Feel like this is a necessary feature. A compromise would be to turn it off for ads but leave it on for everything else...I'm lost now, gonna be hard to quickly determine garbage from good insight.

Your waste of time is google’s revenue and the reason they are doing it.

eh, I would guess it's more like one PM wanted to get a promo by making a high profile change, and by claiming they were protecting some victim their case became politically unassailable

Alternatively,

"Hey, Reddit did this thing. We're a little like Reddit; should we do the thing?"

"I dunno... AB test it."

AB test shows net effect is fewer dislikes, much like Reddit saw

"Cool; let's roll it out."

well this will be good for flat Earthers videos, they always end up with lots of dislikes :) now more people can fall for the countless bs on youtube based on the like count and no counter showing dissent....

Oh no its better than that. All the downvotes count as engagement, so it will get recommended to other people who can only see that it has 100 likes and not 20000 dislikes.

Which means my videos can finally stop being brigaded by those damn round earthers! Spread the truth!

The likes to views ratio is still a useful indicator (although a less obvious one)

They've disabled the visual ratio bar for me. Wish I could get it back.

I need a FF extension that will display this to me visually.

I think it will lead to less liking behaviour. They didn't test for this.

You probably will have to check the comment section

You can disable or delete comments.

You can also disable ratings. Ratings and comments being disabled is a strong signal in its own right as well.

<shudder> reaching into the bowels of YT comments is something i regularly try to avoid. "put on a helmet and pads, and get in there"

It must depends on the videos, but most comment sections where I've gone down weren't bad and a lot were very positive.

The comment section still works

...until it's gone, or new youtube blue checks mark commenters that automatically get floated to the top.

It might become an outlet for all the people who want to tell others whether they think a video is worth watching or not, making it harder to find comments with substance.