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.
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?