YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count
youtube.com
youtube.com
That's how this goes. Once the door is open for censorship, it all works just like lies do, and it's often associated with lies and or hurt egos, say lack of acceptance and respect, and it tends to spread, until it's ridiculous.
And let's get real here: This whole mess is because the government and big media don't like being near constantly ratioed.
They do have the option of improving how they work and what they say, but maybe they feel it is easier to just try and hide the problems. People went away from broadcast because of this crap, and reproducing it online means people will go somewhere else again.
What it won't do is transform things into being reputable.
As I said days before, [0] it will only get worse and YouTube will not change.
Profit means playing ball with entities that can very seriously impact the enterprise. The money is great, but the cost to everyone is YT and friends doing some bidding they would otherwise want to avoid.
Essentially, it's similar to the military industrial complex. Private extension of government, and big business always does this. Has to, or the real threat might be accumulating soft power, the hearts and minds of the people,
Just saying it's not all money here. Power, and I mean established power, is a factor here as well. Corruption is legal here, and in many parts of the world. What we are seeing now is a part of that playing out.
If we were to have some real conversations, perhaps over beers, in a trust type scenario, I'll bet a whole lot of people in tech get this, have no answers, and would prefer it go much differently. We all know how this stuff can empower people, really improve the world.
That's not changed. But there are things in the way.
Best move is to use it with eyes wide open and continue to seek options for news, commentary, matters of importance.
At some point, "profit", being a higher priority than people, and their needs / interests, isn't going to end well. Never does. To me, the question is all about the timeline and where I'm at personally when it does seriously shift.
[1] And I do not mean to denigrate anyone or YT frankly. See my other comments. It's a rough world. Seriously,
That's the nature of censorship.
But especially so when the "alpha testing" is specifically done on videos of the new White House administration.
Unless you're questioning whether removing the downvotes qualifies as censorship at all. Which I would find a little weird.
What hypothetical "pure" intentions would you suggest are possibilities?
This matter is a running conversation.
We would actually listen to the People.
No, that’s clearly not the world we want. Bring on those “crowd shaping tools.
(Edit: Removed the middle paragraph).
Might not do a lick of good. That's OK.
I can, at a minimum, gauge who to trust, who I am working with. A short conversation says a lot. And that's enough to manage what I do, say, risk, reward.
Maybe that is as good as it all can get right now. Maybe not. Real people having real conversations is a path forward though. More people than ever are seeking that having seen the mess you describe unavoidably. The illusion was better before. Now it's all sort of overt, in our face.
Who is "we"? Obviously not the people from the rest of your message.
It’s interesting that let’s go Brandon has become a thing for the most popular president. Why didn’t it happen before?
Google will do whatever it takes to monetize every inch of their investment. By turning off dislikes, users will be forced to engage with additional content.
This is also visible on the other side of the spectrum - Google is pushing heavily integrated campaign products (e.g. Performance Max Campaigns), which include non-performing channels as display and video (in comparison to search), which can't be turned off.
At this point they can, as they are a monopoly, but I hope they will get burned, as they are introducing more and more dark patterns, which result in lower than poor user experience.
My take on this - AdBlock relentlessly, support creators directly. Switch platforms eventually - there's choice out there.
But I don't think there is deep evil thinking behind dislike change - in large corporations people need promotions, some entrepreneurial PM and couple devs identified the opportunity and went for it. Directors/VPs are too disengaged to truly understand impact of changes.
this isn't a small change, it's a major platform decision that impacts user experience, usability and engagement -- it's also received strong criticism from the community including from the original founder of Youtube [1] (see description), but they're pushing it through anyway
You're being too naïve about the corporate agendas behind this change.
It's always been like they I think. Good people can't imagine just how evil people can be because it's so far from their own reality.
What is their political agenda?
Only if you consider egalitarianism and diversity as political issues. To most of society they are universal values so it’s not contentious.
Why?
I'm not convinced how much it'd actually impact watch time, but it seems to be the thesis.
On the issue of hiding dislike counts itself, I don't think it's a big deal, as I don't believe it's the quality signal that some suggest:
1) there's the trolling behavior it encourages, which detracts from the meaning of dislikes
2) relative likes are sufficient, harder to game and less troll-inviting
3) the content, being video, speaks for itself more than text, making it easier to determine what's likely to be of interest.
