This seems rather user-hostile. The downvote count is useful for identifying videos that aren't what they claim to be. And how about DIY videos that give terrible advice? A big downvote ratio will get most people's attention in a way that critical comments may not.
Oh I know, I am pretty cynical and not exactly outraged here. But although they don't care about what's good for us, they do care about what will keep us on the platform. And if it gets harder to find good stuff and filter out the dross, that could conceivably have negative consequences for YouTube in the long run.
I'm not outraged - I'm amused. The ultimate admission the only way they can spread their messaging is through force, not honest competition of ideas. How superior.
Nothing proves you have a worthy argument better than outright hiding from dissent.
Again, they don't care if you stay on the platform. If they did, they wouldn't touch it. The disagreement buttons were added in the first place because they increase and maintain engagement. After a few decades it's now all the sudden a problem?
Ha! The real problem is their desired narratives are being soundly rejected and it's embarrassing. So here we are.
> The ultimate admission the only way they can spread their messaging is through force, not honest competition of ideas. How superior.
> Nothing proves you have a worthy argument better than outright hiding from dissent.
I don't know the general trends across YouTube or why they would do this. Certainly, they've also been silencing views they and certain influential groups advising them don't like, and I've seen videos put out by connected establishment and moneyed milieu downvoted into oblivion. But value and truth are not determined through popular vote. It might coincide, or it might not.
So the only way I can understand your comment is to suppose that downvoting of "preferred" YouTube content has gotten so severe that the company wishes to prevent the communication of exactly how much disapproval there really is for the "official narrative" (while potentially keeping track of it themselves) because once someone knows he's not alone in his disapproval, he might just have more confidence to resist or leave a comment that spreads a message unfavorable to them. So yes, dislikes might increase engagement, but it might not be the kind of engagement they want to facilitate.
> downvoting of "preferred" YouTube content has gotten so severe that the company wishes to prevent the communication of exactly how much disapproval there really is for the "official narrative"
This is exact reason. Go to you tube home page and every day there is bar of "official sources" news on coronavirus (clips from news stations). Here are first four for this day:
People won't leave that easily. Nobody compares to YouTube. Facebook had no way of voicing disapproval for a long time and membership still increased. They are testing various options which might mean they're weighting the relative benefits and damage. And besides, they may be in a position where they have no choice if propaganda is more important than money.
Angry != disapprove because in the context of the other "emotions" it does not distinguish between disliking the post itself, or what it's referencing. If you post "Candidate X did Y" are you angry because the candidate did Y or because your friend posted something anti candidate X?
Come on, I'm trying not to dismiss your perspective just because it sounds a bit conspiratorial, but this is not convincing. Are you saying the YouTube execs (or whoever is leaning on them) are just acting emotionally with no strategy?
There is absolutely a strategy - there is a particular point of view they favor, and anything counter to it is removed.
Dislikes are embarrassing to, for lack of better terminology, their pet causes. Simply disabling them on certain videos or channels calls even more attention to them - so why not just remove them entirely.
The only thing surprising to me is that it took them this long.
It doesn't need to be that dislikes are embarrassing to their pet causes. There were a few instances where business partners would, e.g., post an ad campaign that got so many dislikes the dislike ratio entered the news cycle. I'm sure google gets pressure from their business/ad partners when that goes down.
What a silly conspiracy theory. If the wanted to hide embarrassing downvotes on certain videos, they'd just remove those downvotes, not the entire feature.
To be clear, they aren't removing the button, or a way for users to register their dislike or track that they already disliked a video (I assume), just the count of how many other people disliked it. As a matter of engagement, I'm not sure how much that statistic brings to the table. I agree it might make filtering out crap content somewhat harder, but I'm not sure how good it ever was for that. It might be that the vast majority of the time it indicated anything to the viewer it indicated that some campaign was underway, which generally is counterproductive as a viewer.
