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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

#211

Post by mrtweetyhack »

Hamcha wrote: post #72
1_player wrote: post #18

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…

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.

You mean China owned TikTok?

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

#212

Post by jasode »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #193
jasode wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do people actually look at the votes before watching a video? Yes, lots of people do that to avoid wasting time on bad videos. Especially for product review videos or tutorials, the first thing I look at is the dislike count compared to the like count. If dislikes are high, it's because the reviewer didn't provide useful information. E.g. a "top 5 dash cams" where the video is simply a slide show of dashcams will ha…

Is there actual data on this somewhere that shows how the number of likes and dislikes affect users likelihood to watch? You don't even see the number of likes or dislikes in the video listing page, right? My experience with how to videos is that I'll search on Google, it'll pull up a good video and take me directly to the point in the video that discusses what I want to know. Sometimes I use number of views or numbe…

>Is there actual data on this somewhere that shows how the number of likes and dislikes affect users likelihood to watch?

I'm unaware of such statistics.

>You don't even see the number of likes or dislikes in the video listing page, right?

Correct, the dislikes count was only visible if you clicked into the video. So users that depend on the dislikes count to avoid a bad video would have to click into each video and take a quick glance at the dislikes/likes ratio. If the dislikes are too high, immediately exit out and click the next video.

>I've only ever used the like button a handful of times when I want to quickly save a video. I've never used the dislike.

I also never use the Like & Dislike _buttons_ but that's not relevant to how I found the dislikes _counts_ useful. (Because enough of other viewers expressed their vote by pressing the dislike button.)

> I always thought of them more as a metric YouTube uses in their algorithm and not something people pay much attention to

Lots of viewers pay attention them especially when searching for new videos from unknown creators who are not in their feed. A short video from MKBHD explains the usefulness of dislikes counts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaaJyRvvaq8

E.g. a tech conference might have generated 50 videos each an hour in length. The ones with too many dislikes, I just skip. The dislikes stats helped prioritize what to watch in this age of information overload.

>which can still be the case when the numbers are hidden. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Yes, Youtube says the algorithm will still consider dislikes even though they are hidden for recommendations. But people still want to see numerical stats to quickly curate videos that Youtube did not recommend.

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

#213

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

polote wrote: post #175

My bet is that people will start posting a comment saying "upvote this comment if you want to downvote", the comment will rank first and it will be as if you have a public dislike count

I doubt YouTube’s comment ranking would put this at the top, since it looks a lot like the type of brigading that they are trying to reduce with this change.

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

#214

Post by ironmagma »

1_player wrote: post #18
BitwiseFool wrote: post #6

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…

If they don’t care, why do anything?

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

#215

Post by gthtjtkt »

kzrdude wrote: post #139
hirundo wrote: 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…

Moderation here is quite opionated, isn't it? I would guess that it's a very conscious choice to not show votes or downvotes, since it makes commenter interaction even more contentious. I like it the way it is.

HN is the most heavily moderated, manipulated and astro-turned forum I've even seen, but you don't realize that until the mods start suppressing your posts and comments. Titles are constantly edited for no apparent reason, users who post unpopular facts are permanently penalized, and you can watch as negative stories about large tech companies are quickly flagged off the front page.

There's literally zero transparency here. At least on Reddit you can track the censorship in real time.

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

#216

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

kazinator wrote: post #176
hirundo wrote: 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 int…

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

Agreed. Another way of framing this is that HN is sponsored by an organization that makes a lot more money per HN user than Google makes per YouTube user. In other words, HN users don’t have to pay for their own moderation by generating revenue in the same way YouTubes users do.

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

#217

Post by franczesko »

The majority of YouTube traffic comes from mobile devices (this can be observed in Google Ads for any video campaign), which is losing market share because of Tictoc.

Google will do whatever it takes to monetize every inch of their investment. By turning off dislikes, users will be forced to engage with additional content.

This is also visible on the other side of the spectrum - Google is pushing heavily integrated campaign products (e.g. Performance Max Campaigns), which include non-performing channels as display and video (in comparison to search), which can't be turned off.

At this point they can, as they are a monopoly, but I hope they will get burned, as they are introducing more and more dark patterns, which result in lower than poor user experience.

My take on this - AdBlock relentlessly, support creators directly. Switch platforms eventually - there's choice out there.

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

#218

Post by tshaddox »

slackson wrote: post #200
tshaddox wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, the entire point of YouTube for me is the long tail. I don't watch any of those channels you listed, and the only two I've heard of are Linus and Adam Neely. But the more important point is that even if all the many dozens of mostly small channels I subscribe to were on some other paid video service, I wouldn't want to track down and check in on all those services. Even just 3 would be a vastly worse experie…

RSS/Atom feeds and video files you can play with whatever video player you want seems like it'd cover most of those concerns? The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate. The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.

> RSS/Atom feeds and video files you can play with whatever video player you want seems like it'd cover most of those concerns?

Absolutely, as long as there was widespread agreement in both the distribution mechanism and important video features like closed captions.

> The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate.

No, but the consistency and ability to get everything in one place is pretty vital, and is something you pretty much get for free from single centralized sources. The closed nature is obviously one of the huge downsides.

> The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.

Yep. Another big one is the cost of serving videos.

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

#220

Post by skissane »

Strom wrote: post #192
skissane wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN comments can still be downvoted (if you have enough karma) so arguably you can still get signal quality from the sum of votes. Downvotes on HN comments aren't a pure quality signal. HN's culture is that downvoting something just because you disagree with it is perfectly cromulent behaviour, as established by PG himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691 Hones…

It might be cromulent to some, but in my experience it is not widespread. Definitely done at a much lower rate than other places like reddit. Main indicator of this is that on HN it's not uncommon to see an upvoted comment that has almost exclusively argumentative replies. However on reddit when I see a comment with so many disagreeing responses, it's well into the negative. Also, at a sample point of one, I make an…

> Main indicator of this is that on HN it's not uncommon to see an upvoted comment that has almost exclusively argumentative replies

It could be that people who agree upvote without replying, people who disagree reply to argue against it. HN discourages non-substantive replies; if you agree with everything someone says, it can be hard to generate a substantive reply to it. (In practice, occasional non-substantive agreeing replies are tolerated, but people who do it more than occasionally often encounter some pushback.)

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