disliked and learn from it, but at least viewers won't be disturbed.
On google maps the most informative reviews are the negative ones... even if the ratio is highly biased to 5-star ratings, the few negative ratings usually leak the more honest opinions which help you qualify the positive reviews.
This feels like one of those changes where they already decided to do it and used an experiment to justify their decision. The binary choice between showing only raw dislikes or no dislikes as well tilts the table towards an extreme change.
There's lots of interesting design choices they could have made of not encouraging dislike storms while still giving valuable info to viewers like highlighting if any video has an unusually high dislike to like ratio or attaching comments to dislikes and highlighting highly upvoted reasons why certain people are choosing to dislike a video etc.
Can't even remember the last time I looked at likes/dislikes of any video I watched. Play count stopped having meaning (to me) at least a decade ago.
That said, a couple of years ago I somehow ended up on a channel with literally hundreds of videos. I swear, the average view count of this woman's session was way below one. I just wonder how is that even possible. Spent about 10 minutes clicking on random videos and well, it was sad. Real sad. I wonder if she would've kept going if numbers were hidden. I think she would've bailed long time ago.
Unfortunately, like Facebook before it, this change signals to me that YouTube is for an older generation now and is on its way to being irrelevant in the future. It was a nice ride, though.
My comment on their post: (Nobody will read it there but you fine folk might)
> Just letting you know that I have unsubscribed from youtube premium and will actively be looking for youtube alternatives for content consumption (and creation in the future ?). While the dislike button has potential for abuse there is also potential for abuse by having no feedback mechanism. There are tons of DIY/informative videos on youtube where the information is wrong and can hurt viewers, what happens when someone unsuspecting installs a virus on their computer or gets scammed ? What happens when someone buys a product whose quality is extremely poor ? Does youtube take responsibility ? No, because you are a platform and had no role. I don't mind if you want to monitor the dislikes for abuse but this is taking it too far. I also don't mind creators manually switching off the bar for their videos.
At the end of the day you are manufacturing consent for your users as per the demands of your corporation friends and advertisers. You want a happy place where everything is happy and joyful with no abuse and attacking but alas that is not the world in which we live. Have fun and make profits hacking the brains of the viewers you "say" you care about for your advertisers and corporate friends.
My take is that YouTube is intending for this to increase engagement, by removing signals that might push away viewers from consuming more content.
If excessive social media use is correlated with damage to mental health, then framing this as beneficial sounds contradictory. Now that social media platforms have reached a critical mass, they should be judged not just for being toxic and user-hostile, but also for being too effective at accepting and retaining people for excessive amounts of time.
This isn’t about small content creators. It’s almost certainly about big brands (advertisers) that hate it when their high budget movie/game/trailer/whatever gets publicly downvoted.
This could also be a pride thing for Youtube/Alphabet. For the past few years the Youtube Rewind video [0] has somewhat infamously gotten heavily downvoted, mostly I think as a reflection of how frustrated viewers are with Youtube and maybe Alphabet as well. I'm sure the executives feel some catharsis taking away an avenue for users to express that frustration.
Rewind is kind of old news. Now that time YouTube CEO Susan
Wojcicki received a Free Expression Award from an organisation
sponsored by YouTube[1] is more recent and something else
completely, ratio-wise. Currently at 56,502 dislikes vs 226
likes. Which is a ratio of over 250×.
My take on it is that there is a number of diverse creators on the platform, and many YT users see a very different set of creators. E.g. You might see creators X, Y, Z and I might watch A, B, C for different topics. So, when it comes time to rewind, you can't please everyone since you'll have to pick a subset of creators. And then those who didn't see their favorite creators will be saying things like "Where was creator J? I watched so many of their videos, and they have a billion views, etc." And they might dislike the video, because they feel not represented. So, in my mind, the YT way to do rewind would be to do a custom rewind for each person (but there's no technology to automatically make a high quality video like that today).
Of course, this is just my theory about a segmentation of the population. Then there are people with their own agenda, and will use the dislike button as a protest for other things. Then once it reaches some threshold, some people just like to hit the dislike button to see how far they can push it.
Disclaimer: These are my own views, and not of my employer.
That being said, there is no globally-visible '%age of viewers like this' value on each title. Instead, thumbs up/down seems to be used as probably one of many signals in the '% match' (how likely are you to enjoy it) metric.
Whitehouse youtube also had an embarrassing number of dislikes.
Dislike is incredibly useful to the user. Seeing a high dislike count on video (with some exceptions) indicates a video is likely not what it purports to be.
Yup. I guess I'll use Youtube less, then. The downvote ratio contains so much information as to what video is garbage.
Less than 80% approval -> I don't watch.
I use a Ratings Preview chrome extension to show me the downvotes next to the thumbnails, and it will be rendered useless. I guess I'll just stop getting into Youtube rabbitholes now.
Note: the downvote ratio is a noisy (and sometimes misleading) signal.
From my personal perspective, most vaccine related videos have high % of dislikes. And bunch of videos implying Ivermectine as a cure videos have a high % of likes. I think the dislike ratio is not as valuable to many of these videos.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employer.
They explained in a related post that people were being harassed for hiding it or hiding comments... (Replace people with "brands" and we can infer their true motivation)
Yeah, I fear that some people will see massive dislike ratio on vaccination related videos and think "oh, yeah, vaccination is really unpopular. Maybe I should be listening to what people are saying against it. I don't want to get singled out. No one is getting vaccinated" etc. It seems like it becomes a circle jerk, and a way to "protest", rather than it being an actual signal.
Disclaimer: These views are entirely my own, and not of my employer.
Is it a good thing that an average person is getting fewer and fewer ways to participate in the exchange of ideas? Has this ever worked well in history where less speech was enabled was actually progress?
Is the future of humanity only that corporate-approved ideas and protests are allowed in the public square? Could this ever backfire in the future?
An average person might get their speech silenced when they get some fact wrong. Does the mass media suffer that same fate when they get something wrong? What are the consequences of effectively creating unequal classes of people?
Just a few random questions and thoughts that this line of thinking leads to, in my opinion.
In this thread, a number of posts seem to be some people hyperventilating at the thought of "hate speech" and "misinformation" being allowed on the Internet.
Short of building a time machine and going back and heeding Senator McCarthy's warning, the solutions are very simple in my opinion.
1) Really teach people that words have no power over you unless you let them.
> Sticks and stones may break my bones
> But words shall never hurt me.
Internalize this and voila: any "hate speech" that exists is de facto powerless to harm you.
Society has unfortunately taken the opposite approach and acts as if the existence of hate is harmful by itself and magnifies it to an extreme.
2) Teach people that everything you read online should be considered fake news until you verify it.
Voila. You're immune to fake news, medical misinformation, authoritarian government propaganda, and anything else that's not real.
Society has unfortunately taken the opposite approach and wants to have the political establishment "fact check" and decide what's true for you.
This post comes off as being sarcastic. Here is a question: are you OK with hate speech on social media? If yes, then I don't think we can agree on much. If no, then please re-read your statement and see how it applies to hate speech.
>"Here is a question: are you OK with hate speech on social media? If yes, then I don't think we can agree on much."
And now we circle back to the classic question, who determines what constitutes hate-speech and who is responsible for making the judgement? The kinds of people who end up as censors tend to be the most sensitive and the false-positive rate is very high. There is no shortage of partisan activists willing to indiscriminately label things as racist or hateful these days.
Additionally, what constitutes misinformation that costs lives? I remember back when claiming sanitizing surfaces did not reduce the spread of COVID was misinformation and grounds for a ban on social media platforms. Turns out, sanitizing surfaces really doesn't slow Covid at all. So much of what we know to be 'true' is actually in-flux and subject to change as more time and research goes on.
My point is, wanting to restrict hate-speech and misinformation is not a dangerous thing in and of itself, but it should be done with great caution and hesitancy because you run the risk of censoring true information and preventing people from expressing ideas that run against the orthodoxy of the censors. I hope that people don't view things as black and white as 'allow hate-speech, yes or no?'
> and health misinformation is costing a lot of lives today
Thats a pretty cynical view of humanity - should we ban motorcycles because they are costing peoples lives? What is so bad about letting people make their own choices?
> are you OK with hate speech on social media
I believe in "free speech".
For example, is it even possible for you to tell me an objective definition of "hate" speech or "misinformation"? I bet you can't since it ends up being whatever Alphabet, or Meta's truth and morality departments agree on.
Without ways to express yourself the internet will just turn into TV - where people who agree with the megacorps get to hear their own echos all day.
> Thats a pretty cynical view of humanity - should we ban motorcycles because they are costing peoples lives? What is so bad about letting people make their own choices?
Ridiculous analogy. We're talking about preventing the spread of a lethal contagious disease. If driving a motorcycle made everyone around them unsafe then it would be a valid comparison.
> driving a motorcycle made everyone around them unsafe
Not totally untrue
> We're talking about preventing the spread of a lethal contagious disease
Getting vaccinated doesn't stop the spread... if you believe everything you hear our government officials say then I have a war in Iraq and a truck-load of cloth masks to sell you.
Lets bring it back to that specific example someone brought up, which is vaccination. Do you think it a good thing, personally, for less people to be vaccinated?
Do you think censoring people would help encourage vaccines?
The key point here is the treatment of those opposing certain views as clearly stupid and in need of protecting is toxic and non-productive. Is Joe Rogan a mindless Trump-voting retard?
You're not going to reach people by silencing creators - you're just going to make their viewers feel prosecuted, angry, and confused. They'll just move to other platforms and probably vote for Trump again...
The way to reach them would be through dialog etc. which is getting more impossible by the day.
It was a simple question. Do you want less people to be vaccinated?
The other person suggested that less people might be vaccinated, and your response was to talk about "bad think", and "changes or influences others", where the specific topic is "changes or influences others" to cause less people to be vaccinated.
This implies that you, for some reason want less people to be vaccinated, and that it was a good thing to "changes or influences others", in such a way as less people get vaccinated.
> other person suggested that less people might be vaccinated
And I am suggesting more people might get vaccinated if they are treated as intelligent and allowed to engage in dialog instead of being shadow-banned and removed.
I am saying its a good thing that videos are allowed which encourage people to not get vaccinated or contain information about vaccines not coming from a news network, because the alternative (censorship) is barbaric and unhelpful.
But that would be bad if that happened right? If people got encouraged to not get vaccinated, that would be bad?
> is barbaric and unhelpful.
You think that it is barbaric that a dislike button is not available on one single platform? Because that is what the other comment was about. It was about the dislike button.
It was not about videos being removed en-mass. Instead it was about a dislike button, on one platform.
> If people got encouraged to not get vaccinated, that would be bad?
Yea of course, and thats my point. I think banning these videos and the ability to show discontent makes the problem worse and further divides us on political lines. What exactly is your argument here?
