Honestly, it isn’t hard to justify Youtube’s choices on this very specific issue. The dislike button presumably has a function beyond public shaming. I expect it’s primarily for tailoring recommendations and tuning their algorithms, but in any case it was clearly being abused by troll hordes.
If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video, or could identify other statistical aberrations, it stands to reason that such abuse would actively interfere with the legitimate functionality it was intended for and/or work against the interests of YouTube, advertisers, as well as authors and viewers.
I personally think that removing the public counter was an elegant solution in this case, as it suppresses the worst excesses of trolling while maintaining the original intent of the dislike feature, which should improve the overall experience for most users, generally speaking.
I watch a lot of Youtube videos for DIY stuff like car repair and home improvement.
The like/dislike ratio used to be a very good way to quickly see if the person who made it knew what they were talking about.
Now I instead have to spend a bunch of time reading through the comments to make that determination.
Not that bad DIY videos are useless. They can be a good way of reading a lot of comments on not how to do things. So they have their place. But I want to know that going in.
I completely agree with that, in the past if I saw a DIY video with a 50% upvote rate, I'd know that it should probably be ignored and to look for a better source. Now, I'm not sure. I have to comb through the comments to find out if that particular uploader missed something, left a bolt loose that should be tightened, etc.
That is not the norme, it happen but for very small number of videos, you can not getrid of important functionality on the site as a dislike buttn jut to prevent few of these incidents from happening
If it is incorporated, its definitely not effective. Clickbait dominates Youtube's recommendations and search despite consistently low thumb ratings. An easy example would be a procedurally generated channel such as this one:
Sort by "Popular" and you'll see that their most watched videos have consistently low like/dislike ratios yet are still being actively recommended. If you use Youtube's search feature, these same channels and videos will come up long before the actually informative channels do.
You could argue it's been helping Youtube by wasting viewer's time and making them watch extra ads but its certainly not helping the viewers find what they're looking for. Even mass reporting the channels doesn't seem to stop them.
Doubtful that they can do this in a way that accurately and effectively helps the user compared to showing the dislike count.
YouTube is plagued by low quality content with clickbait titles, descriptions, and images. Often they outright lie about the content. The recommendation algorithm prioritizes these videos first.
Users can't determine in advance that these videos are poor quality, so they'll be forced to watch those poor quality videos until they find a good one. YouTube wants it to be like this because it increases time on the platform and their advertising revenue.
Along the way, users can dislike these videos but that video still gains views which helps push itself upwards in the recommendation algorithm. Particularly videos with clickbait titles, descriptions, and images tend to amass large numbers of views in short periods of time, which YouTube may recognize as "going viral" and give it an additional push in its recommendations when searching for important keywords.
Furthermore, many users are also watching these videos whilst not logged in or don't care to click dislike, which is another lacking signal to help tune YouTube's ranking algorithm correctly.
> in any case it was clearly being abused by troll hordes.
Citation needed. I've never seen any data published by the YouTube team that showed that downvotes were being "abused by troll hordes" to the point where this was such a large problem that it merited a site-wide removal of dislike counts.
With your amount of evidence (zero), I could just as easily claim that they removed the dislike counts purely because of the ratios of the YouTube Rewind videos.
They clearly exist, but are they big enough things to outweigh the usefulness of downvotes? Not to mention youtube already dealt with large-scale brigading by rolling back downvotes.
> using it to advance your own pet position is transparent and irritating
It's extremely poor form and extremely intellectually dishonest to claim that other people said something that they didn't.
"they removed the dislike counts purely because of the ratios of the YouTube Rewind videos" is not a claim that I was making in my comment - it was clearly an example of another position with zero evidence behind it, and the fact that I explicitly pointed out that there was no evidence makes it pretty clear that I wasn't adopting it as my own position. I suggest you read comments more carefully before responding to them, especially if you're going to put words in other peoples' mouths.
> Then present your argument and evidence if you like
No, that's not how this works. I don't need to present an alternative argument. As far as I know, there's no way to present any argument because there's no evidence for them, and even if there wasn't, I'm under no obligation to present an argument while debunking another.
> treating the absence of evidence outside of a court room or a scientific inquiry
The GP was making strong claims in their post ("it isn’t hard to justify Youtube’s choices on this very specific issue", "clearly being abused by troll hordes") and it's extremely reasonable to ask for some proof. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and so on.
Atleast the Youtube Rewind case presents a clear motive. "We don't want people to show that they dislike our content, it looks bad for the company, and us as creators"
>If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video, or could identify other statistical aberrations, it stands to reason that such abuse would actively interfere with the legitimate functionality it was intended for and/or work against the interests of YouTube, advertisers, as well as authors and viewers.
But if you can see that these dislikes were from trolls, then you can account for that and not have the algorithm register them.
By comparing standard deviation from every other rating's time. By comparing account voting patterns across videos. By comparing registration time and voting time. By identifying grouped clustered votes time relationship. This just on top of my head, going to bet there is going to be more to be found in aggregate.