Personally, I upvote if I liked something, and I don't indicate anything if I didn't find it all that interesting or useful. Rarely if ever have I disliked something that youtube has recommended to me. The few times I have it's probably been because of some outside source noting it because it's objectionable. How useful of a signal is that to youtube or the creator? In that case it indicates what people that don't care about their content and aren't likely to watch any more of it think. That seems a poor source of feedback (and if we're talking about hat being useful to indicate to them that they shouldn't have done whatever they did, that's obviously served already by many other mechanisms, including comments).
Personally, I have frequently wished that the downvote button on youtube _comments_ wasn’t fake. (Last I heard, it currently doesn’t even send a packet to any servers when you click it. It used to, until google+ iirc [edit: see correction/update provided by voussoir in the reply. Turns out it does now. Thanks for the update/correction.])
The inability to downvote substantially alters what is said/ranked highly, I think.
A while back they significantly increased the number of ads and also now show YouTube premium popups constantly. I would imagine it's had very little if any negative impact. Google knows YouTube is the only game in town.
For now, but if they keep treating users like shit, it creates a bigger and bigger opportunity for competition to pop in. You might be thinking it's super hard for someone like you or I to create a YouTube competitor. That's probably true, but what about Amazon or Netflix? Can you imagine if Netflix had a YouTube-like platform where, if you're a subscriber, you get no ads?
That's a good point. Who really knows, but possibly Google just doesn't see that coming, or at least not any time soon. A true competitor to YouTube would really do consumers and creators a lot of good though.
Seems like it should be a market inevitability. There are just so many things wrong with YouTube. The main obstacle is the bandwidth cost, and that's not an issue for any major tech company.
I think Facebook could actually properly compete with YouTube if they wanted, it's just that their insistence that you have to be logged in to access content makes it much less appealing as a platform, because you can't just link people to videos easily.
Netflix charges a monthly price. They could have an open YouTube-like service (no subscription required) which adds value to their offering, and tries to bring people into a paying Netflix subscription.
It's not just the ads that are the problem with YouTube. It's also the way they can just demonetize anything that doesn't please advertisers, and the way their recommendation algorithm works. They don't even show me a lot of the videos from people I subscribed to on the app's homepage. Wtf?
This is unlikely, because youtube has one thing that no other platform does, creators. How many youtubers would actually be willing to post on another website, let alone exclusively? How many fans would actually follow them? For already risk averse youtubers this is unlikely.
Many, actually. There are quite a few active alternatives now, such as Nebula for science YouTubers and Odyssey. Last I heard Linus Sebastian was working on an alternative as well.
It seems that most content creators are quite worried about the way YouTube handles (de-)monitization and copyright strikes. Many CCs are also streamers and use YT only as a side channel. Sure, YT still has a large footprint, but it's not as solid as it used to be.
There are, but generally for specific interests, and not nearly enough to challenge youtube's market domination. Without something dramatic youtube effectively has monopoly control of supply and demand.
> they do care about what will keep us on the platform
Yes they do. Watching 2 useless DIY videos and then a 3rd DIY video that finally helped you out, just kept you on the platform 3x longer than if you had filtered out the badly rated one and watched the helpful video first.
Checkmate. YouTube/Google/Alphabet Wins! 3x the ads. 3x the money. 3x the evil. Do not pass go, Google collects your $200. Time to hide the dislike counts... case closed.
They probably think that dislikes aren't actually a good signal for whether or not a video is relevant to a uer.
Crappy videos could automatically be filtered out of their search and recommendations because people abandon them early. They may have determined that's enough to help user's find what they need.
It also helps the issue of dislike brigading since you won't be able to "dislike" a video at all.
Not sure if that's the right move or not but I don't think it's necessarily a bad one.
YouTube premium never shows me adds, and downvotes have reliably gotten the AI to stop suggesting a musician or autoplaying a song that I don't like, regardless of their rough membership in a genre I otherwise want to hear.
It makes me feel guilty to downvote someone or their work who's probably a good person, but it's the only reliable way to tune the AI. I get a lot of enjoyment out of music on youtube premium, but would stop using the service if they started airing ads on the pay service, or began serving music in such a way that I couldn't tune the suggestions and automatic play queues.
