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No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

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Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#391

Post by jmyeet »

thinkingemote wrote: post #261
jmyeet wrote: post #184

The only explanation for getting rid of dislike count that makes sense to me is to make big brands happy as their videos can't be made to look bad with a high dislike count and they can't be "dislike bombed" for things that may be unrelated to the content (eg the recent Activision-Blizzard scandals). Why? Because in every other way (and every way for the viewer), this makes Youtube worse. So it's a hell of a price to…

I believe the official explanation: dislikes are hurting some YouTubers as a form of "crowd bullying". They were a signal or message that the message (but not the quality) was not approved. Dislikes were being used as a form of critique of the content. They were a kind of mob/crowd behaviour than a personal like/dislike. The YouTubers were both marginalised people, those waging culture war stuff and corporations. By…

I don't believe this at all. In any system where likes and dislikes have value to recommendations or whatever you have to identify and neutralize those who try to game the system. For example:

1. Sock puppets

2. Brigading

3. Bullying (which is really the dislike version of brigading)

That should be relatively easy to do at scale. Not perfectly but good enough. Once identified just count those votes as nothing. Present them as if the user has still pressed like or dislike but just don't count it.

Instead what Youtube has done has disincentivized people from disliking, which removes a very useful quality signal. Some will still dislike but less will if there's no feedback.

Dislikes provided a very useful signal to viewers about scams, poor videos, wrong information and so on. This provided a disincentive to post such information. So Youtube has removal that signal from users and effectively opened the floodgates to low-quality and scam videos.

That's just crazy.

And to pin that on "bullying" is (IMHO) ridiculous.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#392

Post by Const-me »

nybble41 wrote: post #386
Const-me wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s totally fine when the service in question is not a natural monopoly. Youtube is a natural monopoly now, just like residential water and electricity suppliers. Too bad it’s not yet regulated as such.

YouTube is not a natural monopoly, as evidenced by the fact that there are other video hosting services (e.g. Vimeo, Facebook, PeerTube). The network effect is real, to be sure, but it isn't absolute, and anyone can start a competing service which is immediately accessible to every Internet user(†). It's not cheap or easy, of course, especially at YouTube's scale, but YouTube has to overcome the same issues. That's j…

> YouTube is not a natural monopoly, as evidenced by the fact that there are other video hosting services (e.g. Vimeo, Facebook, PeerTube).

Tesla sells solar roofs and power walls accessible to every person in US. Is it an evidence electrical grid is not a natural monopoly? No it is not.

Wikipedia defines natural monopoly as following:

> an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors

The network effect does give Google that overwhelming advantage over potential competitors.

Let’s not forget Google themselves tried to create such a competitor in 2005, the service was called “Google Video”. They tried to compete for a year or so, failed despite they had way more money, then bought the complete YouTube.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#393

Post by paulnpace »

Lev1a wrote: post #96
sph wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending really, really old videos from people I normally watch. It's always done this, but it seems worse recently. Also, subscribe to a channel, get recommended their entire repertoire of the last decade. I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss. What…

> I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss. Don't know if you knew this, you can use RSS to get feeds of the channels you want without subscribing or even having a Google account. Good in-browser add-on for following, organizing etc. of RSS feeds: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader…

No need for a plugin. Just add the channel ID to this link:

  https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=
And add that to your RSS reader.

I get everything in perfect chronological order, including livestream schedules.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#394

Post by nth_order »

I don't feel so at all. The quality of YouTube recommendations (and video essays in particular!) for me at least is higher than ever. Absolutely astonishing at times. I am grateful for all the great content the algorithm helped me to discover, be it in the sciences, music, commentary, anything. Time spent on YouTube actually almost never feels wasted. Also I don't care about the disappearance of the dislike count, I don't need it to gauge the quality of a video. Not to say there aren't any problems with the "algorithm", but overall it works really well for me.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#395

Post by michaelmrose »

rasz wrote: post #296
miniwark wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done it a lot for around a year, but i think than the block list is very limited, because after a will the same "blocked" channels come back again in the list. I have now stopped to use this fake feature. I am sure of it because i regularly block official news or music channels, but they appear again anyway after a wile. It's the same for the "not interested" feature. I have stop to tell them, when asked, why…

