No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

It's strange to see imgur as the social media platform it has become. I still think of it as Alan's gift to reddit – a simple image host that doesn't suck.

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

I imagine at the beginning of the socialmediaification it was a curious place full of uncategorized paralel discussion to whatever content imgur hosted for redditors.

Garbage in, garbage out. You feed the recommendation engine with what you watch. I haven't noticed a decline. Like the stuff you like, dislike the stuff you don't, and move on.

> Click baity videos with nice stock footage that is barely relevant and half assed 'answers'.

Stop watching them. Don't waste our time with your failings.

Three dot menu button > Don't Recommend Channel

That's all it takes on Android and desktop Firefox browser.

I've been on Youtube since 2006 and never needed to use the Dislike button. Just zap 'em with "Don't Recommend" and you'll never see it again.

I saw similar bots who copy-paste news content into videos. It's funny to a certain degree. Imagine you are the person doing this, trying to figure out for months how to make money online. In the end, you come to the conclusion that you have to spam YouTube and upload as much as possible - in an automated way... =)

A more elaborate scam are those graphic card reviews: They claim for example to test 4 different GPUs and show them in split screen with FPS and memory information. In reality, it's probably just 1 GPU with the displayed information being faked, because from the pictures alone, you can't see a difference. The information one has to display for the different GPUs can be easily acquired from legitimate graphic card reviews. These videos get millions of views, with positive ratings. Some of these channels probably make >10k a month.

Dislikes are so toxic.

I always felt that Reddit would be so much better if you can upvote what you like and simply ignore the rest. Wouldn't that work? The stuff that people like or find quality posts will rise, so logically the rest will be further down. So why do we need a downvote button?

Imho downvote/dislike buttons on social sites simply validates toxic behaviour, as well as those behaviour from people that wouldn't think of themselves as angry or toxic and yet feel like they need to "fix" the world for others... which almost invariably means they have anger they haven't "digested" yet and so they keep seeing it into the world; anywhere but in themselves. And crucially no amount of dislike/downvotes will make the world a better place - all they do is increase polarization.