Perhaps, but this is the last Google product I still use. If they break YouTube like they did search, chrome, cellphones, and email, I guess I am off to find something else which must hurt their bottom line eventually.
I'm curious what you mean by search being broken? Do you mean the quality of search results or something with search functionality. I ask because lately I've found the quality of certain search results to be increasingly disappointing. I'm not sure if that corresponds to some known change they've made recently though.
The phrase is defined as “a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product.” When YouTube was created, it was intended to show videos to users. There were no ads yet. So the intention is for the viewers to be the users.
The core intention of YouTube is to have a platform to advertise on. Without the viewers, the advertisers would have no interest in the platform. If there were no advertisers, that would not sway the viewers from having interest in the platform. The ads are there as a means to the end, it’s not the end itself.
If there were no advertisers, they would not be able to pay the expenses required to deliver something that meets user's expectations, and they would lose interest.
Not necessarily. There are other models that could work for YouTube, like the subscription model, and they could always go back to YouTube being an unprofitable arm of Alphabet like it was.
In the short run they can get away with ~anything. In the long run though, anything that upsets users makes the rise of a true competitor marginally more likely.
I am actually paying to get rid of advertisements, not to get rid of useful features. This will just get me to stick with my channel subscriptions, as the recommendations are already often better and better scams.
Unfortunately even then Google doesn't view you as the customer in any substantial way. Advertisers have been, and continue to be, who they want to keep happy. The reality is that, in aggregate, most users are willing to take a fair amount of abuse as long as it's free.
It would have been an interesting experiment to show dislikes for premium users and see how many people pay for those feature, but I think that would have been too controversial compared to the ads that are accepted practice already.
Cable television subscribers originally payed to get rid of ads. Then the channels realized they could get you to pay and watch ads. You will be monetized in every way possible.
It's actually much worse than 4:1. YouTube is often hiding upwards of 90% of the dislikes. Like another poster noted, you can see it on https://81m.org/ .
This is also prevalent on those very scripted SNL-type 'comedy' channels that always make it to the front page, or vaccine safety videos (YouTube keeps showing me these videos of black people taking/administering vaccines in a propagandized way because they think I'm an African-American antivaxxer?). What's strange is these channels will have millions of subs but very few views, always with about 6:1 downvote:upvote.
Yeah. The downvote count is extraordinarily important when looking at things like chain sawing how-to videos. So many people uploading unsafe practices. More benign but sharpening videos have the same thing. Some look good but show bad technique.
I've used a fair number of YouTube how-to videos and never thought to check the downvote count. If a video contains bad advice, there will be a well-upvoted comment explaining why it's wrong. That's a lot more informative than an opaque counter
I agree that removing public dislikes is a pretty bad idea, but it's not that important of a tool in fighting misleading videos. I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with misleading thumbnails/titles, and what stopped the glut was not dislikes, but rather Youtube's use of watch time as an important metric.
Beyond the debate on whether or not downvotes are useful as a tool, I think about the higher-level implications of a change like this.
One of the most powerful media platforms in the entire world can institute a change like this under everyone's watch, and none of us have any recourse.
A couple of programmers in their two-week sprint can fiddle around with some Javascript and push it out to the masses, and suddenly large swathes of the historical record are gone forever. (If you consider downvotes to be historical, that is.)
Imagine if someone could white out a section of a book and apply the changes instantaneously to every printed copy of that book in existence.
I think about the implications of being able to look back on human history, and how that historical narrative is increasingly in the control of technology companies and a relatively small amount of people who decide to change that narrative for everyone else. I remember many chronological videos that specifically call out the dislike ratios of some YouTube videos as evidence of the negative backlash certain companies or individuals have received. With no dislikes, that point can no longer be made. That information is lost.
During a live recording of a Japanese entertainment group I watched, whose videos will be preserved on physical discs and be watched by thousands for decades to come, they announced on camera that, in the span of their two-hour performance, they had reached trending status on Twitter. All they had to mention was the word "trend," and the audience responded with enthusiasm. The influence of Dorsey's creation has permeated so many of our lives, including the people who, ten years ago, would never have cared about what bizzare-sounding technologies like Ruby on Rails would eventually enable them to obtain: a universally understood, instantaneous signal of approval.
