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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#781

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…

And Reddit handles this, in general, by giving vague ideas of vote counts and not showing the real number. Why can't YouTube do something similar?

Vague vote counts is a mitigation against bots, it does not protect against human brigading which is what YouTube is trying to address here.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#782
post #703

If people want to actually argue that a creator can be harassed by a dislike button, why not give the creator the option to disable dislikes for that specific video rather than pushing this onto every video out there?

It was never about creators or dislike attacks. There's a reason why they didn't adopt an opt-in solution.

It's about corporations complaining about their ads running on unpopular content. It's about making people waste more time on low quality content, scam and disinformation across the platform.

What you hear from them are pure PR lies. They don't care about small creators and they never did. All they want is to make you watch more ads at the expense of your time and welfare.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#783
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.

Google will just stop showing statistics on cancelled subscriptions during shareholder meetings.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#784
post #734
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 always found this information rather useless myself, so I don't see it as a huge deal. More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content. In my experience it's more of a "controversial opinion" indicator than a "bad video" indicator. >There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds tha…

> In my experience it's more of a "controversial opinion" indicator than a "bad video" indicator.

There are tons of non-controversial topics for which like/dislike is extremely valuable.

Actually, I don't see the like/dislike on my android TV box, and for that reason, I don't even watch new content on it.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#785
Hiding the dislike info on POTUS seems important now.

Hiding the dislike info on CNN seems important now.

Public trust in government is low.

Public trust in corporate media is low.

It's been policy to manufacture consent in the US for quite a while now.

Hard to say this move isn't more of the same, and it's equally hard to say it helps more than it hurts too.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#786

Google must have done A/B testing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think they mentioned an increase in total consumption in the article. If they did not mention it, the test results were likely not promising, meaning that implementing the move regardless is motivated by something else than an increase in ad revenue.

Like unpopular politicians or corporations who can't produce content people want anymore and lobbied for a leg up from Google/Alphabet to keep people ignorant and foolish.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#788

> 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…

This is a weak facade to enact a change they want for other reasons. The real question is what the underlying reason is. I imagine likes will also depart soon as youtube trends toward netflix. I wonder what platform will replace it then

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#789
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…

the fact it isn't optional is the biggest red flag, why not just let channels choose if they want to show dislikes?

Because hidden dislike numbers is information that compares people who hide dislikes to people who show likes unfavorably.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#790
Also, coming soon:

User comment: DISLIKE

Other users click like button on comment a ton of times...

Next official move?

Making comments visible to subscribers and premium users only...

Google is going against basic human nature here and it's Orwellian as fuck.

Next unofficial move?

Censor comments containing, "DISLIKE" because the ones doing it will stand right out same as they did before and having them not stand out is what is being attempted here.

And?

Yeah, DISLIKE

Edit:

I realize this is part of a bigger trend and that is to avoid mass signaling of any kind.

The major players do not want large numbers of people communicating because those lead to large actions, which are expensive and risky from their point of view. While this is perfectly understandable, a functional society allows for these things and it bears those costs and risk because of the even greater costs and risks associated with clamping down on dissent like this.

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