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Testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count

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Re: Testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count

#61
I have a much sillier reason for disliking this change, which is that there is a charming part of YouTube culture where people attempt to explain a small number of downvotes on an otherwise popular video in a witty way.

For example, on a recent piece of Imperial propaganda [1] with 100K upvotes and 935 downvotes, we find the comment:

> 930 heretics and counting...

This one isn't laugh-out-loud funny, maybe raises a grin. Others are better. But it's a tiny artform which will be lost from the world.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWnQedD4BlI

Re: Testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count

#64
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smells political alright. The Biden admin disabled comments on all official The White House channel videos pretty quickly into their administration. Most videos have a tremendously high dislike to like ratio, the most recent is 3.4K dislikes to 205 likes. I don't know who they expect to consume their Youtube content but it apparently isn't the establishment's voter base. This is another brick in the wall that is Yout…

You think Youtube is removing dislikes because of white house vids that average out less than ~25000 views each?

It's one of the few ways that the online public square can still show visible discontent of what their government is doing in a way that is easily visible to all others.

Re: Testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count

#65
post #42
post #31

'member when reddit removed the visible downvote count back in 2014, that was really one of the end of something there https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/28hjga/reddi... Just a random screenshot cause haven't found anything else in Google https://i.imgur.com/3y8W2mk.png You could see if a comment was highly engaging despite at the bottom, say 200/210 (upvotes/downvotes). Nowdays you only see the + or - n…

Ironically YouTube feels a lot like Reddit to me - nothing really changed there the past 5 years, no matter what happened on the business side. Some of it is really weird. Like YouTube trying to get into streaming, but never actually implementing anything for it - no clips, no emotes really, but the weird "create a channel from your personal GMail account" thing is still there. It's like the people there were told no…

but youtube isn't some vc cash cow that has to change every 2 weeks in order to get more moni from vcs

i'm very fine with youtube *just working*

Re: Testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count

#66
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smells political alright. The Biden admin disabled comments on all official The White House channel videos pretty quickly into their administration. Most videos have a tremendously high dislike to like ratio, the most recent is 3.4K dislikes to 205 likes. I don't know who they expect to consume their Youtube content but it apparently isn't the establishment's voter base. This is another brick in the wall that is Yout…

You think Youtube is removing dislikes because of white house vids that average out less than ~25000 views each?

Not just the white house. There's wholesale rejection that is embarrassing and counter to the messaging being pushed my the media and cultural elites.

Disney with the Gina Corano firing has been a huge source of continued embarrassment. Widespread rejection of woke takeovers of popular culture in general are problematic so no, I'm not surprised downvotes are getting remove universally. Much easier to hide reality when you pretend it doesn't exist.

Social media is a propaganda machine at this point. They don't give a crap about free expression. Too many plebs expressing their displeasure with propaganda can't be tolerated so here we go.

Re: Testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count

#67
post #20
post #9

This seems rather user-hostile. The downvote count is useful for identifying videos that aren't what they claim to be. And how about DIY videos that give terrible advice? A big downvote ratio will get most people's attention in a way that critical comments may not.

I agree that removing public dislikes is a pretty bad idea, but it's not that important of a tool in fighting misleading videos. I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with misleading thumbnails/titles, and what stopped the glut was not dislikes, but rather Youtube's use of watch time as an important metric.

> I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with misleading thumbnails/titles

Oh, that's still happening. It never stopped.

Re: Testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count

#68
post #26

This seems deceptive more than anything else. If a content creator doesn't want their videos to be rated they can disable like/dislike ratings entirely. But to remove public dislikes across the entire site takes away a valuable indicator of video quality. Like/Dislike ratio can also express approval and disapproval for the subject itself, which is also valuable.

> But to remove public dislikes across the entire site takes away a valuable indicator of video quality. Indeed. Which means you'd have to watch the ads (oh, right, there's also a video involved) to determine that the content was garbage. If you can tell without watching a video that it's trash, you might not watch it - which is opposed to YouTube's goal of increasing total video hours watched. Or, at least, their sh…

lol - YouTube and most social media is no longer for us plebs. It's all about pushing propaganda, and unfortunately plebs mass rejecting politically motivated BS is too problematic.

Instead of trying to engage/change minds it's just easier to pretend "problems" like people having the temerity to call BS don't exist. Double plus good.

Re: Testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count

#69
post #9

This seems rather user-hostile. The downvote count is useful for identifying videos that aren't what they claim to be. And how about DIY videos that give terrible advice? A big downvote ratio will get most people's attention in a way that critical comments may not.

Now that I think of it, Twitter doesn't have downvotes and I've never struggled to tell a bad tweet from its ratio.

Re: Testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count

#70
post #9

This seems rather user-hostile. The downvote count is useful for identifying videos that aren't what they claim to be. And how about DIY videos that give terrible advice? A big downvote ratio will get most people's attention in a way that critical comments may not.

Now that I think of it, Twitter doesn't have downvotes and I've never struggled to tell a bad tweet from its ratio.

A bad tweet is obvious because it's easy to digest.

Unfortunately, the 'dislike' signal on a YouTube video doesn't tell me if it's because an expert disagrees with its content, or because the creator is being brigaded, or because the downvoters disagree with their politics (related or unrelated).

The comments are a better signal, but looking through them requires reading... YouTube comments.

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