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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

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 video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that. Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects.

View on HN

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 that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that.

My point exactly. So if I get what you say, most of your videos have a fairly inconsequential amount of downvotes, and those that do are not because they're poor quality but rather because it's been disliked by people who weren't your target audience.

If that's your experience as a content creator how can you, as a viewer, consider the like/dislike ratio a good indication of the quality of the content?

I'm not sure. Reddit, Hacker News, etc. all offer ways for content to be downvoted. This allows for user moderation, which has pros and cons, but seems to work better against disinformation than platforms like Facebook which only allow "likes."

I've always used the like / dislike ratio as a measure on the quality/controversiality of the video in question.

Removing it makes paid content so much more attractive for starters...

I am almost laughing as I'm writing this, but reality is moving towards 1984 much quicker that I ever imagined.

The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video. Which obviously is the point. Damn Google got really evil real fast.

There are way too many 15 minute videos along the lines of "How to do X in Y" which should be 30 seconds long. The downvotes are telltale for these, then the most upvoted comment tends to be, "actual answer at 13:30".

Or the video just isn't what the clickbait title says.

I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk.

> I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk.

Ans quite frankly, things being brigaded probably means it's a political hot take, that's even boring when you agree, and just stupid when you don't. If you remove those from the downvoted video list, you're probably left with only a few actually insightful and useful videos.

> There are way too many 15 minute videos along the lines of "How to do X in Y" which should be 30 seconds long.

This is why I stopped using YouTube a few years ago and heavily prefer text+image tutorials to videos nowadays. YouTube is pushing longer videos, because they show you more ads in the middle of them and creators are also rewarded with more money for longer videos + they can insert their "sponsor messages" a.k.a. even more ads.

reality is moving towards 1984 much quicker that I ever imagined

Nothing says “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever” like removing the 'dislike' count from YouTube videos.

Perhaps a smelly sock instead of a boot?

> The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video.

They neither removed nor disabled the dislike button.

They just silenced the audio of the telecast

That's moving the goalpost. They're removing all negative feedback in public.

And even then, saying they didn't disable the button is only arguably true. The button no longer performs its primary function.

> That's moving the goalpost.

I'm not the one moving the goalpost—it started as "reality is moving towards 1984", then "they removed the ability to give negative feedback", and now it's "they removed the ability to see the negative feedback that others gave." That's a significant change.

> saying they didn't disable the button is only arguably true. The button no longer performs its primary function

I'm more sympathetic to this argument—that the primary purpose of the "dislike" button isn't to give the creator negative feedback, but as a "rating" system, with the only 2 possible ratings "+1" and "-1". The problem with that is that, "they changed the rating system" doesn't seem to merit all of the comparisons to 1984. And "more like 1984" vs. "less like 1984" seems a silly way to evaluate rating systems.

Edit: actually, the rating system changed from "+1", "-1", "no vote", to "+1", "no vote"—since you can see the # of views, then you can determine roughly how many "no votes" there are.

It works on Hacker news since the vast majority of people here share the same interests. The same is true in theory on reddit, where the voters on a single subreddit share the same interests, and importantly reddit has rules against brigading to at least try to enforce that limitation.

The basic problem is whether a downvote on a cat juggling video means "this is a bad example of juggling cats" or does it mean "I don't like cat juggling"? On YouTube, it's much more likely to mean the latter, but it's the former that's actually useful.

> the vast majority of people here share the same interests

What are those interests that the vast majority of people here share?

Pendatry:D

HN is a self-selecting echo chamber for people who like the content that is posted to HN.

Ok well, you didn't answer the question, you just repeated something generic you've heard here, I guess. Whether it's true or not, who knows. I'm not sure what it means exactly. How would you go about testing whether that's actually true?

I dislike a fair percentage of the topics posted here regularly, or have no interest in them, and I suspect that's not uncommon. A survey on that subject would be fascinating.

That makes me wonder why you choose to stop by HN. Surely there are a large number of other tech-based feeds that would suit you better.

I wouldn't say there is anything here that I personally 'dislike', stuff that doesn't interest me, sure, but then I just don't read about it. I don't feel the need to down vote it though.

That's the difference I think

This is an excellent point. A dislike value is a single number but represents a large variety of reasons, only some might relevant to if you would think the video is good, and you don't know the breakdown.

> On YouTube, it's much more likely to mean the latter, but it's the former that's actually useful.

What makes you say that? Why is the person that doesn't like cat juggling even clicking on the video?

Because Google steered users this way via their auto-play next video feature. I’ve avoided it like the plague it is so I’m not precisely sure where I saw it, but I’m absolutely sure there was language to the effect of “we pick the next videos automatically based on your likes and dislikes” which translates to “dislike means give me less of this” which means they’ve skewed the usefulness of the metric. It’s no longer clearly indicative of bad content, it’s now indicative of bad content or content users don’t want to see more out automatically.

I'd argued before that dislikes should be removed from hn and i've removed them myself from my own view.

further, YouTube only said the dislike count is private so the moderation still happens

And what's the argument? Legitimately asking, I use it to downvote comments that are low quality in my opinion and I don't think that has a negative impact on HN at all.

I’ve noticed on occasion that comments that border on political speech can really go either way, even if they argue the same point in the same way. HN is, at least according to dang, an unusually diverse community, so leaving it up to a dice roll and timing for a comment to survive its first 10 minutes seems not great.

I often see completely factual comments get downvoted once (to 0), and since it then gets a little greyed out, people turn off their brain and blindly ram the downvote button on it. It just leads to bandwagoning.