> You that that it is barbaric that a dislike button is not available on one platform?
The removal of the dislike button is another step in an undeniable trend toward censorship against anything mega corps and governments decide is not moral or truthful.
People can tell when they are being herded around and silenced, and they dislike it.
Great, so then you would agree then, if someone's "opinions especially if it changes or influences others." caused other people to not get vaccinated, that that would be very bad, and that it would be a good idea to make sure this person is less successful, in their ability to influence others to do that.
No. I would not agree with that. I am opposed to limiting peoples' "ability to influence". People need to have a voice and debates and discussion need to be allowed to happen.
Otherwise you are not changing people's minds, you are simply making their voices disappear from your computer screen.
I think my above question was just answered here. I think YouTube is more aligned with the cultural movement of "positive things only" and only with certain ideas, i.e. COVID vaccine. I think it is a smart business idea for them.
> I think YouTube is more aligned with the cultural movement of "positive things only" and only with certain ideas, i.e. COVID vaccine.
I don't think you can conclude that from the above. My point was that dislike ratios attacks basically abuse the feature that previously provided valuable signal to the user on whether the video was of good quality. Now, this removes the incentive for dislike ratio attacks to abuse this feature.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employer.
I'm a little surprised no one reached for the obvious humor here:
Google spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn humans will create mobs.
This was such an obvious/good change to make. Viewers will still be able to use views:upvotes ratio for determining a video's popularity/worth. A mob won't want to attack that ratio because a high view count could encourage more views.
Judging by what's bubbling up on HN, I guess I'm in the minority on this one.
> We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video–still, we believe this is the right thing to do for our platform, and to help create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves.
It's very sad that this is the only instance in the announcement where they mention viewers, and the reasons cited has nothing to do with viewers' interest.
YouTube has shown the viewers's interests are not very important to them. About a year ago they greatly increased the number of ads, and it does seem over the past few months they have tweaked the algorithm to merch more clickbaity/mainstream videos. Helping me find interesting content just doesn't seem to be what YouTube cares about at all.
This is bad for us users because we will get less information and won't know what contents are being rejected and what's being accepted.
This is good for their ad business department because more users will click on play, incrementing the view count and generating more ad impressions.
This is good for their PR/Law departments because famous people and politicians will be less likely to complain about mass rejection.
I'm always surprised at how often dislike is used on YouTube. I don't think I've ever clicked it. I probably should more for clickbait videos, but it just doesn't seem like a big problem otherwise. Like, why do people click dislike on a Justin Bieber video. I'm confident that 95% of those are people that just hate Justin -- but why then even go to the video to watch it? Just to voice your displeasure?
I'm sure this is to appease brands and we can say a lot about that.
But I want to focus on one big problem with dislikes and down votes. It applies to Youtube, Reddit, HN and probably everywhere you can dislike something: too often people use it simply because they disagree with the opinion expressed or simply dislike to creator or author.
This really diminishes the value of downvoting (IMHO) and I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to address it by figuring out who these opinion downvoters are and just shadow banning them, specifically you let them interact with the UI elements but it doesn't do anything. My theory is you'd get a much better result.
You also have people who review bomb things and I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's a way to express dissatisfaction with, say, company actions (eg ridiculous DRM) and that has value.
You also see things like on restaurant reviews "giving one star because even though the food was excellent and we had a reservation for 4 at 7pm on Friday night, we had to wait 45 minutes when we turned up at 8pm with a party of 11".
I am inclined to think that downvoting and dislikking actually has pretty limited value with the way people use it.
Was watching YT shorts, and all you see is the likes. Lots of likes, and I was thinking who watches this crap.
Thankfully the comments made me realize I am not alone in this though. Wish I could have wasted less time by having the amount of dislikes listed.
Now I am going to have to do the same method on YT videos as I do shorts, where I go look at the comments first which is unfortunate.
Stupid move from YT but was warned it was going to happen.
I'm listening to a "Spaces" chat about this on Twitter right now, and I tend to disagree with the consensus, but I don't have a voice there.
As a viewer, who uses YouTube for educational/learning reasons, dislike ratio is really important for me to know whether I should or should not spend the hour or sometimes more to watch it, rather than go find something else which may be better.
The pessimist in me sees this as a way for YouTube to take away that knowledge you'd have up front, forcing you to watch a video (and the adverts it contains) before you can decide whether it was worth your time.
The pragmatist in me however believes that if we're going to remove dislike counts, we should remove like counts, but again, the pessimist sees this as something that wouldn't benefit YouTube.
Ultimately, given that people are being abused through the counter, I accept the removal of its utility and will probably just bounce out of videos that may or may not have been suitable much more quickly.
For the record, I believe I may have _clicked_ dislike, no more than a handful of times ever for really, truly poor "content".
That's not a feature we need. We need to know like/dislike ratio BEFORE clicking on a video so that we can avoid clicking on it. I end up clicking on so many spam videos cause Youtube doesn't tell you that simple number. For example, looking for sports highlights right after a game usually ends up with tens of spammy results with fake titles trying to take advantage of trendy topics.
Years ago on zeit.de, the online version of the German newspaper, you could sort the user comments by upvotes. But the most upvoted comments often happened to be quite critical of the articles or what might be called the political mainstream. Then at some point the button for sorting by upvotes was removed, and has been absent ever since. I felt somewhat reminded of this sudden disappearence.
In other words "High dislike count in our videos hurts our ability to make more money so we don't want people to leave when they see others disliking the video, better we don't want other to dislike, only like and see count of how many likes"
- IMO a fair decision would have been to remove count for both dislikes and likes if they really cared about bias but they don't.
Its a simplistic solution to a serious problem that plagues all social platforms. If anything we need more qualifiers not fewer: The like/dislike choice is creating an artificial binarity that doesn't exist in real life.
Organized like/dislike campaigns motivated by whatever commercial or political or other reasons are facilitated by a sense of impunity and unaccountability.
We could all use a little more “thinking for yourself” in this age or social media. I laid the move. The dislike button should be used to share what I dislike and use that genuinely to recommend content that I will like. Seeing the number only biases me one way or the other and doesn’t even give me the opportunity to consider how I really feel in the first place.
There were videos with a exact issue I am searching for in the title. When the ratio to dislike to like is huge I can know that they didn't address the issue properly in the video. When they take away this functionality, I have to watch and waste my time or refer comments(if the creator didn't disable that, which is another red flag)
It seems like YouTube just shuts off any interaction whenever a problem crops up. The "fix" for issues with comments on children's videos was to disable all comments on the videos.
Which works, I suppose, but if you take it to it's logical conclusion we'll end up with there simply being no user interaction at all.
> Our experiment data confirmed that this behavior does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.
Why not simply hide the vote count (either way) until a certain threshold of votes is reached? This could be set higher for channels that are just starting out. Below a certain vote count, I personally don’t see much value anyway.
Funny thing about that.... I never pay any attention to the likes or dislikes or even the comments. I sample the video and if I like it I watch and if not move on to the next. Can't be even the leaset bit bothered by the social interaction noise. I'm surprised to here that others actually take meaning from it.
So I read through the comments more and many deal with quality of content - for example instructions that are flat out wrong. I viewed a video on how to change spark plugs in Honda 6 cylinder car. The content creator gave the instruction to put dielectric grease right on the tip of the spark plug. I found a comment that pointed out how utterly stupid this was. Yet the comment was pushed lower by many comments praising the contect creator for his helpful video. So I have to conclude that down votes are a usefull tool. Even if they are misused.
Take this with a grain of salt, but in one of Devon Nash's videos on YouTube, he mentioned (without a source) that YouTube did a study that looked at likes and dislikes. They tweaked the algorithm based on videos that were heavily liked or disliked, and what they found is that likes and dislikes don't matter (for them). It's all about engagement.
So... People will hate watch someone they don't like, and comment on the video about how stupid that person is. These videos with high engagement end up serving lots of ads, and YouTube makes money either way. So my tinfoil hat is that when YouTube recommends a video, before if I saw the heavy dislike bar I might think, "Why is YouTube recommending this bad video to me?" But with dislikes private, I might just engage with the video and think less about why the algorithm recommended it to me.
The problem with promoting/ranking disliked content is that it may be disliked for valid reasons, like low production quality or annoying elements like bad music etc...
I think that when it comes to engagement, Youtube should just police content fairly, apply countermeasures to prevent gaming the system, and allow valid/trusted user accounts to have merit in rating content. There is no easy answer ultimately.
Here's my view: Removing down voting is FAANG's (=big corps) and MSM's reaction of many users down voting (in my eyes rightfully so) videos from public institutions who spread nothing else than propaganda. FAANG and MSM are now afraid that this sentiment contaminates other citizens.
Ding ding ding! This is right on the money. The next time that some admin hack comes out talking about "transitory inflation", there will be no high dislike count to undermine the message. It's all about keeping us unquestioning and obedient. Anyone who thinks this is remotely related to "protecting creators" is delusional.
People are talking about how this will make it difficult to get good information. And that is true. No one will downvote videos now, because publicly expressing your disapproval was the only reason to do so.
Now, the only people who will downvote are people who are technically savvy enough to realize that downvoting will help YouTube recommend better videos to them.
It's a shame, YouTube is one of the last platforms where publicly expressing your disapproval via a voting system is possible. And I think this has an effect on the nature of internet discourse. Look at the difference in conversations on Twitter vs Reddit. On Twitter, if you see something that you disagree with, you leave an (often ad hominem) comment. On Reddit, you just downvote, and feel equally satisfied.
For me dislike speaks volumes. Googles reasoning seems to misguide people to drive more ads. Plain simple and effective. Decision to protect content creator masquerading as earn more at the expense people times. Well now we need to create new Chrome addon something for this shit.
The like:dislike ratio is so important when picking a tutorial video. If I see a video on replacing my headlights has an awful ratio, I'm going to save myself the time and find a different video. YouTube has been disappointing me for years now, mostly with their hiding of things. Subscriptions don't work the same as they used to and recommended videos take precedence over everything else.
The issue is that it's so critical to learning these days, and so much of the entertainment I consume comes from it. Can't say I'm surprised though. Social media has it's positives and enjoyable properties, but in the end, they will manipulate the platform in the most fiscally advantageous way.
As much as I would love to give the benefit of the doubt, this is purely about increasing engagement. Disliking something was a very easy way to say I don't like this.
When something controversial happens from now onwards, you will have engage in the comment section. Humans cannot just move on when they have strong feelings about something like Politics or Climate change for example. With the dislike button gone, most people will feel the need to say you don't like/agree with a video. How do you do that? Comments. The negative engagement makes Youtube/Google money. This has been a known fact for a long time. This way they can cash on it more with increased engagement.
