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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#371
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.

Downvotes on Stack Overflow/Exchange require users to meet a reputation threshold (much like HN) and each downvote removes 1 reputation from the user that gives the downvote. Dislikes on YouTube and similar platforms don't have any cost or barrier to entry.

I wish they'd cost reputation here too. Behavioral experiment after experiment has show people will engage in costly punishment to maintain norms, so don't need to worry about under-downvoting. But enabling downvoting to be costless (and anonymous) does have downsides.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#372
I do sort of understand, similar to Reddit posts, if you post something factual that the 51% simply don't agree with, you'll likely have more dislikes than likes. It doesn't always mean it was a bad video, or that you didn't back up what you were saying with studies/facts, but just that the 51% personally disagreed.

Now there's obviously a lot of videos that are just bad or full of lies that should be negative. But there's also plenty that sit negative for reasons entirely made of opinion.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#373
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.

The media had ruled and controlled the western world with propaganda for the whole 20th century, from newspapers in early 1900s to TVs in late 1900s. We had a very brief period of people escaping the matrix through the internet and communicating through alternative channels, that little blip of media sandbox escape brought Trump and the Brexit and the corporates and media have been working hard to regain control of means of communication ever since.

Be glad you got to live through this very brief period of awakening because they are about to return everyone back into the darkness again.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#374
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'd be a lot better, actually. Downvotes are social poison.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#375

This is a damned shame. I use dislikes to gauge if a video is relevant to the topic at hand. For example, I like fixing stuff and use Youtube for unfamiliar items. Often videos with a high number of dislikes are Spam (usually a bot reading text from some website), Videos where the person handwaves through the steps, videos where the fix is improper, or videos where the creator spends more time monetizing than working…

Same thoughts I had, the more niche the topic the more important this feature was for finding a workable solution. A year back I was fixing a microphone and 9 of the 10 videos I looked at on it were convoluted expensive or ineffective work-arounds while one actually showed how to fix the issue relatively easily.

I'm really gonna miss this feature.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#376
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 is horrible, you just don’t know it it. There is always people like dang dedicating his life to fight all the spam. Look at “new” page and see how many dead links are being submitted each hour.

When you put dislike button, you are adding a degree of freedom in expressing an intent for the user. It is upto you, how you use this information. Most systems fail in this task and then they just remove the degree of freedom as their solution.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#377
> Those in the experiment could still see and use the public dislike button, but because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior 1.

I know it was for a halfway good cause this time, but does anyone else find it creepy with how much nonchalance they are talking about behaviour modification and nudging here?

Google would like its users to more frequently show behaviour X, so they made some A/B tests, found which UI changes most effectively increase the prevalence of X and are now implementing the changes.

No need anymore to actually communicate rules with your users if you can just manipulate them into showing a particular behaviour.

It's not just Google doing this, however they are in a position to do this most effectively right now.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#380
They wouldn't remove dislike counts across the board (seemingly with no opt-out?) if there wasn't a financial advantage to doing so. I don't believe this is because they think it's good for the community.

Is it any coincidence that, in an era where establishment media frequently gets highly ratio'd (look content from the White House, MSM, films with political agendas), an organization that relies on advertising as well as government contracts makes it convenient for said establishment to perpetuate the illusion that there is no dissent?

Let's put aside the possibility that getting brigaded with dislikes can be psychologically harmful to the individual.

How will there ever be actual revolts against the establishment if everyone believes there are no other dissenters? That's the real trouble behind making it impossible to share any negative sentiment on the internet, which is a pattern that mainstream platforms like Google/YouTube are continually edging towards, and it's a darker pattern than most people understand. The simplest way to prevent threats to your regime is to make it difficult, if not impossible for people who agree on the wrong things to recognize that they are not alone.

Hold on ravenstine... these are just dislikes on a bunch of dumb cat videos. You call that "dissent"?

When a piece of media with a wide audience is overwhelmingly disapproved of by that audience, that tells you something about reality. Being selectively exposed to only approved opinions is a disconnection from reality. If you aren't connected with reality, at best your ability to make predictions is impaired, and at worst you can be controlled without even knowing it. If you think you're the only one that disagrees with CorpGov propaganda, you are much more likely to sit on your ass, never getting up to vote, never getting up to protest, never expressing your disagreement with the establishment, because what would be the point? All you could do is accept that you are the crazy one and go with the flow, which happens to be highly convenient for the power structure.

Personally, I don't care that much in the case of YouTube because I believe it has peaked long ago and is begging for a serious replacement. But if all mainstream social media decides to go full speed ahead with this sort of reality manipulation YouTube is attempting today, then I think we are headed for trouble as a global/digital civilization.

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