HN only shows max(upvotes-downvotes, -4) to the original commenter. Censorship?
As such, yeah HN does only show up/downvote ratios like you are claiming. However, the scale is completely different between here and YT, which is a primary source of information for many people nowadays.
Edit - To further elaborate, with the same example, imagine that not only is the dislike ratio masking the actual dissent, but other companies and platforms are collaborating on a truth, and discussion to the contrary cannot be discussed on their platform. This is what is literally happening, you have to be blind to not see it at this point. Government published videos are having their ratios hidden, anything that is counter to the decided narrative is being automatically flagged by AIs on FB/Twitter to throw "warnings" up. This is the nature of the current web right now and you really should acknowledge the tightening of the grip that these companies are doing over the years.
Clearly, that got ridiculous. But, what I'm curious about is if there's an underlying principal in your mind here. Because what you appear to be suggesting is a regulation compelling not only disclosure of internal statistics, but specifically how fine-grain those internal statistics are allowed to be? And, for example, what about twitter? They don't have a dislike button -- do you think they should be compelled to implement one? Since your focus seems to be on where people are getting their news, do you think that news sites (above a certain popularity?) should be compelled to implement dislikes on their own content, or only user-submitted comments?
It's just that it is a very unique situation. We're at a stage where YT is one of the most important platforms on the current web, it's incredibly centralized, and at the end of the day it is up to the whims of Alphabet execs on how they want information published on their platform.
So maybe it's not exactly "censorship" in the standard definition. However, there is functionality that exists and has existed in the product since inception (when it was a rating system instead of voting). You have always been able to see how unpopular a video really is. Taking this away is an alarm to me, especially in today's environment.
I apologize if it's a bit hard for me to explain my reasoning here, but it just truly unsettles me.
I feel you here, but you're not making a principled argument. You're appealing to a fundamental right to free speech, but that just doesn't fit the situation.
If we're going by intent, YT's statement is that people seem to be biased by the rankings. Taking it at face value, they want people to think for themselves, and not pre-judge the content based on what previous viewers thought. That sounds like a good thing to me. That said, I don't consume youtube except when my kid watches minecraft stuff there, so I couldn't care less what happens to/on the platform. What I care about is the legal mechanisms in play -- and your suggestion is quite alarming from that perspective.
So yeah, from a legal perspective, it probably doesn't fall within the domain of censorship, especially since as you say, YT can fully make a case that they are attempting to remove initial bias of videos, and probably win any legal bouts with that standpoint. I would personally argue that it's not removing bias from videos as you are able to still see one side - the upvote side. Hence it feels as though the intent behind this is not to remove bias, but to remove dissent. You see a video that has 100000 likes? That must be pretty popular! However the same video could have 4-5x the amount of dislikes, and you would never know. By virtue of simply publishing any of the like/dislike information, you are giving an initial bias to users prior to seeing the content of the video if the user is able to see this prior to consuming the vid. If they truly wanted to remove initial bias, as an engineer I'd never implement this solution, but only show that information after you watch the video. Even something as simple as showing it at the end of the video could accomplish the idea of removing bias.
Of course I would be unable to argue this point really beyond what I'm doing / attempting to do here, as I have no legal experience or even really experience in debate around such subjects, I'm just an engineer that feels the need to vent a bit of dissatisfaction with the direction the web is turning. Anyways, thanks for listening a bit even if it was a bit ranty.
Since they analyzed the platform as a whole and decided there are more harm than good in dislikes, and they are applying globally (allowing for a transition period), it is just how they decided the feature set to behave. You can't call it censorship if it applies to 100% of people and content without exception.
And newspapers own the copyright on everything they print, even falsehoods.
What's important is the reason why they are doing it, not whether they have the right, because we all agree that they have the right to do it, but we are not all happy.