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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

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

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...

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

They just silenced the audio of the telecast

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?

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.

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

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.

Pendatry:D

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

> 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

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]

> 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.)

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com