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Making the dislike count private across YouTube

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Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#931

Post by enaaem »

darth_avocado wrote: post #625
nickjj wrote: 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.

Channels can already disable the like and dislike bar.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#932

Post by petey283 »

aww wrote: post #821

I have never ever looked at the dislike counts to judge a video. I am baffled by most of the top comments here, that express frustration or outright anger about this. I don't think like counts are relevant to me either. When I consume YouTube (and I have a premium membership which I am happy with) I either know the creator well or I have to trust the search and recommendation algorithms to give me good content for my…

This is exactly my experience and I also have a YouTube premium account. I use YouTube religiously and have my own system of improving the algorithm so that the vast majority of content recommended is something I might watch.

If I don't like a video, I hit dislike and will maybe even remove it from my watch history.

I suspect that most who are against this change are not heavy YouTube users.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#933

Post by MMS21 »

dntrkv wrote: post #854
inChargeOfIT wrote: post #647

This will make the site useless for finding new content and content creators. And what's the point of a Like count without a Dislike count? I'll just assume every video has as many, if not more, dislikes and will turn to other sources for finding quality content (if at all). And they might as well get rid of the comments section too cause that's where people will voice their opinions.. but maybe that's part of the pl…

HN doesn't show dislikes and it manages to surface content better than the vast majority of aggregators and forums out there. Subreddits that remove the dislike function have much better content and levels of discourse. Removing dislikes (hiding them being step one) seems to be one of the better ways to improve the quality of content and commentary. Just for the fact that it removes the ability of a single group to b…

>HN doesn't show dislikes

It sort of does; comments go from black to grey to the point where its nearly invisible.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#934

Post by lbriner »

beezischillin wrote: post #883

This is part of a wider trend in the corporate internet of getting rid of visible user interaction to stop publicising user opinion. News publications have slowly gotten rid of comments sections, Google itself (an entity quite close to the USG) is following suit. Of course I suspect that the idea here is less about creator choice, since they can already hide and filter user interaction to their hearts content and mor…

My experience is that in many scenarios, comments were an attempt to create sticky relationships when the comments themselves add very little.

Take a news site, an article about, say, Trump becomming President. Comments are likely to range from "I can't satnd the guy" though to "I'm so happy he got in". They aren't going to add much of any value to the conversation.

I am seeing more attempts now of people attempting to be "clever" in their comments and start dropping 'facts' taken from various places. Again, interesting at best but at worst it doesn't add anything.

Votes are perhaps less contentious but what are they really saying? I like the article because it is factually correct or I dislike the article because Trump is President?

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#935

Post by ArcCompArthur »

In my opinion this is a bad move. The dislike counter helps me optimize my time and help me avoid bad information. For example if I see a tutorial or some other video with many dislikes I can sometimes predict that the steps in the video aren’t reproducible. In several cases the creator of a video tutorial has linked malicious software in the video as part of the steps of the tutorial and I’ve caught that by first noticing the dislike counter.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#936

Post by simias »

rhizome wrote: post #763
simias wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Howto videos have a wide range of qualities and the up/down ratio is indispensible so you aren't sitting through 18min of someone practicing their English or another rattling off a cocaine bender about washing cars.

Ah, I guess it depends on the type of content you watch on youtube. I find video howtos/tutorial very annoying to watch because they're invariably too slow or too fast, I vastly prefer text-and-images-based guides for that stuff.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#937

Post by streamofdigits »

Its a simplistic solution to a serious problem that plagues all social platforms. If anything we need more qualifiers not fewer: The like/dislike choice is creating an artificial binarity that doesn't exist in real life.

Organized like/dislike campaigns motivated by whatever commercial or political or other reasons are facilitated by a sense of impunity and unaccountability.

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#938

Post by [deleted] »

Thorentis wrote: post #905
beezischillin wrote: post #883

This is part of a wider trend in the corporate internet of getting rid of visible user interaction to stop publicising user opinion. News publications have slowly gotten rid of comments sections, Google itself (an entity quite close to the USG) is following suit. Of course I suspect that the idea here is less about creator choice, since they can already hide and filter user interaction to their hearts content and mor…

Yes, Gab made their own browser called Dissenter that added a comment section to every page of the Internet. Interestingly, I can find very little when Googling for it now. I'm sure other projects have tried this too.

[deleted]

Re: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

#940

Post by pharke »

darth_avocado wrote: post #625
nickjj wrote: 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.

The changes they've made over the years have made a huge difference in the amount I use it. I used to often spend a lot of time discovering new channels and videos and overall just enjoying entertaining content. Compared to today, I've uninstalled the YouTube app from my phone and when I visit the site in a browser I generally ignore the homepage and just search for updates on the content I'm interested in, watch one video if I can find anything that looks relevant and then close the page. If their goal is to show more ads, they're shooting themselves in the foot.
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