I don't think I've ever looked at likes/dislikes for a youtube video. I also don't engage in most up/downvote systems on average. I am not sure how much of an outlier I am, but I wouldn't notice this being gone at all.
So many videos the last year has been downvoted severely because people see through all the bullshit being peddled by the mass media.
YouTube has been censoring and removing any content they can that is against the narrative being created by the mass media.
Large news stations have disabled comments on their videos to try and prevent dissent from being publicly viewable. Some of those videos has so many downvotes, it's hilarious to watch how the users are no longer sleeping and instead reacting to the bullshit.
And now, when censoring and disabling comments still can't hide the enormous dissent, they try to remove even the downvote button.
I'm usually of the opinion that the more information the better, but I also think that the dislike/downvote button adds a lot to the toxicity levels, mainly for comments. It's much better for a group to get excited about something and over-like it than for a group to get angry about something and over-dislike it.
So I guess I'd rather see the dislike button be removed more than I would like to use that information to inform me about the video in question. I don't tend to even look at how many likes vs. dislikes something has, anyway. My tastes are different enough from the norm that it isn't really that helpful of a statistic for me.
I wonder if they tried a different alternative where anyone can upvote, but only content creators with certain karma (say, 501 upvotes) are allowed to downvote. Some news sites do this and I wonder if things worked out better this way.
End of the site. There were many changes but this one will kill it in the long run. Aaaanyways, there competitors brewing up. Recently I visited Rumble, thinking "meh, one of these youtube clones again" only to be shocked that plenty of videos seem to be getting hundreds of thousands of views there. Odysee and Bitchute seem to be doing OK too? I don't know. On one hand it's sad to see Youtube go just because of Google disliking (no pun intended) that people can dislike their corporate messaging (rewind... anything biden related etc.), on the other hand Google can go to hell.
If they are worried about dislike attacks why don't they blind the data with delayed effects?? Like update of a dislike appears days later but you can still see a ratio of likes vs dislikes for the last year or so...
> You can apply for an exemption (to have dislike data on non-authenticated calls) as long as you don’t display or share dislike data with end your users.
Peertube/NewPipe + own API key with the exception will be the way to go now.
I read this as an example of my belief that unfettered engagement without a strong Code of Conduct enforced by human moderates always leads to a toxic community. Removing degrees of freedom in expression is necessary without such efforts to have and enforce standards.
For example, if you use Nintendo products, you can see that they rarely allow unfettered communication. For example, you can choose from a list of things to say, or you can choose an emotion to express, but you can't type whatever you want to other players on their network (usually).
Annoying like how they won't show ratings on search results, particularly annoying on fake movie trailers or generally anything fake like fake spacex live streams with crypto scams on top.
A lot of comments seem to think that this is a malicious decision made by the upper management of google for a variety of sinister reasons. I might be naive but i wonder if this isn't just a poorly thought out decision by somebody, the only motivation being that no dislikes will encourage more creators and thus increase advertising revenue. The poorly thought out part of this is that they are treating their users like plastic bags, but i think users are allowing themselves to be treated like that anyway.
I bet this is at least partially a result of their “awards show” where they awarded themselves all the awards getting a record amount of dislikes in record time, publicly embarrassing them.
It’s not clear from the article, and the linked manage your recommendations page, if and how dislikes affect the recommendation algorithm.
I want the dislike button to send a negative signal to the recommendation algorithm, but it seems to act more like an elevator door close placebo button. [0]
I am really just starting out my channel, so I am not sure I really understand what is the (real) purpose of this change. A dislike hurts somewhat, but it is unavoidable this to happen when you have a large public. I have not seen dislike attacks (not to say they don't exist), but I'm pretty sure they can be avoided with other tactics.
I suspect that not showing the dislikes drives up engagement, but in my experience as a user I rarely look at the number of dislikes to judge a video.
I always said that youtube is too successful and is looking for ways to get rid of users. Peak youtube, as far as pure power for users, was probably the late 2000s. 2016 was when things started to go downhill.
We have a lot of problems where our society has been too successful at its technological goal. Inequality, climate change, gun control. All areas where capitalist economics has produced wild success and enormous effort is diverted from other useful goals to control that success.
>Earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike count to see whether or not changes could help better protect creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks
I'd like to see the actual data. What metric was used to determine whether or not this change resulted in '[..] better protect creators from harassment'? Hopefully it wasn't something weak like opinion polls.
A data oriented company not sharing data from a scientific experiment makes me suspicious.
Regulatory hijacking but of private entity. Reddit, YouTube, and such have already made clear and they no longer pretend to care about free speech and instead have an agenda
This is not what users want and it's not surprising having now observed multiple rounds of YT censorship campaigns. One way ppl fight back against annoying political narrative videos is to downvote them to the mantle. That also gives everyone solace to know that most everyone else believes the opposite of said political narrative videos. Make no doubt about it, YT and their partners have gotten as political as hell in recent years.
The overwhelming sentiment to the decision here is negative, but I don't quite understand that reaction.
If YouTube was just looking out for big brands and/or advertisers, they could have restricted the change incredibly simply. By making it a global change they're saying "ok now we understand how our UI actually led to some pretty bad outcomes in ways we failed to anticipate, and we're fixing that".
It’s because they aren’t objectively bad outcomes. For the content creators it may be bad. But if the content creator is creating, say, authoritarian propaganda, the outcome for the audience is good when the dislike count goes through the roof and helps spread the message that whatever has been published is being rejected by the audience.
* clickbait headline videos that don't deliver - ie, content in thumbnail never shows
* obviously some political content has been getting dislikes which is embarrassing and risks govt coming after them. Trump threatened this and dems are also now making noise here, so these platforms are vulnerable.
* Dislikes were pretty rare, usually in my case I had to be really annoyed at something to dislike it. I didn't mind scams that were properly described, but some stuff is annoying because it's a bait and switch.
I watch a lot of DIY and gardening videos. Occasionally a video gives bad or even dangerous advice and a high dislike ratio can at least indicate that something is off. Comments are also useful to figure out what the creator is doing wrong, but the dislike ratio is a big indicator. This is a terrible move.
Well, at least they didn't blame the weather for this. The levels of dishonesty are just rather breathtaking at this point … and really concerning, because nothing at all good ever comes from dishonesty.
Anyone who has paid any attention at all knows exactly why they are doing away with the down vote count and it has nothing really to do with any sham experiment that is post hoc rationalization for a foregone conclusion.
YouTube used to have 5 star ratings, they got rid of that in 2010 [1]. If stars and dislikes are so bad, why do they have them in the Play Store. I wonder if Trip Advisor and Yelp are next with only likes.
A little experiment: on a limited sample of random videos, it seems like around 1 of 30 people watching will use the like/dislike button. Seeing that a video with 3.6 mil views that has only 9.5k likes would give you a rough estimation of how many people disliked it. Is there a real study on the subject? It seems like it could be used as some sort of heuristic if there is nothing better.
I dislike the information asymmetry this creates between the poster of a video and its viewers. 100K likes serves implicitly as a kind of social proof; no one but the poster gets to know if it also has 80K dislikes. So it's quite easy and natural to look at a video and think that it has some kind of societal approval. It would have been better to hide the number of likes, too.
This is not to support its users. Suddenly it is way harder to avoid the bad quality videos there is.
Perhaps someone has a good curator page/filter where only the good (perhaps 1000 / 50 ratio or so) videos are linked? I am a current premium user but find no use at all for this kind of policies and I find it rather annoying.
What's stupid, is (as long as comments are enabled) all someone needs to say is "I dislike/hate/loathe this video" and everyone who would have previously disliked the video, upvotes that comment (perhaps as well as...).
Although I guess it all counts as engagement, so win-win as far as YT are concerned.
HN allows downvoting of comments once you reach a certain amount of karma (500, I think). You can't downvote comments that are direct children of your own, however.
The more serious problem is when organized mobs , which may be politically motivated and even organized by oppressive states, use the report button to flag videos as inappropriate, which , as i understand, do not appear in recommendations and other listings. And youtube is very happy to remove those.
They wouldn't remove dislike counts across the board (seemingly with no opt-out?) if there wasn't a financial advantage to doing so. I don't believe this is because they think it's good for the community.
Is it any coincidence that, in an era where establishment media frequently gets highly ratio'd (look content from the White House, MSM, films with political agendas), an organization that relies on advertising as well as government contracts makes it convenient for said establishment to perpetuate the illusion that there is no dissent?
Let's put aside the possibility that getting brigaded with dislikes can be psychologically harmful to the individual.
How will there ever be actual revolts against the establishment if everyone believes there are no other dissenters? That's the real trouble behind making it impossible to share any negative sentiment on the internet, which is a pattern that mainstream platforms like Google/YouTube are continually edging towards, and it's a darker pattern than most people understand. The simplest way to prevent threats to your regime is to make it difficult, if not impossible for people who agree on the wrong things to recognize that they are not alone.
Hold on ravenstine... these are just dislikes on a bunch of dumb cat videos. You call that "dissent"?
When a piece of media with a wide audience is overwhelmingly disapproved of by that audience, that tells you something about reality. Being selectively exposed to only approved opinions is a disconnection from reality. If you aren't connected with reality, at best your ability to make predictions is impaired, and at worst you can be controlled without even knowing it. If you think you're the only one that disagrees with CorpGov propaganda, you are much more likely to sit on your ass, never getting up to vote, never getting up to protest, never expressing your disagreement with the establishment, because what would be the point? All you could do is accept that you are the crazy one and go with the flow, which happens to be highly convenient for the power structure.
Personally, I don't care that much in the case of YouTube because I believe it has peaked long ago and is begging for a serious replacement. But if all mainstream social media decides to go full speed ahead with this sort of reality manipulation YouTube is attempting today, then I think we are headed for trouble as a global/digital civilization.
A brilliant example of very-large-scale spontaneous cooperation: 12 years and 10.4M views, and the like/dislike ratio has been at equilibrium the whole time.
I can't help but think that this is just corporate bullshit.
Purely rationally speaking, I think whether or not a dislike amount is shown or not is not gonna be impactful for the things YouTube should optimize to become a better software product and company.
In order to battle fake news, misinformation and fostering a happy and global community, much more fundamental changes are appropriate. But those are inherently incompatible with the liquidity model Youtube/Google/Alphabet have chosen: Increasing shareholder value & profit.
When people are unable to express their disagreement with something in a civil way, they become uncivil. There is plenty of bad content on youtube that may not be against the law, but youtube allows it. I can quickly know if something is controversial by the like and dislikes.
You can't down vote Chinese leaders, and North Korean leaders speeches in their countries. Why should you be able to do in the West. Thanks Youtube, we can't do it here either now. Youtube, making the world a better place, and less embarrassing to our great leaders.
