YouTube still has dislikes. They just don't show the count publicly any more.
No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
71–80 of 498 posts
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#72Without being able to ratio likes to dislikes, every video on YouTube becomes useless for information value. Every video is now for entertainment only, which is what the communist radical left wants - when there is no truth, then whoever shouts the loudest becomes the voice of truth. They have taken a big step towards ruining the internet.
Ah yes, the communist radical left who famously want large private corporations to enable the people with the most resources to dominate public discourse.
Please stop and think of a testable hypothesis, or actually talk to some of these supposed communist radical leftists, before making any more grand claims like this.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#73Me too. YouTube recommendations have been seriously bad for about a month now. I get ideos I’ve already watched and all the interesting recommendations don’t show up any more, it’s become completely boring.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#74I don't think it should be a surprise that as Youtube hired more and more experienced hands from cable and broadcast TV that it would progressively become more and more like TV.
People complain about the manipulative algorithms. But they don't exist in a vacuum, they are the results of some execs deciding to manipulate people. And the way those decisions are made is the same way traditional TV made during all those years.
Then you hire the same execs, to please the same wall street analysts, but now you can use technology to enable the most perverted wet dreams of those TV executives, and you get what you get nowadays on youtube.
It is not different from what the greater web has become once we hired all the advertising people to control and direct our web experiences.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#75Without being able to ratio likes to dislikes, every video on YouTube becomes useless for information value. Every video is now for entertainment only, which is what the communist radical left wants - when there is no truth, then whoever shouts the loudest becomes the voice of truth. They have taken a big step towards ruining the internet.
> the communist radical left
Didn't you find any bigger words?
In the end it's about engagement. Without the dislike count you'll have to watch more videos to find the good ones, so there's more chances to show ads, which is good for revenue.
But yeah, communist world conspiracy is more likely.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#76I don't personally think the dislike button is the explanation. But something seems to have changed in the Youtube recommendations algo in the last few weeks. In my experience, the algo has gotten very noticeably worse recently: - Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?) - Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending reall…
- Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?) For many topics 6-12 year old videos are perfectly acceptable.
Sure, but I'm talking about specifically non-evergreen videos like 10 year old product previews. That's what has cropped up recently. Youtube used to be pretty good about recommending old evergreen content but not time-sensitive content.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#77I don't personally think the dislike button is the explanation. But something seems to have changed in the Youtube recommendations algo in the last few weeks. In my experience, the algo has gotten very noticeably worse recently: - Recommending lots of 6 - 12 year old videos on topics I'm interested in (who cares about a 12 year old product review?) - Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending reall…
> Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending really, really old videos from people I normally watch. It's always done this, but it seems worse recently. Also, subscribe to a channel, get recommended their entire repertoire of the last decade. I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss. What…
> Also, subscribe to a channel, get recommended their entire repertoire of the last decade. I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss.
I fear that there is a very big group (that is usually not on HN) that actually likes this. People who get absolutely hyped on some new channel and just have to watch everything on that channel. Not because it’s interesting content, but because for those few hours/days/weeks they feel that they “belong” to the community of that channel (even if they don’t meaningfully interact or discuss with the other people in that community or even the creator). This also gives them social status with friends. Then after a few hours/days/weeks, repeat the cycle (multiple cycles can run in parallel but not too much as it would affect your social status of being part of the hip cult-of-the-day). Obviously those people also watch stuff outside that channel, but they don’t mind being presented with videos of the same channel all the time, because again bragging rights that come with “oh I’ve really seen everything, look at this: seen it, seen it, …”).
(Seems a bit similar to some other demographic that is extremely into watching sports…)
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#78Stop clicking on click-bait, you're doing it to yourself. Watch only "boring" / serious channels and you won't have that problem. That's what I do and I get great recommendations (tons of numberphile, computerphile, 3blue1brown, pbs space time, finance and economics... stuff like that).
The like/dislike ratio is a universal indicator. Serious/boring channels are not immune to the side effects of its disappearance. It affects every one across the board. Here comes a 20 minutes video on Dynamic Programming and I have no idea what other people really thought of the teacher's ability to get the point across.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#79YouTube is still useful. It's a giant repository of videos that get indexed by search engines. The way to use it is: 1) know what you want to watch beforehand 2) search using a different engine like DDG 3) use yt-dl to grab the video and watch offline The mistake would be to "log in" to the actual site, and click on the "recommended" rubbish and all that algorithmic cruft to manipulate, data-mine your soul and mislea…
"know what you want to watch beforehand" - 100% this. Over at least the past few years, this is almost entirely what I do and it has helped youtube remain a good experience for me. In general, I rarely do research on youtube or twitter or even googling or even reddit. In most instances, I'm better served by just starting with the wikipedia page or some specialized encyclopedia (e.g., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) and then going from there. On sites like youtube, I either go in knowing precisely what I'm trying to watch or to watch new videos from a select few channels I subscribe to (usually silly stuff like press conferences of football managers etc.).
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#80I used the like/dislike ratio to see if something is actually a good video about the topic I'm searching, or should I continue further. For example, if I search "volvo s40 MAF sensor replacement", I won't watch someone ramble 20 minutes about how volvos are good, and why they chose the car in white instead of blue color... I want someone who'll pop the hood and replace the sensor, and those videos will usually have a…
You can at least solve the problem of not seeing dislikes anymore with a browser extension, e.g. "Return YouTube Dislike".
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis... (also available for Firefox, Edge, ..)
Of course, it doesn't solve the recommendation issue the thread creator mentioned.