I believe that the record of who we were and what we did will be important for us to be able to look back on, as it has been for centuries. But it seems that, in the coming decades, that will not always be up to us to decide - just a couple of people in the engagement bureau who decided for us that the alternative was better.
Totally agree with you on this. We're reaching a point where the services some private companies provide are becoming too important to remain private, or at least, being served in a monopolistic fashion where the user has basically no power.
> Imagine if someone could white out a section of a book and apply the changes instantaneously to every printed copy of that book in existence.
Considering a fifteen year old YouTube video can resurface and the millions of votes can change the vote-ratio, digital media isn't necessarily the same as a permanent historical record.
Fair point, but I think downvotes have been useful to me relatively recently. Fake videos may not show up in recommendation feeds, but they still appear in search results don't they? (And if you're searching for something relatively obscure, you can realistically hit the bottom of the barrel, rather than only seeing the more highly rated results.)
I would for anything truly extreme (like some horrible shock footage in the middle of a supposedly innocent video). But I don't know if all of these videos actually violate any rules; often they are of the kind <title: THING YOU'RE LOOKING FOR>, where the content is actually someone talking about the thing I'm looking for.
edit: Or another relatively common type, not necessarily fake or even strictly misleading, just cynically low-quality: a video made by pulling some text content from the web, feeding it through a speech synthesiser, and playing that over over the top of some 'relevant' images.
When you are reporting a video there is "Spam or misleading" option but then again you are left with YouTube algorithm deciding whether video is really "spam or misleading" or it is malicious report.
For the past couple of months I was regularly reporting group of spammers spamming links in comment sections but to this day I still see them running amok.
From a YT standpoint, if I am looking for "interview of HenryBemis" and there are 10 likes and 1000 dislikes, it means that this is probably NOT the video, but someone commenting on the video (e.g. I wanted to see the Oprah-Harry-Meghan video).
If YT removes the dislikes from the public eye, I will either have to scroll ahead, OR watch 5-10mins waiting for the thing to start, then go and try some other video.
YT increases user engagement (I have already watched 10mins of one video and now heading for the next.. and the next.. and the next..). So, for YT this is a win-win.. it's the user that gets tricked.
> if I am looking for "interview of HenryBemis" and there are 10 likes and 1000 dislikes, it means that this is probably NOT the video, but someone commenting on the video
This is the sort of thing I had in mind. Some of it is complete junk and some is probably interesting to some people, but the titles are sufficiently misleading to attract an eye-catching number of downvotes. I can't remember exactly when I last came across this kind of content, but it was definitely quite recently, so I don't think youtube has stamped it out.
You see this very frequently in DIY how-to videos. There's usually about ~30-60 seconds of very helpful instructional content, buried somewhere towards the end of an 11 minute video of rambling and common knowledge. I suspect largely because the monetization gets better if your video is longer than 10 mins...
Dislikes are good not just for identifying bad videos, but also good videos. You can see it in the like/dislike ratio. The higher the better, videos with ratio around >98-99% have very high probability of being good etc
Comparison of likes to views works well enough. Actually, they don't even need likes, they can understand good and bad videos just by analysing how long viewers spent viewing the video.
Likes (and dislikes) are needed mostly for viewers who might want to feel helpful.
It's still absolutely rampant for some types of search terms. For example, try searching for "electronic projects", "crafts", or "life hacks" in an incognito window. The vast majority of the results for all of those search terms have misleading thumbnails and/or descriptions.
Oh if you're going back that far, then yes, it definitely still exists, though I don't doubt it used to be a lot worse. (I phrased my first response carefully in case there had been changes in, say, the past few months that I hadn't fully noticed.)
Downvotes increase engagement. Otherwise they wouldn't have been put there in the first place.
