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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

#201
post #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)

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

That's an oversimplification; downvotes may also reduce the visibility of comments by making them an eyebleeding gray-on-white.

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

#202
post #152
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disabled comments is a very strong signal in its own right. Ratings can also be disabled and usually are as well. Either way, it is still very easy to discern whether the video you are about to watch is controversial.

>Disabled comments is a very strong signal in its own right. It might be but often it's not. A common reason comments are disabled is that a female is in it which invites rude sexist remarks. For example, there was some advanced math university lectures taught by female professors and every one of them was spammed with "men of culture, we meet here again" . Understandably, the channel later disabled the comments out…

I too have watched Numberphile. Rest assured, there's little to no risk of their extremely popular videos being bad.

> No, it's actually cumbersome and wastes extra time to determine if many how-to videos are bad quality without a dislike count.

If this is such a hassle, why participate here on Hacker News, a website providing nothing but informational content with no visible downvote ratings? Could it be possible that this inconvenience is not as bad as you're making it seem? There's plenty of low effort and low quality content reaching the front page every day. Whatever method you use to filter through the content here can also be applied to any other website with similar rules.

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

#203
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"tyranny" Okay, I'm definitely not on YouTube/Google's side here, but calling this tyranny is legit hilarious

Looking at this as a single instance of censorship as tyranny might provoke ridicule, but I see where OP is coming from. Taken in aggregate, in a world with multi-trillion dollar corporations censor their users, it's not ridiculous to talk about this as tyranny. There is no one tyrant, but every corporation rules like one and taken as a whole, the "world's government" (in this case the set of the most powerful corpor…

right. huge companies but also fewer choices. Choice is supposed to be a feature of capitalism, free markets. When so much speech is online, then yet privatization of said speech does become a problem , imho.

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

#204

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.

It's frightening to think that this decision from YouTube might literally end up killing some people. Given the userbase of YouTube, I don't think this is a hyperbole, as unlikely events become likely once the number of samples is high enough.

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

#205

Just in case someone in a position to do something about it is reading this, there's a graceful way out for Youtube. Leave dislike counts publicly available via the API. That way people who use the ratio to evaluate videos (very useful for reviews) can install a browser extension, but dislike mobbing will be minimized, seeing as most casual users will not bother installing such extensions.

Most people probably view from mobile so this would have limited usefulness.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look forward to your treatise on how Taco Bell's removal of the Grilled Stuff Nacho was tyrannical overreach by an unaccountable food monopolist.

cuz if you don't like taco bell there are 2000 other choices that are also good or you can make your own tacos. the same cannot be said for Facebook or YouTube alternatives.

>the same cannot be said for Facebook or YouTube

There are literally hundreds of social media platforms and video hosting sites on the web. Many Youtubers are even advertising their content on alternative platforms.

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

#208
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube doesn't f*** care. Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? Oh, they only upload on our platform? Thought so. They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user. In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they ge…

Some of the more well-known YouTube creators are also on - Curiosity Stream/Nebula (Adam Neely, Mary Spender, Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, Super Bunnyhop) - LBRY/odysee (DistroTube) - FloatPlane (Linus Tech Tips) None of these has a nice recommender like YouTube, so you'll likely either have manual curation (Nebula, Floatplane) or drown in a sea of bad/uninteresting content (LBRY)

Just 99.99% to go

It would take over a hundred years for a person to watch a single day's worth of YouTube uploads. At this point it would take the literal apocalypse to stop them.

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

#209

Sounds like his account has been put into some sort of shadowban mode, which is needed for the {human|bot} spammers out there (not that I know why it would be applied to them).

I'll bet he got flagged for "handjob", which seems like a plausible entry on the list of words disproportionately likely to be used by spambots. Somewhat poetically, "poof" also seems to be on a list (perhaps because in some countries, it's a slur for a gay or effeminate man) [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVlobDyTqeY

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

#210

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…

Youtube doesn't f*** care. Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? Oh, they only upload on our platform? Thought so. They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user. In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they ge…

> In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest

Long running project of mine. "Corporate change bounties". Customers leave some supplier and then state why and somehow demonstrate how much cash has exited with them as a customer.

Here's an example. Let's say att lobbies hard against net neutrality and customers were fed up and left. They could go to this site and somehow select "att + net neutrality + i will return if they support it" and then through some black magic prove that they were a long time att customer that paid $X/month that just cancelled.

There's a way to avoid the black magic by making it a "crowd funding" style site but in many conversations effectively zero people would want to give, say Nestle or Walmart, a gift in return for them not being an evil prick.

So there's gotta be some kind of balance. A number representing potential money on the table that can be captured if a policy change happens.

I made two versions of it a while back but new ideas are hard so oh well. But maybe a third time it will work, who knows

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