YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by gxs » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:16 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #245

paulpauper wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but YouTube is 1000x more popular than the others and much nicer interface and useability. They are not interchangeable in the same way food choices are interchangeable.

Nothing is stopping those other platforms from becoming more popular over time, or from improving their interface or usability. Being popular is not the same as having a monopoly. Youtube doesn't control infrastructure, they can't prevent users from watching other sites or hosting videos elsewhere. They're not granted special privilege by a government. We've just convinced ourselves for the sake of political narrativ…

You’re assuming an even playing field.

Once a corporation reaches a certain size, do you really think it’s possible for any other company to overtake it?

There is in fact something stopping them. There are in fact many things stopping them.

When you have $100 billion war chest, are you really going to let someone just walk in and eat your lunch?

Regulatory capture, lobbying, price manipulation, etc., are all things stopping these companies you just referred to, FYI.

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

#362

Post by shadowgovt » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:17 AM UTC

emkoemko wrote: post #334

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…

so your telling me its fine to leave only likes for a video showing you how to make a DIY air conditioner ? using a bucket full of dry ice and a fan? 100% this will end up killing someone.

Content likely to end up killing someone should be flagged and removed, not community-downvoted.

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

#363

Post by shadowgovt » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:21 AM UTC

ng12 wrote: post #301

summerlight wrote: post #280

I personally think there's a good compromise to prevent "dislike" campaigns while keeping roughly same amount of information (putting quality labels with simple anti spam modeling would work fine), but still it looks like YT wants to get rid of the button itself ultimately? Otherwise it's hard to explain why they didn't even try such middle ground first.

Because dislike campaigns are a lame excuse. Don't forget the most disliked video of all time was published by Youtube itself. Now it's just a video with 220M views and 3M likes.

That's an awful lot of views for something people "dislike.'

Hate-watching?

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

#364

Post by unclebucknasty » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:22 AM UTC

vl wrote: post #360

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 di…

>they blatantly and prominently push their political agenda

What is their political agenda?

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

#365

Post by shadowgovt » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:24 AM UTC

LinuxBender wrote: post #43

I can see why people would be annoyed at being shadow banned. Alternatively get your circle of friends to upload videos to your own site and manage the comments/spam as you see fit. I am not convinced by the arguments that Youtube is needed to handle bandwidth unless you are popular in which case you can probably afford throwing a few small CDN's at the problem. The harder part would be finding advertising partners a…

A shadowban doesn't make it obvious to the target they're banned.

This is something else... Probably a bug.

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

#366

Post by willis936 » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:29 AM UTC

unclebucknasty wrote: post #364

vl wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

> they blatantly and prominently push their political agenda What is their political agenda?

Money good. More of a religion, really.

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

#367

Post by shadowgovt » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:30 AM UTC

908B64B197 wrote: post #244

I'm still struggling trying to understand why YouTube decided to hide the dislike count. What does it achieve?

Anti-brigading social engineering. Without the Pavlovian feedback of seeing the dislike count go up, people are less incentivized to downvote because other people are downvoting instead of because they personally dislike the video.

That's the theory anyway. No idea if it works, but YouTube's not the only network to adopt this approach.

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

#368

Post by jazzyjackson » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:30 AM UTC

gy4ey665t wrote: post #263

kzrdude wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation here is quite opionated, isn't it? I would guess that it's a very conscious choice to not show votes or downvotes, since it makes commenter interaction even more contentious. I like it the way it is.

Hacker News is the most heavily moderated, manipulated and astro-turned forum I've even seen, but you don't realize that until the mods start suppressing your posts and comments. Titles are constantly edited for no apparent reason, users who post unpopular facts are permanently penalized, and you can watch as negative stories about large tech companies are quickly flagged off the front page. There's zero transparency…

HN is popular because of its moderation, not in spite of it.

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

#369

Post by willis936 » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:34 AM UTC

karaterobot wrote: post #236

uh_uh wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do the unthinkable and just give it a go for a few minutes You do this on a societal level and you waste centuries. There's no need for thousands of people to watch a few minutes of a bad DIY video to conclude that it's crap.

Doesn't seem like society is all that concerned with how much time it wastes watching Youtube videos either way. But, in this situation why wouldn't prioritizing videos with more upvotes not work just as well?

A bad DIY video is an innocent example. Removing dislike counts is a blanket net gain for people publishing misinformation.

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

#370

Post by caconym_ » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:35 AM UTC

jasode wrote: post #326

caconym_ wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dis…

The problem with this discussion is that (presumably) neither of us will ever have the data to back up our position. We can only disagree based on how we ourselves use YouTube, and maybe how we've observed friends and family using it.

So what is the point? Unlike a lot of people I've discussed this with, I can at least respect your position as being based in some kind of believable and relatively well-developed use case. But nothing we've said here has even touched on the (alleged) negative externalities of visible downvote counts that (allegedly) motivated this change in the first place. And, again, we just don't have the data to understand the tradeoffs there.

I entered this discussion because I really, honestly don't understand why so many people are so angry about this. And, despite your efforts, I still don't. I have no trouble believing that these legitimately bad, long-tail, high downvote count videos exist, but I still see them as exactly what my original comment characterized them as: an edge case.

I guess I'm just looking for a bombshell that will make me understand, because that's how obvious the downvote count stans make this issue out to be. You aren't wrong just because you don't have such a bombshell, but you aren't going to convince me you're right just by telling me that the way I use YouTube is wrong.