I find the opposite. Fairly often one of my comments will get a quick downvote or two, but they quickly then get enough upvotes to get back into the black, I expect as reasonable people, who might not have bothered upvoting the comment otherwise, do so because they can see that it didn't deserve downvotes.

downvotes on HN are, by official policy, for disagreeing with ideas. They are not just for low quality posts. And, even on sites where downvotes are supposed to be for low quality/off topic, etc enough people still use them as "I don't like this idea and don't want you to spread it even if it's arguably valid".

Further, they're a form of violence against the poster. Not sure what other word to use to be told in a single click "You Suck!". It is or arguably can be a form of bullying.

I personally upvote posts I disagree with that nonetheless improve my thoughts and productively challenge my assumptions. I prefer a voting convention that increases the probability that I give my attention to worthwhile content rather than trendy sentiment.

[clarification: I suspect you agree and do not mean to imply otherwise, though I do not know]

> downvotes on HN are, by official policy, for disagreeing with ideas

Care to link to that policy? I was always of the impression that short low-quality comments that don’t further the discussion are prime examples of acceptable downvote targets here. Disagreeing with a constructively expressed idea is best done by expressing your own argument in a reply.

> I was always of the impression that short low-quality comments that don’t further the discussion are prime examples of acceptable downvote targets here. Disagreeing with a constructively expressed idea is best done by expressing your own argument in a reply.

Amen to that. Not how it always works around here though.

They are not, the guidelines are linked in the footer and don't mention anything about downvotes aside from "not talking about downvotes".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

A quick google

https://www.google.com/search?q=disgreement+downvote+hacker+...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996858

They are not a form of violence. That's concept creep in order to force home a rhetorical point that you're trying to make.

> Further, they're a form of violence against the poster. Not sure what other word to use to be told in a single click "You Suck!". It is or arguably can be a form of bullying.

Your point before that part was something I could engage with, but if you really see any form of disagreement as "violence" or a "form of bullying" then I don't understand how you can even function online.

"Further, they're a form of violence against the poster."

You suck.

Raw votes are pretty bad at moderation. Voting features are there primarily to help engage visitors so they will return.

HN and some subreddits avoid becoming tools of disinformation because they are managed by dedicated moderators who remove posts, comments, and participants who are acting in bad faith. (Facebook does not do this.)

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.

Agreed. Here is a video titled "How a simple Django application works" that is 8 minutes long. It has 29 likes and 27 dislikes. It's a pretty poor quality video, in my opinion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU2SeliQvMM

56 total votes is a signal to me that is not a good tutorial. No need for a like/dislike ratio

On a video with 45,000 views I think the number of votes total doesn't matter as much as how many are up and down.

So if there was a similar video with the same views and likes but 0 downvotes you think it'd be significantly better? I'd guess the difference was noise.

I mean "maybe," right? It just seems like a sample-size problem rather than indicating any bias one way or another. And of course, as far as these things go, you only find out the quality after you watch some or all of it.

Yes, I agree. (I was just using the example given, which probably wasn't the best example for illustrating the value of public downvote counts.)

BTW, I should have known that if I questioned the value of public downvotes on a thread of downvoting enthusiasts that I would... get downvoted.

it's a video with low number of views though, 56 total votes is probably not a signal in that case.

56 samples on a stochastic process gives a pretty narrow normal curve...

Take away the dislike count and you take away the total count too.

Perhaps youtube is the wrong medium for a lot of things and dislikes may not be the best way to express that.

Youtube is borderline stupid right now for most channels that don't have organic growth... what they should do is re-open monetization and live streaming to everyone as its creating its own hell hole if you ask me with the 9 minutes of smash the like button and 1 minute of content we're seeing on every channel that isn't organically growing or making money through other means.

They've changed the sidebar algo/design in the past six months or so and I tell ya, I used to actually use it, but not anymore at all. It's basically been remodeled into the same "front page" business case as Soundcloud, Amazon, and any other "choose from a variety of things that may or may not be sponsored (but almost always are) and only ever relate to your watch history by chance."

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.

My preferences lean that way too, however some of the people doing this kind of production include voice of experience.

Here is a great example:

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC7qMMY6UJHpNakTDMz6vVXQ

Auto mechanic basically documenting repairs as they come into the shop.

He is doing it for a few reasons:

1. His own protection. Publishing them is smart

2. Share his experiences

3. Promote doing this work in an exemplary way.

Rather than get a simple how to with a lot of the usual fluff, viewers are getting a story, almost like being an intern of sorts.

I look forward to the problem of the day and have already found myself handling some repair and service work I do differently and better.

I did not think this was content I watch on YouTube, but apparently it is.

>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.

Like the new Nintendo Switch Online Expansion pack video.

There's a huge community, that instantly dislikes the video.

> 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.

What's funny is I avoided a lot of content i feel in love with because of when TV and netflix had like or stars or dislike buttons.

Just have a brief preview and if i'm interested, i'll watch it.

> brigaded by adversial community

Not necessarily. There are other cases where consumers could use dislike as form of brand boycott

Isn't that similar because the dislike value isn't related to the specific video but a person's opinion of the brand.

For example if you wanted to watch a video on how to setup WSL 2 on Windows 10 and you see one by Microsoft has 100000 dislikes however it's amazing video that doesn't help you.

> 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.

Strongly agree. For example in HN itself if someone poses a fact-based positive opinion about China, it is down-voted whenever Americans are online and voting (does not happen when Europeans are online).

So dislike/down-vote has 0 value. In fact, majority of the comments in this thread are against Youtube, which tells me that Youtube has made the correct decision.

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.

I still see dislikes but will be cancelling my premium the second they go away.

