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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

#351

Post by MonaroVXR »

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.

I never checked the likes to watch a video, I think if you have enough YouTube "experience" you can probably figure out what videos are good and which aren't.

(No hate, just my opinion, I don't care about the likes)

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

#352

Post by dylan604 »

nitrogen wrote: post #328
dylan604 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Was this a real risk or just a perceived one as you stated? I think banning people because they advertised an alternate site would have put YT in a spot of bother.

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

#353

Post by Epitom3 »

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

yeah, it's not like creators can delete comments ...

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

#355

Post by shadowgovt »

Epitom3 wrote: post #348
godshatter wrote: post #178

Likes and dislikes are a horrible way to judge a video, ime. I don't know who liked or disliked a video or for what reasons. A like by someone may be a good reason for me to watch the video where a like by someone else might be an excellent reason not to watch it. Similar for dislikes. Of the two, I guess I prefer likes. People who dislike videos are usually upset about something specific, often things I don't really…

I actually can't believe some people are defending youtube on this.

Why not? They have a hell of a lot more experience running a video sharing and networking service than most folks do.

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

#356

Post by bellyfullofbac »

throwbacktictac wrote: post #340
roenxi wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My first thought is that the reason is to take the incentive away from "dislike" trolls. I reasoned that trolls got some pleasure out of seeing that ratio being skewed and it would encourage them to continue disliking videos.

Hmm, I wonder if a campaign to tell everyone to go and dislike every video they watch would gain traction. The same way Google destroyed this metric for viewers, it would destroy the usefulness for creators.

Act of petty revenge for sure, and they'll probably remove you from their fiefdom for being a troll.

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

#358

Post by unclebucknasty »

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…

OTOH and WRT the comment hiding (i.e. article topic) it's not hard to understand why YouTube doesn't want their comment sections filled with meta. HN "heavily discourages" it as well.

On the issue of hiding dislike counts itself, I don't think it's a big deal, as I don't believe it's the quality signal that some suggest:

1) there's the trolling behavior it encourages, which detracts from the meaning of dislikes

2) relative likes are sufficient, harder to game and less troll-inviting

3) the content, being video, speaks for itself more than text, making it easier to determine what's likely to be of interest.

4) what does dislike even mean on YouTube? Disagreement? Something else? I don't trust that there's enough consistency to give it meaning I care about

5) the number of views is also a better indicator of potential quality than dislikes.

In fact, on that latter point, the percentile of the percentage of the video watched, relative to other videos, would probably be an even better indicator.

That dislike count was essentially noise.

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

#359

Post by bellyfullofbac »

freeflight wrote: post #291

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 communi…

Speaking of translations.. the last few days I've been wondering why some YouTube videos are titled in English although the people in it are talking German, and I'm in a German-speaking country (but using YouTube with the English interface). So, apparently YouTube have started auto-translating titles. Or maybe, since the videos have English subtitles, they're using the creator-provided translated title.

But there is no option to turn this automatism off... and this automatic changing of shit is totally pissing me off.

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

#360

Post by vl »

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…

Youtube Shorts (TicToc competitor) is pure evil. If I accidentally click on it I can find myself two hours later after watching hundred videos I can't even remember anymore. Sure it's high engagement, but it's truly bad for user satisfaction and long-term user retention. On top of that they blatantly and prominently push their political agenda in "news" section.

But I don't think there is deep evil thinking behind dislike change - in large corporations people need promotions, some entrepreneurial PM and couple devs identified the opportunity and went for it. Directors/VPs are too disengaged to truly understand impact of changes.

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