I ran into a robo news reader channel in my suggestions yesterday, which seemed to have just taken the BBC article on Russia's victory day parade and ran it through a text to speech program, but somehow had 300k subscribers. Still having dislikes would have saved me from wasting time, and they don't even have a report option that covers this robotic spam
No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
131–140 of 498 posts
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#132It's just my layman opinion but I think it has something to do with trying to emulate TikTok. I don't use youtube very much but this Sunday I discovered a thing called "siren kings" and wanted to watch some videos about them. Hell, now it's all reggaeton, sound battles and the like! But the thing I noticed is that when I entered a particular video, just that one, I entered a TikTok like mode where I could keep skippi…
> I entered a TikTok like mode where I could keep skipping from a short crappy video to another in an infinite doomscroll of shit
Sounds like you clicked on a "YouTube Short", which will start a TikTok-like view with short videos. These are different than normal videos and as you correctly point out, it is done to emulate TikTok.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#133I 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…
I explicitly downvote videos that aren't directly relevant to what I want to keep seeing. This does mean that I often downvote videos that I've enjoyed, such as useful product reviews for something that I'm buying. This keeps my recommendations relatively clean.
That's what the Not Interested button is for.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
where does the extension get the data from, though? it's not like they just have to remove a `display: none` somewhere.
Apparently, the Youtube API documented here - https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos - returns both likes and dislikes. All Google did was remove the rendering of that API response field onto the webpage.
Extensions probably acquire the video url and make their own API call just to retrieve the dislike count. To me, that seems cleaner than trying to snoop on the main API call response (I think extensions might not have access to those, maybe they do). Basically, the data is available via API calls.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
where does the extension get the data from, though? it's not like they just have to remove a `display: none` somewhere.
The dislike count is still in the data returned by the YouTube API[0], so they're probably getting it from there.
[0]https://developers.google.com/youtube/analytics/metrics#disl...
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#136if you depend on other people to make your own opinion about a content, then you have a problem
hiding dislikes has no effect on me, because i know how to think and judge something by myself
our society became dumb
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#137The problem is that Google is in the business of making money, not in the business of filtering bad from good content. Their decision to keep negative feedback hidden from both their content-producers and their visitors is quite easily justified from a financial point of view.
First, about protecting content producers: Youtubers who generate content with high viewcounts (and thus generating the largest revenue) are either in the show business (e.g., singers) or individuals who associate their personal identity to their brand (e.g., influencers). The problem with influencers is their psychological profile: the vast majority of them can be described as suffering from general anxiety disorder, depression and chronical attention seeking.
This is a very dangerous cocktail that can easily lead anyone in that profile towards suicidal thoughts as soon as anything negative or critical about their performance or appearance reaches their perception.
These people are cash cows for both Google (Youtube and ads) and all companies that use them as human advertisement platforms. Anyone with good sense would know that they should hide negative feedback from these people and make sure they keep believing that the world loves them. Their revenue depends on it.
You can find a similar models in Twitter and LinkedIn. On both platforms, an increasing number of individuals brag about their recent job accomplishments, and they now even share pictures of any training or education they get. Their user interface will emphasize the fact that you had some likes, reshares/retweets and even send you nudges to encourage you to go on. However, one thing they will never tell you is the number of people who just completely dislike what you do.
Users would be devastated at discovering that most people they actually mark as "friends" or "connections" despise everything they post online, they would feel depressed and probably engage into avoidance behaviors towards virtual social networks. And that would also drive revenue down very rapidly.
Second, about hiding the signal from users. When Youtube hides the number of dislikes, it prevents you from a accessing a crucial quality indicator that will very likely influence whether or not you will click (view) the video. What happens is that you must click the video to know if it's bad, and you will have to click subsequent videos until you find the one that suits your expectations. Two consequences:
- the view count increases --> and thus attracts more people --> more revenue
- you click more videos until you find a satisfying one --> more revenue.
That's it. Hiding negative feedback turns Youtube into a terrible experience for viewers but maximizes both short-term shareholder interests and highly vulnerable content producers.
Enjoy it, or leave it, they know you are a minority :)
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#138I 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…
The solution i find about subscribing channels;
I am selecting "Don't recommend channel" for subscribed channels so i see them only in Subscriptions page, i am afraid that Youtube can see it as i am not interested these channels and topics but i didn't see any downside with this method.
I am also unsubscribing frequently posting channels and bookmark them if i want to visit them later so my Subscription page don't have spam videos.
Also removing one time watched uninterested-topic videos from history may help algorithm.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#139I 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…
What bothers me most about the recommendations I get are the videos I have clearly watched. "You recently watched this clip, so we at YouTube think you should watch it again."
I do rewatch some of my history every now and then, mostly music and comedy clips. But it seems like YouTube doesn't understand that this works for some content, but not for all.
Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me
#140I 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…
I am sure you are wrong about it not being the dislike button but it could be something else. Obviously though, this means there is no longer any open source fraud control anymore, of course this would happen!