With YouTube Vanced, there's no reason for premium

Supporting creators?

Yeah exactly. I hate ads and 15$ is nothing to me. I'm not a poor college student anymore.

adblocker? exception being mobile..

And TV

Ublock origin + Firefox seems to block ads on mobile fine for me, the mobile browser interface to youtube does leave something to be desired though.

NewPipe on Mobile all the way

Yup, I was surprised when I found out it had Sponsorblock integration. Immediately ditched Youtube Vanced in favor of Newpipe at that moment.

YouTube Vanced also has it integrated btw. You have to enable it in your settings

I'm aware. I simply prefer Newpipe because it has roughly the same functionality, is more lightweight and is open-source (+ it's on F-Droid so I can easily update it along with all my other apps).

Anything you’re aware of for iOS?

I only use a phone for watching stuff if I don't have a monitor or laptop around. That said newpipe is fantastic when mobile is the only available platform.

YouTube Vanced. It's the YouTube app with an ad locker built in.

Brave browser also blocks ads.

> I hate ads

Then you should definitely use Vanced. It eliminates sponsored parts within videos, which are not removed even if you pay for youtube red.

How does it manage that? Crowdsourcing?

Yes, people click a button to indicate start and end of sponsored segments in a video. Those time markers are sent to a DB, and every subsequent viewer will use that to skip the ad portion.

that is one horrific way to guarantee the content creators you enjoy don't get money.

If content creators don't provide ways for paying them besides ads then that's on them.

no, it's not on them, it's on you for choosing to take money out of their pocket. They have chosen the monetization revenues that they are comfortable with, circumventing the way people make money while watching their content is highly unethical. You don't show up to a local course or theatre production and use a fake credit card because you dislike the fact that they use visa.

Side note, what’s the etymology of ”Vanced”? Is it meant to hint at “advanced”?

They are so anti-ad that they even removed the ad from their own app's name.

So many better ways than funnelling your money through Google.

The Patreon or buying merch route doesn't really work for wide scale though. I can do that for a handful of the very top channels I watch regularly but I can't chip in a buck a month for all 400ish channels I'm subscribed to. Supporting a few creators is easy but giving a trickle the a wide field is kind of the sweet spot for ads.

It'd be really nice to have a way to say spread say $10 a month among the channels I watch, with maybe some options to weight towards smaller channels too.

Like if Humble Bundle and Patreon had a content creator baby together.

Yeah a way for me to not pay much, but still more than my measly ad views would be to a creator, without individually giving them a few pennies every month or a bit at the end of the year. A bit problem is this kind of micro payment is expensive to process unless you can aggregate them at the scale of a platform.

Most people who post more than once a year seem to have a Patreon or something set up.

Not my problem to solve.

This always comes back. It's supporting creators as much as the pennies creators get on Spotify. Only creators with millions of views make money. The rest, if you want to support them, you use alternative channels for that. The main profit maker is Youtube in any case.

That's not true. YouTube gets 45% of the money your videos generate and you get 55%. If a viewer buys a YouTube subscription then 55% of the price of that subscription gets shared among the channels that the viewer watches.

Any source for this?

>Under YouTube’s standard revenue-sharing terms for YPP, partner channels keep 55% of the money generated from ads on their videos.

https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/youtube-partner-progra...

Subscriptions are not the same as Premium. Paying for YouTube Premium basically does nothing to help creators, so you have the extra layer of Subscriptions to individual channels and YouTube get you twice by expecting you to ALSO pay for Subscriptions.

No, YouTube premium revenue is also shared to the creator. As a creator you even get a breakdown of how much you earned from ads and how much from YouTube premium.

I actually forgot that YouTube had rolled out the Join button. You get 70% of the revenue of the Channel Membership (join button). YouTube gets 30%.

Seems great for Android but no iOS or desktop versions sort of limits it as a replacement for Premium, no?

Is there anything similar for iOS/Apple TV.

Still seeing downvotes in my country, but if they remove this imo important metric, I’ll have to cancel my subscription.

On HN ? Unless you are a student you are making enough money to afford premium without thinking much about it and if you are using it enough to notice ads it makes sense to pay for services you use.

This is exactly why the internet is in the situation where it is - nobody wants to pay for stuff so they have to monetise tracking and advertising.

People _want_ to pay for stuff in exchange for not being tracked. But the business of tracking users and selling their data is much more profitable. Even when small businesses and startups create attractive tools to gain market share, they are (sometimes unknowingly at the moment) following their main agenda which is to get users' data and sell it multiple times to other buyers.

> This is exactly why the internet is in the situation where it is - nobody wants to pay for stuff so they have to monetise tracking and advertising.

This is just as oblivious as the "nobody wants to work" rhetoric that's currently popular. It ignores the fact that a lot of products wouldn't be used, and content wouldn't be consumed, if they weren't free.

No, the reason people wouldn't use Facebook if they had to pay for it isn't because they're cheapskates, it's because Facebook isn't offering a product that's actually worth paying for.

Netlfix et al. show that people are willing to pay for things on the internet if they're actually worth spending money on.

Besides, even when you pay for things on the internet, most companies will still show you ads and track you.

>It ignores the fact that a lot of products wouldn't be used, and content wouldn't be consumed, if they weren't free.

This is why I said we are on Hacker News. People here should probably value their time more than 15$/month if they spend nontrivial amount of time watching YT, yet still refuse to pay, freeloading is a common thing unfortunately.

I’m no more a freeloader watching ads on YouTube than I am a freeloader watching broadcast TV or listening to FM radio in my car.

Maybe he meant to say freeloader while complaining or blocking the ads.