Sounds familiar, my post from 7 months ago: "I would love to see someone look deep into Twitch recommendation system - last time I tested the thing they call "Feedback" is a rolling buffer and wont let you exclude more than ~100 things, adding more simply removed oldest entries and starts spamming you with things you already excluded in the past. This looked like performance optimization (less things to track per use…

Why isn't this a variant on a bloom filter that supports deletion? eg vacuum filter

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#396

Post by mcslick12 »

bfgoodrich wrote: post #221
jmyeet wrote: post #184

The only explanation for getting rid of dislike count that makes sense to me is to make big brands happy as their videos can't be made to look bad with a high dislike count and they can't be "dislike bombed" for things that may be unrelated to the content (eg the recent Activision-Blizzard scandals). Why? Because in every other way (and every way for the viewer), this makes Youtube worse. So it's a hell of a price to…

Dislikes, as a visible measure, were widely bombed by Internet trolls and ignorant cretins. The (vast) majority of people don't engage with those tools, so a small, coordinated minority can easily have a massively outsized influence. It was grossly misrepresentative to the wider YouTube userbase. The far right, for instance, was hugely overrepresented because everyone else has a life and isn't spending their day dogp…

I tried to downvote your comment for making unsubstantiated claims like "The (vast) majority of people don't engage with these tools". But was unable to because I don't have enough karma. Do with that what you please.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#397

Post by paintman252 »

miniwark wrote: post #257
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a "don't recommend channel" option if you click the 3 dots button on a video. I use this liberally for all sorts of reasons and it makes my recommendations much better.

I have done it a lot for around a year, but i think than the block list is very limited, because after a will the same "blocked" channels come back again in the list. I have now stopped to use this fake feature. I am sure of it because i regularly block official news or music channels, but they appear again anyway after a wile. It's the same for the "not interested" feature. I have stop to tell them, when asked, why…

this isn't true. I have clicked "no interested" on hundreds of videos and channels. It works

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#398

Post by paintman252 »

alexb_ wrote: post #105

I've recently heard about this YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar. If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently, you've probably run into him. Because of the "no dislikes" change, he's everywhere now. And by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now th…

>The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account,

This isn't accurate math

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#399

Post by philsnow »

zmgsabst wrote: post #49
sph wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recommending tons of videos I've already seen or recommending really, really old videos from people I normally watch. It's always done this, but it seems worse recently. Also, subscribe to a channel, get recommended their entire repertoire of the last decade. I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss. What…

I genuinely don’t understand why Google got it right with Circles, realizing we have different orthogonal interests… but all my YouTube subscriptions go in a giant pile, as if advanced math, news, and rap videos are fungible content. I want some ability to create sets of channels with a focus and only access that when I want to. I think the problem is that YouTube has always been a manipulative and exploitative platf…

> I genuinely don’t understand why Google got it right with Circles

Do you mean on google plus? (Or did that feature make it to other parts of the gooverse?)

The feature on Plus that I desperately wanted was "squares", or facets of your online presence that people could individually subscribe to. Just for instance, if Noam Chomsky had been an active poster on all kinds of topics on Plus, I would not subscribe to his updates because I only care about his work in linguistics, not any of his political activism.

But, the way all the current social properties are set up, the poster either has to have multiple accounts and log in / log out or keep separate browser profiles etc, or just posts everything under one account.

It could be better. It could be pretty seamless: allow the author to tag the post with a click or two just before posting, encourage them to tag posts that aren't tagged before posting, learn what tags they use most and analyze the content of each post to prominently feature in the UI the tags that look like they apply. Allow subscribers to subscribe to author+tag pairs instead of just authors. Done.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#400

Post by heleninboodler »

_v7gu wrote: post #379
heleninboodler wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both groups have the same signal-to-noise ratio I kinda doubt this, to be honest. In real life, I discount the opinions of people who only ever have negative things to say. Seems as though serial dislikers might deserve the same treatment.

Emotionally, I really get it. We feel positive towards positive thoughts and vice versa for negative ones. But in the context of information, a "recommender" that recommends everything is equivalent to one that recommends nothing: both are worthless (ie can't provide any new information)

Yeah, I think you get zero information from someone who only upvotes or only downvotes, whereas you get some signal from people in the center.
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