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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

#271

Post by nefitty »

kristopolous wrote: post #264
alisonkisk wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New ideas aren't a hard sell. Cumbersome ideas that cost more than the benefit are a hard sell.

I believe it was one of Steve Blank's fairly complicated books that differentiated different kinds of new[1] Simplifying dramatically, there's new solutions to acknowledged problems and unacknowledged problems. What you say satisfies the first one. The unacknowledged problem requires you to first connect desperate ideas and consolidate them together in the prospect's mind. Then you need to convince them that it's a s…

There's also the issue that solutions to "unacknowledged problems" can be perceived as grifts.

"Your app predicts when my lightbulbs will go out and it costs $1? Wait, why wouldn't I just do what I do now which is have some spares and wait till one actually goes out?"

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

#272

Post by no_way »

wolpoli wrote: post #113
topynate wrote: post #24

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.

The Google Chrome team uses a similar strategy to deal with backlashes: They leave a feature they want to removed behind a feature flag to keep the outspoken users happy. A few releases later, they remove the flag, when the casual users have moved on and there aren't enough outspoken users to cause any kind of mobbing.

Feature flags are not meant to be used as a general settings, it's mainly for testing, flags also auto expire so they need to be renewed after certain amount of chromium releases [1]. Old features behind the flag are left for few releases so they can be rolled back in case something bad happens, not that users manually should toggle them on.

[1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...

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

#273

Post by kazinator »

cbozeman wrote: post #235
kazinator wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Suppose a person hired by Google is paid $60 per hour, and can review 20 video comments in that time with a reasonable thoughtfulness. So every human review costs Google $3.

The entire revenue of $20B could be blown through on reviewing 6B comments.

If you want to keep this activity to 10% of revenue, that caps you to 600M comments.

> No it's not

And I specifically said the site operators; people hired by Google to moderate are just hired help. They are not equivalent of a dang.

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

#274

Post by Nextgrid »

charcircuit wrote: post #270
uh_uh wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>You do this on a societal level and you waste centuries. What you are missing is that YouTube recommends videos that you will likely enjoy. YouTube's recommendations try to minimize this waste.

YouTube's entire business model is to occupy your time; whether it's a waste or not doesn't matter to their bottom line. They will absolutely not do anything to minimize the waste.

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

#275

Post by slig »

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

Then they'll get shadowbanned exactly like OP's video.

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

#276

Post by kristopolous »

nefitty wrote: post #271
kristopolous wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it was one of Steve Blank's fairly complicated books that differentiated different kinds of new[1] Simplifying dramatically, there's new solutions to acknowledged problems and unacknowledged problems. What you say satisfies the first one. The unacknowledged problem requires you to first connect desperate ideas and consolidate them together in the prospect's mind. Then you need to convince them that it's a s…

There's also the issue that solutions to "unacknowledged problems" can be perceived as grifts. "Your app predicts when my lightbulbs will go out and it costs $1? Wait, why wouldn't I just do what I do now which is have some spares and wait till one actually goes out?"

Nice insight. Reminds me of another problem: targeting.

If the target customers have already found each other, it's an easier sell. If they haven't then you have a "customer diaspora"

For instance, if I have a new game, there's plenty of organizations, institutions, and forums I can introduce my game on.

If instead, I have productivity software that helps disorganized people manage time better, there's no "disorganized users group" or "decluttering news" website to find the people ... it's a slog. Where would those people concentrate? A bar on a weekday night maybe? The most inconvenient parking spaces of an office park? I don't know.

At least to me this is a harder problem

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

#277

Post by justsomeuser »

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…

I agree. I think the most valuable comments are the ones which have a balance of a large amount of "up" and "down" votes.

Those are not just "upvote if you agree with this positive sentiment", but often giving valid reasons against someones opinion.

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

#278

Post by fnord77 »

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…

prediction: next, youtube will delete/hide negative comments to prevent people from looking at the top comment (as a proxy for up/down votes) and seeing that a particular video is not worth the time.

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

#279

Post by fsckboy »

rhegart wrote: post #108

https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ So frustrating not having the dislike button

the content I watch (mostly intellectual or political conversations or lectures) rarely has a dislike rate of more than a few percent, so I don't understand what good the dislike button does.

>So frustrating not having the dislike button

I can understand the satisfaction of smashing the button on something you don't like... but does your frustration take a different form that translates into more/less usability?

(I can also imagine that a dislike button might help in an overall rating system like Yelp or Rottentomatoes, but then those systems don't serve me particularly well either. If something is hugely popular, that means middlebrow tastes like it, which isn't that useful. I don't want to watch or read Stephen King, and after all, people vote with their dollars for McDonald's. I suppose this could be a useful metric on youtube for gaming livestreams or skating videos or something?)

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

#280

Post by summerlight »

I personally think there's a good compromise to prevent "dislike" campaigns while keeping roughly same amount of information (putting quality labels with simple anti spam modeling would work fine), but still it looks like YT wants to get rid of the button itself ultimately? Otherwise it's hard to explain why they didn't even try such middle ground first.
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