I think you missed the point the person you are replying to is talking about - if you are watching youtube normally and seeing ads you aren't a freeloader. They are saying those that would use apps like vance or newpipe instead of just paying for premium are the freeloaders

Ah. You’re right and thanks. I had read that post, but from the use of the trademark assumed that YouTube Vanced was some other YouTube offering that I also didn’t care about, not that it was a 3rd party app that bypassed ads.

I put a book on a table in a library and every time someone reads it, it costs me a penny.

However, every time someone reads it I am also paid 2 pennies by a dude that wants to tell people about his new book.

People were fine with that, so I also found another guy to pay me 2 pennies to talk about the book he wrote as well.

A negligibly small fraction of those people have started wearing earplugs. How unfair!

So I found a third guy to pay me 2 pennies to talk about the book he wrote as well, and more people started wearing earplugs! What the heck!?!

I'm imagining someone in 1990 hearing you say that being able to instantly start watching almost any music video or filmed lecture/talk ever made isn't "a product that's actually worth paying for". I would've given anything to have that.

>I'm imagining someone in 1990 hearing you say that being able to instantly start watching almost any music video or filmed lecture/talk ever made

Imagine going back and mentioning that this would also be a way for the company (Google) to snoop on your conversations and censor dissenting thougth.

A free way to stream any video sounds nice, but it doesn't once you mention the fact that it actually limits the type of content you are able to enjoy.

We should be trying to build a better infrastructure for FOSS video streaming instead of trying to rationalize shitty business models.

No one is censoring thoughts and any conversations that are snooped on are ones you allow to be snooped on by using a free service.

>any conversations that are snooped on are ones you allow to be snooped on by using a free service

I don't think the innocence of the people who don't know the difference between proprietary and free software should be the thing we attack here, specially since the company in question has gone through great efforts before to restrain the spread of the FSF.

That's debatable. Any company that analyses large amounts of data produced by you in the form of posts, likes/dislikes, follows etc are effectively reading your mind.

You just described what the internet enables.

Someone in the 90s wouldnt have a clue about how much garbage there is to sift through, nor the narcissistic culture that all social media, but especially the type focused on videos, brings.

All the grifters, charlatans, anti-fact, political blowhard, fake, plastic, garbage that litters the whole site from left to right to non-political.

I hope the service fails, frankly.

So stop tracking and use good old-fashioned sleuth work like “he's watching a video about fixing plumbing, let's show him some tools or possibly DIY products for homeowners”.

> you are making enough money to afford premium without thinking much about it

This is a broad assumption, what makes you think everybody on this site can afford £12 a month for something they can get completely for free with uBlock Origin and YouTube Vanced?

"On HN ? Unless you are a student you are making enough money to afford premium without thinking much about it and if you are using it enough to notice ads it makes sense to pay for services you use."

That's simply not true.

I spend exponentially more money on content now than I ever did in the past. Both in digital services and physical media.

Not everything is worth my money and Google can kiss my ass.

Not all HN users live in the West. I know YouTube Premium is available in some low-income locations as well, although I concede I don’t know how much they adjust the price.

Currently I pay for

* Breaking Points (10/mo) * 3 substacks (5/mo each) * ProtonMail (5/mo) * StandardNotes (10/mo) * netflix * hulu * prime * boomerang * shudder * disney+ * hbomax * sometimes pandora

This is on top of the fact I buy about 20 records a year and roughly average about 20 dvds/blurays a year and about 10 books a year.

I dont care if Google doesn't get some money.

Honest question... why do you pay for Premium when you still get in-content ads?

You only get in content ads on specific streams which are easy to avoid unless you think the content is actually worth it.

Sponsorblock with browser extension and on mobile with Vanced Youtube works quite well for more popular videos.

SponsorBlock

I have Premium and watch almost daily and can't remember the last time I saw an ad. Isn't that the whole point of Premium?

It says in-content advertisement. Like the famous Squarespace advertisement. YouTube premium doesn't skip the in-content ads which content creator put in the videos.

I press Right arrow key 3-4 times and it skips it.

At least host reads are usually somewhat related to the genre of the channel, and skippable.

You can use SponsorBlock on Firefox to skip those in-content sponsorships/ads/etc.

so I can watch youtube on my ipad without ads every 3 minutes driving me crazy. It was either get premium or give up on youtube, or maybe the ipad.

I was already using google music, and then youtube music family (which sort of sucks at least in terms of app development), so this was more an incremental add-on.

what do you expect?? for YT to cut and sew the video that the creator make?

just use your forward skip button ffs

Those are skipable, non-algorithmic, and fully at the discretion (and for the profits of) the creator.

Its the non-skipable 1 minute adds on youtube on my TV (where addblocker does not work) that make my happy to have YouTube premium.

Not the person you're asking, but I am a Premium subscriber. In the niche I mostly watch (classical music performances) in-video ads are still quite rare--thank goodness!. So the Premium sub is still a benefit, esp. b/c before I subscribed, ads would suddenly run in the middle of a concert, which was incredibly annoying.

I've cancelled mine as well.

Same, companies can only be influenced by their financials these days. I even buy subscriptions I don't need with the intention of cancelling them 2-3 quarters later (need to make sure the money shows up on the books first).

So basically if a company you don’t pay currently makes a decision you don’t like, then you send them 6-9 months worth of subscription fees?

Then if they keep making decisions you don’t like, do you stay subscribed?

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

Brilliant!

Seems like a bit disproportionate reaction. Most of YouTube's value is in the videos.. not the dislike counter. Help me understand the trade-off here...

Video's value is in dislike counter. It helps in assessing content from new/smaller studios.