4) what does dislike even mean on YouTube? Disagreement? Something else? I don't trust that there's enough consistency to give it meaning I care about
5) the number of views is also a better indicator of potential quality than dislikes.
In fact, on that latter point, the percentile of the percentage of the video watched, relative to other videos, would probably be an even better indicator.
That dislike count was essentially noise.
Can't agree. Perhaps you've forgotten about clickbait thumbnails and video titles.
"Top 10 Scariest Roller-coasters" with photo-shopped thumbnail of a coaster car mid-air between fake section of track. Literally millions of views from people wanting to see this incredible coaster that jumps the gap. What you find is an ordinary video of copied, grainy clips of ordinary coasters.
Previously, such a video had a HUGE number of downvotes. Now those dislikes are hidden, the deception is permitted to flourish.
It is still a big Internet out there. All it takes is an up and coming platform to steer people elsewhere.
YT is big, and yeah they will carry on via inertia, but for things like news, organizing, commentary? Yeah, people will seek it elsewhere.
net_votes = up_votes - down_votes
The difference between 102+/100- votes and 2+/0- votes is large, but invisible on this site. I think it would be better for HN to go to where YouTube was, giving us an idea of both the net vote and the level of activity. Like up/down or up/total or net/total.
That fixes many of the abuse problems with downvotes.
HN situations are also monitored by the site operators themselves, who intervene. YT is too vastly big for that.
No it's not, it's our society that's fucked. It's our CEOs' legal requirement of fiduciary responsibility that causes these problems.
YouTube was 10.9% of Google's revenue for the year 2020, with something around $19,770,000,000 of income. How many employees could Google hire to manually investigate and take action against users? Even 10% of that income to address this problem would hire literally tens of thousands of people to tackle the issue.
The "problem" with Big Tech is that they're convinced of their own intelligence and they all believe they can automate their way to Utopia. Well you can't. You're not that smart. You're not that wise. You need bodies on the ground, you need hands doing work. We may get there some day, but it won't be today, tomorrow, ten years from now, and it may not even be a hundred years from now.
A little painful hubris in the form of some of these enormous social media platforms collapsing not under their own weight, but under their own arrogance in the form of thinking they can automate their problems away, would be a good dose of medicine sorely needed.
Agreed. Another way of framing this is that HN is sponsored by an organization that makes a lot more money per HN user than Google makes per YouTube user. In other words, HN users don’t have to pay for their own moderation by generating revenue in the same way YouTubes users do.
There's literally zero transparency here. At least on Reddit you can track the censorship in real time.
HN comments can still be downvoted (if you have enough karma) so arguably you can still get signal quality from the sum of votes.
Especially since in most cases, you can simply comment instead of downvote.
Downvotes on HN comments aren't a pure quality signal. HN's culture is that downvoting something just because you disagree with it is perfectly cromulent behaviour, as established by PG himself:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691
Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of that decision, but I didn't start this site.
This is better for freedom of expression and showing the split would be a bad idea imo. Comments who are more upvoted are also more downvoted because they are more visible (as they rank first)
That's an oversimplification; downvotes may also reduce the visibility of comments by making them an eyebleeding gray-on-white.
Those are not just "upvote if you agree with this positive sentiment", but often giving valid reasons against someones opinion.
I wonder whether using a ratio instead of difference would help?
If by "ratio" you mean showing both the net score and the total number of votes, I guess that would be one way to solve this. But a single ratio score (i.e. net score divided by total number of votes) is probably just going to look weird and useless.
The same principle could be applied to upvotes/downvotes too, yeah?
"That's not abusive at all", you may be thinking. But calling others names, even something as nonsensical as calling them a "handjob", can still easily fall under their terms of use.
If you refer to the original video[1], people are nothing but critical of the change. Why aren't those being disappeared? Maybe because Youtube doesn't care what people post as long as they follow their terms of service.
This is one step removed from not being able to criticize [elided so as not to send this thread the wrong direction; use your imagination].
It was a handjob. He wasn’t wrong. And his comment abused no one, merely a corporation.
If you’re arguing that an ML algorithm picked up on their comment and deemed it problematic enough to shadowban him forever with no appeals process, then that’d be even worse. But doing it manually is nearly as bad.
Remember, you can’t just “create a new account” on YouTube. You have a fan base. The only reason we heard his message at all today was because YouTube chose not to restrict his ability to post videos too; other moderators might. Especially against someone so abusive, who is clearly harming the wider community… right?
