Doesn't this same problem apply to the like button as well, not only the dislike button?

Can someone tell why dislike mobs are worse than, say, a boycott? I don't get why anyone other than those directly impacted are so against groups of people stating they don't like [thing]

Even Paul Graham thinks voting rings are a problem, to the extent that he said (somewhere, I can't remember where) that a substantial part of the HN codebase is dedicated to measures against spam, voting rings, and other abuses. Steps to prevent voting rings were among the top measures he deemed necessary.

A dislike mob is just like a voting ring.

Another dimension of the problem is the scenario where a user takes a dislike to someone else's comment, and goes through that other person's comment history, downvoting every one. That's obviously an abuse of the voting system and it makes sense to organize things so that it is minimized. (One way to do it is to set a time limit on voting on a given comment.)

YouTube comment dislikes are actually there only for show. The dislikes don't get counted for comments at all. They could do the same thing for the videos.

But they shouldn't. If there are people who want and like 75% of the videos I watch and like, I'd really prefer that YouTube avoid recommending me videos that those people have already watched and disliked.

The only disliked that should be ignored are the ones where someone didn't even let a video load before hitting dislike.

They would only use liked videos to do recommendations anyway. So unliked and explicitely disliked should be treated the same. Incidentally I don't think I've ever used the dislike video button, if it's bad I just move away.

I rarely like or dislike anything, unless there's some significant reason to do either. The best example I can think of for when I've happily disliked something was the 2018 YouTube Rewind, which was absolutely atrocious a Google needs to understand that their creators are getting more and more reason to find an alternative to their ridiculously poor management relating to monetization and the algorithms.

I wonder if they leave the dislike button on comments for psychological reasons.

Stackoverflow comments under questions and answers also can only be liked and when you want to downvote you feel frustratingly helpless. On Yotube even if you know it doesn't do anything it's slighly less frustrating as you are able to do some sort of thing it's like a personal closure that let you move on.

Haha yeah, I've actually clicked on the dislike button for comments I hated, even after I knew it doesn't do anything, and I have felt better.

Solution: remove the dislike button. Alternatively don’t report the dislike button and only use it to adjust media suggestions.