I don't think this is a good idea. To me one of the biggest problems with social media that propagates disinformation to large unquestioning audiences is that there are easy ways to reinforce the message and to see how much it resonates, but it is hard to gauge when an idea is controversial or if there are many people who disagree. It is worth way more to see dislike counts and ratios on dangerous content than to protect creators from the internet being mean at all costs.
From reading the other comments I am clearly in the minority here, but this is absolutely the right way to go. It’s the first and most simple means of destroying echo chamber bombing.
Visibility of voting only reinforces agreement ahead of any independent consideration.
They performed an experiment to see if removing the dislike button would mitigate brigade voting, or mob voting, especially against small creators. The results of their experiment, they say, is that it did address this issue.
That sounds like a great result!
The problem would be if they did not test any other side effect of removing the dislike button. For example, if the only thing they tested was whether it prevented mob downvoting in a small number of cases, and not whether it negatively affected the experience for a majority of users, the results of the experiment would not mean much. Based on the reaction, I am guessing this what they actually did.
(If they published their methodology and results somewhere, I apologize: I looked but did not find anything like this).
That's the problem with product research: it's often poorly designed, when it's not just designed to confirm a prior decision and back it up with some data.
No matter whether you agree or disagree with this change (good reasons for both sides in the comments), what does it say about our society that a minute UI change on a website by a private company can potentially cause huge consequence
There should have be an option for the content creator to enable or disable this.
Just like how comments can be enabled or disabled per video or the whole channel. Since this change was for creators to reduce harassment on themselves.
It doesn't really matter if they remove it or not. Perceptions are what matter. People will be able to upload videos that are disconnected from what most people believe or actually want and there's no way to show that you don't agree with the video. And I begin to believe its me that's wrong, when I might be in the silent majority. Then YT can control the algorithm further obfuscating popular beliefs and culture.
They have been steadily moving towards recommendation engines that rely more on inferred behaviors than direct feedback for a long time. I'm surprised they didn't just completely eliminate dislikes.
That aside, timing sure is interesting given the recent Nintendo fiasco. Wonder how much they spend on ads each quarter.
It's probably not so much about Nintendo specifically as one advertising partner, as much as it is about encouraging the advertiser ecosystem to be comfortable with continually spending money on Youtube as a platform.
If Youtube removes dislikes, there is less risk for these viral "dislike" moments to happen, which can make content producers and advertisers nervous.
Additionally, Google probably puts way more resources than you might expect into things like moderating the usage of the dislike button and making sure it isn't exploited by bots, nefarious actors, etc.
Not much downside from the business side of Youtube in taking steps to sunset the button.
It's interesting that the Internet took the YouTube Rewind dislike thing as a win, meanwhile YouTube themselves took it as an opportunity to learn about the negative side effects of their users' free will.
Terrible decision as someone who uses YouTube a lot…high dislike rate is a key signal for creators lying or shenanigans in a video…guess people are going to start leaving more negative comments. Thanks YouTube!
That is not a safe assumption at all. You're assuming the total number of votes is proportional to the view count. But a more provocative video will prompt more people to vote
A video that makes people angry might encourage people to vote who otherwise wouldn't have voted
I think a popular video will attract votes one way or the other.
A video that makes people angry will encourage people to dislike the video, and thus eat into the total vote share.
I agree that this likely only covers videos with a large number of views (~millions). There's a long tail where the view count/vote count is not enough to comment on the number of dislikes.
About conspiracy theories, assuming that policies created by known democrat supporters are influenced by what issues democrats faces isn't any more far fetched than assuming that policies created by known republican supporters are influenced by what issues republicans faces.
As a complete novice in life in everything that is not Tech, I rely on a lot of how-to videos on YouTube from small unknown creators. Likes and Dislikes ratio is one of the key filter to weed out less helpful or outright misinformed videos. This may be shrewd move for YouTube to boost engagement but at the greater cost of utility and UX. Very disappointing.
YouTube Rewind <--- an annual video event with some of the highest dislike counts in the history of the platform. I feel like the timing on YouTube's decision here is suspiciously convenient.
I'm go glad THIS is what youtube is doing to promote inclusion and respect across youtube. not you know the hate videos, comments, and unfairness in how they apply and enforce their policies
Somebody should make an extension that brings back dislikes and comments on videos where they're disabled. Just store it all on a different server but seamlessly integrate it into YouTube.
I wonder whether the views-to-likes ratio can serve as a proxy for dislikes. If you watched it, then didn't like it (i.e. didn't click the like button), you [probably?] disliked it.
This helps if the video is just a victim of a dislike bandwagon. Some videos are quite interesting, yet just because people saw many dislikes, they also tend to press the dislike button.
I used to not understand why videos had dislikes even when they haven't premiered yet. But then one day, I realized that in order for YouTube to stop recommending me some channels, I had to press the dislike button.
YouTube recommendation is so bad. Even when you aren't interested in something, they keep on showing it until you click on it. For example, I watched a few Squid Game videos a few weeks ago. Suddenly, because Ben Shapiro did a video on Squid Game, it kept on showing me that thumbnail for days.
The algorithm should have realized that his channel was much more about right wing news than Squid Game and shouldn't have shown it every single day on my recommendation. I don't watch any politics on YouTube.
The worst part was if I clicked on the video, it would re-enforce the algorithm that I wanted right wing news. So the only option was to click the dislike button. It feel like I was force to click the button.
I wonder how long it takes before there is a chrome ext that brings back likes/dislikes similar to AdBlock or SponsorBlock. It’s the ratio that I care about not the absolute numbers.
I like this. It perfectly illustrates how when you give the public a negative signal it will be turned into a weapon for angry people to hurl at you whether it makes any sense or not.
You take out your anger using whatever outlet you think you have available by spamming the report system?
So in response to YT taking away downvotes because it’s abused by angry trolls and brigaders you decide to abuse and brigade a different system. Surely nobody can predict what will happen.
I use the dislike button to inform other users that the video (usually tutorials) is poorly made and is not worth watching. I get huge value by other users doing the same. That's not trolling and that's not abuse.
People hitting the company that censors them is not good or bad, it's inevitable. Also, a lot of people who used dislike will now resort to writing unflattering comments to express themselves. That is also inevitable. Let's see how that plays out. Surely the content creators' feelings will be spared.
I don't do that, by the way, thanks for asking. I'm just saying it's utterly moronic to take away freedom of expression from all users and channels just because a small subset can't handle seeing a fucking dislike.
Such policies should be opt-in for each channel / creator. But that won't help politicians and big brands to save face, so we can't have that. Sad.
In response to their reasoning, why not instead hide dislikes only for smaller creators then? Once you reach a certain threshold of views/subscribers, it becomes visible again.
I wonder if the catalyst was the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack video dislikes. Many said Nintendo wouldn't even notice but maybe they did and advocated for the change.
I'm confused. How do you judge the results of an election between two candidates if you know the number of votes cast for candidate A, but not the total number of votes?
I think the danger of such a shift is that people will no longer have the same level of incentive to make 'good' videos but rather clickbait-y ones that go viral
was this because all joe biden videos had more downvotes than upvotes? just kidding but all jokes aside i don't think getting rid of the dislikes is a good idea.
Note the logical fallacy they want to implant here:
Dislike "attacks" result in high dislike counts, therefore all high dislike counts are not genuine.
People will often watch something they dislike with more intensity than something they like. The number of dislikes isn't the reason they want to watch it, it's the idea the title or cover image brings to mind. And those ideas and images are curated by Google.
Take the number of dislikes out of visibility and you strip the noise away from the signal that makes them money; views.
And who knows, the user might end up watching something that they wouldn't normally due to dislikes and, surprise, they like it. More exposure, less echo chamber-like. Less potential influence over a viewer's opinion of the content.
This is yet another move to make YouTube friendly to the same powers that be everywhere. This is a tool for centralized control, not a platform for everyone.
The reason they're doing this is the whitehouse is a joke. It's harder to convince the proles they should continue to be as easily mollified as they are when the proles aren't aware of how angry everyone else is.
It's hard to convince the world that what the TV people are paid to say is correct when it's clear that the vast majority disagree.
Reminds me of Gab's "dissenter" extension which added comments and live chat to any web page. I don't know if it still exists since it got removed from extension marketplaces.
So I have never clicked a like nor dislike button on YouTube after they switched from stars to the thumbs. I always wondered who actually puts in the extra few seconds to do so, but I'd guess it's people that have a very strong opinion.
Especially the "Don't forget to smash that like button below" became so much noise that it's getting auto-filtered in my head
This change feels like the next step of positioning YouTube as something like a TV alternative, encouraging more long-form content and series over one-off videos.
I do sort of understand, similar to Reddit posts, if you post something factual that the 51% simply don't agree with, you'll likely have more dislikes than likes. It doesn't always mean it was a bad video, or that you didn't back up what you were saying with studies/facts, but just that the 51% personally disagreed.
Now there's obviously a lot of videos that are just bad or full of lies that should be negative. But there's also plenty that sit negative for reasons entirely made of opinion.
I'm curious how useful voting really is. The usefulness of it really depends on if voters are disciplined enough to remove their opinion voting and vote based on an established, high-level framework. The latter still includes some opinion, but at least more rigorous and less opinionated.
I can see a couple outcomes from such a system:
- downvotes are guideline violations
- upvotes indicate relativity, not necessarily agreeableness
- no interaction would be common
All of this is centric to a users thought. I don't think a machine could be taught these things.
I'd like to glean valuable context from voting ratios. It used to be possible. But my confidence in voting is dashed. There's too much money and power involved. Gaming the system is something I feel is (rightly or wrongly?) too easy to do. Facebook's introduction of a like button was a turning point in what the Internet is used for.
Piling onto the anecdotes, I always do a rough maths of likes vs. dislikes before watching any video from unknown creators. For pure entertainment, a 100-to-1 ratio or better means it might be watchable. For science, maths or computing maybe 20-to-1. If a woman, black person or LGBTQ* person is presenting I assume that the haters have already got to the downvote button, so I give them about a 10x slack.
> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks
Wow. Well, the politically motivated truth behind this change is pretty darn obvious, right?
If you're confused what I mean, check any US mainstream media video with an obvious political slant but pretending to be "objective news" and look at the like/dislike ratio. The system is totally working...except it isn't working out well for the political party that YT would prefer.
The more striking thing to me is how little effort they put into the cover excuse. IMO this just shows they don't really care about the optics of censoring speech or letting users flag propaganda. Quite brazen.
Absolutely. 2019 was only 2 years ago. YT's politics are the same now as they were then.
Also, "dislike mobs" are hardly a thing at all. Almost always a large number of dislikes on content like "rewind" videos expresses widespread genuine disapproval of content. In the rewind example, users likely found this content cringy and felt pandered to.