I think this type of thing is going to become a bigger deal over the next decade. Being shadowbanned from Twitter would kill me; I’ve put years of effort into it. But we’re one handjob away from people being fine with it.
This doesn't sound like healthy engagement. When people talk this way about online video games we consider it an addiction issue that needs addressing.
Corporations are people too you know.
Many of us who used to defend Google before now don't.
Some because Reader.
Some because the nymwars/Google+ (the single identity part).
Some because Google shuttered Google+ after they had made it the only social network some of us ever liked.
Some because Google is sucking the oxygen out of markets and then leaving.
Some because of how eager they are to obey China.
Some because of the James Damore story.
Some because search has been more or less broken for a decade and nobody cares.
Point is: there is a limit how many times and how badly you can disappoint/hurt users before even the most ardent fans gets tired of it.
Everyone is hating on the removal of the dislike count; across many videos and many comments. If I hear that more of them are getting removed or shadow banned and that they hadn't used a vulgar word, I'll start believing that YouTube is suppressing opposition to the change.
Their systems could perceive it as an attempt to evade the filter.
Also, their terms of service are not divine unambiguous laws. They makes the the rules themselves, and enforce them as selectively as they please.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219
[2]: https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-was-censoring-china-propag...
The end result? I'm sticking to my current channels. I can't be alone and knowing that YouTube takes recommended content so seriously, I have to imagine this is going to panic plenty of product managers at YouTube.
They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user.
In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view.
- Curiosity Stream/Nebula (Adam Neely, Mary Spender, Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, Super Bunnyhop)
- LBRY/odysee (DistroTube)
- FloatPlane (Linus Tech Tips)
None of these has a nice recommender like YouTube, so you'll likely either have manual curation (Nebula, Floatplane) or drown in a sea of bad/uninteresting content (LBRY)
That's why I choose to reward them through non YouTube platforms like Patreon. I've also noticed a huge trend in content creators making sponsorship deals that they embed in their own videos. I sense that canceling your YouTube premium won't hurt them as much as it used to in the past. Plus, you can give a portion of your subscription to them directly, should you so choose.
Long running project of mine. "Corporate change bounties". Customers leave some supplier and then state why and somehow demonstrate how much cash has exited with them as a customer.
Here's an example. Let's say att lobbies hard against net neutrality and customers were fed up and left. They could go to this site and somehow select "att + net neutrality + i will return if they support it" and then through some black magic prove that they were a long time att customer that paid $X/month that just cancelled.
There's a way to avoid the black magic by making it a "crowd funding" style site but in many conversations effectively zero people would want to give, say Nestle or Walmart, a gift in return for them not being an evil prick.
So there's gotta be some kind of balance. A number representing potential money on the table that can be captured if a policy change happens.
I made two versions of it a while back but new ideas are hard so oh well. But maybe a third time it will work, who knows
Basically, I've stopped using YouTube as a source for finding new content. If I get linked to a video from a trusted source (here, reddit, etc), then I'll watch the video, but they lost me as a member of the community.
Over time this should put pressure on them to be open to a better platform and make the move as soon as such platform exists.
So no, they probably won't lose "users", but they may lose "engagement," however they're measuring that at the minute.
Rumble and Rokfin, where more and more them are moving. History is littered with bankrupt companies who thought they were untouchable because people had nowhere else to go.
YouTube is becoming the place you find content, not necessarily though where you spend money. They're going to start caring about this.
You may be a HN TikTok skeptic (there are many) but TikTok is already expanding to things you’d find on YouTube historically, like tutorials, DIY, arts and crafts.
Once you move the discovery off YouTube, it becomes trivial to move the content to another video host. The discovery is the lock-in.
A lot of them are cross-posting to Odysee, and some are also on Nebula.
Paying for the privilege of interacting with some shitty thing I don't like to be entertained.... doesn't seem entertaining to me.
lmfao
In my personal experience, I rarely even noticed the dislike count. Sometimes I'd wonder who the few unfortunate people were who disliked a video with about 1000x as many likes. It reminded me of the 1 star reviews you see on Amazon complaining about the postman for a product that otherwise has a stellar record. I just assume something is wrong with those peoples computers which made their video glitch out or something. I don't really trust negative feedback that much when it is paired with an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for the same thing. And I don't think I ever encountered a video with anywhere near the number of dislikes as likes, let alone more dislikes. I personally have never disliked a video. If I'm watching something new, I'll just watch part of the video myself, and decide if I want to watch the rest or click away to something else.
