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

#381

Post by tqi » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 4:57 AM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #369

karaterobot wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Relying on viewer voting to identify misinformation is a terrible idea. These videos are deceptive by design - and in our polarized environment the voting is probably a better reflection of the audiences's priors than the truthfulness of the content.

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

#382

Post by hamburglar » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 5:00 AM UTC

cbozeman wrote: post #235

kazinator wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker news has a minimum karma requirement for downvoting; you can't just create an account (or a dozen accounts) and start downvoting something you don't like, or to harass someone with serial downvotes. You must first attract a certain number of upvotes for your comments and submissions. That fixes many of the abuse problems with downvotes. HN situations are also monitored by the site operators themselves, who int…

> 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…

> It's our CEOs' legal requirement of fiduciary responsibility that causes these problems.

This is nonsense pretty much every time it’s trotted out. There is no objective “requirement of fiduciary responsibility” that governs every action a CEO might take in a given situation, especially not for dumb minutiae like “allowed unfettered downvoting.” If it was this simplistic, we wouldn’t need CEOs at all.

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

#383

Post by tqi » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 5:06 AM UTC

jasode wrote: post #284

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…

>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…

I watch how-to videos a lot, and I think dislikes are not that useful. In my case either it's either A) a common topic, and I just go by total view count and watch the top 3-5 videos or B) it's a super niche topic and I watch all 1-5 videos available.

It feels like people are imagining some fantasy scenario where there are hundreds of similar videos with not that many views but very different vote count patternsm...

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

#384

Post by RappingBoomer » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 5:09 AM UTC

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.

why would youtube care what the dislike trolls do or what gives these "dislike trolls" pleasure? I would think that youtube's business model would not include any plan to determine what gives "dislike trolls" pleasure

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

#385

Post by tdeck » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 5:12 AM UTC

MonaroVXR wrote: post #351

BbzzbB wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Same here, I didn't realize so many people relied on the voting metrics. Were they visible in the video list view or did you have to click through to see them?

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

#386

Post by bargl » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 5:25 AM UTC

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…

The metric I use in hn is votes to comments. When I want a good non controversial read I go for a low ratio of comments to votes. When I want a more controversial topic I find the things with more comments to votes.

It's just additional signal on the content in a world where I just can't read it all.

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

#387

Post by drusepth » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 5:32 AM UTC

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.

>Because you can't see a video has a 1:9 like:dislike ratio to tell you it's not worth your time

I see this argument every time dislikes are brought up but no one seems to ever mention views as a third data point. I've never really paid attention to dislikes (other than hearing about dislike raids), but you can still see videos' like:view ratio, which IMO has always been more significant than dislikes anyway.

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

#388

Post by BoorishBears » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 5:36 AM UTC

RappingBoomer wrote: post #384

throwbacktictac wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why would youtube care what the dislike trolls do or what gives these "dislike trolls" pleasure? I would think that youtube's business model would not include any plan to determine what gives "dislike trolls" pleasure

They already said but people are allergic to knowing what they're talking about.

They didn't remove the dislike button, they removed the count.

They removed the count because they found it reduced spurious usage.

That way they can use the dislike count for their algorithm ( and you can still use it for curating your content) without having it influenced by brigading.

I mean they still show it to creators anyways, so I don't get what the weird conspiracies are. Like this is such a nothing of an issue it's insane.

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

#389

Post by spiderice » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 5:39 AM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #153

prox wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining coin?

I don't think so, my cpu is fine, doesn't use any more than youtube uses. I think the poster must have something wrong with their browser. I've seen more than a couple of people who got kicked off youtube move to odysee as they are much less aggressive on removing content. They also have downvoting.

As soon as I clicked on that link my computer fans got really loud. I closed the tab and they died down. Opened it again just to verify and they got loud again. I don't think it's just GGP.

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

#390

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Sat, Dec 04, 2021, 5:46 AM UTC

cbozeman wrote: post #235

kazinator wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker news has a minimum karma requirement for downvoting; you can't just create an account (or a dozen accounts) and start downvoting something you don't like, or to harass someone with serial downvotes. You must first attract a certain number of upvotes for your comments and submissions. That fixes many of the abuse problems with downvotes. HN situations are also monitored by the site operators themselves, who int…

> 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…

There is no fiduciary duty to maximise shareholder value.

Use your preferred search service to search for fiduciary duty myth.