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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#301

Post by MichaelDickens »

trts wrote: post #296

The dislike button on YouTube videos is one of the few remaining signals that what you are seeing is propaganda. It hadn't occurred to me that this would happen (although it seems obvious) and it is unexpectedly frightening to me. I suppose the fallback will be videos with comments enabled, where people can 'like' a comment who is saying something common sense and reasonable in response to the content.

In my experience, if a video has comments disabled, it's probably bad. The lack of signal is itself a signal.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#302

Post by jb1991 »

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…

I'm confused, as I see downvotes on other user's comments on Reddit. Did they walk back that move?

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#303

Post by numpad0 »

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.

I think recommendation centric architecture that YouTube has changes meaning of upvotes/downvotes from a global content value judgement into a clustering signal. The platform can correlate that signal to the content to cluster users, creators, content, into groups and cohorts. Those characterizations can be further used to optimize platform for ad clicks.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#304

Post by Mountain_Skies »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #22

> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks. ah yes, google looking out for the little folks... someday, a technical solution like not allowing downvotes until a channel gets so many views or subscribers may be feasible, but until then, this will have to suffice

Reminds me of when Garth Brooks was pushing for laws that would ban the resale of CDs. After receiving a lot of criticism, he said it wasn't to protect his album sales but to keep struggling artists with a small number of CD sales from having to compete with used CD stores. Of course the odds that any given used CD store would have your favorite obscure band's CD were quite low but they were guaranteed to have all of the Garth Brooks CDs.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#305

Post by josteink »

> As always, I’ll be monitoring questions and feedback in the comments below. -Meaghan, TeamYouTube

Let me guess… Except for dissenting or disliking comments?

This move is all about removing users ability to voice disapproval in a simple and effective way when big corporations stumble.

Think PC movie remake-trailers, out of touch YouTube rewind videos, etc.

All heavily disliked, and users were allowed to say that.

I guess only corporate praise is allowed from now on?

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#306

Post by rrll22 »

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…

Many kids knowingly hit dislike and many kids randomly hit either, to best of my knowledge.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#307

Post by warning26 »

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…

This is incorrect; Reddit still shows downvotes, as well as upvote/downvote ratio, even if you're on the "new" Reddit.

If you're on the old Reddit, some subreddits used CSS to hide the downvote button, which I think is dumb, but you can easily get around that by going to the new Reddit long enough to downvote.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#308

Post by quotemstr »

tpoacher wrote: post #140
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…

I think you're probably reading too much into this. It's far less likely to be politically motivated, and much more likely to be profit-motivated. Quoting from the article: "We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video." Remove negative counts, make people more likely to click on videos, serve more accompanying ads, profit. Simples.

No, that's just not believable. YouTube (and Google more generally) are full of people who believe they need to control the public conversation for the public's own good. They've gone to the best schools, lived cosseted lives in safe, sparkly clean neighborhoods, and never had to shower after work instead of before work. They're totally out of touch with what regular people think, yet believe they know better than regular people and have not only a right, but a duty to guide the public conversation in what they see as the right direction.

YouTube people have spent years censoring inconvenient thoughts (e.g. the lab leak hypothesis), juicing rankings in favor of mainstream media, and outright banning their ideological opponents.

If they believe that they're just making the internet less "toxic", it's because they don't differentiate between people with different value systems and monsters to be silenced.

There is zero chance this lately instance of censorship is profit driven. It's yet another favor Google is doing for an establishment that's rapidly losing credibility with the public and control of the narrative.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#309

Post by summerlight »

albeebe1 wrote: post #274
summerlight wrote: post #263

As usual, HN users are making lots of interesting assumptions (some comments to a conspiracy level) on the intention here... But in the reality, there are many smaller creators who is frequently being harassed by trolls (have you heard about those young Chinese patriots trolling over Korean and Japanese channels?) and one of their tool is the dislike button. And creators have been complaining about this for many year…

But creators have always been able to hide the like/dislike counts on their videos

That's not really meaningful unless you can change the trolling dynamic as whole, which needs a platform level change.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#310

Post by foogazi »

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…

> If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be.

Really ? There’s always your own evaluation of the content - as well as snopes, comments, other opinions, other media sources

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