When I heard the announcement of removing the count as an effort to combat brigading, it made a lot of sense to me. I've seen the growth of negativity across the internet in the last few years. People are actually addicted to outrage these days, so anything that can help eliminate that seems like a good idea to me. The fact they kept the button there and still show the count to the uploader seems like they've at least tried to appease the diehards who appreciate having that dislike button - pretty fair if you ask me.
You may challenge the assumption that only diehards care about this, but I've just looked at a few videos in my feed to see the number of likes and it's abysmal. 40k likes for a video with 4M views. 18k likes for a video with 800k views. They're all like that. The like/dislike metric just doesn't have much engagement. While you predict dire consequences for YouTubes future and panic among their employees, I am thinking that casual users probably have not even noticed at all.
The fairest critical take I've seen (not that I totally agree with it, but I respect his experience as a creator) is probably Linus' "rant": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN3ojSzyIG8
I get that creators want to be paid and need a better home than youtube, but none of this bodes well to me yet.
They did this with an understanding of its impact on engagement.
Right now, I enjoy having a broad mix of people, young, old, men, women... to talk to. One thing I love is when they bring me stuff to discuss.
The trick is to express an interest and make those conversations fun, real gives and takes.
The numbers on people seeking news outside the established media are pretty high.
YT and the White House did that public beta and that was noticed! Brought to me by others who probably would not otherwise.
"Why hide dislikes for POTUS?"
Why indeed!
The people saying few care about the details like the HN crowd usually does are not wrong.
But there is more to this than that.
Discussing whether dislikes is useful to understand potential video quality is a mixed bag like proponents of that idea say. And in some instances, say for how to videos, it is a great metric, like those proponents say too.
A higher order look at this is more like what normies are into.
They ask how come this became an issue after POTUS, CNN and Fauci got ratioed non stop?
They ask, "who decides what is misinformation? Is it the same people getting RussiaGate wrong for years, and who always seem excited about endless wars?"
I can make a case for how hanging out here alters perceptions in like kind.
Maybe more people talking outside their comfort zone, with a more diverse set of people and contexts is a good thing. Having done it for a while, I sure think so.
People do not care too much about the details. They care a lot about being managed, essentially told they need to be guided in this way.
Stupid "I don't want to think" content got replaced by twitch, even through many twitch streams contain hardly any interesting "content" they are sadly stile miles better then most/close to all "dump" YT content (because "dump" YT content has gotten pretty bad).
And high quality YT content often gets demonetized and seldomly recommended, because its either not advertisement friendly enough or doesn't cover a wide enough audience spectrum.
Isn't that good for them though? Generally speaking, it's a lot easier for youtube to do a few red carpet partnership shenanigans with the ssniperwolfs and mrbeasts in the top ranks and screw the long tail. That story has played again and again all over the entertainment media industry.
If everyone does what you're doing, they can potentially even get away with having to do less content moderation, or quietly "disappearing" channel categories, etc. You're already getting sort of played by relying on recommendation systems in the first place. People seem to think recommendations scour the deep web to cater to them personally, but the Occam's Razor take is that you get shown whatever the algorithm determines is clickbaity enough for your general flavor of hivemind.
>because I can no longer gauge how worthwhile they are to try and watch.
That is YouTube's job. Their recommendation algorithm will try and suggest videos that are worthwhile for you to watch. The order that videos are recommend is how know which videos are likely more worthwhile for you to watch. After clicking on a video most people judge the video be just watching the first few seconds an opposed to looking at the likes. They will switch to a different video if they didn't find that one interesting. Another common behaviour is just skimming through a video.
When I'm considering whether I might like to watch a video, I do the unthinkable and just give it a go for a few minutes if it looks like it might be interesting or entertaining. I don't really need aggregated opinions from random people on the internet to help me make my decision on whether I like it or not. I couldn't, for example, tell you if I'm currently seeing dislikes on videos even though I've watched a fair few of them recently.
You do this on a societal level and you waste centuries. There's no need for thousands of people to watch a few minutes of a bad DIY video to conclude that it's crap.
What you are missing is that YouTube recommends videos that you will likely enjoy. YouTube's recommendations try to minimize this waste.
It's just additional signal on the content in a world where I just can't read it all.