No, the real issue here is too many of the "right" things are getting downvoted. So when The White House, Disney or the Academy disable downvotes on part or all of their videos but other wide swaths of videos don't need to disable downvotes, the contrast causes them to stick out like a sore thumb.
It calls attention (also known as engagement) - but not the kind of attention those who run social media companies want. Attention that is counter to the desired narratives is unacceptable. So here we go with the lame excuses that are all the sudden relevant when they weren't when the like/dislike stuff was instated decades ago?
You are all over this thread claiming that the White House is explicitly pressuring Google to remove this feature of the site. Do you have supporting evidence, or did you just make this up? It seems more like you have a narrative and agenda to push.
Yeah the only reason The White House YouTube channel receives views right now is because Trump used it to to campaign and it became fairly popular amongst his supporters. It's main audience is still his supporters because most people don't really watch The White House on YouTube.
I didn't say anyone, let alone the White House is pressuring them to remove anything. Why would the WH have to pressure them? I have zero doubt that Google is pushing this themselves.
What I firmly believe, based on statements by the companies and the employees that work for them as well as their actions (over the past five years in particular) is they have a particular agenda to push and if you aren't on the right side of their messaging they intend to suppress it by any means possible.
The revolving door and growing ties between Google and segments of government strongly suggests a constant flow of information and the creation of incentives in a way that create a common understanding across both. Meaning, you might not need to "tell" anyone to do anything in particular. Your ties create common interest and once two groups, here relatively fluid groups with fuzzy boundaries, share a common interest, no explicit coordination is necessary.
Yep. I think this is the sort of thing that could potentially backfire on them, though. Engagement through addiction sadly seems to be a bottomless goldmine, but engagement through deception can leave people dissatisfied and ripe for poaching by a competitor. If hiding downvotes does cause people to watch more bad and misleadingly-titled content, that could be profitable in the short term but dangerous in the medium-long term.
Totally agree. I notice I find comment sections of sites that allow downvotes (e.g. HN, Reddit) much easier to navigate and filter than sites like Facebook and Twitter that only allow upvotes. Only allowing upvoting gives you similar dynamics to partisan primaries in the US - the most polarizing content filters to the top instead of sinking to the bottom.
I don't know if these large tech companies act on normal incentives. They're almost post-modern corporations.
I don't think anyone truly understands their decision making process. It's above even the leadership. Scott Alexander mentioned this in a post this week:
> Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity.
Seems like an opportunity to create a browser extension to have crowd sourced upvote/downvotes kind of like Reddit masstagger. Wonder if there is a way to ensure that upvote/downvotes are not tampered with on the server side.
I agree. I've seen a lot of YouTube videos that are basically a robotic automated voice-over on top of some stock footage. They're everywhere, and usually I can avoid getting tricked into watching them based on the dislike count. But the like count alone is not enough to figure that out since niche videos can have low like counts.
noisy signal is better than no signal, which in turn is better than manipulated signal. at least with this change they won't be deleting[0] dislikes anymore.
This is a misleading "experiment". Why were only White House channel videos looked at? If you wanted to show that there was targeted dislike manipulation, you would also need to do this analysis on other popular videos, preferably right-leaning political ones. This could simply be an algorithm that detects bot behavior which gets applied broadly, in which case they are not changing any "real" signal.
It's certainly possible that Youtube is acting in a political manner and is preferentially deleting real dislikes, but this post hardly proves that.
50000 people would show up to a Trump rally. 15 journalists to a Biden rally. Engaged dislikers are not "bots". And the left has plenty of resources to have their own like-"bots". No, the truth is very simple. There's at least 50000 Trump supporters that will downvote Biden's white house. Even more because ... no travel required.
My main point is that the article suggests that this manipulation is selective, and while Youtube might indeed be selectively manipulating White House videos, the methodology used doesn't show that.
Here's a simple question which should be easy to answer, if you've actually approached this in an impartial way: does Youtube also remove likes or dislikes from other videos in a similar way? If the answer is "yes", then the conclusion becomes much less politically interesting.