Yeah, I'm actually behind this one. There's enough negativity on the internet, if youtube lose 0.25% of their premium subscribers they'll still be just fine. I doubt if much more than that will drop their subscriptions as the main value is lots less ads and premium-only content.

If you cant deal with the negativity then stop making videos, its that simple.

By the same token, if you can't deal with people who don't want to deal with negativity then stop using YouTube. It's that simple

Have you ever tried watching a tutorial and come across one that has a ton of dislikes? Its a clear indicator that the video is a waste of time. Removing this is going to waste peoples time.

> Removing this is going to waste peoples time.

The term of art is ‘increase engagement’.

Same, subbed for years and just cancelled. Was hoping they’d ask why but they don’t care.

Same here and agree 100%. Seeing ads again will help me spend less time on the platform. I almost cancelled earlier this year but this made it easy for me to pull the trigger.

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.

Shut up and swallow some more ads!

is there a reliable way to block YT ads with a browser add-on?

I'm using Ublock + Umatrix and still seeing a huge surge in ads across all videos.

Youtube is also injecting pre-rolls at the beginning of content I've uploaded to a new youtube channel that is not monetized (I have no interest in putting ads in front of my content)...so I have zero interest in supporting their ad empire.

Piped + Privacy Redirect

AdGuard on iOS or Brave on Windows reliably removes YouTube ads for me.

Enhancer for youtube which makes youtube much better in my opinion. Ironically there is now a large, prominent sponsor logo on the add-ons settings page.

https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube

what the hell?

What are ads? Ublock Origin on Firefox on PC, here.

are you subscribed to any unique lists? Ublock is the first thing I install and it's been on my machine for many many years, but the YT ads seem to be pushing through

Ublock Origin on Firefox on PC here too and I don't see ads either, thank Zeus!

no, default settings

Are you using Firefox? If not, it blocks additional resources when compared to Chrome.

I'm using a flavor of chromium, but have noticed no ads when watching of FF. It didn't click that Google made changes to restrict ad-blocking effectiveness on YouTube at the browser level; thanks

SponsorBlock has a video highlight part option now, as more users start submitting it, you could use that to judge.

> 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.

Then why not keep counts and ratios optional?

That's the f*** up part. It's already optional. The owner can choose not to show it

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

> I'd be curious to see if people get overly annoyed by how many unworthy videos they watch and thereby reducing overall engagement.

A popular streaming service inflates the ratings of the content offered on its service to the point that I'm hesitant to use it that much.

Without the like vs dislike ratio, I'm less likely to use Youtube. I'm already using Bing and Google to search for videos b/c they absolutely botched their search experience.

I've started using Bing more and more as well. I never thought I'd see the day.

Channels can already disable the like and dislike bar.

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.

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

Lessco Brandon isn’t getting many upvotes these days

Absolutely. This is exactly the kind of thing that creators should be able to opt-in to, just like disabling comments. Very disappointed to see this shielding of everyone's eyes from videos. If a creator wanted to opt to hide it, sure, but flat out hiding it is unfortunate.

Why would be poster of a video receive special privilege for videos that they post? That would be like a seller being allowed to remove unfavorable reviews of their product. That the reviews are not under the control of the seller/poster is the only reason that they would be useful at all.

Uploaders have had this ability for a while now already.

As others have pointed out, uploaders had the ability to block voting entirely, but couldn't adjust visibility of positive/negative votes separately. There's a huge difference between a video with +10k/-10 and a video with +10k/-100k. Displaying both identically gives a deliberately false equivalence.

I suppose we still have upvotes as a percentage of views to fill in some of the gap.

True, though that still makes it ambiguous whether content in a video is heinous, or merely boring.

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

> There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that.

Yes. People downvote based on their expectation. So you can have content that you would probably find bad that has a lot of upvotes because it has a niche that likes it, and my sense is that the excursions in dislike ratio are more often driven by distribution channel or brigading than the intrinsic value of the content.

> Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects.

Doesn't this directly contradict your experience as a creator? But if it was true, wouldn't it be a good thing that creators no longer feel as much pressure to conform to fan expectations, eg in pursuit of bigger opportunities/audiences?

You have always been able to hide the like/dislike count on your published videos.

Let's not be stupid about this. The only people benefitting from this change are the shady ones.

Controversial videos aren't necessarily shady.

They do it so the likes can be displayed while hiding the dislikes. This encourages controversial videos, which is good for youtube since "all engagement is good engagement".

> But if it was true, wouldn't it be a good thing that creators no longer feel as much pressure to conform to fan expectations, eg in pursuit of bigger opportunities/audiences?

I'm not sold on that idea personally. The videos I create are based on what I'm doing in my day to day as a developer or if someone comments with a video suggestion since that's almost always in my wheel house of video topics which I greatly appreciate when this happens. I don't really make videos with intent to optimize for views / upvotes or get upset when a video gets a few downvotes. Lots of them have 100% upvote ratios and almost all have 95%+.

YouTube does let video creators disable voting but whenever I see that on any video I almost always think the channel owner is trying to do something nefarious. Maybe they're trying to avoid transparency by hiding downvotes or they are super self conscious about making videos and my internal bias suggests the video will be worse quality when compared to others. That's not always the case but it's true more often than not, at least for my own subjective take on video preference (mainly tech and hardware, no news).

I always strive for maximum transparency and let the results figure themselves out naturally.

In the end, this is mainly a huge downgrade for consumers of videos. It sounds like the algorithm will still take downvotes into account and video creators can still see the downvotes. It's the viewers who can no longer use this as a metric to quickly gauge a video's quality. In a world with so many amazing videos to watch, losing this quick filter hurts a bit.