It's something fucked up on their end, lots of users are affected (also since long before this dislike count thing happened), and they're in no hurry to fix it.
And there's no point posting on support.google.com about it because clueless "Product Experts", aka non-employees who don't actually know anything, will just parrot the same old "Oh your comment must've been detected as spam" "Oh your comment must've violated Youtube policies" "Oh the channel owner must've deleted your comment" nonsense.
This is just a shadowban / temporary suspension from commenting, and there is no evidence it's in any way related to "criticizing dislike removal".
There's no evidence that it's "a shadowban / temporary suspension from commenting" either. It's not in my case, nor I doubt for all the other users I've seen complaining about it. It's a bug on Youtube's end, plain and simple.
That was the last thing he commented which strongly suggests it is. The other few comments he showed were innocent ones praising animations and stuff too.
It's like finding a street full of protesters and trying to figure out the best way to make sure nobody sees them. The problem isn't your method, it's your goal.
[1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
* "the information in this video is wrong"
* "i don't like the person who made this video"
* "this isn't the content i expect from this channel"
all of which is vastly more useful than just a downvote.
It is not like I can't leave comments anywhere like the guy in the vid, it just, sometimes happens with specific things, with no clear indication as to why it happens.
My takeaway is that I've minimized my interactions with Amazon's fake reviews. I don't trust them, and if I need something "for real" (not on a whim), I just go to a reputable vendor instead of "Aliexpress but with 100% markup". (The reputable vendor still marks things up by 100%, of course, but at least they're not Amazon.)
I remember when YouTube comments still had a neat and convenient little "translate" feature. Made it actually possible to practically cross the language barriers in comment discussions.
That lead to many interesting insights and discussions, and then, it was suddenly just gone. Which in practice meant that a whole bunch of people that used to be able to communicate with each other, crossing language barriers (How wonderful!), now suddenly couldn't anymore..
It's like the exact opposite to what the web was supposed to do, and the trend has been steadily keeping up. Removing the downvotes is also removing a form of signaling, and thus communication.
And the trend is not just reserved to YouTube, it's even more and more of a thing in places where it absolutely doesn't belong; Many modern video games do not have an "all talk" function anymore, out of fear nasty things might be written and then read by too many people, possibly leading to controversy in the bored "gaming press".
At this rate I wouldn't be surprised to even see YouTube comments go away for good.
But there is no option to turn this automatism off... and this automatic changing of shit is totally pissing me off.
Shaddowbanning should be like the justice system, it is better to let a a hundred guilty go unpunished than to convict one innocent person.
It doesn't tell you "that's not allowed" or something. It updates the UI so you think it went through but it actually didn't.
The issue is that someone is complaining that Youtube is auto-deleting their comments.
Unless you know someone inside Youtube who has the technical knowledge and access to dig into this there is no way to know exactly what happened to your account: how your account's auto-deletion state got triggered.
It could be due to some completely different reason not related to the content of their posts being remarks against the Youtube change with regard to downvotes.
Maybe the comments were simply too repetitive in their content, and triggered a mechanism against repetitive posts (being predicated on the hypothesis that repetitiveness is an earmark of spam).
Or maybe the comments used offensive language; could be that YT has some mechanism to put serial posters of comments that use certain words on ice for a while.
If you look into the Youtube support forum, a large number of people have or have had this problem.
It may resolve itself if that person just stops commenting for about a week.
I fail to understand why people think that's true. I see a far simpler explanation, which is that advertisers don't want people to know people think of their products. Let's just take the Juicero company\1 for example as we all know its product really "missed the mark" 2. Assume the fact that they released their juicer via a huge amount of digital ads. A lot of people would probably think their product is good just because they like their ads 3 as they seem to be competently made. But since we all know the product is extremely bad, people would probably give their ads a thumbs down on YouTube. However by removing the dislike button, determining if the product is good or bad by seeing the likes or dislikes on its video would become impossible.Of course over time the press would have shown the product as being a complete waste and word of mouth would be terrible, so the company would eventually implode as it did in real life.
1 I know its defunct
2 https://www.failory.com/cemetery/juicero
3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAsEEW7WUHA&ab_channel=Juice...*
I am a huge fan of YouTube, and I consume way too much YouTube. I mean, there's also problems with YT, make no mistake, but I'm admitting my bias, and also proclaiming my experience level.
