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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

#291

Post by freeflight »

It's just flabbergasting how much YouTube has regressed.

I remember when YouTube comments still had a neat and convenient little "translate" feature. Made it actually possible to practically cross the language barriers in comment discussions.

That lead to many interesting insights and discussions, and then, it was suddenly just gone. Which in practice meant that a whole bunch of people that used to be able to communicate with each other, crossing language barriers (How wonderful!), now suddenly couldn't anymore..

It's like the exact opposite to what the web was supposed to do, and the trend has been steadily keeping up. Removing the downvotes is also removing a form of signaling, and thus communication.

And the trend is not just reserved to YouTube, it's even more and more of a thing in places where it absolutely doesn't belong; Many modern video games do not have an "all talk" function anymore, out of fear nasty things might be written and then read by too many people, possibly leading to controversy in the bored "gaming press".

At this rate I wouldn't be surprised to even see YouTube comments go away for good.

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

#292

Post by squarefoot »

webdoodle wrote: post #88
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'd like to see torrent hosting become a thing. I don't like to leave my computer\network connected to the internet all the time, but would like to make video/audio I've produced available. A hosting provider that lets me upload my content and host it as a torrent would solve many of the problems we currently face with private gatekeepers deciding what can and can't be hosted, displayed, voted on, commented on etc.

You don't need a full sized computer to be connected 24/7, Just grab a Raspberry PI or any (sometimes even cheaper and less power hungry) equivalent, flash the smallest OS of your choice that does what you want: serving videos and files, seeding torrents, hosting a node of your favorite communications platform, etc. You can keep the system on SD then use two USB drives for data, the second rsynced to the first, so you have some sort of redundancy without RAID. Total cost less than $100, possibly a lot less if you already have some parts (used hard drives and USB enclosures, SD card, etc). SSD drives would be overkill and more costly. If well tuned (drives spinning down when not used after a safe limit, say 2 hours, efficient CPU throttling, etc) It could draw less energy than the smallest lamp in our house: totally sustainable.

About the software, I have a dream (tm): NNTP expanded so that it can be integrated with other services, include small binaries natively, or magnet links when above a certain size, the torrent being automatically created, seeded and linked by the originating user's client, employ enough security to become troll/vandal proof, etc. The infrastructure is already here, but the protocol is too tied to the limitations of the Internet in the 70s and 80s and takes for granted that everyone is a gentleman, which makes it hardly usable today.

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

#293

Post by caconym_ »

jasode wrote: post #284
caconym_ wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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. 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 a…

The primary signals I use to judge the worth of a video are 1) its prominence in search results, and 2) the video itself.

This is because dislike counts are in my experience extremely unreliable—they may be elevated for stupid and irrelevant reasons on a really great video, or they may not be significantly elevated on a video that is very much not worth my time. Anecdotally (though no more so than any other account in these comments, AFAICT), I've found this to be true even on videos with relatively objective subject matter.

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

#294

Post by deadmutex »

BbzzbB wrote: post #234
dwighttk wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 1:9 like:dislike ratio to tell you it's not worth your time

Is this really a good metric? Counterpoint: many news videos related to Covid are heavily downvoted. Does that mean that they're bad coverage? or that people don't like to hear what the news has to say?

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

#295

Post by solveit »

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…

> Even 10% of that income to address this problem would hire literally tens of thousands of people to tackle the issue.

Tens of thousands of people moderating comments sounds like the worst of both worlds. Not nearly enough to keep up with volume, and way too many to ensure quality moderation. You'll get a horde of randos deleting stuff in idiosyncratic ways while bad stuff keeps getting through anyway.

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

#296

Post by Lamad123 »

matt123456789 wrote: post #190
Metricon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of a number of Youtube creators that are also placing their content on Odysee as a potential backup. I first heard of this site from Dave at EEVblog: https://www.youtube.com/c/EevblogDave/videos https://odysee.com/@eevblog:7

Maybe I live under a rock, but I’ve never heard of odysee. I’m definitely checking them out. I love that their tag line is “welcome, we have dislikes.”

there is also altcensored, but it's kinda slow and can be a little unreliable.. It has a lot of content from 2014-2018 that has been removed by Suzan Wucccicizchzky

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

#297

Post by lordofgibbons »

deadmutex wrote: post #294
BbzzbB wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 1:9 like:dislike ratio to tell you it's not worth your time Is this really a good metric? Counterpoint: many news videos related to Covid are heavily downvoted. Does that mean that they're bad coverage? or that people don't like to hear what the news has to say?

This metric isn't meant for a bot, it's meant for people to use common sense on.

If I see a covid related news story, I'll just ignore the like/discount ratio. But if I see a tech tutorial or conference talk with 50% like/dislike, I'll be fairly confident that the video isn't worth my time.

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

#298

Post by memorysafety »

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…

I'll disagree. It seems you and GP have been lucky enough to never stumble on videos with #dislikes > #likes, for whatever (usually well-deserved) reasons.

I'd seen some; wishing I could unsee those.

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

#300

Post by narrator »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #164
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…

>Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? Rumble and Rokfin, where more and more them are moving. History is littered with bankrupt companies who thought they were untouchable because people had nowhere else to go.

Rumble is going public soon via a SPAC[1]. They have 30 million active users, up from 1 million a year ago. 50% of the voting public who voted for Trump is a pretty good demographic for starting a big new Internet company. It's as if Microsoft in the 90s said they wouldn't sell software to Republicans or something and everyone had to switch to Apple. I think it's unprecedented in the history of American business that a company would alienate such a large demographic purposefully.

[1]https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-spac-...

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