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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#721
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…

Exactly, how will I figure now that a 20 min video has no content promised in the title?

How many times I looked for guidance on YouTube on some software, or cooking recipe or some rare clip, just to find out it was not what I was looking for by the dislikes?

Now I’ll have to watch ”fix your xxx with this easy trick” at 2x speed to know it was crap.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#722
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 often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching You summarized why Youtube is doing it. Sure harassment is one aspect of it, but this drives up the clicks for Youtube and therefore the ad revenue. I'd be curious to see if people get overly annoyed by how many unworthy videos they watch and thereby reducing overall engagement.

Harassment could be solved in way saner ways, like detecting unusual peaks of dislikes at some content.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#723

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…

For recommended videos I see only two paradigms - videos with >95% likes - mostly political videos that have obviously been brigaded imo this is a reasonable change

I rarely engage with YT recommended videos so I can't verify the accuracy of your claims. Either way, however, it sounds like reworking their recommendations algorithm would be a more reasonable way to deal with this issue than simply hiding the like/dislike ratio. How is this change going to meaningfully affect which videos show up as recommended?

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#724

I'm usually of the opinion that the more information the better, but I also think that the dislike/downvote button adds a lot to the toxicity levels, mainly for comments. It's much better for a group to get excited about something and over-like it than for a group to get angry about something and over-dislike it. So I guess I'd rather see the dislike button be removed more than I would like to use that information to…

>It's much better for a group to get excited about something and over-like it than for a group to get angry about something and over-dislike it. Toxic positivity is not a good thing, and not "much better"

What are the downsides to toxic positivity?

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#725

> Clearly a flawed conclusion. For the result of their experiment they deduced what they wanted it to say. Because we can easily say that the effect is not "dislike attacking" but other effects: - shy people more afraid to give their opinion not knowing that others have done the same. - the feature feeling useless, as even if you dislike, you might thing that you click will worth nothing as no one will see it. Imagin…

Completely agreed with this. If you make a feature less useful than before of course it will be engaged with less.

A radical approach in the similar vein would be to just turn off half your infra and add a ton of latency to YouTube. That would similarly solve the "dislike attacking behavior" altogether at the cost of having your existing users hate your product, with the added bonus of server cost savings.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#728
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…

Exactly, how will I figure now that a 20 min video has no content promised in the title? How many times I looked for guidance on YouTube on some software, or cooking recipe or some rare clip, just to find out it was not what I was looking for by the dislikes? Now I’ll have to watch ”fix your xxx with this easy trick” at 2x speed to know it was crap.

> Exactly, how will I figure now that a 20 min video has no content promised in the title?

Both Google and rights holders don't care. The more of the video you sit through, the more ads they get to shove in your face. It's a win-win situation for both parties.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#730

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…

That's exactly when dislikes are so useful. This screams of a bad/easy product decision by someone who doesn't use YouTube this way. Facebook, ebay, etc went to this so I guess that's the future. No negative reviews to maximize time-on-site.
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