>There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that.
My point exactly. So if I get what you say, most of your videos have a fairly inconsequential amount of downvotes, and those that do are not because they're poor quality but rather because it's been disliked by people who weren't your target audience.
If that's your experience as a content creator how can you, as a viewer, consider the like/dislike ratio a good indication of the quality of the content?
BTW, I should have known that if I questioned the value of public downvotes on a thread of downvoting enthusiasts that I would... get downvoted.
Youtube is borderline stupid right now for most channels that don't have organic growth... what they should do is re-open monetization and live streaming to everyone as its creating its own hell hole if you ask me with the 9 minutes of smash the like button and 1 minute of content we're seeing on every channel that isn't organically growing or making money through other means.
Here is a great example:
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC7qMMY6UJHpNakTDMz6vVXQ
Auto mechanic basically documenting repairs as they come into the shop.
He is doing it for a few reasons:
1. His own protection. Publishing them is smart
2. Share his experiences
3. Promote doing this work in an exemplary way.
Rather than get a simple how to with a lot of the usual fluff, viewers are getting a story, almost like being an intern of sorts.
I look forward to the problem of the day and have already found myself handling some repair and service work I do differently and better.
I did not think this was content I watch on YouTube, but apparently it is.
There are tons of non-controversial topics for which like/dislike is extremely valuable.
Actually, I don't see the like/dislike on my android TV box, and for that reason, I don't even watch new content on it.
Just have a brief preview and if i'm interested, i'll watch it.
Like the new Nintendo Switch Online Expansion pack video.
There's a huge community, that instantly dislikes the video.
Removing it makes paid content so much more attractive for starters...
I am almost laughing as I'm writing this, but reality is moving towards 1984 much quicker that I ever imagined.
The dislike button is like the booo's at a stadium. Removing all negative feedback removes the public ability to respond negatively to a video. Which obviously is the point. Damn Google got really evil real fast.
Or the video just isn't what the clickbait title says.
I get that some things get brigaded sometimes, but in my experience that's few and far between compared to false junk.
This is why I stopped using YouTube a few years ago and heavily prefer text+image tutorials to videos nowadays. YouTube is pushing longer videos, because they show you more ads in the middle of them and creators are also rewarded with more money for longer videos + they can insert their "sponsor messages" a.k.a. even more ads.
Ans quite frankly, things being brigaded probably means it's a political hot take, that's even boring when you agree, and just stupid when you don't. If you remove those from the downvoted video list, you're probably left with only a few actually insightful and useful videos.
Nothing says “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever” like removing the 'dislike' count from YouTube videos.
They neither removed nor disabled the dislike button.
And even then, saying they didn't disable the button is only arguably true. The button no longer performs its primary function.
I'm not the one moving the goalpost—it started as "reality is moving towards 1984", then "they removed the ability to give negative feedback", and now it's "they removed the ability to see the negative feedback that others gave." That's a significant change.
> saying they didn't disable the button is only arguably true. The button no longer performs its primary function
I'm more sympathetic to this argument—that the primary purpose of the "dislike" button isn't to give the creator negative feedback, but as a "rating" system, with the only 2 possible ratings "+1" and "-1". The problem with that is that, "they changed the rating system" doesn't seem to merit all of the comparisons to 1984. And "more like 1984" vs. "less like 1984" seems a silly way to evaluate rating systems.
Edit: actually, the rating system changed from "+1", "-1", "no vote", to "+1", "no vote"—since you can see the # of views, then you can determine roughly how many "no votes" there are.
The basic problem is whether a downvote on a cat juggling video means "this is a bad example of juggling cats" or does it mean "I don't like cat juggling"? On YouTube, it's much more likely to mean the latter, but it's the former that's actually useful.
What are those interests that the vast majority of people here share?
I dislike a fair percentage of the topics posted here regularly, or have no interest in them, and I suspect that's not uncommon. A survey on that subject would be fascinating.
That's the difference I think
What makes you say that? Why is the person that doesn't like cat juggling even clicking on the video?
further, YouTube only said the dislike count is private so the moderation still happens
Further, they're a form of violence against the poster. Not sure what other word to use to be told in a single click "You Suck!". It is or arguably can be a form of bullying.
