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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#441
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 suspect that your notion of what qualifies as propaganda differs significantly from most people.

Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate.

The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#442

> 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 also serves Google’s long term interest in being able to feed you content according to their own objectives with less transparency, similar to the FB newsfeed.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#443
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.

How does the dislike button indicate propaganda?

It seems most people are engaging with YouTube in the same bubbles as any other social media platform.

The "propaganda" videos I see (when searching for them) on YouTube don't have large dislike ratios, they are very much liked by the people who consume that content. An example is PragerU videos.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#444

Hilarious the visceral response here to the apparent and inevitable decline of YouTube content quality with the removal of a dislike count -- when Hacker News itself doesn't show a down vote count nor even a down vote button for a large portion of its population.

You are missing the mark very, very widely on an obvious difference.

Upvote and Downvote are NOT the same thing as Like and Dislike.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#445
post #432

I used to not understand why videos had dislikes even when they haven't premiered yet. But then one day, I realized that in order for YouTube to stop recommending me some channels, I had to press the dislike button. YouTube recommendation is so bad. Even when you aren't interested in something, they keep on showing it until you click on it. For example, I watched a few Squid Game videos a few weeks ago. Suddenly, bec…

(fyi) The ... button has an "I'm not interested in this option / channel" which you can to remove the video without having to click on it + downvote.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#446
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 suspect that your notion of what qualifies as propaganda differs significantly from most people. Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate. The ultimate sol…

I think the problem is that the dislike count itself is too aggregated. What you really want is to know if people similar to yourself like / dislike certain content.

This is very similar to the problems where YouTube fits you into filter bubbles, and Netflix struggles to tell you good recommendations. TikTok supposedly does a better job then others at this, likely due to having lots of signals from short videos.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#447

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…

Seems like a combination of top-rated comment and likes divided by viewcount will yield similar information, though...

Big assumption, have you run the data? I doubt it would be a good proxy.

Make a video on a taboo topic. During the first wave you end up with tribal zealot commenting and liking with low/medium viewership.

This pushes the video in the mainstream which causes more views but smaller likes counts. The top comments increase with flamewars in the comments.

Without the dislike the popularity could be negative.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#448

> 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.

Ah, right. We must censor speech for the "greater good".

The underclass must not be allowed to organize or disseminate "dangerous" ideas.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#450

> 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.

Any good gained with this will be overshadowed by losing super important feedback from real users about negativity of the content. Kids videos, tutorials, whatever. How will you know you are getting the best result for your search instead of some search-optimized garbage that already lured tons of people before?
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