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Comment by only4here | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a really neat project, but I'm still confused on why YouTube would remove dislikes in the first place.

To benefit old media channels, entertainment companies posting trailers for games/movies/shows, less negativity for ads. A great example is the White House channel which gets a lot of negativity via the dislikes.

Also, they're not removing dislikes, they're removing the dislike counter.

One reason is perhaps because the dislike button is used to show political discontent. Just look at any whitehouse.gov youtube video, which clearly get brigaded with dislikes (or perhaps people really aren't that enamored with their politicians...)

This extension works flawlessly.

Maybe it was low hanging fruit? Removing the counter might eliminate easy coordination of distributed automated attacks. It could make botnet brigading less nuanced, and possibly easier to detect and mitigate. It also disincentivizes human brigading by removing context.

Channels get shadow banned by activists through manipulation of automatic moderation. This required keeping the activity under the threshold needed to bring a human in the loop. It's been a while, but there are guides on dark web forums on targeted harassment and manipulation of auto moderation of various platforms.

It's always frustrating to see non techy creators wail and gnash their teeth about being banned or harassed by a platform, when it's a million times more likely that a small group of dickheads manipulated automated rules using downvote and channel reporting features.

Not sure why captcha or other barriers aren't required for the use of abusable functions on social media, that's always seemed very user hostile.

It very well could be the mitigation of coordinated botnet attacks and the like. But the other possibility is the removal of a very easy method of showing disapproval. Youtube has been pushing more MSM sources on the platform and they don't want to harm their brand/product. Check out this Fauci Documentary trailer (with the extension, hehe) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJYnE1xWdZI

And the above example also plays into the political angle of removing the dislike button. ie antivaxx narrative.

People will now be able to perfectly manipulate their audience by deleting every unwanted comment and hiding behind the fact that dislikes not being present is not their fault. I'd argue that viewers need more protection than creators.

If you are actually confused about it, you have not noticed how big tech is censoring and blocking people from displaying their dissent about what's happening in the world.

My takeaway was that they're not getting rid of dislikes, just not showing them to creators on their own videos. Something to do with less negativity for creators.

I might be misremembering though.

You have in entirely backwords mate.

Indeed, I stand corrected.

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-to-youtube/

because YouTube's own video are among one of the most disliked video. And they want to appease politicians, big companies etc.

Because the system is not working well enough on scale. People manipulate it for various reasons and use it the wrong way. At the end, there is more damage than benefit. The same happens at other platforms too, and they all are experimenting with alternative solutions for this problem. But so far nobody seems to have found a good solution for this. I would even say, it's unsolvable, because humans.

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