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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

#431
post #345

This whole conversation has been baffling to me. I am a huge fan of YouTube, and I consume way too much YouTube. I mean, there's also problems with YT, make no mistake, but I'm admitting my bias, and also proclaiming my experience level. A year or more ago, someone alleged to me that the like:dislike ratio is informative, and I've been watching it since then on videos that I was watching anyway. I've also been watchi…

You clearly don't watch any political videos if the ratios you're seeing are universally that favourable. Almost all mainstream news content was heavily downvoted. More recently content promoting vaccines, LGBT politics, diversity / BLM related topics, etc have all come under significant fire from viewers and is very often downvoted. I strongly suspect YouTube is having the same problem rotten tomatoes has been havin…

You're right, I definitely do not watch political content on social media, haha. What a mess that would be.

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

#432
post #360

The majority of YouTube traffic comes from mobile devices (this can be observed in Google Ads for any video campaign), which is losing market share because of Tictoc. Google will do whatever it takes to monetize every inch of their investment. By turning off dislikes, users will be forced to engage with additional content. This is also visible on the other side of the spectrum - Google is pushing heavily integrated c…

Youtube Shorts (TicToc competitor) is pure evil. If I accidentally click on it I can find myself two hours later after watching hundred videos I can't even remember anymore. Sure it's high engagement, but it's truly bad for user satisfaction and long-term user retention. On top of that they blatantly and prominently push their political agenda in "news" section. But I don't think there is deep evil thinking behind di…

Shorts are awesome.

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

#433
post #430

Of course they are! That's how this goes. Once the door is open for censorship, it all works just like lies do, and it's often associated with lies and or hurt egos, say lack of acceptance and respect, and it tends to spread, until it's ridiculous. And let's get real here: This whole mess is because the government and big media don't like being near constantly ratioed. They do have the option of improving how they wo…

YouTube is on the side of profit, so is now moderating its platform like the large media companies who have moved in from TV/Cable to also using YouTube. The creators and users are always last place. As I said days before, [0] it will only get worse and YouTube will not change. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29407822

Not reputable.[1] And that's OK, expected. [not OK as in, I approve, because I just don't. OK in being aware and acting reasonably and prudently]

Best move is to use it with eyes wide open and continue to seek options for news, commentary, matters of importance.

At some point, "profit", being a higher priority than people, and their needs / interests, isn't going to end well. Never does. To me, the question is all about the timeline and where I'm at personally when it does seriously shift.

[1] And I do not mean to denigrate anyone or YT frankly. See my other comments. It's a rough world. Seriously,

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

#434
Honestly, this was bound to happen sooner or later. YouTube wants to become as mainstream as televisions are for households. It will do anything to please its corporate advertisers. Some people claim YouTube has done this due to various political reason, for example the ruling in Kyle Rittenhouse's case.

I fail to understand why people think that's true. I see a far simpler explanation, which is that advertisers don't want people to know people think of their products. Let's just take the Juicero company\1 for example as we all know its product really "missed the mark" 2. Assume the fact that they released their juicer via a huge amount of digital ads. A lot of people would probably think their product is good just because they like their ads 3 as they seem to be competently made. But since we all know the product is extremely bad, people would probably give their ads a thumbs down on YouTube. However by removing the dislike button, determining if the product is good or bad by seeing the likes or dislikes on its video would become impossible.Of course over time the press would have shown the product as being a complete waste and word of mouth would be terrible, so the company would eventually implode as it did in real life.

1 I know its defunct

2 https://www.failory.com/cemetery/juicero

3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAsEEW7WUHA&ab_channel=Juice...*

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

#436
post #430

Of course they are! That's how this goes. Once the door is open for censorship, it all works just like lies do, and it's often associated with lies and or hurt egos, say lack of acceptance and respect, and it tends to spread, until it's ridiculous. And let's get real here: This whole mess is because the government and big media don't like being near constantly ratioed. They do have the option of improving how they wo…

YouTube is on the side of profit, so is now moderating its platform like the large media companies who have moved in from TV/Cable to also using YouTube. The creators and users are always last place. As I said days before, [0] it will only get worse and YouTube will not change. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29407822

One nit to pick on your otherwise fine point:

Profit means playing ball with entities that can very seriously impact the enterprise. The money is great, but the cost to everyone is YT and friends doing some bidding they would otherwise want to avoid.

Essentially, it's similar to the military industrial complex. Private extension of government, and big business always does this. Has to, or the real threat might be accumulating soft power, the hearts and minds of the people,

Just saying it's not all money here. Power, and I mean established power, is a factor here as well. Corruption is legal here, and in many parts of the world. What we are seeing now is a part of that playing out.

If we were to have some real conversations, perhaps over beers, in a trust type scenario, I'll bet a whole lot of people in tech get this, have no answers, and would prefer it go much differently. We all know how this stuff can empower people, really improve the world.

That's not changed. But there are things in the way.

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

#437

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"…

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

There's no evidence that it's "a shadowban / temporary suspension from commenting" either. It's not in my case, nor I doubt for all the other users I've seen complaining about it. It's a bug on Youtube's end, plain and simple.

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

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Imo, people get endorphine hit from hitting dislike and feeling like they publically revenged. You are taking that away.

There are of course also arguments there and back. But the emotional reactions are either about interests or feelings. More likely to be feelings here.

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

#440
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube Shorts (TicToc competitor) is pure evil. If I accidentally click on it I can find myself two hours later after watching hundred videos I can't even remember anymore. Sure it's high engagement, but it's truly bad for user satisfaction and long-term user retention. On top of that they blatantly and prominently push their political agenda in "news" section. But I don't think there is deep evil thinking behind di…

Shorts are awesome.

the videos may be decent, and I do kind of appreciate there being a part for only rather short videos, but the UI is terrible. If you want to write a comment on one, it keeps playing the audio on loop. Who's idea was that? It's a terrible idea. Did they not do any user testing on it? Or is it in order to artificially inflate the viewcount numbers?
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