PS, I think you're overestimating the amount of people who care about White House channel videos. E.g. the press briefing from 3/29/21 has less than 34,000 views. I guess some of the Trump rally attendees forgot to show up to their downvote party.
agreed - but what this comes down to is YouTube sells ads and advertisers only pay for safe spaces. Advertisers do not want your commentary or your dislikes. YouTube is not a public forum, it is a publisher with editorial discretion.
You have no idea why people are voting (or even if they are people). Even just based off quality, what does that mean, the content is good? The production quality is good? Maybe it's getting downvoted because the creator said something on Twitter, unrelated to the video. The only thing it could possibly signal is attention it's getting and even that would be iffy
There's plenty of other ways of figuring out if something is good. When you go to a restaurant do you just look at the star rating? Or do you read reviews, look at the menu, ask ppl etc
There aren't plenty of ways of quickly figuring out if a video is bad.
It's clear that people is this discussion are focused on different types of videos, and the varied responses to the removal of downvotes reflect this. I'm focused on board game videos, which are the only videos I watch. A large number of downvotes on a board game video indicate that the video includes major rules mistakes. So when I see many downvotes, I simply play another video. I'm not going to bother performing a thorough investigation of the quality of one board game video that has a lot of downvotes.
A bad tweet is obvious because it's easy to digest.
Unfortunately, the 'dislike' signal on a YouTube video doesn't tell me if it's because an expert disagrees with its content, or because the creator is being brigaded, or because the downvoters disagree with their politics (related or unrelated).
The comments are a better signal, but looking through them requires reading... YouTube comments.
Yes, if I am trying to fix my dishwasher and I see a video with a high dislike ratio I will move on because at best it's probably a time waster and at worst dangerous.
My options now would be to spend a minute or two watching it or reading the comments (engagement!), which may not exist on some niche videos you run across for things like this. This adds up when browsing. Don't forget creators can disable comments too.
> My options now would be to spend a minute or two watching it or reading the comments
Fully agreed with you on everything you said here, but that specific line I quoted sounds a bit optimistic to me.
You would only waste a minute or two if the video author decided to actually start his video "for real" from the very beginning, instead of spending the first few minutes on his entire life story (that is not even related to the video content) and asking people to like and subscribe. It became so commonplace, these days I instantly start liking videos just for not wasting the first few minutes on things completely irrelevant to the actual content (which would be somewhat fine for entertainment videos, but definitely not for things like DYI tutorials and lessons).
For instructional videos I usually click through to skim before fully committing, especially if they waffle at the start. It works easier on desktop than mobile though.
I'm not sure if it still works, but you used to be able to append something like '&wadsworth' to the end of youtube links and it would act like a timestamp link 30% of the way through the video.
Keep in mind that downvotes will likely continue to be taken into consideration by recommendations and search. To be honest heavily downvoted videos don't usually show up much in my YouTube experience.
I'm pretty sure comments on DIY videos are more indicative of quality than downvote count
Google wants to maximize their watch time metrics. Users are less likely to watch a video with many dislikes. If the user watches a bad or unhelpful video, that just means the user will have to watch even more videos to find a good one. :)
The downvote count is useful for identifying videos that aren't what they claim to be.
Down votes only tell you someone decided to give a negative reaction. They don't tell you anything about why they did that. Using them as proxy evidence for your assumptions is dubious, especially on videos with small numbers of votes.
Often the reason why public dislike numbers are hidden is because people copy reactions - a visible count of down votes attracts more down votes. That doesn't tell you everyone who watched the video had rationally decided that the content is actually bad.
I'm apparently not most people. I watch far more hours of YouTube every day than I'd like to admit, but I never even notice the like/dislike counts, let alone rely on them to provide any meaningful signal.
