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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#501

Post by kazinator »

tediousdemise wrote: post #492
smaryjerry wrote: post #423

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…

I am in support of dislike/downvote buttons being removed across all platforms, for the sole reason that people and groups misuse/abuse them. Legitimate opinions get silenced and squelched by the hivemind, or hidden by propaganda machines such as the JIDF. You can make the same argument that like/upvote buttons also get misused and abused, but the consequences are not the same. You might disagree with this and justif…

What definition of "censor" are you using, which allows downvotes to be framed as censorship, yet the concealment or elimination of downvotes to escape that branding?

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#502

Post by bequanna »

Loughla wrote: post #489
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…

>Wow. Well, the politically motivated truth behind this change is pretty darn obvious, right? I still am very confused by what you mean and what you're getting at with this.

Please read the sentence right below the one you copy + pasted:

> 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 ratio. The system is totally working...except it isn't working out well for the political party that YT would prefer.

In other words: People are disliking obvious political propaganda that YT would prefer that you like.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#503

Post by dukeofdoom »

Almost any video featuring Biden, the "most popular" president in history, gets disliked by a huge ratio. So Youtube is making it that you can't publicly dislike government propaganda now. Huge setback for civil rights and democracy. Government lies, and corporate media joining hands together yet again.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#505

Post by codetrotter »

tediousdemise wrote: post #492
smaryjerry wrote: post #423

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…

I am in support of dislike/downvote buttons being removed across all platforms, for the sole reason that people and groups misuse/abuse them. Legitimate opinions get silenced and squelched by the hivemind, or hidden by propaganda machines such as the JIDF. You can make the same argument that like/upvote buttons also get misused and abused, but the consequences are not the same. You might disagree with this and justif…

> When you censor an opinion by downvoting something, you are making an unfair decision for future viewers of that content who would rather make that decision on their own.

The value of the downvotes on HN, Reddit and YouTube is to save time when trying to find signal among the noise.

Still, I agree that some people may end up unfairly not being heard/seen.

But removing downvotes seem one step closer to surrendering to The Algortihm.

Then again, perhaps that is the general idea. And perhaps it will work out. YouTube can transparently use watch time instead of vote counts when deciding how to rank stuff. That’s what TikTok does, from what I understand. Maybe YouTube already does as wel. And in that sense, video content is a bit different from text.

So even though my initial impression of this change was negative, I think it may work out when we consider the difference between HN, Reddit on one side and video streaming services like YouTube and TikTok on the other side. (Also, I am aware that Reddit hosts videos too, but I am talking about the text and external link content here).

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#506

Post by FridayoLeary »

jonas21 wrote: post #354
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.

Imagine a News site for Hackers that only had the option to upvote stories. How horrible would that be?!

i don't know. The more i look at hn the more i appreciate the thought that went into it. Stories are far more black and white- either they violate the guidelines or not. The only thing a downvote would do is to make the story float all over the front page as there is an inevitable vote war. I would even say that most users don't like any given news story, which would lead to the situation that everything would get downvoted into oblivion. Comments OTOH lend themselves far more to moderation by downvotes. Remember we still get the "nuclear option" of flagging a submission.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#507

Post by flyinghamster »

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.

Or, the author doesn't want to bother with a brigade of trolls and spammers descending on it.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#508

Post by summerlight »

zkldi wrote: post #314
summerlight wrote: post #263

As usual, HN users are making lots of interesting assumptions (some comments to a conspiracy level) on the intention here... But in the reality, there are many smaller creators who is frequently being harassed by trolls (have you heard about those young Chinese patriots trolling over Korean and Japanese channels?) and one of their tool is the dislike button. And creators have been complaining about this for many year…

Nonsense, Creators have been able to hide their likes and dislikes for years. This is a global change that cannot be opted out of.

As I stated in a follow up comment, this change explicitly targets the trolling dynamic as whole, not just giving individual some controls. Most creators (and trolls as well) don't even know that option exists, so that option alone doesn't do anything meaningful. As always, the default option is what really matters.

I personally suspect that this is a step toward removing the dislike button at all (which is an obvious way to eliminate this attack vector) but they're just not ready to remove the button due to some other factors.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#509

Post by robmccoll »

tediousdemise wrote: post #492
smaryjerry wrote: post #423

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…

I am in support of dislike/downvote buttons being removed across all platforms, for the sole reason that people and groups misuse/abuse them. Legitimate opinions get silenced and squelched by the hivemind, or hidden by propaganda machines such as the JIDF. You can make the same argument that like/upvote buttons also get misused and abused, but the consequences are not the same. You might disagree with this and justif…

> But that's why you have a brain, so that you can make that decision for yourself! When you censor an opinion by downvoting something, you are making an unfair decision for future viewers of that content who would rather make that decision on their own.

Would you make the same argument in favor of getting rid of upvotes?

Also, expressing disagreement isn't censorship. The availability of the content is unchanged. YouTube doesn't eliminate content from their platform based on some number of downvotes.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#510

Post by bequanna »

feoren wrote: post #488
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…

> an obvious political slant I think it's worth really pondering this phrase. It's the kind of thing people just toss out without really thinking about what it means, in the hopes that it will produce automatic head-nods from the reader. When you are so deeply, heavily, unwaveringly invested in a very specific idea to the extent that anything that slightly disagrees with that idea has an "obvious political slant", yo…

Ha, I love that! My comment seems to suggest that maybe I am right-leaning and you sneak in a reference to Q-anon! Genius!
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