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

251–260 of 590 posts

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

#251

Post by gary_0 »

handoflixue wrote: post #231
caconym_ wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

I think comments are less useful since the channel owner can arbitrarily delete and filter them (correct me if I'm wrong). So part of the outrage is that dislikes were the last semi-reliable metric left to check for garbage/troll videos.

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

#252

Post by notatoad »

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

they might, but chances are that if you force people to move their dislikes into the comments, they're going to provide more information than just "downvote", and the top comment will be some variaton of

* "the information in this video is wrong"

* "i don't like the person who made this video"

* "this isn't the content i expect from this channel"

all of which is vastly more useful than just a downvote.

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

#253

Post by FjgdymdjttdjG »

inChargeOfIT wrote: post #142
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…

I cancelled my premium, unsubscribed from all my channels, and have stopped browsing YouTube (which I did daily for years). Basically, I've stopped using YouTube as a source for finding new content. If I get linked to a video from a trusted source (here, reddit, etc), then I'll watch the video, but they lost me as a member of the community.

Gotta pay the Premium, or burn 1500 mAh / hour because you can't turn your screen off without Premium. You and about 4 billion others can't afford the Google toll, so pay for electricity instead. One way or another, you will pay.

Gotta get that gold.

If only I could calculate the total electricity burn planet wide because 4 billion people can't turn their screens off. I wonder how a 4 billion screenburn compares to 1 million Bitcoin miners, or whatever the total is.

I listen 95% of the time, lectures, opera, podcasts, other stuff, and there are multitudes of data that don't need me to be staring at my screen.

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

#254

Post by ItsMonkk »

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…

The important aspect is less of where the video is hosted, but where people are looking for content discovery. With the removal of dislikes, YouTube is actively making their content discovery worse. On the margin people should be looking for new content discovery options. You might see people drift to Reddit, you might see people drift to DIY StackExchange. That's the message we should be pushing in these conversations as a result of this, you should be changing your behavior.

Once you move the discovery off YouTube, it becomes trivial to move the content to another video host. The discovery is the lock-in.

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

#255

Post by throwaway0a5e »

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…

You'll see some video of some guy in Bangladesh doing some "you should never do this, but you can do this" wiring job to make some piece of industrial machinery run and it will either be 1000:1 likes or 1:1000 in favor of dislikes, pretty much wholly dependent on whether Reddit has found it. So I just wind up watching it to figure out why everyone hates it so much.

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

#256

Post by emodendroket »

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…

I think hanging out in places like this is drastically altering your perception of how much anybody noticed or cared about this change.

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

#258

Post by TheMonarchist »

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 difference between 102+/100- votes and 2+/0- votes is large, but invisible on this site.

I wonder whether using a ratio instead of difference would help?

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

#259

Post by Terry_Roll »

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…

Peertube, Patreon, Netflix, Sky.... do I need to list more?

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

#260

Post by caconym_ »

handoflixue wrote: post #231
caconym_ wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

> 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.

This is the "edge case" (not the best term for it, but whatever) I'm talking about, but I still don't really buy it. There are a lot of signals for how worthwhile a video is going to be, and frankly I'd rank likes/dislikes as the least useful one, mostly because they provide no context and aren't normalized to the video's view count.

If we see an epidemic of amateur electricians getting zapped, etcetera, I suppose YouTube will have some egg on its face. But somehow I don't think that's going to happen.

Post reply on HN