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YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count

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

#411

Post by ng12 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #363
ng12 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It became a meme in it's own right and is still referenced fairly often 3 years later. It was downvoted heavily because it's a particularly laughable example of how out-of-touch corporations can be. I think this is the most likely reason why YouTube is removing dislikes: they need to protect their advertising dollars.

Here's the video, for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJOTdZBX1g

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

#412

Post by ford_o »

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…

There are better ways to prevent downvote brigades than removing dislikes altogether. Not to mention that keeping likes around doesn't solve anything, as it can be exploited in the same way by upvote brigades! As long as you don't start to actively detect fake accounts and don't limit the number of upvotes / downvotes per day a person can give, it will always be possible to game the upvote metric by a small group of people / bots.

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

#413

Post by nirui »

Here is a simple tip/formula for you: Thumbs Up / View Count. The higher the number, the better the "Like" quality.

Base on my personal experience during the last few days, a "Fairly Good" video should give you something close to 0.06 on the metric. (reminder: the sample matters, you have to do your own numbers)

I guess now they have to remove the view counts too LOL.

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

#414

Post by ford_o »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #174
BitwiseFool wrote: post #6

I really hope this backfires spectacularly on YouTube and the zealots who pushed for this change are held professionally accountable. I already click on fewer videos in search results and recommendations because I can no longer gauge how worthwhile they are to try and watch. The end result? I'm sticking to my current channels. I can't be alone and knowing that YouTube takes recommended content so seriously, I have to…

I'm really puzzled why anyone cares about this so passionately. I'm not a YouTube diehard but I use it pretty regularly to watch a handful of channels I like, maybe 2-3 hours per week watching videos on the site. Occasionally I'll search for how to video and click on whatever is in the top few results on Google. I've seen several posts now across different sites lamenting this change, but I've yet to see anything rem…

No idea what HOW TO videos you watch, but in my domain, 80% are garbage, where the dislike ratio saves me minutes of watch time on each.

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

#415

Post by tobiasSoftware »

Drew_ wrote: post #202
jasode wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Disabled comments is a very strong signal in its own right. It might be but often it's not. A common reason comments are disabled is that a female is in it which invites rude sexist remarks. For example, there was some advanced math university lectures taught by female professors and every one of them was spammed with "men of culture, we meet here again" . Understandably, the channel later disabled the comments out…

I too have watched Numberphile. Rest assured, there's little to no risk of their extremely popular videos being bad. > No, it's actually cumbersome and wastes extra time to determine if many how-to videos are bad quality without a dislike count. If this is such a hassle, why participate here on Hacker News, a website providing nothing but informational content with no visible downvote ratings? Could it be possible th…

> I too have watched Numberphile. Rest assured, there's little to no risk of their extremely popular videos being bad.

I mean there's the Numberphile where they claim that the sum of 1 to infinity is -1/12, supporting their claim by rearranging terms in an infinite series in ways that are not allowed, while not explaining that the actual topic that they are talking about requires both a different definition of equals and extending a pattern into where it is not properly defined. So yeah, even Numberphile can put out a trash video full of errors.

By the way, I just checked the dislike ratio using an extension and while that video was still mostly liked, it has about 20% dislikes whereas most of there videos are less than 1% dislikes, so while the dislikes didn't work perfectly, they at least did inform people that something was going on with that video.

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

#416

Post by Arnavion »

The "criticize their hiding of the dislike count" part is irrelevant. I've done no such thing and all my comments have been getting auto-deleted in the same way for a few months now, long before this dislike count thing happened.

It's something fucked up on their end, lots of users are affected (also since long before this dislike count thing happened), and they're in no hurry to fix it.

And there's no point posting on support.google.com about it because clueless "Product Experts", aka non-employees who don't actually know anything, will just parrot the same old "Oh your comment must've been detected as spam" "Oh your comment must've violated Youtube policies" "Oh the channel owner must've deleted your comment" nonsense.

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

#417

Post by tobiasSoftware »

fsckboy wrote: post #279
rhegart wrote: post #108

https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ So frustrating not having the dislike button

the content I watch (mostly intellectual or political conversations or lectures) rarely has a dislike rate of more than a few percent, so I don't understand what good the dislike button does. > So frustrating not having the dislike button I can understand the satisfaction of smashing the button on something you don't like... but does your frustration take a different form that translates into more/less usability? (I…

The dislike button is extremely useful to indicate scams and erroneous information.

Even outside of outright scams its still useful. For example, there's a Numberphile video (a high quality channel that explains math to ordinary people) where they go off the rails and make a bunch of errors to claim that the sum of 1 to infinity is -1/12. It's based on real concepts but the way they present it is completely incorrect. It had a dislike ratio of 20% whereas most of their videos have a dislike ratio of about 1%. By seeing such a high number of dislikes, it alerts the user that something could be off about this video and that they should not take what is said at face value.

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

#418

Post by ehsankia »

Arnavion wrote: post #416

The "criticize their hiding of the dislike count" part is irrelevant. I've done no such thing and all my comments have been getting auto-deleted in the same way for a few months now, long before this dislike count thing happened. It's something fucked up on their end, lots of users are affected (also since long before this dislike count thing happened), and they're in no hurry to fix it. And there's no point posting…

Yep, this person is creating a correlation where there is none, and everyone is just riding the confirmation bias. It's strange how HN collectively throw their skeptical side out of the window and accept a single anecdotal evidence as proof whenever it's a topic like this.

This is just a shadowban / temporary suspension from commenting, and there is no evidence it's in any way related to "criticizing dislike removal".

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