Care to link to that policy? I was always of the impression that short low-quality comments that don’t further the discussion are prime examples of acceptable downvote targets here. Disagreeing with a constructively expressed idea is best done by expressing your own argument in a reply.
Amen to that. Not how it always works around here though.
[clarification: I suspect you agree and do not mean to imply otherwise, though I do not know]
Your point before that part was something I could engage with, but if you really see any form of disagreement as "violence" or a "form of bullying" then I don't understand how you can even function online.
You suck.
HN and some subreddits avoid becoming tools of disinformation because they are managed by dedicated moderators who remove posts, comments, and participants who are acting in bad faith. (Facebook does not do this.)
Not necessarily. There are other cases where consumers could use dislike as form of brand boycott
For example if you wanted to watch a video on how to setup WSL 2 on Windows 10 and you see one by Microsoft has 100000 dislikes however it's amazing video that doesn't help you.
Strongly agree. For example in HN itself if someone poses a fact-based positive opinion about China, it is down-voted whenever Americans are online and voting (does not happen when Europeans are online).
So dislike/down-vote has 0 value. In fact, majority of the comments in this thread are against Youtube, which tells me that Youtube has made the correct decision.
This is exactly why the internet is in the situation where it is - nobody wants to pay for stuff so they have to monetise tracking and advertising.
This is just as oblivious as the "nobody wants to work" rhetoric that's currently popular. It ignores the fact that a lot of products wouldn't be used, and content wouldn't be consumed, if they weren't free.
No, the reason people wouldn't use Facebook if they had to pay for it isn't because they're cheapskates, it's because Facebook isn't offering a product that's actually worth paying for.
Netlfix et al. show that people are willing to pay for things on the internet if they're actually worth spending money on.
Besides, even when you pay for things on the internet, most companies will still show you ads and track you.
Imagine going back and mentioning that this would also be a way for the company (Google) to snoop on your conversations and censor dissenting thougth.
A free way to stream any video sounds nice, but it doesn't once you mention the fact that it actually limits the type of content you are able to enjoy.
We should be trying to build a better infrastructure for FOSS video streaming instead of trying to rationalize shitty business models.
I don't think the innocence of the people who don't know the difference between proprietary and free software should be the thing we attack here, specially since the company in question has gone through great efforts before to restrain the spread of the FSF.
All the grifters, charlatans, anti-fact, political blowhard, fake, plastic, garbage that litters the whole site from left to right to non-political.
I hope the service fails, frankly.
This is why I said we are on Hacker News. People here should probably value their time more than 15$/month if they spend nontrivial amount of time watching YT, yet still refuse to pay, freeloading is a common thing unfortunately.
However, every time someone reads it I am also paid 2 pennies by a dude that wants to tell people about his new book.
People were fine with that, so I also found another guy to pay me 2 pennies to talk about the book he wrote as well.
A negligibly small fraction of those people have started wearing earplugs. How unfair!
So I found a third guy to pay me 2 pennies to talk about the book he wrote as well, and more people started wearing earplugs! What the heck!?!
That's simply not true.
Not everything is worth my money and Google can kiss my ass.
This is a broad assumption, what makes you think everybody on this site can afford £12 a month for something they can get completely for free with uBlock Origin and YouTube Vanced?
* Breaking Points (10/mo) * 3 substacks (5/mo each) * ProtonMail (5/mo) * StandardNotes (10/mo) * netflix * hulu * prime * boomerang * shudder * disney+ * hbomax * sometimes pandora
This is on top of the fact I buy about 20 records a year and roughly average about 20 dvds/blurays a year and about 10 books a year.
I dont care if Google doesn't get some money.
I actually forgot that YouTube had rolled out the Join button. You get 70% of the revenue of the Channel Membership (join button). YouTube gets 30%.
https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/youtube-partner-progra...
Then you should definitely use Vanced. It eliminates sponsored parts within videos, which are not removed even if you pay for youtube red.
Brave browser also blocks ads.
It'd be really nice to have a way to say spread say $10 a month among the channels I watch, with maybe some options to weight towards smaller channels too.
Still seeing downvotes in my country, but if they remove this imo important metric, I’ll have to cancel my subscription.
The term of art is ‘increase engagement’.
