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.

[0]: https://phzoe.com/2021/01/27/white-house-youtube-dislike-man...

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.

> Engaged dislikers are not "bots".

I didn't make that claim.

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.

My working theory was that since Biden asked youtube to remove dislikes and a google engineer confirmed this, then it actually happened.

81m.org tracked other channels. Different behavior.

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.

That's pretty wild. The HN submission for this URL was "flagged". I wonder if dang would approve of a second attempt?

I would say votes aren't a signal at all. You can be voted in either direction for anything. You don't know who's voting or why.

All that article shows is that the votes are manipulated by users too, there's no signal in down vote brigading like that

How could votes not be a signal? That would only be true if everyone used a stochastic generator to choose up or down.

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

It’s the worst solution except for every other we’ve ever tried.

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.

It's better to present your alternative hypothesis than engage in personal criticism.