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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

#401

Post by karmasimida »

EricE wrote: post #66
Hammershaft wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whe…

> I'm not surprised downvotes are getting remove universally. Much easier to hide reality when you pretend it doesn't exist

Reality is whatever one would like to believe. If you believe in dislikes as 'reality', then you would think most people in US would go rather die than doing so. I would not choose to have this dislike number fool me then, as I don't have need to remind that there are people who don't like you online.

What is not propaganda nowadays? If you have a twitter account, you are propaganda. Everyone is broadcasting some opinions here and there. As long as it is not removing dislikes just for some videos, this is a fair play, and nothing to do with free speech, whatever that means anyway.

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

#403

Post by duskwuff »

lightgreen wrote: post #270
nitrogen wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

View time isn't adequate if a video isn't obviously bad until the very end though.

Good videos which end terribly are exceptionally rare. Dislike mobs do more harm. They probably ignore dislikes already.

> Good videos which end terribly are exceptionally rare.

1. Videos which promise to show something that never actually appears

2. Very short videos which are difficult to not watch in their entirety

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

#404

Post by ByteJockey »

booleandilemma wrote: post #235

Users should just comment "dislike" (or some form of it) from here on out. Or maybe people can rate videos on a 3rd party service.

So we're back to just commenting sage on things we don't like?

The more things change...

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

#405

Post by jasonfarnon »

EricE wrote: post #306
retsibsi wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, I'm trying not to dismiss your perspective just because it sounds a bit conspiratorial, but this is not convincing. Are you saying the YouTube execs (or whoever is leaning on them) are just acting emotionally with no strategy?

There is absolutely a strategy - there is a particular point of view they favor, and anything counter to it is removed. Dislikes are embarrassing to, for lack of better terminology, their pet causes. Simply disabling them on certain videos or channels calls even more attention to them - so why not just remove them entirely. The only thing surprising to me is that it took them this long.

It doesn't need to be that dislikes are embarrassing to their pet causes. There were a few instances where business partners would, e.g., post an ad campaign that got so many dislikes the dislike ratio entered the news cycle. I'm sure google gets pressure from their business/ad partners when that goes down.

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

#407

Post by youeseh »

jlebar wrote: post #387
rz2k wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube premium never shows me adds, and downvotes have reliably gotten the AI to stop suggesting a musician or autoplaying a song that I don't like, regardless of their rough membership in a genre I otherwise want to hear. It makes me feel guilty to downvote someone or their work who's probably a good person, but it's the only reliable way to tune the AI. I get a lot of enjoyment out of music on youtube premium, but…

The tweet is clear that you can still downvote videos to tune the algorithm. Dislikes just won't be shown.

Perhaps they should let paying members see counts.

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

#408

Post by 81million »

frongpik wrote: post #196
argvargc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a site tracking these, some of the stats on older videos with high views are crazy (down the page): https://81m.org

Looks like trolling to me. There's 95% dislike rate even for a mundane "paycheck protection bill".

It is NOT trolling. I made the site. You can easily verify my data.

- The hard way: Use YouTube's API to track the stats on one of the videos. Compare to my data, and the two will line up.

- The medium-hard way: Over the course of a day or so, simply compare the official likes/dislikes that you see on youtube.com to my stats at 81m.org. You will see that my stats line up with the official numbers.

It might be hard to believe at first, but I guarantee you that if you look into it, you will see that YouTube is deleting dislikes. There are tons of random threads about this on Twitter that are totally independent of my site 81m.org.

(edit: add newline between list items)

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

#409

Post by wdb »

cronix wrote: post #282
retsibsi wrote: 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.

Look at the downvotes of this channel. Just pick any video since Jan. It's around 4:1 dislikes to likes. You can bet this is why they're doing it. https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos

Similar to the Star Wars channel

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

#410

Post by mahogany »

phzoe wrote: post #383
mahogany wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a misleading "experiment". Why were only White House channel videos looked at? If you wanted to show that there was targeted dislike manipulation, you would also need to do this analysis on other popular videos, preferably right-leaning political ones. This could simply be an algorithm that detects bot behavior which gets applied broadly, in which case they are not changing any "real" signal. It's certainly p…

50000 people would show up to a Trump rally. 15 journalists to a Biden rally. Engaged dislikers are not "bots". And the left has plenty of resources to have their own like-"bots". No, the truth is very simple. There's at least 50000 Trump supporters that will downvote Biden's white house. Even more because ... no travel required.

> Engaged dislikers are not "bots".

I didn't make that claim.

My main point is that the article suggests that this manipulation is selective, and while Youtube might indeed be selectively manipulating White House videos, the methodology used doesn't show that.

Here's a simple question which should be easy to answer, if you've actually approached this in an impartial way: does Youtube also remove likes or dislikes from other videos in a similar way? If the answer is "yes", then the conclusion becomes much less politically interesting.

PS, I think you're overestimating the amount of people who care about White House channel videos. E.g. the press briefing from 3/29/21 has less than 34,000 views. I guess some of the Trump rally attendees forgot to show up to their downvote party.

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