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YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

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Re: YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

#171

Looking at a lot of timber framing technique videos this week and realized how badly I miss the dislike as a signal that the video-taker is doing something wrong or dangerous.

Same. The like count is completely useless without the dislike count. They may as well have just gotten rid of both.

Re: YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

#172
post #81

Hacker News has a similar problem with comments: net_votes = up_votes - down_votes You need at least two of the above variables to get an idea of both the direction and magnitude of the voting. Hacker News provides only one: net_votes. YouTube used to provide up_votes and down_votes, effectively providing all three. Now YouTube has reduced its information to up_votes, so they're now down to one variable in the equati…

Because on HN there are only two possible states for comments. Flagged or visible. The upvotes and downvotes just help compute the order.

This is better for freedom of expression and showing the split would be a bad idea imo. Comments who are more upvoted are also more downvoted because they are more visible (as they rank first)

Re: YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

#174

I really hope this backfires spectacularly on YouTube and the zealots who pushed for this change are held professionally accountable. I already click on fewer videos in search results and recommendations because I can no longer gauge how worthwhile they are to try and watch. The end result? I'm sticking to my current channels. I can't be alone and knowing that YouTube takes recommended content so seriously, I have to…

I'm really puzzled why anyone cares about this so passionately. I'm not a YouTube diehard but I use it pretty regularly to watch a handful of channels I like, maybe 2-3 hours per week watching videos on the site. Occasionally I'll search for how to video and click on whatever is in the top few results on Google. I've seen several posts now across different sites lamenting this change, but I've yet to see anything remotely persuasive that this is a bad thing. Sometimes I think it's just people being grumpy about any change at all, the way some people will grumble about a logo change despite it having no real consequence of how things work.

In my personal experience, I rarely even noticed the dislike count. Sometimes I'd wonder who the few unfortunate people were who disliked a video with about 1000x as many likes. It reminded me of the 1 star reviews you see on Amazon complaining about the postman for a product that otherwise has a stellar record. I just assume something is wrong with those peoples computers which made their video glitch out or something. I don't really trust negative feedback that much when it is paired with an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for the same thing. And I don't think I ever encountered a video with anywhere near the number of dislikes as likes, let alone more dislikes. I personally have never disliked a video. If I'm watching something new, I'll just watch part of the video myself, and decide if I want to watch the rest or click away to something else.

When I heard the announcement of removing the count as an effort to combat brigading, it made a lot of sense to me. I've seen the growth of negativity across the internet in the last few years. People are actually addicted to outrage these days, so anything that can help eliminate that seems like a good idea to me. The fact they kept the button there and still show the count to the uploader seems like they've at least tried to appease the diehards who appreciate having that dislike button - pretty fair if you ask me.

You may challenge the assumption that only diehards care about this, but I've just looked at a few videos in my feed to see the number of likes and it's abysmal. 40k likes for a video with 4M views. 18k likes for a video with 800k views. They're all like that. The like/dislike metric just doesn't have much engagement. While you predict dire consequences for YouTubes future and panic among their employees, I am thinking that casual users probably have not even noticed at all.

Re: YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

#176
post #81

Hacker News has a similar problem with comments: net_votes = up_votes - down_votes You need at least two of the above variables to get an idea of both the direction and magnitude of the voting. Hacker News provides only one: net_votes. YouTube used to provide up_votes and down_votes, effectively providing all three. Now YouTube has reduced its information to up_votes, so they're now down to one variable in the equati…

Hacker news has a minimum karma requirement for downvoting; you can't just create an account (or a dozen accounts) and start downvoting something you don't like, or to harass someone with serial downvotes. You must first attract a certain number of upvotes for your comments and submissions.

That fixes many of the abuse problems with downvotes.

HN situations are also monitored by the site operators themselves, who intervene. YT is too vastly big for that.

Re: YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

#177
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not related to the dislike feature in particular, but Youtube is definitely losing the next generation of creators. Plenty of people are using TikTok as their main platform nowadays, as it has bigger reach for their markets.

TikTok is targeting a different type of content, there is no competition with YouTube as we know it, which is videos longer than 10 minutes.

Which is frankly still a wild concept to me because when I was of prime YouTube-binging age, the maximum length of a video was 10 minutes.

Re: YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

#178
Likes and dislikes are a horrible way to judge a video, ime. I don't know who liked or disliked a video or for what reasons. A like by someone may be a good reason for me to watch the video where a like by someone else might be an excellent reason not to watch it. Similar for dislikes. Of the two, I guess I prefer likes. People who dislike videos are usually upset about something specific, often things I don't really care much about. People who like something generally actually like it, as far as I've seen.

When I'm considering whether I might like to watch a video, I do the unthinkable and just give it a go for a few minutes if it looks like it might be interesting or entertaining. I don't really need aggregated opinions from random people on the internet to help me make my decision on whether I like it or not. I couldn't, for example, tell you if I'm currently seeing dislikes on videos even though I've watched a fair few of them recently.

Re: YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? A lot of them are cross-posting to Odysee, and some are also on Nebula.

2 platforms I have never heard of before this post. It's like saying Mastadon is a replacement for _______. Yeah, no it/they are not replacing. Those sites are like the catch can for those willing to step away from THE place. Until those creators actually leave YT to 100% commit to other places by no longer posting to YT, then the masses are not leaving YT (or FB/Twit/etc). Edit: Do any of these content creators post…

Do any of these content creators posting to other non-YT sites mention the availability of these sites in their YT videos?

Yes. EEVblog mentions Odysee all the time, and many many channels mention Nebula when shilling Curiosity Stream. They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma.

Re: YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

#180

I can see why people would be annoyed at being shadow banned. Alternatively get your circle of friends to upload videos to your own site and manage the comments/spam as you see fit. I am not convinced by the arguments that Youtube is needed to handle bandwidth unless you are popular in which case you can probably afford throwing a few small CDN's at the problem. The harder part would be finding advertising partners a…

> Alternatively get your circle of friends to upload videos to your own site and manage the comments/spam as you see fit

I’m confused by your suggestion. I have no interest in watching videos that my friends are uploading (because my friends aren’t uploading). How would having a site where my friends post videos help this situation?

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