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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#411

Post by politician »

kingcharles wrote: post #275
nickjj wrote: post #67

Bummer. I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching. If I see a 3,000 up / 48 down video on a topic I'm interested in there's a really good chance the video is great. I'm a small time creator (~13.5k subs) and don't care at all about upvotes or downvotes being public. There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the vid…

That's an interesting point. Why can this feature not be video or channel specific so that a creator who is being targetted could switch off the count if they wanted?

Plausible deniability. If a creator turns off dislikes on a particular video, that's a strong signal that they're producing propaganda or have a thin skin. If YT does it for them, for everyone, then affected creators can just shrug and pretend like they definitely would never turn off dislikes.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#412

Post by orangeoxidation »

MichaelDickens wrote: post #301
trts wrote: 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.

In my experience, if a video has comments disabled, it's probably bad. The lack of signal is itself a signal.

It's a signal that the creator does not want do engage in moderate / discussion on YouTube. There's perfectly valid reasons for that (e.g. topic is controversial, video is only for embedding or archiving on YouTube, there's no social media manager, the video is for kids). It is not a good signal for the video being not worth your time.

Otoh creators can delete comments. So the comments existing and being positive about a video is not a good signal for the video being good either.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#413

Post by Jensson »

avs733 wrote: post #144
_qbjt wrote: post #101

[flagged]

>Most YouTube users (and people on the Internet in general) do not conduct themselves respectfully or demonstrate any sort of intellectual curiosity when engaging with these sorts of feedback mechanisms. You nailed how I feel about this entire conversation. The author of the blog PopeHat summarized it really eloquently: Stop pretending bad faith is good faith for the purposes of “politeness” or “dialogue.” https://tw…

> Stop pretending bad faith is good faith for the purposes of “politeness” or “dialogue.”

Assuming others argue in bad faith is even worse than arguing in bad faith. If you argue at all you should assume that the other party argues in good faith, otherwise just stop as you only hurt your cause by assuming bad intentions in an argument.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#415

Post by Griffinsauce »

MichaelDickens wrote: post #301
trts wrote: 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.

In my experience, if a video has comments disabled, it's probably bad. The lack of signal is itself a signal.

Sometimes but it often happens when a comment section gets brigaded as well.

Negative feedback is not always given in good faith.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#416

Post by simonsarris »

asciimov wrote: post #208

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…

In the past I have used dislikes to tell if chain sawing tutorials are good or if the operator is insane. It works well for things like that.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#417

Post by ridaj »

nickjj wrote: post #67

Bummer. I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching. If I see a 3,000 up / 48 down video on a topic I'm interested in there's a really good chance the video is great. I'm a small time creator (~13.5k subs) and don't care at all about upvotes or downvotes being public. There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the vid…

> There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that.

Yes. People downvote based on their expectation. So you can have content that you would probably find bad that has a lot of upvotes because it has a niche that likes it, and my sense is that the excursions in dislike ratio are more often driven by distribution channel or brigading than the intrinsic value of the content.

> Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects.

Doesn't this directly contradict your experience as a creator? But if it was true, wouldn't it be a good thing that creators no longer feel as much pressure to conform to fan expectations, eg in pursuit of bigger opportunities/audiences?

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#418

Post by pcwalton »

trts wrote: 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.

[flagged]

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#419

Post by geuis »

Another reason this is a terrible idea:

Video creators have always been able to disable the upvote/downvote ratios and comments.

Every single time I have encountered a video where the counts have been disabled by the creator, it’s because the video has something objectively wrong with it. It’s inaccurate, misleading, poor quality, offensive, or some has some other generally negative attribute.

This happens less so with comments being disabled. Videos with high up to down vote ratios but with disabled comments are usually because the creator is being attacked by trolls. These videos are usually pretty interesting to watch.

So yeah this is an incredibly short sighted change and is removing an important quality signal to viewers.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#420

Post by varnaud »

trts wrote: 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.

I think that seeing a overwhelmingly positive like to dislike ratio might hide signals that what you're viewing is propaganda.

"If so many people like this, it probably has value." "There is always a few dislike from haters, safe to discard them."

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