What fraction of videos on YouTube are political in nature? Seems like a lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in this. Why should videos about replacing the alternator on a 1999 Ford Ranger have the Like/Dislike buttons removed because YouTube wants to protect a very small number of accounts from criticism?

Exactly.

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.

In last months comments often just disappear randomly. Youtube outsourced their spam filter and it was messed up - randomly deletes comments on basis of poorly set machine learming model and wrongly set keywords.

It’s definitely not small. I’m not particularly political and anecdotally my recommendation bubble has atleast 30% of politically “triggering” videos. These videos don’t have to be explicitly political but just involve a person that can be considered a “trigger”. I mostly watch videos on wood and metal working.

What YouTube recommends to you is just that, their recommendations. It doesn't reflect the actual amount of content that exists, it reflects what YouTube wants you to watch to drive engagement. It might be 0.001% of content but make up 30% of the recommendations YouTube gives you.

> It doesn't reflect the actual amount of content that exists, it reflects what YouTube wants you to watch to drive engagement.

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.

Interestingly we have similar hobbies. I have to actively hit the don't recommend this to me button on all the political stuff. It generally works for a while and then I accidentally watch something close to controversial and I get another flood.

I too mostly watch woodworking/metalworking. If I ignore the “current events” row of videos that I haven’t clicked on in years (because they are incredibly boring and oversimplify complex topics), less than 1% of my recommendations are political. I wonder how YouTube decides which videos to allow in that special row. Most of them don’t have nearly as many views/hour as my usual recommendations.

The algo loves some ragebait. I ruthlessly remove bad recs and yet I watch one self-help video and suddenly the algo shows me far-right suggestions.

It’s pretty incredible how hard the recommendation algorithm is trying to make me become right wing. It must assume I am because of my interests and watch history. Not interested, YT.

The fraction of political videos on Youtube is "definitely not small"?! I'd be surprised if it's more than 0.01%, i.e. if more than 1 in 10,000 videos are political.

Sure, but many "Normies" are aware of this dynamic and adjust their expectations accordingly. If some video critical of gamers, anime fans, or WoW players gets piled with downvotes it's no mystery. Same with political content. It's well understood that controversial things get more negative reactions.

And this makes the system useless. Removing it is the healthy solution to interrupt the game.

How does it make the system useless? It simply means the bar for "should I watch this" re: [dis]like ratio changes at least in part based on video content. If I see a technical video with more than 10-15% dislikes, I probably won't watch it or will be skeptical. But a video about abortion can be 50/50 and still have great content.

It seems unlikely that giving someone more information makes something worthless.

This system is useless because it does not communicate the reasoning behind a downvote, nor is it objective in the first place. People downvote for many reasons, and quality is the seems usually to be the most likely. You could make the most informative and objective correct video, and toxic communities could downvote it because they feel triggered for some absurd reasons, or because it competes with their favored content-creator, or because of reasons which are independent of the video itself

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.

Useless for controversial content maybe, not for non-controversial content. What percentage of content on YouTube is controversial do you think? Probably very little, so this "solution" seems like a serious overreach that removes something that's useful 90% of the time to appease some minority.

The system is fine. What if we applied this logic to elections? Just get rid of them altogether since they're prone to brigading.

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.

> The system is fine. What if we applied this logic to elections? Just get rid of them altogether since they're prone to brigading.

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?

The same mechanics are at play when people don’t participate in the democratic process. It’s a vocal minority rule. This is why a certain political party in the US tries to disqualify so many people from voting. If we had a mandatory voting system in the US with a federal holiday our government would look very, very different.

No, because if the US had a better voting system it would also require voter ID for example

Healthy solution? It's hammering a needle with a hydraulic press.

There's another side to this too - downvote the authoritarian state propaganda. When I see a 99% disliked video and click a "Dislike", I feel that I am not alone. When all forms of political participation are verboten, you use what you have. Now we have even less.

The problem is only the “disenfranchised” like you use it and more often than not your views are verboten for a good reason.

Not everyone on HN lives in the US or EU. The views that are forbidden here are rule of law, democracy, political representation, freedom of speech, freedom of faith, human rights and so on. People who try to oppose this are regularly imprisoned, tortured, killed, repressed or forced to leave the country.

Whats the difference between the disenfranchised and a oppressed group trying to be heard? If you can answer that honestly you will see your own comment is hate speech.

But youtube isn't removing the button or the signal from their algorithms - they are just removing the optics of having a disliked video (which a lot of users including myself found useful)

Because the channels they want to protect are politically aligned with YouTube.

It’s a business decision. Based on view count vs like/dislike ratio a lot of these videos are obviously brigaded. Most people aren’t engaged enough to represent themselves in the like/dislike ratio. It doesn’t make sense to bury them for the vast majority.

>Based on view count vs like/dislike ratio a lot of these videos are obviously brigaded.

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?

View count vs like/dislike ratio is an incredible accurate metric for my point.

Can you please elaborate? You have a way to compare a raw metric (counts) against a ratio (like vs. dislike) that yields useful insights as to whether the like vs. dislike ratio was the product of brigading?

This makes me think of how steam does indeed have some smarts to warn users when a game may be getting review brigaded. I think it's a combination of volume of reviews by time, and perhaps the referrer (?). It does seem to work fairly well afaict.

Steam also allows a user to view the raw information if they want. At least the last time I looked. The option could definitely be more obvious though. Giving the user the ability to see the like/dislike data over time gives them their own ability to decide whether likes/dislikes come from an external source to the page. This information should include a graph of the total views over time as well as likes and dislikes over time in parallel.

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).

It's not the worst idea but it also triggers when developers do something to the game and many players want to review that change.

What if they are?

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.

This is to kiss the ass of big corporate creators and protect their brand when it becomes unpopular

This, imo. Netflix did the exact same thing.

Like I mentioned somewhere else, for recommended videos I see two binary paradigms

- 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.

If it is easy to believe some videos get a natural >95% rating; isn't it just as likely some content would evoke a <5% rating without 'brigading'? I am not saying that this doesn't sometimes occur, but I also don't believe it's the only case.

Agreed, people made the same argument for removing 5 star ratings from Netflix ('people only ever vote 1 star or 5 stars'). If this were an input for the decision making, these platforms could very easily present that evidence.

I do miss the Netflix of years gone past.

How can you know?

The alternative is that you're only allowed to like things and increased consumption must be fostered at every turn.

Can't have anyone being critical bc the very nature of that is contrary to consumption or promotion

And Google uses it as a propaganda tool to remove votes on unpopular videos they want to boost, whether there's actual money changing hands its an undeclared in-kind contribution.

What is a "normie"? Sounds like a vaguely inflammatory/derogatory term, but not 100% clear on what you mean by it.

It's not necessarily derogatory, it depends on the context.

"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".

Persons in the center of the bell curve; not the outliers/zealots

recent political pushes aren't being well received, with sentiment being very negative on WhiteHouse media pushes, mainstream narratives around vaccines and the like (on YT). Normies are swayed easily by dislike bar, so the elites at YT are trying to hide it -- just like reddit hid the downvote count, to enable astrotrufing campaigns and overall shill activity many years ago.

This site is also pretty retarded and shill-friendly with its "you can downvote if you've accumulated enough good boy points" setup