281–290 of 590 posts
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From the perspective of YouTube, the goal is to increase engagement, so you end up watching more video content = you win. Though it's a pretty sad tactic and deceptive in the long-term.
Yeah it's already employed where you can't tell how good a search result video is since the ratings aren't displayed there.
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…
You may be a HN TikTok skeptic (there are many) but TikTok is already expanding to things you’d find on YouTube historically, like tutorials, DIY, arts and crafts.
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> 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 ar…
What are those other signals to help filter quality? Because in my experience, the dislike-to-likes ratio is the #1 statistical signal. It beats the #likes/#views ratio which is far weaker. Comments are not a better signal because (1) they can be deleted by the channel and (2) they take more work to scroll through than just looking at the public dislikes number.
It doesn't even matter that dislikes don't have "context" (do you mean "downvote reasons"?). To me, the context is the video itself.
If I come across a plumbing how-to and it has more dislikes than likes, it's a junk video. MKBHD is another youtuber that explains the usefulness of dislikes counts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaaJyRvvaq8
EDIT add: also note in the MKBHD video the comments from other famous youtube creators that they also depend on public dislike stats when they themselves consume videos.
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>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.
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.
Honestly I think the best solution should have been to let creators enable/disable dislike visibility on each of their *own* videos. Removing that for every single video on the platform is a supernova level of overkill.
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…
Isn't that good for them though? Generally speaking, it's a lot easier for youtube to do a few red carpet partnership shenanigans with the ssniperwolfs and mrbeasts in the top ranks and screw the long tail. That story has played again and again all over the entertainment media industry.
If everyone does what you're doing, they can potentially even get away with having to do less content moderation, or quietly "disappearing" channel categories, etc. You're already getting sort of played by relying on recommendation systems in the first place. People seem to think recommendations scour the deep web to cater to them personally, but the Occam's Razor take is that you get shown whatever the algorithm determines is clickbaity enough for your general flavor of hivemind.
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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.
Has anyone built a browser plug in that we can down vote or up vote videos? Outside of Youtube?
It wouldn’t help. Not enough people would use it to be helpful. The chances of someone with the extension installed having watched and voted on the obscure tutorial you’re about to watch is near zero.
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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…
By that I mean for example, I knew of many people who were outraged and dismayed when RSS feeds started to disappear from websites. They belonged to a class of individual who prefers things to be categorized as granularly as possible. That kind of person is highly upset when their categorizing toolset is downsized.
But other people never bother with those tools, don't care if they're eliminated, and frankly find it hard to sympathize with their hypercategorizing comrades.