Dislike mobs are typically targeted to a specific account (like the White House) or video, not the 300,000 videos uploaded every day. Did you know that?
In other words, "dislike mobs" are very real, organized, and occur often. This evidence disproves the idea that "'dislike mobs' are hardly a thing at all."
Would you please stop posting political battle comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that, regardless of their politics, because it's destructive of what this site is supposed to be for.
We've already had to ask you this before. If you'd please review the rules and stick to them, we'd appreciate it.
In my defence, I replied to a political statement about Biden's popularity. But now that I reread the comment, I can see how it was overtly speculative. Shouldn't have made it.
It can be politically motivated now, and reputationally motivated then. It can also be both, then and now. We know nothing outside of what YouTube's PR department is telling us, and all PR is nonsense wrapped around bullshit.
It's pretty obvious why they're rolling it out now. YouTube spends a lot of its time suppressing signals it doesn't like.
But, in the end, who cares? Everybody not suffering from brain damage knows that YouTube manipulates the hell out of all of the public metrics; and everybody who isn't clinically dead knows that these things are gamed into uselessness.
To someone who doesn't live in USA the policies created by tech companies always seemed random and strange. But then I started looking at Californian news and suddenly it all made sense, it seems most strange policies are made in response to local political issues and then the whole world has to live with it. I can't say for sure whether that is what happened now, but it wouldn't be the first time.
It also serves Google’s long term interest in being able to feed you content according to their own objectives with less transparency, similar to the FB newsfeed.
Please read the sentence right below the one you copy + pasted:
> If you're confused what I mean, check any US mainstream media video with an obvious political slant but pretending to be "objective news" and look at the like/dislike ratio. The system is totally working...except it isn't working out well for the political party that YT would prefer.
In other words: People are disliking obvious political propaganda that YT would prefer that you like.
Sorry I must have missed something. The quote you're addressing talks about smaller creators. Wouldn't this apply to smaller creators from both parties?
I think it's worth really pondering this phrase. It's the kind of thing people just toss out without really thinking about what it means, in the hopes that it will produce automatic head-nods from the reader. When you are so deeply, heavily, unwaveringly invested in a very specific idea to the extent that anything that slightly disagrees with that idea has an "obvious political slant", you are literally brainwashed. I know that's an overused accusation, but it's hard to define "brainwashed" any other way; you've decided that your very small bubble of beliefs is the truth, and therefore any video that doesn't 100% conform to it is "obviously" politically biased and full of lies. And what does "politically" even mean? That word has just lost all meaning. Politics is just anything that affects people's lives.
The reality is that everything related to COVID or vaccines that isn't 100% Q-anon Trumpist cult-thumping is currently brigaded with downvotes. Do you not see the irony in rejecting everything outside of your bubble as obvious lies, while simultaneously calling for less censorship? All you're really saying is: we want every idea censored except for ours.
You used the word "obvious" twice, and the whole post has a "you know what I mean; wink wink, nudge nudge" vibe to it. I know I won't change your mind, but I just think it's worth pointing out to others to really just notice how weird that use of language really is. The Q-anon thought-virus is real and it has evolved to be very good at what it does. This kind of language is part of its infection mechanism. It's worth really examining.
By aligning themselves with a fact free version of reality, the conservative/libertarian hybrid movement that has captured the right have put themselves politically against anyone who is interested in truth or objective reality. This big tech by that definition aligns with “the left”.
Every video that correctly describes the benefits of the COVID vaccine and makes it to the front page is spammed with dislikes, and this constitutes a major threat to public health. No, this is actually a very important change.
you can still leave a shitty comment, its just your negative feedback in the binary only goes to the publisher to show them that they have missed the mark as opposed to signalling behaviour to others (still possible with comments).
The social signal that a large number of people disapprove of content is what they are looking to hide.
It isn't just important for us to know if the majority of viewers think a fortnite walkthrough is shitty. We also need to know when a politician is lying to us.
Do most people think this is bullshit? That is what the like/dislike ratio communicates so succinctly.
The idea that the dislike ratio indicates any of this is kinda silly. At best, a "large number" or "majority of viewers" isn't even close to a 10th of those who have watched it, the rest either liked the video or didn't care enough to leave a like/dislike. And as is pretty commonly known, people are much more likely to leave feedback if they're unhappy than happy, so clearly the numbers are going to be at best unreliable and likely very tilted in the dislike direction.
I don't think I've ever used like/dislike as any sort of indicator beyond seeing that there's some drama going on. Its a very unreliable metric.
If you want discourse about a video and its propagandiness then IMHO reddit would be a better place to get that because it has conversational features, unlike other social media spaces.
An enormous number of public opinion polls broadly show acceptance of the COVID vaccine, including mandates [1]. Yet every video demonstrating the efficacy of the vaccine that makes it to the front page of YouTube is spammed with dislikes (80% or more). It's statistically impossible for the polls to be off by so much that YouTube dislikes are representative of actual public opinion. This is why it is necessary to take antivaxxers' toys away.
Any good gained with this will be overshadowed by losing super important feedback from real users about negativity of the content. Kids videos, tutorials, whatever. How will you know you are getting the best result for your search instead of some search-optimized garbage that already lured tons of people before?
I suppose seeing highly disliked videos is a good red flag for some, but these videos don't really show up in search results or recommendations to begin with. I can't remember the last time I've seen a video with any more than 15 or 20% dislikes. Either way, you should probably watch the video anyway and make up your own mind.
The public is broadly on board with vaccines, including mandates [1]. The entire problem is that COVID videos are spammed by an unrepresentative group of antivaxxers.
Except not getting vaccinated harms others. Yes, they're mostly harming themselves, but some people aren't able to be vaccinated, and a few vaccinated people have still been hospitalized from covid complications.
People have literally died from not being able to receive treatment from their diseases because hospitals were filled with COVID patients who didn't take the vaccine when offered.
This only proves the point to remove the dislikes as clearly those are coordinated dislike attacks. The subject matter in that video doesn't even have anything worth liking or disliking; it was pretty standard stuff. The screenshot you show has the person shown disliking it - whomever took the screenshot has an agenda. And that Twitter account speaks for itself.
Any proof of that? I really can't see how google would be vulnerable to bots and brigading. I mean, you can't use vpns or tor on google apps without solving annoying puzzles.
I actually thing this is a fair idea.
Preserving the button so I can tell the algorithm (and video author) that it's not something I want to see is a good thing.
Hiding the number of dislikes makes me unable to be biased towards what I've seen and forces me more directly to form my own opinion.
I think it would be a good idea to do the same with the Likes count.
I don't understand the rationale? I spend a lot of time (probably more than I should) on YouTube, since it's full of interesting videos that teach me new skills. My experience has been that mass dislikes only happens on videos that are 1. bad quality in multiple dimensions 2. false / misinformation 3. politically contentious. For most videos, they have a positive like/dislike ratio, and you can use this as a strong signal about quality on the topic in the description/title.
I fundamentally disagree with the idea that a dislike is "harassment" or an "attack". This really reads to me like Google is upset by the politically contentious videos that do get ratioed, and this is politically motivated on their part. Generally speaking, YouTube content creators trend left on US political issues, but YouTube's audience reflects the mainstream and trends slightly to the right on US political issues, which means that left-leaning politically contentious videos tend to get ratioed, and that includes left-adjacent issues that aren't strictly political but have been politicized.
Either YouTube is a place for creators to put themselves out there and engage with their audiences... or it's another place that is corporately whitewashed to be as inoffensive (and thus uninteresting and shallow) as possible. Historically it's been the former, and I see this as another in a long string of moves by Google to turn it into the latter... despite that being exactly what people fled from when they started spending more hours watching YouTube than they did television. It seems Google doesn't know or doesn't care what their audiences actually want.
Right, this is actually the only remaining purpose "dislike" had on Youtube.
It was nice to have a universal Youtube meme, if you post that the person who failed at Mario Kart "Never had the makings of a varsity athlete" nobody knows what you're talking about, or if you comment on a board game Let's Play video that "I didn't know this was a Red Coin level" again, straight over their heads. But everybody knows a number of dislikes reference. Whether it's "13 people just want to watch the world burn" or "9 Yoshis watched this video".
I understand the incentives, however, I think the biggest consequence of this is that it will give a false sense of support on conspiratorial videos and other forms of misinformation.
Some people think that the more likes a video has, the more the community agrees with it's message, and therefore the more truth the video contains. The classic appeal to the majority fallacy.
This is only going to strengthen those communities and empower them further.
People would rather watch whatever validate their biases, and would rarely dislike something that does not. And the engagement algorithm would work towards that.
For those reasons, the dislike button is not going to be a great loss for anyone but those who were using it quite seldomly, and they are a minority.
I mean, if a multi-month, google-scale experiment says it helps, it... probably does? But I'd personally like to see more get done to the robot likes/dislikes thing than this.
You know, that thing where a video has 100 views but 150 likes+dislikes? It's simply too annoying to me.
This is attacking a problem that happens 1% of the time to ruin experience for the 99% of the time.
=> I mean, if a multi-month, google-scale experiment says it helps, it... probably does?
Helps who?
Youtube user incentives are not necessary alligned the with company incentives. If it helps by making you a "peaceful" consumer who can't assess on average how other people think.
Maybe it is good for youtube but is it good for you.
Given that they've decided to go ahead and remove it, I'd wager that the amount of people for which the public dislike count of a video is the one thing that makes their visit worthwhile is not huge.
Also, publishers still get to see it, it's only viewers that won't. Which probably means we'll all have to engage a lot more with the algorithm to route around garbage, but I kind of do that already so I'm not convinced it's a dealbreaker.
> Helps who?
>> "Earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike count to see whether or not changes could help better protect creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks – where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos"
Navigate to the cdc's youtube channel and click through their recent videos, most of them have more dislikes than likes, especially if the video is related to the covid vaccines.
Search "covid vaccine" and have a look through those as well. Plenty of them have many more dislikes than likes, especially if the video is about mandates and or from MSM.
we can complain all we want about this but it's going to change nothing -- we'll get our frustration out here and then comply with whatever they decide to do to further their agenda
Some have already cancelled their Premium subscriptions, others have discovered alternatives to Youtube such as Odysee. So complaining does lead to change, even if it isn't a change in Youtube's agenda.
wow even developers lose access to this data. i cant say om thrilled with this. "for our platform" seems so odd when youtube is by far the most popular streaming video website.
Floored and pleased by this. A social media company making a real attempt to curb harassment by re-examining fundamental features. Obviously there's more these companies could do, but this feels significant.
