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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

support.google.com

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#611

It's funny how differently people react to things. I look at this and think "there is nothing about Youtube that I find more useless than the dislike count, and I think this probably - on balance - a Good Thing." Everybody else seems to think it's an attack on the fundamental essence of all that is Right, Good, and Just in our universe. Weird... I never would have expected so much consternation about a dislike count.

Many people probably felt the same with Google Reader or any feature Google killed.

If you read the comments in detail you will see that people describe how they used the dislike count. It's therefore not useless.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#612

I bet Google always keeps a few big but not particularly time-sensitive announcements like this in their back pocket so they can drop them as a distraction when some sizeable negative story about them breaks - say, when a $2.8B antritrust ruling goes against them ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29175511 )

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#616
post #593

For the viewers (us), this is the opposite of what they should do. For us, they should be showing the up/down count ratio on the video preview link itself so we could easily identify the garbage videos without even having to click on them. Of course this would reduce the amount of ads and pages they would serve to users, so it's in their interest to do everything they can to prevent users from being warned of time-wa…

The corollary is that wasting users time more aggressively is more likely to instill resentment and platform abandonment. Definitely a two edged sword.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#617
post #67

Bummer. I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching. If I see a 3,000 up / 48 down video on a topic I'm interested in there's a really good chance the video is great. I'm a small time creator (~13.5k subs) and don't care at all about upvotes or downvotes being public. There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the vid…

I just canceled my premium subscription. I'm not taking this lightly, YT has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. But at this point it feels like the responsibile thing to do is to vote with my wallet. Not that a change in course is likely; their leadership has been hell bent on ruining the platform for years.

Same.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#618
post #67

Bummer. I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching. If I see a 3,000 up / 48 down video on a topic I'm interested in there's a really good chance the video is great. I'm a small time creator (~13.5k subs) and don't care at all about upvotes or downvotes being public. There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the vid…

[deleted]

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#620

It's funny how differently people react to things. I look at this and think "there is nothing about Youtube that I find more useless than the dislike count, and I think this probably - on balance - a Good Thing." Everybody else seems to think it's an attack on the fundamental essence of all that is Right, Good, and Just in our universe. Weird... I never would have expected so much consternation about a dislike count.

Here is an easy example to understand the utility of the dislike count:

Imagine you are looking for a How-To video on something very common but specific, such as changing a car part or Windows setting, and that when you search for this you are given dozens of options. All of these options are 20 to 30 minutes long and 90% of them are either inaccurate, out-dated, or automated click-bait. This lower 90% will have a disproportionate number of dislikes. Each time you click one of these videos the dislike ratio can save 20+ minutes of your life and this benefit is multiplied by dozens of videos and tens of thousands of viewers.

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