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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#191

Post by Grakel »

woah wrote: post #136
louissan wrote: post #110

I find this pathetic. As if the removal of the "dislike button" helps in any way, shape or form to create a more "inclusive" environment. This reeks of the silencing of what is perceived as dissident voices, is all. I've personally never hit a like or dislike button in my life, never will ... but found it interesting as a viewer to see the ratio. Even knowing this ratio is probably at least partially the outcome of b…

I know we're not supposed to tell people to RTFA on here... but i feel like i should tell you that they are not removing the dislike button

RTF comment. He found the count informative, as do many people.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#193

Post by ronsor »

Liwink wrote: post #154

It makes me curious why HN does not support "dislike". Will "dislike" make HN more informative?

HN allows downvoting of comments once you reach a certain amount of karma (500, I think). You can't downvote comments that are direct children of your own, however.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#196

Post by saltminer »

tpoacher wrote: post #140
louissan wrote: post #110

I find this pathetic. As if the removal of the "dislike button" helps in any way, shape or form to create a more "inclusive" environment. This reeks of the silencing of what is perceived as dissident voices, is all. I've personally never hit a like or dislike button in my life, never will ... but found it interesting as a viewer to see the ratio. Even knowing this ratio is probably at least partially the outcome of b…

I think you're probably reading too much into this. It's far less likely to be politically motivated, and much more likely to be profit-motivated. Quoting from the article: "We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video." Remove negative counts, make people more likely to click on videos, serve more accompanying ads, profit. Simples.

This...unfortunately makes sense.

If I can tell just by the dislike count if a video is a fake tutorial or w/e, I'm likely to leave immediately. If I'm on my phone (don't have adblock), I'll have closed the video before the preroll ad even lets me skip it.

Now, I'll have to sit through it and make youtube some money before I can determine if a video is any good or not.

Edit: Think about all those scam channels on YT. Disabling likes/dislikes looks fishy, but now they don't have to worry about that since only the likes are visible. This is a massive win for the "GTA online free money"-type channels.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#197

Post by mattowen_uk »

adoxyz wrote: post #29
qwertox wrote: post #4

Hmm. For me the dislike button was informative. If feels like they are trying to create a world where everything can only be good, better, even more better, which just doesn't represent reality. Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.

100% agree. If they're going to do away with the dislike counter, then do away with the like counter as well.

My opinion on this, is that they should hide BOTH the counts, and only the creator can see it.

Keep the actual buttons, as they signal to YouTube what you do and do not want to see in future, but the actual counts only have use to the creator... and even then a simple ratio or percentage alongside the video in the Creator Studio is enough; there's no need for actuall numbers.

What's not been mentioned is that YouTube add a small % of fake clicks to the like/dislike buttons, and also hide the real counts for a while, if there's a rush on clicks (to dissuade click-bandwagoning).

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#198

Post by etchalon »

beckman466 wrote: post #156

why isn't YouTube a public utility yet? or forfeit it for stewardship by archive.org. having the power to monopolistically decide on the design and technical choices for billions of people using proprietary/black box tech is absurd.

If the metric is "anything used by X people should be a public utility", we'll need to have a talk about nationalizing Coca Cola.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#199

Post by Barrin92 »

louissan wrote: post #110

I find this pathetic. As if the removal of the "dislike button" helps in any way, shape or form to create a more "inclusive" environment. This reeks of the silencing of what is perceived as dissident voices, is all. I've personally never hit a like or dislike button in my life, never will ... but found it interesting as a viewer to see the ratio. Even knowing this ratio is probably at least partially the outcome of b…

as the post itself points out this has nothing to do with dissident voices but with preventing dislike attacks and 'ratio-ing' as is common on websites that have these mechanisms in place. Downvote bombing content if anything distorts discourse and makes it harder to figure out what people actually think. There's a reason this very website caps downvotes at -4.

What I find cringeworthy is this keyboard warrior mentality of likening an incentive change on YouTube videos to dissident activity, as if downvoting some cat video on the internet is like publishing Samizdat in the underground of the Soviet Union, maybe pipe down a little bit

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#200

Post by Guvante »

tpoacher wrote: post #140
louissan wrote: post #110

I find this pathetic. As if the removal of the "dislike button" helps in any way, shape or form to create a more "inclusive" environment. This reeks of the silencing of what is perceived as dissident voices, is all. I've personally never hit a like or dislike button in my life, never will ... but found it interesting as a viewer to see the ratio. Even knowing this ratio is probably at least partially the outcome of b…

I think you're probably reading too much into this. It's far less likely to be politically motivated, and much more likely to be profit-motivated. Quoting from the article: "We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video." Remove negative counts, make people more likely to click on videos, serve more accompanying ads, profit. Simples.

You have to load the page to see the dislike count. They already got ad revenue by the time you see it.

I am sure they have better data than anybody as to how often a video is loaded for the first time and disliked within a few seconds of starting.

While once in a while this could be caused by a bad video start it probably mostly isn't caused by the content of the video.

By looking at behavior of users and pattern matching it probably wasn't hard to see that certain users were "making the number big".

Additionally as the article details they likely targeted those users with a new "don't show the number" feature and saw an improvement in the unwanted behavior (unnecessary dislikes).

The reality is that while dislike is fantastic from a quality filter standpoint human behavior likes making numbers big and sometimes they do weird things you have to correct for.

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