I think we can infer that troll doesn't need time to watch video. So if a dislike came from a user with watching time is less than 10% (just as an example) it can be categorized as troll.
> then you can account for that and not have the algorithm register them
It’s an unsolvable problem which is why they disabled it entirely. If you “account” for “bad” input the only consequence is that those responsible for that bad input figure out how to get it classified as good input.
If it's an unsolvable problem for downvotes, it's an unsolvable problem for upvotes, too. The reason they took away downvotes is because they started to partner with the networks, to artificially boost their posts, and to deemphasize and demonetize their traditional amateur comment (inspiring a shooting.)
The mainstream content gets ruthlessly downvoted because polish doesn't equal quality, and the networks (wisely) don't want their stuff distributed by a platform that allows users to mark it as bad. So Youtube took away the ability to mark content as bad. It's no more complicated than it looks.
I am sure the removal had more to do with certain ideological views/content being more likely to be downvoted. The decision came soon after the critically panned Susan Wojcicki YouTube CEO 2021 Free Expression Awards. This probably has the record for the worst ratio of any video in the site's history.
What? Suddenly we are in a ficitious world where there are droves of trolls disliking videos, and somehow they are sentient as to YouTube's recommendation algorithm, and they desperately want the video to disappear from everyone's recommendations, so these trolls come up with new and inventive ways of DISLIKING videos?
I don't think I've ever read more made-up scenarios than on this website.
Google didn't think it'd be worth it to pursue a solution that would solve this, and probably nobody internally wanted ownership of it. The second best solution is the one that doesn't cost much and solve the problem. Youtube being the only game in town, where are people gonna go anyways? Daily Motion? Post implementation KPI probably showed that traffic hasn't budged, and the problem has been solved. As far as Google is concerned, it was a rational decision.
You don't even need to be famous in order to get trolls who are hating you so much that they make it their job to ruin your life. When you get above a certain size you will have organized troll armies coordinating attacks on private Discord servers.
right, I don't think the comment was disregarding bregading. That a multi-billion dollar company's algorithm is too dumb to deal with it is what astounds.
You basically can't allow people to give negative feedback for a thing and have that feedback mean anything (ie affect recommendations for anyone but you or show it to other users) without insincere feedback being used to hurt the reviewee.
There are ways to counter this, the easiest is to not show negative reviews but count them positively, a dislike actually boosts them just like a positive review would. Not really recommended due to promoting rage bait but brigading would stop working.
You also can't allow people to give positive feedback without insincere feedback being used to artificially promote things. If you're going to have a feedback system, you need some manner of checks and balances on it to limit insincere feedback.
> There are ways to counter this, the easiest is to not show negative reviews but count them positively, a dislike actually boosts them just like a positive review would,
I think it would be better to just merely count the number of upvotes and complete, or almost complete views, for boosting purposes.
The downvotes should be for tailoring feeds, whether personal, or the aggregate feeds of people with similar interests and like/dislike votes.
Any specific criticism can be saved for the comments.
How was it being abused by troll hordes enough to warrant that change? Only time I've seen videos with huge downvotes were for negative product sentiments (e.g. pay to win schemes), bots clearly compiling videos of product specs and reviews off Amazon and passing off as their own, or when the video was clearly clickbait. I spend an unhealthy amount of time on YouTube and I don't remember coming across videos that seem "abused by troll hordes" - okay, maybe for some products, but not widespread as you would lead me to believe.
Also, couldn't you have stopped people from rating your videos if you felt you were being targeted? Maybe if the search results on YouTube and Google were actually better than they were 5 years ago I'd buy into the downvote interfering with their system. The only good thing on YouTube is their recommendation algorithm, and I don't buy that dislikes would have altered that system. In fact, didn't that exist before this change?
once thing that anecdotally comes to mind was that Westworld videos used to be heavily downvote brigaded because some sort of 4chan mob didn't like Thandiwe Newton.
I remember it because I originally put the show aside because all the trailers had such extremely high downvote ratios. It seems to be somewhat common with content around videogames as well that provokes online groups for one reason or another.
Public shaming is essential. Anyway it still happens, even more brutally, in the comments.
What they should have done is add more detail on the nature of the downvotes, like the Steam store does for negative reviews. That is, have graphs of positive and negative ratings over time to make any downvote brigading obvious. Maybe have a way to exclude "less-verified" votes, or allow the viewer to look at only e.g. YouTube Premium votes (which are more likely to be real people given the cost). And so on...
Perhaps they could do as on Stack Overflow, and let a downvote cost one point from your accrued points? Or perhaps that's too much of a re-design. It could regulate spam downvotes though. (I think the biggest problem with SO is that your point pool is visible, with gold and silver and so on, which leads to anyone with a high enough sum being treated differently, although that might actually not reflect competence or expertise.)
It actually makes perfect sense considering YouTube's business model of advertising and "engagement".
