Do people actually look at the votes before watching a video? I don't think I've ever done that on YouTube. The outrage over this just seems so manufactured to me.
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.
My experience with how to videos is that I'll search on Google, it'll pull up a good video and take me directly to the point in the video that discusses what I want to know. Sometimes I use number of views or number of subs to judge whether a video is worth watching.
I've only ever used the like button a handful of times when I want to quickly save a video. I've never used the dislike. I always thought of them more as a metric YouTube uses in their algorithm and not something people pay much attention to , which can still be the case when the numbers are hidden. Maybe I'm wrong though.
I'm unaware of such statistics.
>You don't even see the number of likes or dislikes in the video listing page, right?
Correct, the dislikes count was only visible if you clicked into the video. So users that depend on the dislikes count to avoid a bad video would have to click into each video and take a quick glance at the dislikes/likes ratio. If the dislikes are too high, immediately exit out and click the next video.
>I've only ever used the like button a handful of times when I want to quickly save a video. I've never used the dislike.
I also never use the Like & Dislike _buttons_ but that's not relevant to how I found the dislikes _counts_ useful. (Because enough of other viewers expressed their vote by pressing the dislike button.)
> I always thought of them more as a metric YouTube uses in their algorithm and not something people pay much attention to
Lots of viewers pay attention them especially when searching for new videos from unknown creators who are not in their feed. A short video from MKBHD explains the usefulness of dislikes counts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaaJyRvvaq8
E.g. a tech conference might have generated 50 videos each an hour in length. The ones with too many dislikes, I just skip. The dislikes stats helped prioritize what to watch in this age of information overload.
>which can still be the case when the numbers are hidden. Maybe I'm wrong though.
Yes, Youtube says the algorithm will still consider dislikes even though they are hidden for recommendations. But people still want to see numerical stats to quickly curate videos that Youtube did not recommend.
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.
But many videos disabled comments while the dislikes count was still visible to help decide.
>You should also acknowledge that you may like content that is unpopular (highly disliked videos
For non-politics or non-music videos such as how-to tutorials or product reviews, I've never experienced this. The crowdsourced dislikes was a very accurate indicator of a bad video and I've never disagreed with it.
It might be but often it's not. A common reason comments are disabled is that a female is in it which invites rude sexist remarks. For example, there was some advanced math university lectures taught by female professors and every one of them was spammed with "men of culture, we meet here again". Understandably, the channel later disabled the comments out of respect for those women but at least the dislike numbers were still visible.
>, it is still very easy to discern whether the video you are about to watch is controversial.
No, it's actually cumbersome and wastes extra time to determine if many how-to videos are bad quality without a dislike count. That's why so many are irritated that Youtube removed it.
> No, it's actually cumbersome and wastes extra time to determine if many how-to videos are bad quality without a dislike count.
If this is such a hassle, why participate here on Hacker News, a website providing nothing but informational content with no visible downvote ratings? Could it be possible that this inconvenience is not as bad as you're making it seem? There's plenty of low effort and low quality content reaching the front page every day. Whatever method you use to filter through the content here can also be applied to any other website with similar rules.
No, I wasn't talking about Numberphile. I was actually talking about videos from Institute for Advanced Study: https://www.youtube.com/user/videosfromIAS/videos
Last month, every one of those videos that had a young female professor in the thumbnail had the "men of culture we meet again" spam and other rude comments. All the comments have been recently deleted and disabled.
>Hacker News, a website providing nothing but informational content with no visible downvote ratings?
The HN (net) downvotes are visible because the posts are greyed out. For tech topics (not politics), I don't scroll to the bottom to read a bunch of greyed out comments. Downvotes lowering their visibility are saving reading time on HN. Same idea as Youtube dislikes.
I mean there's the Numberphile where they claim that the sum of 1 to infinity is -1/12, supporting their claim by rearranging terms in an infinite series in ways that are not allowed, while not explaining that the actual topic that they are talking about requires both a different definition of equals and extending a pattern into where it is not properly defined. So yeah, even Numberphile can put out a trash video full of errors.
By the way, I just checked the dislike ratio using an extension and while that video was still mostly liked, it has about 20% dislikes whereas most of there videos are less than 1% dislikes, so while the dislikes didn't work perfectly, they at least did inform people that something was going on with that video.
* 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.
When the dislike count was available, videos in the same category I mentioned above would get 100 likes to 1 dislike, perhaps that I'd call somewhat rare.
But either way, I also don't care about the removal of the dislike count at all, one can still access the ratio via views to like count.
It does sound actually crazy that people are up in arms about this.
I have a feeling Youtubers are probably the segment most annoyed by the change, which happen to be the ones with the megaphone.