Would it be a bit conspiratorial to guess that this is related to the terrible like/dislike ratio on the Biden administration's YouTube presence, as tracked by https://81m.org/
AKA: We need to stop a metric that puts Democrats, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris in such a bad (horrible) light. This has nothing to do with content creators or audience. This is all about elections, politics, and most of all Joe Biden/Kamala Harris.
I guess now ,
I’ll just consider views to like ratio as a new form of hinting at dislike
Overall , this is a pretty bad move,
If a creator feels harassed by dislikes , they should use it as a way of learning to grow thick skin,
They need it anyways as public professionals.
Instead what now went away, is information on how others in a community reacted to a video or content,
Dislikes have always been a great way to detect misinformation or incorrect content or atleast give a hint that a topic needs more researching.
Now, someone who’s new to all of this,
Will see a youtube video on cleaning their desktop and wont understand why,
Running
“sudo rm -rf —no-preserve-root /“
Is a very bad idea ....
why isn't YouTube a public utility yet? or forfeit it for stewardship by archive.org. having the power to monopolistically decide on the design and technical choices for billions of people using proprietary/black box tech is absurd.
You can watch videos on YouTube, or not, and it ends there.
Nothing about this "removes dissent" since comments still exist. And you know, the entire mechanisms of government and public protest which predated YouTube.
What it removes is the ability for people to gamify a metric. The metric still exists. It's still used for ranking and personalization.
But a brigade of leftists swarming a button on a video that mentioned nuclear energy isn't useful.
yes you're right, who cares about our digital infrastructure, it's not like it is an industry where some of most valuable companies in the world are in, right? /s
TL;DR "People watch fewer videos if they see more dislikes which means we make less ad revenue, the result of this A/B test is we will continue to optimize for ad rev"
I find this pathetic. As if the removal of the "dislike button" helps in any way, shape or form to create a more "inclusive" environment.
This reeks of the silencing of what is perceived as dissident voices, is all.
I've personally never hit a like or dislike button in my life, never will ... but found it interesting as a viewer to see the ratio. Even knowing this ratio is probably at least partially the outcome of bot farms and the like.
Disney, DC Comics and the like must've complained about bad ratings/unfavourable like/dislike ratios I guess..
Let's try and see this as a tangent/bastard child of Newspeak. What better way too have people forget about something than to remove its linguistic manifestation from the dictionary? Same thing here, except people's way of expressing their approval/refusal. Google and the like are literally after the ultimate "macdonaldification" of people - cattle unable to say "NO".
It's the exact same move that reddit made years ago, and it enabled a new era of online brigading and fake credibility/popularity for content shown on pages.
If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be.
It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others.
The beginning of the end of being able to trust YouTube stats (as if that wasn't already an issue).
This is incorrect; Reddit still shows downvotes, as well as upvote/downvote ratio, even if you're on the "new" Reddit.
If you're on the old Reddit, some subreddits used CSS to hide the downvote button, which I think is dumb, but you can easily get around that by going to the new Reddit long enough to downvote.
You don't even need to suffer through "new Reddit" long enough to hit the downvote - you can just disable custom CSS on old Reddit (to be clear this is an account-level setting on Reddit, not some browser hack you need to do yourself).
You can't see the ratio, but if a comment has a negative score you'll see it, which I would count as downvotes being "visible" -- certainly better than YouTube's terrible choice here. Downvotes are also surfaced when the ratio is ~50% with a "controversial" marker.
I don't believe reddits obfuscation efforts did anything but significantly hamper spammers who relied on accurate counting to be able to determine when their spam accounts were shadowbanned and the reach they had.
Reddit has always had a significant problem with downvote meaning "disagree" or "dislike", which according to redditquette is incorrect usage. In practice, the downvote is about enforcing groupthink on reddit and enforcing subreddit culture, and it is just as powerful today as it has ever been. Sort by "controversial" and you'll see.
> If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be.
There are many ways of doing so, with their own pros, cons, and time requirements. At best you're losing a relatively low quality way of quickly filtering out some videos.
> It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others.
You seem to want it both ways. It is judging videos by this ratio that allows the harassment to have an effect.
There may also be an emotional component to it; a private downvote likely stings a lot less than a public one. It prevents people from piling on or joining in the harassment. And it can allow YouTube to shadowban harassing accounts.
For the people who could actually affect change, it hides nothing. YouTube and the creator both get to see the numbers, and in extreme cases, they'd be available for law enforcement.
> The beginning of the end of being able to trust YouTube stats (as if that wasn't already an issue).
> Why are dislike counts more credible than like counts?
Nobody said they are. I'd be about as upset if like counts went away but dislike counts remained. The point is having both counts gives you a very useful signal.
>I'd be about as upset if like counts went away but dislike counts remained.
Interesting thought: why do you never just see a dislike button anywhere?
>The point is having both counts gives you a very useful signal.
No. The point is that you really don't know how useful the signal is.
Dislike buttons actively encourage bad behavior, so can create skew in the signal. That's intuitive, and also backed up by YouTube's research; hence the change here.
That might tell you something, but it’s not always clear what. Could be brigading, sock-puppets, tribalism, or lots of other causes.
In the end, pretty much all such voting mechanisms are flawed in some way or another. More interesting are the comments left by known experts in the field.
>pretty much all such voting mechanisms are flawed in some way or another. More interesting are the comments left by known experts in the field.
Agree with this. I think downvoting is net-negative, as it encourages bad actors. Let relative upvotes determine quality. For disagreement, use comments. For content that violates terms or is misleading, etc, use flagging.
They want to hide how many people are agreeing with the user, so the user feels he is the minority.
The power of resisting something comes from feeling like many other people are also resisting it. Removing the dislike count means the user can't see if he is alone in his opinion or not.
It's a shit move designed to promote further self censorship and control over the minds of the users.
> You can still dislike videos to further personalize and tune your recommendations
Not long ago in history, such a statement would have been totally incomprehensible, I mean completely nonsense. Even linguistically, there's so much baked into this. For starters, that there is an algorithm which which the viewer has a relationship with, and that the viewer wishes to further refine that relationship by expressing preferences. Yet, the interpretation of those preferences (by servers) are held within a black box.
It is interesting to put things into perspective like that, but I'm not quite sold on the idea that you need to know these background details (of algorithms and black boxes) to understand that expressing your preferences (dislikes) to a business may lead them to tailor what they serve you.
It turns out YouTube didn't see much benefit in providing a way to (metaphorically) shoot content creators. Taking the bullets out seems like a positive step for the community as a whole.
Helps to know who are the people that don't buy whatever it is that Google is pushing. At the very least serve them carefully selected content to change their ways.
Maybe you are right and he didn't read the article, but I think his points still stand.
This is a ridiculous decision. When someone puts something into the public space and everyone dislikes it, that should visible to anyone. This is just going to make ridiculous conspiracy videos and other harmful material like racist propaganda seem more legit than it is viewed by the rest of the public.
Now tell me more about the gray comments here on HN. If this system wasn’t designed to promote brigading and hive mind reflex… well… unintended consequence?
Often people will post comments which are inflamatory, off-topic, advertising, etc. and 'the community' can mark them down.
The parent poster saying "I've never hit a like or dislike button in my life" is a little bit like saying "I've never thrown litter or picked up litter in my life". Both understandable, one respectable, the other a bit weird - if you like the environment you are in but leave all the litter collecting to others and don't contribute to it, what's that saying about you and your one-sided use of the environment?
If you want HN or YouTube to have stuff you like, and not be overrun by the wild west of the internet, and there are no paid editors like the newspapers of old, not adding to the collective voting is like saying "everyone else, moderate this for me into a place I like, thank you".
> "I've never hit a like or dislike button in my life"
The Prime Directive protects lesser-evolved, unprepared civilizations from the dangerous tendency of well-intentioned starship crews to introduce advanced technology, knowledge, and values.
And even then, HN's guidelines say the downvote button is for comments that don't add to the discussion. Even a comment with incorrect information can add to the discussion (though admittedly much less often than an accurate comment), so it's not really about accuracy, either.
(But I will admit that I often downvote things simply because they are inaccurate.)
Why should that be up to the viewer to deduce from likes or dislike count?
The videos that people fully watch, have a positive comment section, and receive many more likes than dislikes are the videos that should result from searches.
Or how about repair videos. There are countless diy fixes for cars, computer, cell phone repair, and countless others. I use the dislike count to see if I am wasting my time watching a bad repair video. That doesn’t mean I won’t watch it but that I am more aware I may need to skim through or fast forward to key parts like the actual removal of a part or something. Anyways I think this is a negative change.
I think this is the common problem with rating systems though. Youtube is saying that the dislike count and ratio are used to unfairly pile on and reduce the real signal of the video. Instead some videos get brigaded for various reason ("I don't like this person" gets conflated with "I don't think this content is useful")
There was a user-submitted recipe app that had a similar problem, where rating system on recipes is challenging because does it imply that the recipe was incorrect, the food tasty, the writing poor? It is too hard to get that signal from a single point of "average rating"
Don't be silly. Of course YouTube can be relied on to properly censor videos themselves. They will make sure you never see anything that may make you uncomfortable. Your complete lack of faith is astonishing. (sarcasm)
> that should visible to anyone. This is just going to make ridiculous conspiracy videos and other harmful material like racist propaganda seem more legit than it is viewed by the rest of the public.
Report videos that violates Youtube's guidelines, and start your own platform if you take issue with the engagement tools they offer. Arguably, the data shows that outrage drives unhealthy engagement [1], and this appears to reduce outrage driven engagement, no different than HN flamewar detection and other mechanisms to encourage more civil discourse.
EDIT: Youtube isn't the internet, nor "commons", it's a single web property. Lots of other forums for your speech (including your own Mastadon, Discourse, or Peertube instance).
"What we learned from the experiment:
Those in the experiment could still see and use the public dislike button, but because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior 1. We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks. Our experiment data confirmed that this behavior does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels."
It's not about appeasing Disney, it's about discouraging shitty behavior.
> because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count
How is this any different than users targeting a video with lots of likes to drive up its count, though?
If YouTube were hiding both the public like and dislike counts, I wouldn't give this a second thought. But to say "seeing counts influences people" as a reason for hiding dislikes, and not extending that same argument to likes as well just seems a bit shallow.
Public counts are useful because they provide a gauge of perceived quality. If I see a video with lots of likes and no dislikes, it's fair to assume I'll like that video. If I see a video with lots of likes and I can't see the dislikes, I have absolutely no idea whether I'll like it or not; maybe it's a really good video and everyone liked it, or maybe the majority of people disliked it but I just can't tell. If you're removing my ability to gauge quality anyway, then why not just remove the like count as well?
This change is essentially shifting from "three out of five dentists prefer Trident" to "three dentists prefer Trident". The loss of information is so substantial that the remaining information is essentially useless.
