But I don't think there is deep evil thinking behind dislike change - in large corporations people need promotions, some entrepreneurial PM and couple devs identified the opportunity and went for it. Directors/VPs are too disengaged to truly understand impact of changes.
this isn't a small change, it's a major platform decision that impacts user experience, usability and engagement -- it's also received strong criticism from the community including from the original founder of Youtube [1] (see description), but they're pushing it through anyway
You're being too naïve about the corporate agendas behind this change.
It's always been like they I think. Good people can't imagine just how evil people can be because it's so far from their own reality.
What is their political agenda?
Only if you consider egalitarianism and diversity as political issues. To most of society they are universal values so it’s not contentious.
It's not black and white.
For example, what do you mean by egalitarianism? Equality under the law? Well, Republicans/Liberals tend to agree with equality under the law, whereas Leftists and Gender/Racial Identitarians don't. California recently tried to repeal 1960s civil rights legislation preventing discrimination by race, precisely because they'd like to discriminate on the basis of race...because to them, egalitarianism doesn't mean equality under the law, but rather that the law should have weighted parameters necessary to transform societal outcomes into equal measures by arbitrary population, irrespective of those population inputs. Mind you, these are the people claiming to be egalitarian. As Ibram X. Kendi says himself, "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." To many (most?) people, that isn't egalitarianism...so it's political. It's clearly not a universal value when it's actually a bundle of competing values claiming the same word.
What about diversity? What, that diversity is just good? Is that the point? Because what exactly do you mean? What if there was a group of liberal people who had democratically made their society in accordance with what they felt aligned with liberalism, and were suddenly being told that a major influx of right wing evangelical Christians were to be allowed to come into their society (and be given exactly the same voting rights as them)? What about a group of frat bros? Is this the kind of diversity you mean? You just accept that diversity is indiscriminately a net positive? What exactly is the mechanisms that makes that be the case? Surely it matters what the cultures are that are being made to coexist, what degree to which they have common ground, what degree to which their respective strengths cover for their respective weaknesses, the rate at which the cultures can tolerate the encroachment of the other while still remaining cooperative rather than hostile, the degree to which each culture has its elements preserved independently of the product of the two cultures interacting, and the degree to which the cultures are encouraged to and are actively assimilating. I mean, this is just scratching the surface. There are many factors that determine whether or not diversity is actually a good thing, and it often comes down to magnitude and rates, which are seemingly unwelcome from that sort of conversation. And then there is the (now tired) distinction between superficial diversity and diversity of thought. There is the (racist) notion that diversity of skin color will result in diversity of thought, proposed by exactly the sort of people who actually detest diversity of thought, and just want to see different colored faces in the crowd. Again, this is just scratching the surface of this conversation.
So to say "it's not contentious" is pretty ridiculous, because these are completely loaded terms that mean completely different things to completely different people who ultimately have completely different goals for society. They're not universal values.
For one, Indian immigrants in the US disproportionately enter medicine, as do other Asians, in total constituting 17% of doctors. This is despite Asians constituting 6% of the population. 5% of doctors are black, despite constituting 13% of the population. In accordance with most advocating diversity for the sake of diversity, the reason for the disparity is assumed post hoc to have been due to discrimination...but why? It's as if the inputs have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the outcomes. In order to seek population parity, that would mean arbitrarily capping the number of Asian doctors, and arbitrarily pulling black doctors from a pool of applicants that literally doesn't exist.
Rather than a deontological approach, of perhaps simply ensuring that the hiring process is as blind and devoid of bias as possible, diversity advocates are instead interested in diversity for the sake of diversity.
Again, this is political beyond just "being a good person" or not.
Why?
I'm not convinced how much it'd actually impact watch time, but it seems to be the thesis.
They didn't remove the dislike button, they removed the count.
They removed the count because they found it reduced spurious usage.
That way they can use the dislike count for their algorithm ( and you can still use it for curating your content) without having it influenced by brigading.
I mean they still show it to creators anyways, so I don't get what the weird conspiracies are. Like this is such a nothing of an issue it's insane.
There are of course also arguments there and back. But the emotional reactions are either about interests or feelings. More likely to be feelings here.
This is a wonderful case for removing it. Better than I could have ever proposed.
Youtube didn't add it for revenge and their statement on removing the dislike count shows this.
Act of petty revenge for sure, and they'll probably remove you from their fiefdom for being a troll.
Also it would confuse creators: is this video shit, or is it the campaign?
I see this argument every time dislikes are brought up but no one seems to ever mention views as a third data point. I've never really paid attention to dislikes (other than hearing about dislike raids), but you can still see videos' like:view ratio, which IMO has always been more significant than dislikes anyway.
Sure, you and I can do the math, establish a threshold value above which a video is worth watching (this was _much_ more intuitive with a like:dislike ratio btw), and compare that for each video. But can your mom do that? Can your kids do that? Can you do that while drunk? Can you do that with mind fog and high fever from Covid? Can you do that during a schizophrenic episode? Can you do that when you have early stage dementia?