I wonder how correlated the like/view ratio is with the like/dislike ratio. If that correlation is very high we might not be losing much info. It'd just take an annoying extra second to calc the ratio.

This would be interesting to scrape together before that part of the API goes away in December. I wonder how correlated the like/dislike ratio is to the like/view ratio. I'd imagine not very. I don't like very many videos, but I don't know about others.

That's an interesting point. Why can this feature not be video or channel specific so that a creator who is being targetted could switch off the count if they wanted?

That's already possible. Content creators can turn off comments and/or votes for any video.

Not just dislikes though, or?

Plausible deniability. If a creator turns off dislikes on a particular video, that's a strong signal that they're producing propaganda or have a thin skin. If YT does it for them, for everyone, then affected creators can just shrug and pretend like they definitely would never turn off dislikes.

That's not the only reason for turning off downvotes... I'm a musician, and have dealt before with competing musicians downvoting me in hopes of driving my videos below theirs. Or occasionally someone can share a video publicly and initial response is based on brigading or just not well received. The display of lots of downvotes before views are properly accumulated can cause bias towards the content. Things were just fine when creators had the control over whether or not to show dislikes.

Many creators use Youtube for different purposes. Youtube does a big injustice because they don't fairly separate content based on the type of entity that's posting content enough (i.e. an indie music producer versus a big industry music company or indie vlogger living in their parent's house versus a well funded TV news channel).

"Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong."

> I'm a musician, and have dealt before with competing musicians downvoting me in hopes of driving my videos below theirs.

This implies there are more competing creators than total viewers.

Well there are also several individual niches where the competition can play out in very personal ways as well. I work within a specific sub genre of music, and more often than not that entire niche sometimes operates based on "small town" politics.

I still do it for the passion, not much profit has ever been there... har.

would you mind sharing a link? there's no youtube link in your bio.

I promise not to give a thumb down XD

always interested to check out other's work :)

https://www.youtube.com/c/RuffTuffRecordings/videos

Sure friend, fair warning though, I'll probably delete this in a day or so to avoid an ID trail of people that might scan my posts later on... The Internet can be vengeful a times even if I am not so. :P

Because it has nothing to do with it. Explanation is a fig leaf. Check White house videos and see the real reason

It depends, stuff like videos critical of foreign countries political regime end up spammed by politically sponsored griefers to delegitimize them, exactly playing to your heuristic.

edit: :^)

Canada is no paradise, but I haven't seen any indication that sponsored agents are gaming the system on videos critical of them.

No, no, no! They are referring to Cambodia or Catalonia or Castlevania. Maybe even California or Carcinoma.

Unless a different county was meant. Although I've been thinking for a minute - nothing except Canada came to mind.

That’s a serious charge to level against Cuba. Could you share evidence of it?

Ok found it! Everyone can mark off 'China' on their HN bingo cards.

China starts from Ch, it's not intuitive to say, for me at least, it starts from C. Single consonant sound Ch.

I feel like the like-dislike button needs to be expanded instead to encompass various the nuances on why you might like or dislike a video.

Something I liked could be as trivial as an enjoyment of said content or a dislike because of it's presentation, or liking content that was presented in poor tastes yet recognizing it's comedic value.

That's not to say I don't recognize that the like-dislike ratio can also be gamed however.

Before facebook, reddit and such I imagined discussion platform where you'd have 3 options, upvote for agreeing with the content, downvote for disagreeing and third option for spam and incomprehensible things and things devoid of any value positive or negative.

Yes! No! Garbage!

System would recommend you the content based on your adjustable levels of tolerance for adversarial views, contoversy and tolerance for garbage.

I even considered supporting mixed vote by placing a dot in Yes! No! Garbage! triangle. Basically two axes, agreement and quality, with range of possible agreements narrowing down to zero as quality goes down.

Unfortunately, at least unfortunately for your preferences, YouTube (and the modern web broadly, perhaps) does not really prioritize ways for users to find content.

They're committed to recommendation and such.

And for people who are sensitive to downvotes, there's already the option to make them private.

I really don't understand this move... this will seriously limit our ability to filter bad content. I hope that they'll provide an alternative.

> I really don't understand this move... this will seriously limit our ability to filter bad content.

I think that is entirely the point.

To me the point is to remove the negativity. They don't want to be the targets of the same criticism as FB. It's also seem to be a cultural trend in the US that only positive comments are accepted.

A lot of comments here already point out that YouTube’s own videos are regularly downvoted to oblivion. Also that in this very sensitive political climate across the western world gouvernements and big corporations don’t want to appear rejected by the opinion. I tend to think it was an important argument for this decision

I use it for the same thing, though most videos seem to fall into one of three categories:

-Millions of views, 99% liked

-Videos without ridiculous view counts, where the like/dislike ratio actually helps

-Brigaded with dislikes

Don't you worry about that metric to help you decide what to watch. Let google worry about it for you. /s

Perhaps you could use views and the like count. If the video has 10M views, and only 10k likes, then perhaps it sucks? I dunno. You would really have to sit through it I suppose, which is the point of this move.

That said, it does not affect me much as I use YouTube exclusively for music. I used it for other videos as well, but Google is making YouTube a worse platform day by day.

> I often use like vs dislike ratios as a gauge on whether a video is worth watching.

That's the problem. You had a tool to judge a video was worth watching without having to watching the ads.

Now you have to watch ads to find out if the video is crap. This is a very good thing. for Google

that's exactly what i do, i think youtube is messing up big time. this is almost as bad as onlyfans trying to go completely wholesome

Similarly, I also like watching videos that have a high dislike-to-like ratio because that tells me the video might be about something I'll appreciate that the rest of the public doesn't.