I don't think the ratio of likes to dislikes is a reliable indicator of quality. It probably will be for certain categories of video, but not for anything polarizing like a review of an Apple product or anything even remotely politics-adjacent.
Totally agreed, that's why I wanted to call out that it's a measure of perceived quality.
If there's really great documentary about the International Space Station, I'd expect flat-earth believers to think that it's rubbish, that's just part of being human.
Conversely, if I saw a documentary about abortion (or some other very polarized topic) which had a 9:1 like-to-dislike ratio, the difference between that ratio and my expected 1:1 ratio would tell me that lots of people thought that the video was high-quality, even those who didn't share the same ideological views.
"Dislike attack behavior" could just be a video that is widely disliked. It doesn't necessarily mean there's any sort of coordinated attack on it, so your "shitty behavior" comment doesn't really fly.
So people watch it without the prejudgement and bias of knowing what the wider group thinks and dislike on their own judgement. That seems like a simple solution to coaching people into good curation patterns and behaviour.
It will likely so give some good results in the background for YT and media partners but it is allowed to be both.
If nobody can see the dislike number, what is the point of disliking a video? It doesn't make the video less likely to appear on feeds. Having the number makes disliking a video feel like you've actually done something rather than just piss in the ocean.
This seems like the wrong target to me. Why not go after the user?
If there's a user that is going around disliking a ton of videos, especially on a single channel, and/or without watching some minimum time or % of that video, it seems likely that user is being abusive; so perhaps shadow-ban that user's votes?
Similar with new users.. disallow use of dislike completely until they've been around a while and built up some reputation/history (by watching, upvoting, etc). If the user is possibly a bot (I assume there's algorithms to determine confidence of bot vs real user), require more verification.
I'm sure there's a reason they're not taking this approach, but I find it hard to believe they're choosing they way they are based on the reason they're giving here.
If I can tell just by the dislike count if a video is a fake tutorial or w/e, I'm likely to leave immediately. If I'm on my phone (don't have adblock), I'll have closed the video before the preroll ad even lets me skip it.
Now, I'll have to sit through it and make youtube some money before I can determine if a video is any good or not.
Edit: Think about all those scam channels on YT. Disabling likes/dislikes looks fishy, but now they don't have to worry about that since only the likes are visible. This is a massive win for the "GTA online free money"-type channels.
> I don't see how removing the dislike count will in any way increase the click rate.
The rationale is, Google noticed that people use the dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video.
If you can't use dislikes to decide whether or not the video you're considering is actually worth watching, you're more likely to click simply to find out.
In order to find out, you first need to watch the ads.
That's all. Someone at Google simply just put two and two together and realised that the visible dislike count was costing them in ad clicks.
Was it politically motivated? Probably not.
Will it have profound political effects? Absolutely!
That's one argument, but on the other hand if you can't vet the videos by yourself before watching, the average quality of the videos you watch will drop, decreasing the incentive for you to spend time on the site.
Isn't autoplay the normal, default setting? Do a significant percentage of users have autoplay disabled?
Disabling autoplay on an ongoing basis isn't an option for me because I won't log into Google services, except to check who is still mailing my gmail address on the long tail of de-googling.
Not in my world it's not. I'm pretty sure FF has disabled autoplay as well as default. The only time autoplay is allowed is when listening a "full album" play list. But that's only after I've scrolled the list to make sure some asshat hasn't pushed in a rando video below the first page.
I think you could see it on the page, even before the video started playing (i.e. while you're still watching the ads). But maybe I remember wrongly.
Still. Far more likely to quit in the first 10 seconds than you would be to stick around for a couple of minutes and find out. Let alone click a related link.
There actually are browser extensions and userscripts that show a like/dislike bar on the thumbnails. Let's say goodbye to them. Likes per view will be the only metric they'll be able to calculate.
Nothing is stopping anyone from storing likes and dislikes offsite. Now that YT is opting-out of being a source of record for dislikes, it's pretty straightforward for those sorts of tools to step in.
No, that's just not believable.
YouTube (and Google more generally) are full of people who believe they need to control the public conversation for the public's own good. They've gone to the best schools, lived cosseted lives in safe, sparkly clean neighborhoods, and never had to shower after work instead of before work. They're totally out of touch with what regular people think, yet believe they know better than regular people and have not only a right, but a duty to guide the public conversation in what they see as the right direction.
YouTube people have spent years censoring inconvenient thoughts (e.g. the lab leak hypothesis), juicing rankings in favor of mainstream media, and outright banning their ideological opponents.
If they believe that they're just making the internet less "toxic", it's because they don't differentiate between people with different value systems and monsters to be silenced.
There is zero chance this lately instance of censorship is profit driven. It's yet another favor Google is doing for an establishment that's rapidly losing credibility with the public and control of the narrative.
You have to load the page to see the dislike count. They already got ad revenue by the time you see it.
I am sure they have better data than anybody as to how often a video is loaded for the first time and disliked within a few seconds of starting.
While once in a while this could be caused by a bad video start it probably mostly isn't caused by the content of the video.
By looking at behavior of users and pattern matching it probably wasn't hard to see that certain users were "making the number big".
Additionally as the article details they likely targeted those users with a new "don't show the number" feature and saw an improvement in the unwanted behavior (unnecessary dislikes).
The reality is that while dislike is fantastic from a quality filter standpoint human behavior likes making numbers big and sometimes they do weird things you have to correct for.
This is some next-level conspiracy. Like most, it's feasible and perhaps in the realm of possibility, but there are probably 30 explanations above it in the "that makes sense" queue.
Notably, their rationale they posted. Isn't it possible that they both see a positive outcome for creators not to get votebombed, and remove negative publicity from corporate partners like Disney?
I challenge anyone to tell me they do NOT think that brigading downvotes/dislikes is a thing on forums and Youtube.
> I challenge anyone to tell me they do NOT think that brigading downvotes/dislikes is a thing on forums and Youtube.
The discussion is about whether YouTube should be hiding the existence of these occurrences and the potential ramifications of such a policy. I haven’t seen anyone denying the existence of brigading.
Out of curiosity, what is the criteria for dislikes to be considered brigading? If I share a video containing hateful comments towards a community of people and they share that video amongst their community, what do you think the outcome of that will be? I would bet a high percentage of viewers from that community will dislike the video. Is this brigading? Why or why not?
It's because their explanation is nonsensical on its face. How is a dislike "harassment"? How are genuine groups of people downvoting something an "attack"? YouTube isn't like HN where likes and dislikes are summed. People disliking a video doesn't change how many people liked it, both are visible.
This seems to come from a culture in which disliking someone, disagreeing with them or telling the they're wrong is the worst offense possible. In no way is it comparable to actual harassment, so of course people speculate about alternatives.
If someone seeks out content that they wouldn't ordinarily interact with just so that they can dislike/downvote it or post nasty comments - that's an attack.
If someone gets recommended a video and they don't like it, disliking is then constructive criticism.
But there are groups out there that actively look for particular types of content to dislike - without even watching it.
YouTube knows how someone arrived at a video - if they wanted to, they could only count likes and dislikes from people who had the content recommended to them. Or they could drop likes/dislikes from incomplete views. Actually I think they already do that, I recall reading something to that effect years ago.
It's all irrelevant anyway - their stated justification puts "harassment" first. Given the poisonous cancel culture that exists inside Google it's very obvious what their real motives are and the rest is thus all open to question. If it was 10 years ago Google's only justification for this sort of change would have been to improve the utility of the site, and we'd have believed it because that'd have been consistent with their other actions. In 2021? Not so much.
I 100% believe that high dislike counts on ideologically favored videos is the real reason. This includes both White House sources and official propaganda regarding Covid-19 and vaccines. (It is undoubtedly propaganda IMO, though note that that does not necessarily make it wrong)
The question to ask is not what reasons could they have done this for, but why did they do it in this particular way at this exact time?
It's a hypothesis completely unsupported by any evidence, but confidently stated as if it were self-evidently true. This is how conspiracy theories start. Later, someone vaguely remembers reading somewhere (here) that "the White House asked YouTube to get rid of dislikes," then still later it becomes a story on Fox and Friends: "Why is Biden making YouTube get rid of the like button?" By that time, someone's off the cuff supposition has become part of the dank ocean of fact-free memes that have polluted our discourse.
as the post itself points out this has nothing to do with dissident voices but with preventing dislike attacks and 'ratio-ing' as is common on websites that have these mechanisms in place. Downvote bombing content if anything distorts discourse and makes it harder to figure out what people actually think. There's a reason this very website caps downvotes at -4.
What I find cringeworthy is this keyboard warrior mentality of likening an incentive change on YouTube videos to dissident activity, as if downvoting some cat video on the internet is like publishing Samizdat in the underground of the Soviet Union, maybe pipe down a little bit
like downvoting a cat video is the only type of video being downvoted. If a "tutorial" is bad, people can downvote it. If the next view sees lots of downs, they can avoid it and go to the video saving them time, and no longer rewarding with ad share for a worthless video.
>If the next view sees lots of downs, they can avoid it
the exact point is that this is terrible because the downvotes aren't representative of anything. two examples. Go to Youtube right now, pick a 5 minute daily covid update. I'm not talking about op-eds, just factual reporting about the stats. Chances are it has been downvoted 80% because there's a bunch of crazies on that site downvoting every news video.
another example, Thandiwe Newton years ago made some political comments 4chan didn't like, so they started to bombard every westworld video with her in it. I saw those ratios and decided to not watch the show for months. Turns out is actually great and it was just some right-wing internet mob being angry about her.
Nobody ever downvotes shitty tutorials, because the only people who passionately downvote youtube videos are crazy. I can't tell you how many crappy tutorials with wrong info in it i've seen, entirely upvoted.
>the exact point is that this is terrible because the downvotes aren't representative of anything.
The video owner can disable comments. Why not allow them the decision on showing/hiding this data? Clearly, there are people that are in favor and some that are against. Allow the "publisher" to make the decision. Seems like a decent compromise.
> this is terrible because the downvotes aren't representative of anything
Speak for yourself?
I watch football highlights on YouTube. Due to copyright many videos are just clickbaits with perhaps a few seconds of real footage, or are missing games or whatever. The up/downvotes are a reliable measure in that niche.
Oh I could not give a dead flying flamingo about likes and dislikes on YT.
It's the intent behind all this that I find repulsive. As someone justly mentioned above, this all comes down to uninterrupted flow of content towards (less) able to resists psyches.
you nailed it on the head. some players want to control public opinion rather than changing their business model or philosophy closer to what the people want
Actually it was Sony who recently had their trailers spammed with dislikes by Spider-Man stans complaining for the delay in the release of the second trailer for “Spider-Man: No Way Home”.