This change is an attack on the people most susceptible to manipulation. I am outraged that you're making up excuses.
(No hate, just my opinion, I don't care about the likes)
High view count does not mean high quality. They are pretty orthogonal.
Checking it back, I only see the likes when I click through them.
Is this really a good metric? Counterpoint: many news videos related to Covid are heavily downvoted. Does that mean that they're bad coverage? or that people don't like to hear what the news has to say?
If I see a covid related news story, I'll just ignore the like/discount ratio. But if I see a tech tutorial or conference talk with 50% like/dislike, I'll be fairly confident that the video isn't worth my time.
It does mean for sure many people don't agree with them.
> or that people don't like to hear what the news has to say?
ironic...
On the issue of hiding dislike counts itself, I don't think it's a big deal, as I don't believe it's the quality signal that some suggest:
1) there's the trolling behavior it encourages, which detracts from the meaning of dislikes
2) relative likes are sufficient, harder to game and less troll-inviting
3) the content, being video, speaks for itself more than text, making it easier to determine what's likely to be of interest.
4) what does dislike even mean on YouTube? Disagreement? Something else? I don't trust that there's enough consistency to give it meaning I care about
5) the number of views is also a better indicator of potential quality than dislikes.
In fact, on that latter point, the percentile of the percentage of the video watched, relative to other videos, would probably be an even better indicator.
That dislike count was essentially noise.
Can't agree. Perhaps you've forgotten about clickbait thumbnails and video titles.
"Top 10 Scariest Roller-coasters" with photo-shopped thumbnail of a coaster car mid-air between fake section of track. Literally millions of views from people wanting to see this incredible coaster that jumps the gap. What you find is an ordinary video of copied, grainy clips of ordinary coasters.
Previously, such a video had a HUGE number of downvotes. Now those dislikes are hidden, the deception is permitted to flourish.
So, again, I said views are (generally) a better indication than dislikes, not a perfect one.
>Literally millions of views from people wanting to see this incredible coaster that jumps the gap.
Don't know how much of a vid must be viewed before YouTube counts a view, but that's also where my suggestion to rate by percentage of the video viewed comes in.
>Now those dislikes are hidden, the deception is permitted to flourish
I think (hope) most people are trained to ignore those fake vids over time, but content that is outright misleading should really be flaggable and removed by moderators anyway vs hit with vague dislikes.
Link integrity has always been a thing. Fake thumbs and misleading video titles are a link integrity issue. By hiding downvotes, Youtube has awarded a gift to clickbait content creators.
Don't forget clickbait thumbs and titles range from blatant lies to "somewhat exaggerated". View count won't indicate quality for those.
Besides, a video released only 2 weeks ago might be high quality but low view count. 200 likes and zero dislikes for example on a new video from a low-key channel about a niche subject, is a very good indicator of quality for that new video. Now with that ratio hidden, all we see is "200 likes" but with possibly higher dislikes hidden from view.
>people watch the whole video waiting for the thumbnail's promise that never arrives. Partial view stats won't help in that case.
Neither signal is perfect, but it's easy to simply smash the dislike button for any or no reason. OTOH, actually watching the video takes effort and commitment, which is in itself a signal. Many people will give up fairly quickly.
So, the chances that the majority of people are watching entire vids waiting for the thumbnail to happen is IMO substantially less than the chances that people just effortlessly smash dislike.
And, I think people get trained pretty quickly to avoid the "impossible" thumbnail with massive landsharks eating trains or whatever.
>video released only 2 weeks ago might be high quality but low view count
Relative like-to-view ratio is probably a better indicator than factoring in the oft-abused dislike button.
>200 likes" but with possibly higher dislikes hidden from view.
Again, YouTube should offer a flag button for scammy or otherwise disagreeable content, then moderate accordingly. That's far better than a generic dislike button.
But, we're probably going to agree to disagree here.
It is still a big Internet out there. All it takes is an up and coming platform to steer people elsewhere.
YT is big, and yeah they will carry on via inertia, but for things like news, organizing, commentary? Yeah, people will seek it elsewhere.
Others will figure this out. The value is high enough for users to fund it. I would for sure. In fact, funding that via small money from people is likely the best model. AD driven stuff has too many conflicts of interest.
Google will do whatever it takes to monetize every inch of their investment. By turning off dislikes, users will be forced to engage with additional content.
This is also visible on the other side of the spectrum - Google is pushing heavily integrated campaign products (e.g. Performance Max Campaigns), which include non-performing channels as display and video (in comparison to search), which can't be turned off.
At this point they can, as they are a monopoly, but I hope they will get burned, as they are introducing more and more dark patterns, which result in lower than poor user experience.
My take on this - AdBlock relentlessly, support creators directly. Switch platforms eventually - there's choice out there.