A year or more ago, someone alleged to me that the like:dislike ratio is informative, and I've been watching it since then on videos that I was watching anyway. I've also been watching it especially closely since they announced this any people said they value the ratio. Nearly every video I see on YT has near the same ratio, about 90:1. 30:1 is extremely rare, 150:1 is even more rare. I don't doubt that there are worse videos out there than 30:1, but YT never shows them to me.
When I want to just binge on woodworking crafting videos, they suggest good stuff in my feed. With a 90:1 ratio. When I want to teach myself something, I search for that specific topic and they suggest good stuff. With a 90:1 ratio.
And when they do suggest crap, like often my feed will contain some "how to do basic web dev" video that is full of distortions or outright errors (as a moderately senior web dev, this is an area where I am not subject to Gell-Mann error), those videos STILL have the same damn like:dislike ratio, so how could I use that ratio to protect me from errors?
How the hell are other people allegedly finding these videos with dislike numbers as high as 10%? (I mean, before this month. Obviously now you cannot do the experiment I've been doing.)
As a side note, my Dislike Count only went away a few days ago. I dunno when it went away for other people.
They've lost their grip on reality, and the majority of viewers understand that and show their distaste towards their non-stop lying and gaslighting, while they brazenly push narratives funded by billionaire philanthropists in spite of their abysmal, spiraling ratings.
I strongly suspect YouTube is having the same problem rotten tomatoes has been having in recent years... In their case we've seen films such as Captain Marvel do very poorly with audiences, while largely receiving praise from critics. What's the problem with that? Well, if you happen to land on a certain side of the culture wars you may start asking if the film's audience review is actually a reflection of the films quality or if it's just a reflection of it being vote bombed by misogynistic trolls. If you think it's the latter then you might feel the need to take action, and in the case of rotten tomatoes you might start altering and deleting audience reviews to ensure the audience score is conforming with what you know to be their true opinion of the film.
I'm not saying YouTube did remove the dislike button for political reasons, but their reasoning for doing so certainly doesn't make any sense. If creators are being harassed by the dislike button they can just disable it as many creators had been doing. And if you disable the dislike button you're only encouraging hate in the comments, which is probably worse for a creators mental health, and already enough of a problem on YouTube as it is. The timing of this move is also extremely suspicious. Nowadays my YouTube homepage seems to be full of mainstream news channels which I haven't subbed too often pushing the mainstream narrative in regards to COVID vaccines or some other hot culture war issue.
Right now I have 6 mainstream media videos being shown on my homepage none of which I have subbed to, 5 of which are COVID related and the other is about Ghislaine Maxwell. I have absolutely no interest in this content, in fact I actively try to avoid the news but YouTube for whatever reason has been pushing these videos onto my feed recently and therefore if I do end up watching them I'm likely not going to enjoy it much and am probably quite likely to downvote them.
I guess I'm not saying big tech have an interest in controlling what information you see and how you perceive it, but it certainly looks a bit suspicious.
You know what else you can't be 100% certain of? How many dislikes this video got.
It's one thing how the comment disappears. It's a whole other thing how you are asked to "take a screenshot of the disappeared comment to investigate".
If you feel this singles out Google, think twice. Yes, Google definitely wasn't afraid to meddle with its search results for its own gains before. But there are other companies having practices just as shady.
Like "how the Apple Podcasts app went from a 1.8-star score all the way to 4.6 stars in a month without any actual fixes"
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791968/apple-podcasts-...
Hiding dislikes, disappearing comments, tricking users into reviewing unrelated services.
There is a broader issue unfolding recently about platforms and transparency.
(Only half-serious. I've seen a few "upvote this comment to dislike the video" and similarly clever workarounds already, so there does seem to be some bits of opposition and creative thinking left.)
Great idea! Too bad it doesn't work if the creator disables comments...are there any ways to navigate around that obstacle?
https://returnyoutubedislike.com
I absolutely oppose heavy censorship but some is required otherwise it would turn into crazyshit.com, the only way to have a censor free platform is to be rid of the scum bags that post scams, child porn etc.... Its unfortunate politicians managed to creep their way into youtube and impose biased censorship but its no surprise with how Google is already under the governments thumb with how biased their search results are. Youtube will never be what it was before and I doubt an alternative can take its place without the same thing happening. Thats part of living in a corrupt society, where Wallstreet reigns supreme,the rich exploit and profit off loopholes in our laws instead of doing the right thing, politicians are allowed to be bought through campaign donations and the media isnt held accountable for blatant tabloid like lies. Things will get substantially worse when Meta goes live and studies its users as they go on VR. On the bright side it could be worse, at least were not in a police state like China, Iran where they are trying to ban pets since its Haram or a country with no widespread internet access like North Korea.