Then if they keep making decisions you don’t like, do you stay subscribed?
I was already using google music, and then youtube music family (which sort of sucks at least in terms of app development), so this was more an incremental add-on.
Its the non-skipable 1 minute adds on youtube on my TV (where addblocker does not work) that make my happy to have YouTube premium.
just use your forward skip button ffs
How many times I looked for guidance on YouTube on some software, or cooking recipe or some rare clip, just to find out it was not what I was looking for by the dislikes?
Now I’ll have to watch ”fix your xxx with this easy trick” at 2x speed to know it was crap.
Both Google and rights holders don't care. The more of the video you sit through, the more ads they get to shove in your face. It's a win-win situation for both parties.
I'm using Ublock + Umatrix and still seeing a huge surge in ads across all videos.
Youtube is also injecting pre-rolls at the beginning of content I've uploaded to a new youtube channel that is not monetized (I have no interest in putting ads in front of my content)...so I have zero interest in supporting their ad empire.
What are ads? Ublock Origin on Firefox on PC, here.
You summarized why Youtube is doing it. Sure harassment is one aspect of it, but this drives up the clicks for Youtube and therefore the ad revenue. I'd be curious to see if people get overly annoyed by how many unworthy videos they watch and thereby reducing overall engagement.
A popular streaming service inflates the ratings of the content offered on its service to the point that I'm hesitant to use it that much.
Yes. People downvote based on their expectation. So you can have content that you would probably find bad that has a lot of upvotes because it has a niche that likes it, and my sense is that the excursions in dislike ratio are more often driven by distribution channel or brigading than the intrinsic value of the content.
> Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects.
Doesn't this directly contradict your experience as a creator? But if it was true, wouldn't it be a good thing that creators no longer feel as much pressure to conform to fan expectations, eg in pursuit of bigger opportunities/audiences?
Let's not be stupid about this. The only people benefitting from this change are the shady ones.
I'm not sold on that idea personally. The videos I create are based on what I'm doing in my day to day as a developer or if someone comments with a video suggestion since that's almost always in my wheel house of video topics which I greatly appreciate when this happens. I don't really make videos with intent to optimize for views / upvotes or get upset when a video gets a few downvotes. Lots of them have 100% upvote ratios and almost all have 95%+.
YouTube does let video creators disable voting but whenever I see that on any video I almost always think the channel owner is trying to do something nefarious. Maybe they're trying to avoid transparency by hiding downvotes or they are super self conscious about making videos and my internal bias suggests the video will be worse quality when compared to others. That's not always the case but it's true more often than not, at least for my own subjective take on video preference (mainly tech and hardware, no news).
I always strive for maximum transparency and let the results figure themselves out naturally.
In the end, this is mainly a huge downgrade for consumers of videos. It sounds like the algorithm will still take downvotes into account and video creators can still see the downvotes. It's the viewers who can no longer use this as a metric to quickly gauge a video's quality. In a world with so many amazing videos to watch, losing this quick filter hurts a bit.
Many creators use Youtube for different purposes. Youtube does a big injustice because they don't fairly separate content based on the type of entity that's posting content enough (i.e. an indie music producer versus a big industry music company or indie vlogger living in their parent's house versus a well funded TV news channel).
This implies there are more competing creators than total viewers.
I still do it for the passion, not much profit has ever been there... har.
I promise not to give a thumb down XD
always interested to check out other's work :)
Sure friend, fair warning though, I'll probably delete this in a day or so to avoid an ID trail of people that might scan my posts later on... The Internet can be vengeful a times even if I am not so. :P
edit: :^)
Something I liked could be as trivial as an enjoyment of said content or a dislike because of it's presentation, or liking content that was presented in poor tastes yet recognizing it's comedic value.
That's not to say I don't recognize that the like-dislike ratio can also be gamed however.
Yes! No! Garbage!
System would recommend you the content based on your adjustable levels of tolerance for adversarial views, contoversy and tolerance for garbage.
I even considered supporting mixed vote by placing a dot in Yes! No! Garbage! triangle. Basically two axes, agreement and quality, with range of possible agreements narrowing down to zero as quality goes down.
They're committed to recommendation and such.
I really don't understand this move... this will seriously limit our ability to filter bad content. I hope that they'll provide an alternative.