While advertising-based business models are ultimately always at odds with the user, they can (and have successfully) coexisted in the past - a product can have a certain amount of advertising/user-hostility and still remain usable. That's what YouTube used to be until now - they had to keep the advertising/user-hostility somewhat tame in order to keep growing their marketshare.
The problem is that in a monopolized vertical, there is nothing preventing the product from going "all-in" on advertising and we're now seeing the late/terminal stages of this cancer in action.
Removing dislikes and having people watch videos that are known to be bad still counts as "engagement", especially if people have to waste time watching the video fully before realizing it is bad. Even better, if they end up doing so and then have to try a different video then it's even more engagement.
The nasty side-effects of this change (up to life-threatening consequences in case of DIY videos for example) aren't their concern nor liability.
I was an old YouTube "Paid" subscriber. I can't remember what it was before "Red" or even if it was a thing? Anyway it's been quite a while. The dislike removal annoyed me but the straw was the whole "Shorts" thing.
My subscription feed almost 10x'd overnight to the point that it had no value. I started unsubscribing from the "short" spammers which were genuinely good channels and this got my subscription feed as to be very little. Not enough to be worth paying for so I cancelled.
I put the money to Audible now.
I find it staggering that youtube didn't know I was a paid member as far as a product. I wasn't allowed to filter shorts. I was still (before) Sponsor Block being fed in-video ads. So the only thing they ended up offering me was a very limited paid UBlock/SponsorBlock experience which is already free. I don't think I have actually lost anything by not paying "premium".
I have the same gripes about the "shorts" thing, but YouTube without a premium sub is just unwatchable due to the adds and not allowing background play on mobile.
Saying that it was weighed against the intrest of advertisers is not correct. It was a political descision made to stop political opponents from leveraging the dislike ratios of certain online videos to their favor in debates.
There is no proof that it was because of invalid dislikes, made by bots or anything like that. Calling the source of the dislikes trolls is unsubstantiated.
Why Youtube cares about politics is a large topic, but I don't think it is in any way shape or form correct to state that it was a advertiser/investor/monetary driven descision. Sites have likes/dislikes because it increases engagement, even negative engagement is engagement.
I think just having to watch a significant portion of the video before you can leave a like or a dislike would have largely mitigated the brigading issue. Besides, it would have made the reviews more thoughtful overall.
Maybe removing the dislike count is a simple and effective solution, but I would not call it good or elegant because of its downsides.
I can't think of anything that's been ratio'ed hard where it would make me think that the dislike count needs to be hidden everywhere. For instance , Rings of Power trailers got hit pretty hard, and some of the more woke hollywood adaptations, but those things also bombed (at least given expectations) so it's hard to say the ratio didn't represent public sentiment.
There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that the dislike count was "abused by troll hordes". Your arguments are very weak and remind me of the rhetoric used by totalitarian regimes in justifying their censorship.
"Public shaming" is the result of creating content that most likely deserves to be publicly shamed. This has also not disappeared, but is now in the comment section. This is just as "elegant solution" as SWAT team shooting all the hostages in order to be able to injure one hostage taker.
Most likely the reason to remove the dislikes is either because
a) YouTube for some reason wants more user engagement in the comment section
b) To protect American corporations (advertisers) from the uncomfortable reality that 95-99% of the people don't like their woke-content.
YouTubers already had the tool they need to combatting this kind of troll by disabling rating and comment.
Disabling dislike has the unfortunate side effect of making scam videos a lot harder to identify. And before people comment, no, manually disabling rating and comment was not the same as the current system, and would absolutely sound the alarm bell on informative/educational/infomercial videos in the old days.
This example showcasing malicious TOR browser being distributed, and might already get someone politically jailed or even killed: https://youtu.be/XS-r2Vpkxas
I myself sincerely cannot find any justification for the current system.
Maybe on some type of videos. For the type of video I watch (non polemic content) it was a very useful indicator of what to expect. My youtube experience has degraded since they removed it and I think I watch less videos as a result.
> If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video
Why not only allow using the dislike button upon watching the video or some proportion? But then what's the proportion? I'm sure I can dislike something almost immediately. I can even dislike the idea of a video, can't I? I'm a Youtube user, I'm not sure why I wouldn't be allowed to dislike any video that I dislike, for whatever reason, because I dislike it.
This is an odd thing to hypothesize at this point. YouTube has the data now, until they release the stats and let us know if the move actually had the desired effect, talking about it like this is entirely pointless.
Has hiding dislikes stopped pile ons? (I bet it hasn't)
If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video, or could identify other statistical aberrations, it stands to reason that such abuse would actively interfere with the legitimate functionality it was intended for and/or work against the interests of YouTube, advertisers, as well as authors and viewers.
I personally think that removing the public counter was an elegant solution in this case, as it suppresses the worst excesses of trolling while maintaining the original intent of the dislike feature, which should improve the overall experience for most users, generally speaking.