Yes, lots of people do that to avoid wasting time on bad videos.
Especially for product review videos or tutorials, the first thing I look at is the dislike count compared to the like count. If dislikes are high, it's because the reviewer didn't provide useful information. E.g. a "top 5 dash cams" where the video is simply a slide show of dashcams will have more dislikes than likes.
Dislike counts may be unreliable for politics videos but it was an accurate indicator for other topics like DIY how-tos. With the dislikes gone, I now scroll through comments first before hitting play. (But some channels disable comments so that doesn't always work.) I hope Youtube brings the dislikes counter back as their policy change is very user hostile.
I guess I do the same when I'm thinking about buying a book about a technical topic, after all - I read the amazon reviews to see if it's going to be a waste of my time.
* a smaller group of people who care about it (like me);
* and a majority of people who don't care either way about votes.
YouTube can satisfy both by keeping downvotes, but Google is notorious about not giving a fuck about users and only caring about results.
The small number of people who care about downvotes aren't going to stop watching because they're gone, so when viewed through the lens of Google's metrics these people simply don't exist at all.
People rarely even use the like button, let alone the dislike. I'd wager the majority of casual users don't even know anything has changed.
I have a feeling Youtubers are probably the segment most annoyed by the change, which happen to be the ones with the megaphone.
So frustrating not having the dislike button
>So frustrating not having the dislike button
I can understand the satisfaction of smashing the button on something you don't like... but does your frustration take a different form that translates into more/less usability?
(I can also imagine that a dislike button might help in an overall rating system like Yelp or Rottentomatoes, but then those systems don't serve me particularly well either. If something is hugely popular, that means middlebrow tastes like it, which isn't that useful. I don't want to watch or read Stephen King, and after all, people vote with their dollars for McDonald's. I suppose this could be a useful metric on youtube for gaming livestreams or skating videos or something?)
Or is it anti-spam algorithms getting triggered by people flooding the comments sections of videos with the same inane comments? And/or getting flagged by creators and other youtube users?
Frankly, I can't see most creators wanting their youtube video comments full of "BRING BACK THE DISLIKE BUTTON", and I could see lots of their fans being annoyed by such comments as well.
My guess is that 95%+ of youtube users are more annoyed by an extremely vocal minority disrupting things than they are the removal of the dislike button.
What do you think about our product? interested? very interested? or very interested? which one? which one? which one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZJQDpS7ikc
With the dislike count gone you cannot make a quick judgement about what Youtube recommended to you. Less power to the people, more power to Youtube.
It's a very subtle change. Also a monumental one.
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
They like my dislikes since I frequently 'dislike' videos I actually like as a strategy, I do so specifically for truth-tellers that I figure youtube doesn't like, for two reasons:
(1) I write algorithms and thus know it causes pain for YT algorithm writers, going ... crud, the pattern is not as easy as expected so now I have to write another exception/condition. Each one makes their code more complex of course and a little bit less maintainable. (2) To help protect the content creator from rising to top of the list for getting canceled as the higher the views combined with the ratio of likes/dislikes the more likely humans in the office will be talking about them and drool over dropping the axe.
I'm subscribed to over 200 channels but many are truth-tellers. Others are science/engineering/computing but some are even lefties, and of those, when they are pushing the official narrative bull, sometimes I upvote (the opposite of what I really think).
For 1+ years I've been saving my comments to be able to prove in court some day that I am civil yet often shadow-banned (2.48 MB today). Anyone can sue via the Sherman Antitrust Act etc etc in Federal court for collusion and so on.
(YT likes people trying to viciously tear each other's throats out, good times, but posting intelligent informative content does not serve to create a wonderfully dumb underclass. Yesterday for example, someone had asked how to really understand voltage, was asking for help and my reply was deleted immediately).
I'm only aware of one comment of mine with more than a mere handful of likes. Currently at 3.9K, quoting the scientist in the video ...
"Cats may purr for any number of reasons" Scientist code for: We weren't able to get a cat to purr to study it
There are content creators who make the occasional video that gets ratioed. And there are others who have a majority of their videos ratioed.
