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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

#321

Post by soheil »

I don't think this is so bad. Overtime users will find a way to cope. There are also a number of secretive things YT is doing that users will never become aware of. Focusing on just the thing that gets publicity creates bias. YT is what it is and it will evolve the way Google wants it to. Either use it or not. Giving this much attention to one feature makes Google even more careful next time they make a change that negatively impacts users to do it in a more hidden way.

Kind of like the more a weak person's immune system deals with a virus the more mutation the virus makes and in the end the stronger it becomes.

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

#322

Post by Retric »

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.

That’s simply going to force users to do something else. YouTube still has plenty of great content, but if users can’t find it then it may as well not exist.

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

#323

Post by Causality1 »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #297
deadmutex wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Imagine the number of dead PCs if that Verge video hadn't been riddled with dislikes.

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

#324

Post by Retric »

kazinator wrote: post #273
cbozeman wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

So wait you think it takes 3 minutes from someone making ~120,000$ per year to determine if “gg” is an abusive comment for a let’s play video?

Also, I think your overestimating the number of YT comments. Let’s assume 1 billion hours of watch time per day, and say 20 billion videos, but only 1 in 10,000 views get a comment. That’s just about your 600M threshold per year picked from super inflated costs.

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

#325

Post by roenxi »

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.

Tricking users into watching low-quality content on YouTube seems like such an obviously bad strategy it would pierce through even a few layers of corporate madness. Their reasoning is in all likelihood different.

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

#326

Post by jasode »

caconym_ wrote: post #293
jasode wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 i…

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

This is not as good a signal because for many long-tail videos, the topmost video in the search results has a bad dislike-to-like ratio.

>and 2) the video itself.

This is not efficient use of time for the viewer because the point of a quick statistic is to avoid watching the video in the first place.

>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,

Totally opposite experience. For thousands of videos I've consumed that are not-politics and not-music such as tutorials, the bad dislike ratios were the most reliable indicators Youtube had for trash videos.

To be clear, I'm talking about dislike ratios and not absolute counts. Maybe that's the source of the disagreement? E.g. if I see a video with hundreds or thousands of dislikes (absolute counts), it's not a problem unless the ratio is out of whack.

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

#327

Post by kazinator »

yeetman21 wrote: post #308
kazinator wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

who in their right mind would hire a content moderator for 60$ an hour? It would most likely be the work of some off shore English Speaking Country like India and they would get 6$ an hour, AI would first flag or not flag things and then the human moderators would intervene, just like how Facebook and China does it.

> It would most likely be the work of some off shore English Speaking Country like India and they would get 6$ an hour

Could they do it better than an algorithm which already does it for free?

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

#328

Post by nitrogen »

dylan604 wrote: post #197
nitrogen wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any of these content creators posting to other non-YT sites mention the availability of these sites in their YT videos? Yes. EEVblog mentions Odysee all the time, and many many channels mention Nebula when shilling Curiosity Stream. They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma.

> They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma. Why so? Are these other platforms unable to payout as much as YT? Seems natural that ad revshare would not be the same on a site that nobody has heard of compared to the numbers available from YT. Doesn't seem too enticing for creators to go to other platforms where there is less revenue potential. I'm just not seeing the pris…

The (reverse, sort of) prisoner's dilemma comes from the perceived risk of being banned by YT for promoting competitors on their site. If a single creator defects (from YouTube) too early, that creator loses, so creators have to cooperate.

I assume this is less of a risk now than it used to be, because more creators are promoting alternative sites, and I'm even seeing ads for TikTok on YouTube itself.

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

#329

Post by tehwebguy »

ripply wrote: post #230
dwighttk wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By turning off dislikes, users will be forced to engage with additional content. Why?

The only other way to engage is to leave a negative comment

Which is not really sufficient because negative comments can be deleted, commenters can be blocked & comments can disabled for a video entirely.

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

#330

Post by jholman »

This whole conversation has been baffling to me.

I am a huge fan of YouTube, and I consume way too much YouTube. I mean, there's also problems with YT, make no mistake, but I'm admitting my bias, and also proclaiming my experience level.

A year or more ago, someone alleged to me that the like:dislike ratio is informative, and I've been watching it since then on videos that I was watching anyway. I've also been watching it especially closely since they announced this any people said they value the ratio. Nearly every video I see on YT has near the same ratio, about 90:1. 30:1 is extremely rare, 150:1 is even more rare. I don't doubt that there are worse videos out there than 30:1, but YT never shows them to me.

When I want to just binge on woodworking crafting videos, they suggest good stuff in my feed. With a 90:1 ratio. When I want to teach myself something, I search for that specific topic and they suggest good stuff. With a 90:1 ratio.

And when they do suggest crap, like often my feed will contain some "how to do basic web dev" video that is full of distortions or outright errors (as a moderately senior web dev, this is an area where I am not subject to Gell-Mann error), those videos STILL have the same damn like:dislike ratio, so how could I use that ratio to protect me from errors?

How the hell are other people allegedly finding these videos with dislike numbers as high as 10%? (I mean, before this month. Obviously now you cannot do the experiment I've been doing.)

As a side note, my Dislike Count only went away a few days ago. I dunno when it went away for other people.

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