From what they said it is to protect creators as groups go around creating games to dislike different small creator videos.

Now you can use likes / views ratio. The higher the score, the better the video.

What about... number of views : number of likes ... ratio

>> I'm a small time creator (~13.5k subs) and don't care at all about upvotes or downvotes being public.

Yes, but you're not someone YouTube is trying to protect.

The problem is people also use it as a propaganda tool to bury videos they don’t politically agree with. Normies have much lowered like/dislike button engagement so it’s a disservice to the vast majority.

But youtube isn't removing the button or the signal from their algorithms - they are just removing the optics of having a disliked video (which a lot of users including myself found useful)

Like I mentioned somewhere else, for recommended videos I see two binary paradigms

- videos with >95% like ratios

- political videos that have obviously been brigaded

Assuming most normies don’t have great engagement rates with the like/dislike button based on view count, this change is doing the vast majority a service.

If it is easy to believe some videos get a natural >95% rating; isn't it just as likely some content would evoke a <5% rating without 'brigading'? I am not saying that this doesn't sometimes occur, but I also don't believe it's the only case.

Agreed, people made the same argument for removing 5 star ratings from Netflix ('people only ever vote 1 star or 5 stars'). If this were an input for the decision making, these platforms could very easily present that evidence.

I do miss the Netflix of years gone past.

Because the channels they want to protect are politically aligned with YouTube.

It’s a business decision. Based on view count vs like/dislike ratio a lot of these videos are obviously brigaded. Most people aren’t engaged enough to represent themselves in the like/dislike ratio. It doesn’t make sense to bury them for the vast majority.

>Based on view count vs like/dislike ratio a lot of these videos are obviously brigaded.

That's your belief but you have no evidence to prove this. And even if true, why does the entirety of content of YouTube need to be punished for the undesired behavioral patterns that YouTube has cultivated on controversial videos they've pushed on everyone?

View count vs like/dislike ratio is an incredible accurate metric for my point.

Can you please elaborate? You have a way to compare a raw metric (counts) against a ratio (like vs. dislike) that yields useful insights as to whether the like vs. dislike ratio was the product of brigading?

This makes me think of how steam does indeed have some smarts to warn users when a game may be getting review brigaded. I think it's a combination of volume of reviews by time, and perhaps the referrer (?). It does seem to work fairly well afaict.

Steam also allows a user to view the raw information if they want. At least the last time I looked. The option could definitely be more obvious though. Giving the user the ability to see the like/dislike data over time gives them their own ability to decide whether likes/dislikes come from an external source to the page. This information should include a graph of the total views over time as well as likes and dislikes over time in parallel.

Not giving users this information and removing like dislike counts just makes it so that a small number of people at YouTube have even more ability to control what is pushed on that site. With this change users have even less ability to check the validity of a video; validity means different things to different users here. People who stay at YouTube will just have to deal with the fact that they will have videos pushed to their screen for reasons that are hidden to them, that they don't have the ability to check out anything other people think about the video, and can't even signal that there is something wrong to them about the video (sure, they could comment, but any comment can be deleted by the video author and there is the fear of losing your Google account, which can include their email contact to everyone and authentication information also, which can have huge consequences for their ordinary life).

It's not the worst idea but it also triggers when developers do something to the game and many players want to review that change.

What if they are?

Why is this a bad thing exactly?

Smells a lot like democracy and a platform worth of people telling the creator they aren't welcome.

Maybe YouTube doesn't like that but that doesn't make them right.

Sometimes the users are right, it's their platform to. Going against them just drives them away further.

With the hostile actions of YouTube over the last couple of years YouTube is asking for disruption.

This is to kiss the ass of big corporate creators and protect their brand when it becomes unpopular

This, imo. Netflix did the exact same thing.

How can you know?

What fraction of videos on YouTube are political in nature? Seems like a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in this. Why should videos about replacing the alternator on a 1999 Ford Ranger have the Like/Dislike buttons removed because YouTube wants to protect a very small number of accounts from criticism?

It’s definitely not small. I’m not particularly political and anecdotally my recommendation bubble has atleast 30% of politically “triggering” videos. These videos don’t have to be explicitly political but just involve a person that can be considered a “trigger”. I mostly watch videos on wood and metal working.

What YouTube recommends to you is just that, their recommendations. It doesn't reflect the actual amount of content that exists, it reflects what YouTube wants you to watch to drive engagement. It might be 0.001% of content but make up 30% of the recommendations YouTube gives you.

> It doesn't reflect the actual amount of content that exists, it reflects what YouTube wants you to watch to drive engagement.

Exactly. And what drives engagement more than enraging political content? Of course they're going to shove politics in your face even if you've never watched a single one before.

I too mostly watch woodworking/metalworking. If I ignore the “current events” row of videos that I haven’t clicked on in years (because they are incredibly boring and oversimplify complex topics), less than 1% of my recommendations are political. I wonder how YouTube decides which videos to allow in that special row. Most of them don’t have nearly as many views/hour as my usual recommendations.

Interestingly we have similar hobbies. I have to actively hit the don't recommend this to me button on all the political stuff. It generally works for a while and then I accidentally watch something close to controversial and I get another flood.

The algo loves some ragebait. I ruthlessly remove bad recs and yet I watch one self-help video and suddenly the algo shows me far-right suggestions.

It’s pretty incredible how hard the recommendation algorithm is trying to make me become right wing. It must assume I am because of my interests and watch history. Not interested, YT.

