Can you clarify this for me? I have always assumed that since I’m the one watching the video I’m their customer/user?
You are not paying, right? So you are the product. You are targeted with ads tailored to your viewing pattern; your data is what creates value.
I am actually paying to get rid of advertisements, not to get rid of useful features. This will just get me to stick with my channel subscriptions, as the recommendations are already often better and better scams.
YouTube was a free speech platform only as long as it took to establish dominance. Now it's just another corporate megaphone with an inconvenient independent creator problem they are slowly solving by making it an intolerable place to have dissenting opinions. Can't question the election, can't question coronavirus. Big Google decides what is acceptable and keeps the rules and process vague, inscrutable, and opaque s…
If you want a free speech platform you should advocate for a government funded competitor. You might think that the NSA would instantly prune comments but you'd be failing to see the 800 lbs gorilla which is the US GAO and FOIA requests that'd hamstring anything the intelligence branches tried to do (outside of, y'know, legitimate threats).
That's an interesting idea. I'm working on an alternative discussion site and have wondered why the Gov doesn't do more to foster competition rather than hold pointless hearings with the same 3 people over and over again.
Targeted dislike campaigns are clearly a thing. I'm glad they are doing this.
For what percentage of videos? 0.0001%? Seems like they're tossing out the baby with the bathwater, punishing everyone using YouTube in order to protect a very small number from criticism.
Oh I know, I am pretty cynical and not exactly outraged here. But although they don't care about what's good for us, they do care about what will keep us on the platform. And if it gets harder to find good stuff and filter out the dross, that could conceivably have negative consequences for YouTube in the long run.
I'm not outraged - I'm amused. The ultimate admission the only way they can spread their messaging is through force, not honest competition of ideas. How superior. Nothing proves you have a worthy argument better than outright hiding from dissent. Again, they don't care if you stay on the platform. If they did, they wouldn't touch it. The disagreement buttons were added in the first place because they increase and ma…
Who is “they”?
You appear to have lept to some very extreme conclusions without anything resembling supporting data.
Downvotes increase engagement. Otherwise they wouldn't have been put there in the first place. No, the real issue here is too many of the "right" things are getting downvoted. So when The White House, Disney or the Academy disable downvotes on part or all of their videos but other wide swaths of videos don't need to disable downvotes, the contrast causes them to stick out like a sore thumb. It calls attention (also k…
You are all over this thread claiming that the White House is explicitly pressuring Google to remove this feature of the site. Do you have supporting evidence, or did you just make this up? It seems more like you have a narrative and agenda to push.
The revolving door and growing ties between Google and segments of government strongly suggests a constant flow of information and the creation of incentives in a way that create a common understanding across both. Meaning, you might not need to "tell" anyone to do anything in particular. Your ties create common interest and once two groups, here relatively fluid groups with fuzzy boundaries, share a common interest, no explicit coordination is necessary.
Are people really using votes like that? You putting your trust in deciding quality in a vote count? There's so much wrong with that.
It’s the worst solution except for every other we’ve ever tried.
There's plenty of other ways of figuring out if something is good. When you go to a restaurant do you just look at the star rating? Or do you read reviews, look at the menu, ask ppl etc
Your first mistake was thinking that you are the user they care about serving :p
Perhaps, but this is the last Google product I still use. If they break YouTube like they did search, chrome, cellphones, and email, I guess I am off to find something else which must hurt their bottom line eventually.
Your first mistake was thinking that you are the user they care about serving :p
Perhaps, but this is the last Google product I still use. If they break YouTube like they did search, chrome, cellphones, and email, I guess I am off to find something else which must hurt their bottom line eventually.
Are people really using votes like that? You putting your trust in deciding quality in a vote count? There's so much wrong with that.
noisy signal is better than no signal, which in turn is better than manipulated signal. at least with this change they won't be deleting[0] dislikes anymore. [0]: https://phzoe.com/2021/01/27/white-house-youtube-dislike-man...
I would say votes aren't a signal at all. You can be voted in either direction for anything. You don't know who's voting or why.
All that article shows is that the votes are manipulated by users too, there's no signal in down vote brigading like that
Youtube is trying to sit on two chairs: it needs dislikes to feed its ML algorithms, but it wants to keep users in the dark. I doubt users will bother to send likes and dislikes into the void, so youtube will have to give at least something back. I bet that the final solution will be to show users convincing fake data, so they would feel the urge to contribute by clicking that like it dislike button.