Well, this might be why. [0] That's a Biden video hosted by CNBC Television that currently has 571 upvotes and 1400 dislikes. There there is the Joe Biden channel, where almost all videos have at least 50% dislike count compared to upvotes, and a significant number have more dislikes that upvotes. [1]
if the spin becomes "Biden wants it" without any proof, Biden videos will keep being downvoted only because those who oppose to him think he is censoring YouTube
But that's not what downvotes on YouTube should be used for
I am sure Biden as the President of the USA has the power to ask YouTube to reset the counters and call it a mistake, there would be no need to change the entire platform for everybody else
This is not about vote bombing but a recent change made today. My comment shows one possibility, to hide that the videos of certain accounts have many dislikes. There are other accounts which are subject to vote bombing that have relatively constant levels per video of dislikes, so it doesn't appear in this case I mentioned that you drew a valid conclusion.
most of the votes (up and down) don't come from real people and do not represent real users' opinions and are casted for the most stupid reasons, like in DIY video example I am friend with the author or am friend of a competitor.
there is nothing more hostile to users than the fake information YouTube is providing
I would go as far as to remove the votes completely and sort the videos randomly
It's the same old story of HN downvotes
They happen randomly, sometimes users are targeted by bots that downvote everything they write and, most of all, if there is no way to know who downvoted you, the only way to survive it is to make a new account, because "moderators" don't care, their job is not to protect users, but to protect their employer.
Same goes for YouTube they are an ads company disguised as a UGC platform.
Advertisers and Premium subscribers are the real users.
as a proof of what I've written on the parent comment, I made the usual mistake yesterday: I commented on a thread about bitcoins writing that no, btc won't save the World and no, very few people got rich, btc are not making the general population rich.
Of course I received a couple downvotes, that rippled over my previous comments on completely unrelated topics, like this one, just because my other comments where more than 24 hours old and they couldn't be downvoted as per HN rules (the parent comment was already 15 hours old when received the only downvote - meaning nobody cared for it - at the same time of the btc thread that was fresh).
> You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own comment, and you cannot downvote 24 hours after the original comment was made.
If downvotes where ided, it would be obvious that the downvotes on the comments on this thread were just retaliation from the frustrated owners of bitcoins whose propaganda was being questioned.
The id doesn't have to be the real useranme, it could be a random id that identifies a user for a brief period of time (48 hours) so that other users could report the issue, knowing that it's not their paranoia, but a real thing.
Regardless of direction, votes are also useful for misidentifying videos that are what they claim to be. Rare kudos to YT; thumbs-up for the anti-reductionists on this one.
Hrm - maybe this is deserving of some public health lawsuits for any anti-vaxxer videos that slip through their content filter and end up hitting trending.
Youtubers have mentioned that up/down votes seem to have very little effect on video surfacing so I think Youtube has already figured out that folks are heavily biased in up/down voting and removed it from any algorithmic uses.
"A big downvote ratio will get most people's attention in a way that critical comments may not." I'm sorry but this is one of those things which absolutely needs citation. I can't remember the last time I looked at likes/dislikes to decide whether to watch a video. The thumbnails on the watch/rec page are what draw me in to watch a video, I don't bother looking at the number of likes/dislikes (or comments) until maybe after watching the video.
It's often an issue with how to and DIY videos. A big offender is Howcast. They have good search results because of their early presence on the platform but a lot of their videos are low quality by modern standards and not worth watching. Lots of high quality channels now producing dedicated content for whatever you were looking for but can be several videos down in lists.
Honestly, having dislike buttons always seemed _extremely_ user-hostile to me. You can get a lot of the same signals a "dislike" gives by just looking at the likes-to-views ratio, without introducing a method of negative feedback on what is often a largely creative endeavor that people put a lot of work into.
Comments on YouTube are bad enough. If you want to tell a video creator their work sucks, comments still work fine.
I think that YouTube algorithms are so smart right now that YouTube doesn't need dislike button anymore it can simply rank bad videos so low that you don't even know they exist.
Edit: YouTube algorithms are so smart* I was exaggerating using hyperbole(figure of speech) in order to imply strong impression and feeling that YouTube algorithms are good enough for YouTube to afford dismissing dislike button.
Instagram is doing fine with likes only so I don't see a reason why YouTube wouldn't. Go to comment section to say what is wrong with the video you are watching or use report button if the video is violating TOS.