The fraction of political videos on Youtube is "definitely not small"?! I'd be surprised if it's more than 0.01%, i.e. if more than 1 in 10,000 videos are political.

Exactly.

The example you make is fantastic, because if such a video had 4 times more dislikes you know you’ll probably not find anything useful there, generally confirmed by skimming comments fast as “ this is a 1997 model “, etc.

In last months comments often just disappear randomly. Youtube outsourced their spam filter and it was messed up - randomly deletes comments on basis of poorly set machine learming model and wrongly set keywords.

Sure, but many "Normies" are aware of this dynamic and adjust their expectations accordingly. If some video critical of gamers, anime fans, or WoW players gets piled with downvotes it's no mystery. Same with political content. It's well understood that controversial things get more negative reactions.

And this makes the system useless. Removing it is the healthy solution to interrupt the game.

How does it make the system useless? It simply means the bar for "should I watch this" re: [dis]like ratio changes at least in part based on video content. If I see a technical video with more than 10-15% dislikes, I probably won't watch it or will be skeptical. But a video about abortion can be 50/50 and still have great content.

It seems unlikely that giving someone more information makes something worthless.

This system is useless because it does not communicate the reasoning behind a downvote, nor is it objective in the first place. People downvote for many reasons, and quality is the seems usually to be the most likely. You could make the most informative and objective correct video, and toxic communities could downvote it because they feel triggered for some absurd reasons, or because it competes with their favored content-creator, or because of reasons which are independent of the video itself

You must be pretty deep inside the bubble of the topic, as also the bubble of the content-creator, to be able to evaluate the value of the rating. And that makes it worthless, because most people can't be that deep and follow everything. And the people who are, are more likely re-enforcing their own ignorance.

The Ratio is one of those tools which are making sense when they are fresh, but become corrupted over time, making it useless after a while.

The system is fine. What if we applied this logic to elections? Just get rid of them altogether since they're prone to brigading.

There's plenty of clickbait videos that have horrible like to dislike ratios and you can save yourself time by seeing the dislike bar. This is just removing an important piece of functionality and making the site less functional and less user friendly.

The same mechanics are at play when people don’t participate in the democratic process. It’s a vocal minority rule. This is why a certain political party in the US tries to disqualify so many people from voting. If we had a mandatory voting system in the US with a federal holiday our government would look very, very different.

No, because if the US had a better voting system it would also require voter ID for example

> The system is fine. What if we applied this logic to elections? Just get rid of them altogether since they're prone to brigading.

Yes, elections suck, but that's their purpose. Mankind is not able to act smart on scale, but there is the interesting effect that we will act sane enough on scale. Elections usually aim to utilize this balance, because all other known solutions are sucking even more.

And not to forget, in a healthy working democracy, you can't game elections like you can do it with (dis)likes. With online-services, it's relative easy to get thousands of alt or hacked accounts, which you can use to manipulate the numbers as you like.

> There's plenty of clickbait videos that have horrible like to dislike ratios and you can save yourself time by seeing the dislike bar.

How do you know? How many of those horrible videos are you actually watching yourself to confirm their quality? And on how many of them does your own bias comes into play?

Healthy solution? It's hammering a needle with a hydraulic press.

Useless for controversial content maybe, not for non-controversial content. What percentage of content on YouTube is controversial do you think? Probably very little, so this "solution" seems like a serious overreach that removes something that's useful 90% of the time to appease some minority.

recent political pushes aren't being well received, with sentiment being very negative on WhiteHouse media pushes, mainstream narratives around vaccines and the like (on YT). Normies are swayed easily by dislike bar, so the elites at YT are trying to hide it -- just like reddit hid the downvote count, to enable astrotrufing campaigns and overall shill activity many years ago.

This site is also pretty retarded and shill-friendly with its "you can downvote if you've accumulated enough good boy points" setup

The alternative is that you're only allowed to like things and increased consumption must be fostered at every turn.

Can't have anyone being critical bc the very nature of that is contrary to consumption or promotion

And Google uses it as a propaganda tool to remove votes on unpopular videos they want to boost, whether there's actual money changing hands its an undeclared in-kind contribution.

There's another side to this too - downvote the authoritarian state propaganda. When I see a 99% disliked video and click a "Dislike", I feel that I am not alone. When all forms of political participation are verboten, you use what you have. Now we have even less.

The problem is only the “disenfranchised” like you use it and more often than not your views are verboten for a good reason.

Not everyone on HN lives in the US or EU. The views that are forbidden here are rule of law, democracy, political representation, freedom of speech, freedom of faith, human rights and so on. People who try to oppose this are regularly imprisoned, tortured, killed, repressed or forced to leave the country.

Whats the difference between the disenfranchised and a oppressed group trying to be heard? If you can answer that honestly you will see your own comment is hate speech.

What is a "normie"? Sounds like a vaguely inflammatory/derogatory term, but not 100% clear on what you mean by it.

Persons in the center of the bell curve; not the outliers/zealots

It's not necessarily derogatory, it depends on the context.

"Normie" just means "ordinary", "average", or "uninitiated". It usually means someone with very conventional political or cultural views but it can also mean "someone who isn't part of a subculture or group" ie developers talking about laptops might say "normies don't usually need more than 8GB of memory but some development tasks require more to be comfortable". Other times it's used in a more derogatory sense to imply that someone is a bit too credulous towards the establishment of the day ie "normies think that corruption and inequality only exist in developing countries".

Yes, good move to increase view count. If you don't have a like/dislike ratio to judge, you're more likely to play it and watch at least a bit. Everyone wins (at Google): more ads, more money.

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