I think that is entirely the point.
-Millions of views, 99% liked
-Videos without ridiculous view counts, where the like/dislike ratio actually helps
-Brigaded with dislikes
That said, it does not affect me much as I use YouTube exclusively for music. I used it for other videos as well, but Google is making YouTube a worse platform day by day.
That's the problem. You had a tool to judge a video was worth watching without having to watching the ads.
Now you have to watch ads to find out if the video is crap. This is a very good thing. for Google
Yes, but you're not someone YouTube is trying to protect.
The example you make is fantastic, because if such a video had 4 times more dislikes you know you’ll probably not find anything useful there, generally confirmed by skimming comments fast as “ this is a 1997 model “, etc.
Exactly. And what drives engagement more than enraging political content? Of course they're going to shove politics in your face even if you've never watched a single one before.
It seems unlikely that giving someone more information makes something worthless.
You must be pretty deep inside the bubble of the topic, as also the bubble of the content-creator, to be able to evaluate the value of the rating. And that makes it worthless, because most people can't be that deep and follow everything. And the people who are, are more likely re-enforcing their own ignorance.
The Ratio is one of those tools which are making sense when they are fresh, but become corrupted over time, making it useless after a while.
There's plenty of clickbait videos that have horrible like to dislike ratios and you can save yourself time by seeing the dislike bar. This is just removing an important piece of functionality and making the site less functional and less user friendly.
Yes, elections suck, but that's their purpose. Mankind is not able to act smart on scale, but there is the interesting effect that we will act sane enough on scale. Elections usually aim to utilize this balance, because all other known solutions are sucking even more.
And not to forget, in a healthy working democracy, you can't game elections like you can do it with (dis)likes. With online-services, it's relative easy to get thousands of alt or hacked accounts, which you can use to manipulate the numbers as you like.
> There's plenty of clickbait videos that have horrible like to dislike ratios and you can save yourself time by seeing the dislike bar.
How do you know? How many of those horrible videos are you actually watching yourself to confirm their quality? And on how many of them does your own bias comes into play?
That's your belief but you have no evidence to prove this. And even if true, why does the entirety of content of YouTube need to be punished for the undesired behavioral patterns that YouTube has cultivated on controversial videos they've pushed on everyone?
Not giving users this information and removing like dislike counts just makes it so that a small number of people at YouTube have even more ability to control what is pushed on that site. With this change users have even less ability to check the validity of a video; validity means different things to different users here. People who stay at YouTube will just have to deal with the fact that they will have videos pushed to their screen for reasons that are hidden to them, that they don't have the ability to check out anything other people think about the video, and can't even signal that there is something wrong to them about the video (sure, they could comment, but any comment can be deleted by the video author and there is the fear of losing your Google account, which can include their email contact to everyone and authentication information also, which can have huge consequences for their ordinary life).
Why is this a bad thing exactly?
Smells a lot like democracy and a platform worth of people telling the creator they aren't welcome.
Maybe YouTube doesn't like that but that doesn't make them right.
Sometimes the users are right, it's their platform to. Going against them just drives them away further.
With the hostile actions of YouTube over the last couple of years YouTube is asking for disruption.
- videos with >95% like ratios
- political videos that have obviously been brigaded
Assuming most normies don’t have great engagement rates with the like/dislike button based on view count, this change is doing the vast majority a service.
I do miss the Netflix of years gone past.
Can't have anyone being critical bc the very nature of that is contrary to consumption or promotion
"Normie" just means "ordinary", "average", or "uninitiated". It usually means someone with very conventional political or cultural views but it can also mean "someone who isn't part of a subculture or group" ie developers talking about laptops might say "normies don't usually need more than 8GB of memory but some development tasks require more to be comfortable". Other times it's used in a more derogatory sense to imply that someone is a bit too credulous towards the establishment of the day ie "normies think that corruption and inequality only exist in developing countries".
I'm a small time creator (~13.5k subs) and don't care at all about upvotes or downvotes being public. There's only been a handful of videos out of hundreds that received more downvotes than expected because the video was posted on a place out of my control and folks didn't like that. Almost always if a video naturally gets downvoted it's because you either released something bad or unrelated to what your channel normally expects.