> 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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USE5USAodiI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4kqSV1p3T8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmOL9ek7Tys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DpzcMZPTqA

Noticing here, each and every has more dislike than like.

There is a political angle as well. Official Whitehouse videos have been getting 10x the downvotes as upvotes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynG4j-BsRhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBpYZnmPz3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16p2PcPgB5M

> Again, they don't care if you stay on the platform.

Why not? Even if you're right that they care more about propaganda than money, what's the point of propagandising to an empty room?

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.

facebook still has no way to voice disapproval.

They have like, love, care, haha, wow, sad, angry

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?

If logic were involved we wouldn't be having a discussion about removing dislikes in the first place, no? :)

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.

Wouldn't business partners be a trivial subset of their pet causes? It's not just a political set.

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.

When it's only the same kinds of content that has to have special treatment, that special treatment still calls unwanted attention.

So hence why the whole feature is pRoBlEmAtIc and must be removed :p

They do that too

So why would they remove the feature if it worked better manipulated?

what narratives are being rejected?

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.

> Last I heard, it currently doesn’t even send a packet to any servers when you click it.

Just tested. It makes a post to

  /youtubei/v1/comment/perform_comment_action

with a parameter ?key and a payload containing "actions" both of which are long alphanumeric strings.

Oh! Thanks! I'm glad to hear that this has changed.