When people see that, they ask why?
And you look at big media, and government, and I think this removing dislikes doesn't make any sense from our point of view, but it does from theirs.
Person sees the video and how liked it is. In the past he would have seen 3k dislikes and perhaps started to think, what's wrong with the content? Perhaps they would not buy my book..
But not anymore, now we can sell the ideas much easier. And if we think positively, buying likes is much cheaper now than before. No need to worry about those dislikes so much. Just buying enough of them for making the content more believable!
Thank you YouTube for making these business practices easier.
Kind of like the more a weak person's immune system deals with a virus the more mutation the virus makes and in the end the stronger it becomes.
It's quite annoying when I'm looking at neutral, nonpolitical content, and I can't get a sense of whether or not other viewers hate it. I look at a decent amount of tutorial content for various things, and the like-dislike ratio is fairly indicative of whether or not the content is wrong or if I should even continue watching it.
That’s exactly the problem, though. Nobody hides the like bar unless they expect a bad rating, so a hidden like bar might as well just be all red (people tend to assume the worst).
No matter what your view is on this (harassment or genuine negative sentiment, it doesn’t matter) an optional like bar might as well be mandatory for all the good it does.
I’m confused by your suggestion. I have no interest in watching videos that my friends are uploading (because my friends aren’t uploading). How would having a site where my friends post videos help this situation?
This is something else... Probably a bug.
Base on my personal experience during the last few days, a "Fairly Good" video should give you something close to 0.06 on the metric. (reminder: the sample matters, you have to do your own numbers)
I guess now they have to remove the view counts too LOL.
My block-list & 'don't recommend channel' is growing faster now.
(I'm guessing Facebook has already experimented with this).
Seems great from a board room, YouTube is too big to fail in 2years...
But this is just a signal that the platform is decaying to the latest generation of artists/creators...
Shame that for now they have a stranglehold on money and advertisers.
Something is amiss here.
(Yes, Im still salty about comment ratings and still want them back.)
What does it achieve?
That's the theory anyway. No idea if it works, but YouTube's not the only network to adopt this approach.
AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY
I was under the impression cyberpunk got that right, generally.
You are not a serious person.
I cracked up. This is the hell world we have been pushing for - it's arrived.
I have a similar IRL situation where I live. I need a vaccine passport to go into places where I can request an ID (which can only be done in person). I need an ID to apply for a vaccine passport.
One has to wonder whether these systems are broken by design.
Edit: I clearly didn't word this well, because people are responding to me with things I agree with. Let me try again. Certainly, everyone can and should complain about this if you want to! (You have my thanks in this case, I don't like it either.) I'm just saying that in a "normal" situation you'd be able to respond to this change by switching to a competitor. I don't think the complaints are strange but rather the lack of complaints about the fact that there are (sorta/kinda) no alternatives.
I use youtube for entertainment and learning. This change has seriously made youtube less useful to me on the learning side because the dislike count was a good signal to the quality of the information in the video.
Is this a new thing? I see this argument all the time.
When Coca Cola made their impopular recipe change were people defending it with "oh it is a private company, haters gonna hate".
Yes? But this isn't the source of why people are upset. As far as I can tell, no one is protesting YouTube's ability to do what they did. No one is demanding the government force YouTube to reverse this decision.
I also feel like reflexive arguments like "So-and-so is a private company and can do whatever they want" is unhelpful and irrelevant to the discussion. Do I really need to be reminded that some giant corporation has control over their own platform? Was I ever under the illusion otherwise? Why is corporate criticism met with a reminder that they had the right to make the decision?
Additionally, the entwined mindset of 'you can just go somewhere else if you don't like it' is also unhelpful. Very few decisions like these are bona-fide deal-breakers.
"'cause you are the government. You are jurisprudence. You are the volition. You are jurisdiction. And I make a difference too."
Some countries (mostly of the EU) already try to enforce some control against this kind of monopolies but they are still too bland.
And competition fails to appear thanks to the WhatsApp effect. If most of the content/friends are on it, its not easy to change to another platform unless something drastic happens (like the Great Firewall).
that being said, it is also their right to shut down whatever content Russia/China/Iran/etc finds disagreeable, I'm sure you don't mind that either.
The public/private distinction is important to respect, but according to reason. They don't live in hermetically sealed off universes as some libertarians would have you believe. Just as government can overstep, so can private business.