In reality they have been moving towards this for a while. I've been hit by one of their A/B experiments that turns off the visual ratio bar, so it takes a second to figure out the ratio (if it's bad, I normally skim over the comments).
Nothing to be concerned about, citizen. If a video is disinformation, no need to look for downvotes, YouTube’s moderators will take care of removing that dangerous content for you. Nothing to see here.
I can’t say I’ve checked but I’d have assumed every partisan political video gets a tonne of downvotes. I assume you’re referring to some sort of recent organised thing though?
Check the like/dislike ratio for any mainstream media video which features an obvious politically slanted view on some topic.
The problem here is that people are using the like/dislike ratio to indicate what may be biased content masquerading as 'objective news'. It just so happens that this (accurate) method is flagging the left leaning propaganda that YT wants to propagate.
This Trump rally from The Hill, where he tells his followers to get the vaccine that he got, garnered 1.5k likes and 1.3k dislikes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huQdxDnQkac
Here a Fox affiliate covers a recent Trump rally, but it has 10 times more likes vs dislikes! Didn't anyone tell them about the grand Youtube conspiracy?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi4niom7se8
I am alluding to the current party in the White House that gets every video downvoted into oblivion. Some sites accused YouTube of deleting the downvotes.
It's just blind speculation. There is absolutely no historical precedent of Big Tech corporations implementing censorship controls at the behest of governments. Anyone claiming otherwise is spreading misinformation and should be censored.
Government already admitted to pointing Facebook to accounts to be deplatformed. Government and social media collusion is now best assumed to be going on. All that matters now is how much the companies are incentivized to push back. The answer: not much.
If this change happened or not due to such collusion is secondary to the thing worth noting: it would not be surprising if it did, it would be consistent with the governments positioning if it did, and it would also be hard to prove if it did, and if it was proven it would be vociferously defended by legions of commentators and the media. All that would need to happen was for the government to suggest the downvotes on pro-vax vids were contributing to deaths and ergo liability, and suggest the whole feature serves as a mechanism for disinformation they may be liable for in general, perhaps criminally so if the feature can be traced back as a proximate cause of something like the capital riot. Poof.
>Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration. [...] The government and Google shared engineers, lawyers, scientists, communications specialists, executives, and even board members. Google has achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government: a true public-private partnership. [0]
>MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, I would say first, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that [The White House is] in regular touch with social media platforms — just like we’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets — about areas where we have concern [1]
>So it is possible YouTube removed dislikes it deemed "spam" from videos posted by the White House account, including the Jan. 20 press briefing video. But there is no evidence YouTube deliberately removed authentic dislikes from the video to support the Biden administration or silence critics. [2]
That is speculation, not circumstantial evidence. Thank you for providing sources that say "there is no evidence YouTube deliberately removed authentic dislikes."
You have to make reasonable inferences when evaluating the potential for collusion between what are arguably the two most powerful entities in the world.
Wait, so should platforms do nothing against creators that are brigaded and review bombed?
A video being organically downvoted to oblivion is way different than a bunch of users organizing on 4chan, Reddit, or being directed by their favorite parasocial media personality to go bomb a video/product.
If I was YT I wouldn't want to bother policing this crap and just take away all the incentive to do it in the first place.
I don't think the GP's narrative was that this exclusively happens to the Democrats. Just that it happens way more on the current White House's videos than it did on the last administration's. Plucking examples where Republican videos were downvoted intensely does not refute an argument the OP wasn't making in the first place.
Yes we should totally take google at their word when they say it's not politically motivated.
They can say whatever reasoning they want, that does not necessarily make it true. Google has a well defined history of lying publicly or hiding the things they do. Dragonfly, PRISM... These things take brave whistle blowers that have their lives ruined to reveal.
If I said, "I am going to eat this fried twinkie because it is for my health" would you take that as a factual statement (that twinkies are healthy) just because some PR department repeated it on my behalf? Google saying they are not doing this on behalf of the current administration means nothing. Nobody reasonable expect them to really be honest with the public/users anymore.
or perhaps its merely co-incidental but because some people/activists are always so thirsty about politics _any_ event can be correlated to their political lens.
Most pro-vaccine videos are also massively disliked on YouTube, despite the fact that the vast majority of people support vaccines.
I'm guessing you're a conservative, and you don't want dislikes to go away because you think it's great that pro-democrat videos get downvoted, but you can't base real public opinion on YouTube dislikes. It's massively astroturfed
Well the country clicked over to greater than 50% of people with at least one dose on May 25, 2021 so it seems like the majority did support vaccination before the mandates.
You're living in a bubble if you think that people only support vaccines because of Mandates. Even in America, which is one of the more vaccine hesitant countries, the majority of adults got the vaccine long before any mandates were introduced
As long as you don't mind how it will affect the suggestion algorithm. The most maddening thing is when a video is of the correct topic of my interest, but I know it includes misinformation as well. If I dislike, it biases against seeing more of this topic. If I like, it might bias toward the misinformation. In practice, regardless, it seems to default rely on "leftwing vs rightwing" tags until it gets confused enough it just doesn't recommend the topic at all.
Just mash that dislikes until there is no more content creators with anything remotely uncomfortable to you. Unsarcastically. Let the algorithm designers spend their life struggling to deduce what they could ask you in plain human language for immediate response. I'm guessing that is how engineer performance is measured and rewarded for there.
Why do you assume a priori that my youtube experience must include recommendations from a biased source and why are you against viewers taking matters into their own hands to craft the youtube experience they wish?
They could craft a set of hot button keywords to deliver a much better experience (i.e. if I say I don't like sports, then don't recommend sports videos) but they choose otherwise and handwave a bunch of mumbo jumbo just like what you wrote.
Imagine if you could no longer choose what to watch on your TV but instead it chose for you. Are you good with that?
I just installed an extension to block all the recommendations because it wouldn't stop recommending Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro videos to me. And they have nothing new to say to me.
Edit: Oh no! I admitted that because I don't want to those videos I got rid of all recommendations. So off-topic I know!
this is obviously so advertisers don’t have to deal with ratio’d videos. advertisers like phizer who pay for content on all advertising platforms, and who pay for content like rachel maddow, tucker carlson and meet the press. that content must be seen as legitimate by users who don’t already know that it isn’t. it’s mind control, and it’s at the behest of the monied interests so good luck with your toddlers all you parents. as someone who escaped/survived a cult i figured out a way around mind control, but that’s beyond the ability of most people. I’m Glad I Don’t Have Kids.
> Those in the experiment could still see and use the public dislike button, but because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count.
I don't understand this part. So, hiding the dislike count means less people will dislike.
Then what's the point of disliking a video? It provides much less feedback to a creator than just commenting, it's more often used as a signal to other viewers. If it's hidden, there's really no point of including it at all. In fact, why not remove likes too? And while we're at it, let's remove the view count too.
This is a really strange change, and I'm not sure that I'm happy about it.
BTW, you appear to be shadowbanned: many of your comments and all but one submission show as [dead] to me (although some of your comments have been vouched for, which unkills them).
This is terrible. The dislikes are often a source of ground truth and sometimes even comfort. Like when Gillette created an advertising campaign that promoted the idea of male original sin, the idea that men are intrinsically bad. Seeing that video in the wild might make you feel crazy but seeing that I was not alone in how I felt about that commercial made me feel like I wasn’t crazy.
>Most YouTube users (and people on the Internet in general) do not conduct themselves respectfully or demonstrate any sort of intellectual curiosity when engaging with these sorts of feedback mechanisms.
You nailed how I feel about this entire conversation. The author of the blog PopeHat summarized it really eloquently:
Stop pretending bad faith is good faith for the purposes of “politeness” or “dialogue.”
> Stop pretending bad faith is good faith for the purposes of “politeness” or “dialogue.”
Assuming others argue in bad faith is even worse than arguing in bad faith. If you argue at all you should assume that the other party argues in good faith, otherwise just stop as you only hurt your cause by assuming bad intentions in an argument.
Of course bad faith just coincidentally happens to be something my ideological opposites do and good faith is what people who agree with me do. Strange how it works out that way but I assure you, it has nothing to do with my ideological values and is merely a coincidence.
Finally someone posted something logical and well reasoned, thank you!
Content creator protections and guardrails go both ways and can protect both the producers of propaganda but also the small independent voices of dissent too. People don't realize that voices of dissent can be shouted down or terrorized by trolls and harassment. Imagine a scenario where a small content creator speaks out against powerful governments. These governments have their online propaganda farms troll that users content with dislikes and hateful comments designed to scare them into deleting it. The dislike ratio is then used to downvote the content so it doesn't appear in people's recommended watch lists a form of censorship in itself.
I'd rather have a platform both protects the powerful and the vulnerable equally well than a platform that protects neither or only one of them.
These businesses were built from pseudonymous comments (and posts) and open, lightly moderated discussion. The question is whether what Youtube is doing will kill the golden goose, which has somehow easily weathered the owner-demeaning attacks from its disgusting users for its entire existence.
Say you and your band from college found one of your old recordings and posted it on YouTube. 5 years later a friend you lost contact with finds the video and comments, hey I saw you guys live. I
So funny that a lot people still tries to pass down votes or dislikes as something essential. It is already more or less proven that it does not work the way it is sold in many contexts.
Anyone else marveling at the amount of time/effort/thought spent on this vs. let's say (cliché incoming) curing cancer, or (slightly less cliché but quickly catching up) stopping/mitigating climate change?
YT's aim, with this move, is to make a friendlier environment for propagandists, advertisers and anybody else who's pushing an ideology. They are the #1 source of cash after all.
For comparison, Reddit posts advertising that looks exactly like a user post. With voting and discussion turned off.
I wonder what likes and dislikes are even for. They don't generate income for channel owners afaik, nor do they affect the recommendation algorithm for users, also afaik. Only views "matter." Especially if the other half gets hidden now, they should just get rid of the whole thing. It doesn't seem to provide anyone with anything, except useless bandwagoning
Try finding reviews for older fitness equipment. 90% of them are generated by scripts pulling images and text from Amazon and image search. The other 10% are either old commercials from when the product was released or long term owners of the product doing real reviews. None of these videos get very many views so that's not a useful metric. The automated videos probably only get viewed for a minute or so before they exited but that's enough time to register a view. The automated videos tend to accumulate dislikes from people angry they got tricked into watching. Now that signal is gone and actual product reviews will no longer be able to rise above the automated ones by having a favorable Like/Dislike ratio. Because these reviews are for old products, even the legitimate reviews have only a small number of views and doesn't serve as a useful way to separate the clickbait from the actual content.
Read the article. They specifically say that they will still use "like" and "dislike" to help figure out recommendations for videos to recommend to you, and that the publisher of the video will still see the dislike count, so the creator gets the feedback.
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29177460, but we merged that thread hither)