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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#421

Post by irthomasthomas »

bequanna wrote: post #386

> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks Wow. Well, the politically motivated truth behind this change is pretty darn obvious, right? If you're confused what I mean, check any US mainstream media video with an obvious political slant but pretending to be "objective news" and look at the like/dislike…

It's cute how many commenters are not aware of this. https://mobile.twitter.com/FRANK_SINATRA7/status/14584818380...

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#422

Post by Pxtl »

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.

Except that groups have a proven track-record of assembling masses to brigade things they loudly hate. And since most people don't downvote, a determined group of downvoters can send a hyper-loud signal.

Personally, I think this is all flowing from a fundamental problem: there is no concept of "credibility" with upvotes and downvotes. As conservatives are fond of saying "facts don't care about your feelings", but all our social media use feelings to determine which "facts" get the loudest boost.

Any system that uses a raw number of votes (be they up or down) as a weighting score is basically encouraging botnets, brigades, etc. Like, every climate activist has a swarm of climate-change deniers following them around online and I consider their opinions worse than useless.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#423

Post by smaryjerry »

Removing the dislike count is the worst possible thing YouTube could do. Youtube is not just people talking about their day or political content. It is practical content, like how-to videos, and entertainment. When you search how to do something the number one indicator it will be useful or helpful video is the dislikes. This is critical for sifting through all of the garbage videos that don’t work or aren’t related who are just trying to make a buck or get views. Even in entertainment dislikes offers the same feedback, and while it’s not a perfect measure, it absolutely provides a good indicator.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#424

Post by politician »

notreallyserio wrote: post #240
qwertox wrote: 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.

Removing downvotes from SO seems like it would be a net good. Instead of downvoting, people could be more encouraged to post better and more correct solutions. A good intermediate solution would be to only record downvotes that come with a comment.

There's no salvaging what SO has become - the place where good complex questions are promptly closed by uninformed moderators. The place where questions about new versions of software are closed as duplicates of questions about older obsolete versions whose answers are no longer relevant. The place where popular questions with hundreds of upvotes and strong discussions are closed as off-topic.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#425

Post by jeffalo »

> 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.

I don't understand this part. So, hiding the dislike count means less people will dislike.

Then what's the point of disliking a video? It provides much less feedback to a creator than just commenting, it's more often used as a signal to other viewers. If it's hidden, there's really no point of including it at all. In fact, why not remove likes too? And while we're at it, let's remove the view count too.

This is a really strange change, and I'm not sure that I'm happy about it.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#426

Post by pcwalton »

bequanna wrote: post #386

> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks Wow. Well, the politically motivated truth behind this change is pretty darn obvious, right? If you're confused what I mean, check any US mainstream media video with an obvious political slant but pretending to be "objective news" and look at the like/dislike…

Every video that correctly describes the benefits of the COVID vaccine and makes it to the front page is spammed with dislikes, and this constitutes a major threat to public health. No, this is actually a very important change.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#427

Post by varenc »

ep103 wrote: post #381
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.

Reddit did this same thing, for the same reason. Can't have people disliking an advertisement posed as a submission! that would hurt Reddit's appeal to advertisers. This was one of the major inflection points for worsening quality of content on reddit, and it will be for Youtube too. For exactly the reason you've described.

Notably, HN does this too for the YC company job ads shown on the HN front page. Allowing users to comment on your job ad will inevitably lead to negative content so HN disables it.

(Though compared to reddit ads, these job listing have a very light touch. And they’re just a free perk for YC companies)

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#428

Post by aeternum »

WriterGuy2021 wrote: post #331
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.

It's a signal that people don't like what they are hearing. If the propaganda aligns with their interests, the majority will like it. It's not a good signal for gauging propaganda in my opinion.

I find it is an incredible indicator for low view-count videos. If dislikes are greater than likes it's a pretty good indicator you should just skip.

Seems like it'd be useful to hide the dislike count only after the video gets a certain number of likes.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#429

Post by tomstockmail »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #421
bequanna wrote: post #386

> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks Wow. Well, the politically motivated truth behind this change is pretty darn obvious, right? If you're confused what I mean, check any US mainstream media video with an obvious political slant but pretending to be "objective news" and look at the like/dislike…

It's cute how many commenters are not aware of this. https://mobile.twitter.com/FRANK_SINATRA7/status/14584818380...

This only proves the point to remove the dislikes as clearly those are coordinated dislike attacks. The subject matter in that video doesn't even have anything worth liking or disliking; it was pretty standard stuff. The screenshot you show has the person shown disliking it - whomever took the screenshot has an agenda. And that Twitter account speaks for itself.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#430

Post by manuelabeledo »

People would rather watch whatever validate their biases, and would rarely dislike something that does not. And the engagement algorithm would work towards that.

For those reasons, the dislike button is not going to be a great loss for anyone but those who were using it quite seldomly, and they are a minority.

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