Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 590 posts

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

#231

Post by handoflixue »

caconym_ wrote: post #194
mitchdoogle wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rem…

I'm with you. It baffles me how much people claim to care about a metric that seems only to be legitimately useful in the edgiest of edge cases, and has literally never been of any use to me. And, maybe I'm being unfair, but many of these people seem like exactly the sort of people who'd get involved in an ideologically-motivated downvote brigade. Ironically, all the signals I do trust to tell me which videos are wor…

> It baffles me how much people claim to care about a metric that seems only to be legitimately useful in the edgiest of edge cases, and has literally never been of any use to me.

Different use cases for YouTube, presumably? If you're listening to music or watching well-established content creators, then dislikes are basically irrelevant. But if you're looking for a "how to" tutorial, dislikes and comments are the only way to quickly sort the good from the bad.

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

#232

Post by flycaliguy »

dwighttk wrote: post #226
franczesko wrote: post #217

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 c…

> By turning off dislikes, users will be forced to engage with additional content. Why?

They will comment instead, which is a more valuable form of engagement. A quick dislike and then moving on is less time spent on a video? People return to see responses to their comment, end up in conversation or reading other comments. My guess anyways.

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

#233

Post by munificent »

1_player wrote: post #77
Hamcha wrote: 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.

> TikTok is targeting a different type of content, there is no competition with YouTube as we know it

I something learned from the MMO boom back in the days of WoW. After WoW came out, there were a glut of other MMOs. Game companies were like, "Look at WoW! Players love MMOs! If we make MMOs, we'll be rich!"

Almost all of them failed. The problem wasn't that the games were bad. Many were technically and artistically better. It definitely wasn't that gamers couldn't afford them. Cost was within the level of disposable income for most. The problem wasn't even network effects and userbase, though those do have an effect. Gamers move to new games all the time.

The problem was that there is one fundamentally scarce commodity: human time.

Thinking of competition in terms of physical goods is using an Industrial Age definition of competition when we're living in an Information Age. Consumers need a wide variety of unrelated physical things, so competition is only really meaningful between the products of the same kind. Also, producing goods has a significant per-unit cost.

With information—especially entertainment media—anything that takes user attention competes with every other product that does the same. It doesn't matter if the products are completely unrelated: they burn the same scarce resource, so users using one are less able to use the other. And this is the only scarce resource in the equation since the marginal cost of streaming the same movie to one viewer or a million is essentially the same.

YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Fortnite, Instagram, Fox News, Minecraft, Reddit, Spotify, they're all competing against each other.

As Reed Hastings said once, "You get a show or a movie you’re really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep. And we’re winning."

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

#234

Post by BbzzbB »

dwighttk wrote: post #226
franczesko wrote: post #217

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 c…

> By turning off dislikes, users will be forced to engage with additional content. Why?

Because you can't see a video has a 1:9 like:dislike ratio to tell you it's not worth your time. Granted, you'll (probably) be able to tell from the comments, for now.

I'm not convinced how much it'd actually impact watch time, but it seems to be the thesis.

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

#235

Post by cbozeman »

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…

> YT is too vastly big for that.

No it's not, it's our society that's fucked. It's our CEOs' legal requirement of fiduciary responsibility that causes these problems.

YouTube was 10.9% of Google's revenue for the year 2020, with something around $19,770,000,000 of income. How many employees could Google hire to manually investigate and take action against users? Even 10% of that income to address this problem would hire literally tens of thousands of people to tackle the issue.

The "problem" with Big Tech is that they're convinced of their own intelligence and they all believe they can automate their way to Utopia. Well you can't. You're not that smart. You're not that wise. You need bodies on the ground, you need hands doing work. We may get there some day, but it won't be today, tomorrow, ten years from now, and it may not even be a hundred years from now.

A little painful hubris in the form of some of these enormous social media platforms collapsing not under their own weight, but under their own arrogance in the form of thinking they can automate their problems away, would be a good dose of medicine sorely needed.

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

#236

Post by karaterobot »

uh_uh wrote: post #198
godshatter wrote: post #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…

> I do the unthinkable and just give it a go for a few minutes You do this on a societal level and you waste centuries. There's no need for thousands of people to watch a few minutes of a bad DIY video to conclude that it's crap.

Doesn't seem like society is all that concerned with how much time it wastes watching Youtube videos either way. But, in this situation why wouldn't prioritizing videos with more upvotes not work just as well?

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

#237

Post by paulpauper »

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…

The problem is voting is that it confirms what views are popular, not what is correct . The assumption that voting can help correct misinformation is probably wrong.

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

#238

Post by smoe »

1_player wrote: post #77
Hamcha wrote: 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.

Many educational YouTuber push heavily for their extended / deeper content on Nebula in their YT videos.

I don’t know how well Nebula is doing, but I don’t see it as impossible that there is going to be some fragmentation in the video space in the future.

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

#239

Post by paulpauper »

krapp wrote: post #206
paulpauper wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

but YouTube is 1000x more popular than the others and much nicer interface and useability. They are not interchangeable in the same way food choices are interchangeable.

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

#240

Post by cbozeman »

skissane wrote: post #140
r00fus wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very interesting to ask what's gained by seeing downvotes in addition to upvotes, and whether that differs based on whether the content is video or commentary. HN comments can still be downvoted (if you have enough karma) so arguably you can still get signal quality from the sum of votes. Especially since in most cases, you can simply comment instead of downvote.

> 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…

All the downvote - or upvote for that matter - does for me is tell me what the prevailing opinion is for people who likely have similar backgrounds to me, have had similar experiences as me, and who have similar attitudes as me.

If my comments are highly upvoted, I've hit upon a truth or realization with which many people agree. If my comments are downvoted, I've also likely hit upon a truth or a realization, but one with which many people are deeply uncomfortable.

It's up to my own powers of discernment and wisdom to determine if people are all wrong and the prevailing sentiment is incorrect, or if it's me who's out in left field and is significantly off-base. We will never engineer a button to press to give us this insight.

Post reply on HN