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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#251

Post by paganel »

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…

> Disney, DC Comics and the like must've complained about bad ratings/unfavourable like/dislike ratios I guess..

I think it was mostly about politics.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#252

Post by LarrySellers »

felistoria wrote: post #171
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…

The White House has one of the worst ratios. I would imagine thats likely why it happened.

The change was being explored years before Biden was president

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/youtube-doesnt-like-...

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#254

Post by Mountain_Skies »

MattGrommes wrote: post #153

I've never understood why they even have a downvote feature. It's almost always like 10,000 likes to 43 dislikes. What information is that getting across? Even if it were 10k to 1k, that doesn't even indicate anything real because of so many people disliking stuff because the host is a woman or they were told to by some other Youtuber.

There are tons of "product review" videos that are little more than an automated voice reading scraped product descriptions along with a slideshow of images from a web search for the item. They have nearly no value but for products with few video reviews, view count is not a useful metric. These faux review videos get downvoted and it serves as a good signal that the video isn't worth watching.

The people who make these automated videos aren't looking for millions of hits per video, they're looking for a few hundred, which when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of this type of video, means millions of clicks for them. Since actual reviews of older products have a small number of views, the automated ones float to the top of search results. Dislikes was a way of separating the two. Few people click Like for the good videos but there were enough clicking Dislike on the shovelware videos to help filter them out. Expect to see an increase in these automated garbage videos as they're now allowed to drown out actual content.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#255

Post by CoryAlexMartin »

Barrin92 wrote: post #199
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 mental…

If you think cat videos are the most impactful videos on Youtube, you must have stopped paying attention to the website 15 years ago.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#256

Post by nomorecommas »

winternett wrote: post #218
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…

It's the exact same move that reddit made years ago, and it enabled a new era of online brigading and fake credibility/popularity for content shown on pages. If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be. It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others. The beginning of the end of being able to trust YouTube stats (as if th…

> Goodbye old useful web... sigh

I did warn years ago that the gamification of the web would lead us here. The mere existence of voting systems on social media sites encourages the kind of behavior they claim to be addressing. In fact, I'm guessing they already know that.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#258

Post by phh »

alex_c wrote: post #161

This change is very upsetting. Ever since becoming a parent, I've been baffled by a mystery. I noticed that - unlike most other popular content - children's videos on YouTube almost always have roughly a 2:1 like to dislike ratio no matter what channel or type of content. Why? Where do all the dislikes come from? Is it from kids mashing touch screens at random? Parents taking what small revenge they can at being subj…

Maybe the reality is all those votes are purely random, but somehow the dislike button has half the chance of random click than like button. Which would be pretty interesting.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#260

Post by secondaryacct »

capybara_2020 wrote: post #27

What about cases where the dislikes are against a gov figure and the count gives you confidence in numbers. Plus now authoritarian governments get to serve out even more propaganda talking about videos that are liked and the opposition has no way to see that the opposite also happens. So the opposition grows even more silent. Afraid to act because it might lead to negative repercussions and there is no scale of the d…

If an opposition needs google videos dislike buttons to exist, it's already too late and already too silent.

What they can do is make opposition videos and get their own support, it'll be just as useless but it wont be brigaded visibly by the massive dictatorial support.

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