Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making the dislike count private across YouTube

support.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 1001 posts

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#361

Post by bogota »

jonas21 wrote: post #354
qwertox wrote: post #4

Hmm. For me the dislike button was informative. If feels like they are trying to create a world where everything can only be good, better, even more better, which just doesn't represent reality. Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.

Imagine a News site for Hackers that only had the option to upvote stories. How horrible would that be?!

HN does have a downvote button you just don’t have enough reputation to use it yet.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#362

Post by pugets »

runevault wrote: post #15
qwertox wrote: post #4

Hmm. For me the dislike button was informative. If feels like they are trying to create a world where everything can only be good, better, even more better, which just doesn't represent reality. Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.

I mostly agree with you, with the caveat of brigading being a very real thing that lowers the information value. But then why show upvotes either because positive brigading is just as damaging to the information as downvote brigades.

YT can counter brigades by giving viewers even more statistics about a video. Example: what’s the like to dislike ratio of a video in the past 7, 30, or 90 days, compared to all-time?

Steam (a video game store) does this already. They categorize reviews as either being recent (made in the last 30 days) or all-time. If a game has excellent all-time reviews, but mixed recent reviews, then you can suspect something has recently upset the playerbase.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#364

Post by pizza234 »

jonas21 wrote: post #354
qwertox wrote: post #4

Hmm. For me the dislike button was informative. If feels like they are trying to create a world where everything can only be good, better, even more better, which just doesn't represent reality. Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.

Imagine a News site for Hackers that only had the option to upvote stories. How horrible would that be?!

There's a significant difference - misleading/malicious content.

A fake trailer can for example be spotted by the number of negative votes. If the negative votes concept is gone, using a low number of positive votes as indicator is less effective.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#365

Post by jeffbee »

jonas21 wrote: post #354
qwertox wrote: post #4

Hmm. For me the dislike button was informative. If feels like they are trying to create a world where everything can only be good, better, even more better, which just doesn't represent reality. Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.

Imagine a News site for Hackers that only had the option to upvote stories. How horrible would that be?!

It would be MetaFilter, a site with a noticeably higher level of discourse than HN.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#366

Post by bequanna »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #286
klipklop wrote: post #16

Odd that a certain political party got a large amount of downvotes on all their videos and YouTube removes the publics ability to see them soon after.

I can’t say I’ve checked but I’d have assumed every partisan political video gets a tonne of downvotes. I assume you’re referring to some sort of recent organised thing though?

Not organized at all, completely grassroots.

Check the like/dislike ratio for any mainstream media video which features an obvious politically slanted view on some topic.

The problem here is that people are using the like/dislike ratio to indicate what may be biased content masquerading as 'objective news'. It just so happens that this (accurate) method is flagging the left leaning propaganda that YT wants to propagate.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#367

Post by spurgu »

qwertox wrote: post #4

Hmm. For me the dislike button was informative. If feels like they are trying to create a world where everything can only be good, better, even more better, which just doesn't represent reality. Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.

Yup. If I'm watching a positive review of a [insert-object] I'm planning on buying and it has 10k likes visible while hiding 2k dislikes I'm probably going to get horribly misled.

While if it's a video of a political debate I would expect there to be a ton of dislikes by default, so I suppose it wouldn't matter much in that scenario.

And in howto/explanation-videos, if dislikes aren't shown, there's no signal for people telling them whether or not it's a good explanation.

I suppose you could devise a dislike count yourself by calculating the likes/views ratio. But why... people are deliberately putting their content up publicly for display and as such are opening themselves up for scrutiny/criticism/dislikes. It can't be all praise and hugs and kisses. That's how we treat children.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#369

Post by mahart »

rrll22 wrote: post #306
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.

I have found videos that were marked disliked by me that I never intended to dislike. Pretty sure it was all from trying to scroll on mobile and a click accidentally getting registered.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#370

Post by notriddle »

zkldi wrote: post #314
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…

Nonsense, Creators have been able to hide their likes and dislikes for years. This is a global change that cannot be opted out of.

The problem with that is, as mentioned in other comments here, most of the people who hide likes/dislikes are just propaganda outlets and fragile jerks whose videos are crap. YouTube is a success because normally the system works.

But, unfortunately, the system doesn't always work, and when it fails, it's usually because you're being actively targeted and the system isn't doing anything to stop it. So you're stuck between "leave the like bar visible, and nobody watches my videos because state actors are using bots to dislike my videos" and "hide the like bar, and nobody watches my videos because most people who hide their like bar are asshats." Either way, nobody watches your videos, and it doesn't necessarily mean your videos suck.

In other words, nobody hides the like bar unless they are either being massively downvoted, or they expect to be massively downvoted. Which means that a hidden like bar might as well be 100% red.

Post reply on HN