The problem with the dislike button seems to be that nobody agrees on what it should be used for.

In previous HN discussions, it's become apparent that some people use it to say "I am not interested in this video".

That is of zero use to other users. The video isn't necessarily bad, it's just on a topic you don't care about.

If you are instead using it to mean "this video is factually wrong" or "this video is obnoxious" that might be useful.

If you are using it to say "I don't agree with this political viewpoint" or "I don't like this movie/superhero/game/TV franchise", then that's also probably not that helpful.

Apparently you cared enough about it to start watching it after reading the title. A video with "Rust" and "Tokio" in the title will probably be unwatchable if it has a like to dislike ratio of 1 to 3, even if the title signals you that you want to see that video. But since there no longer exists this ratio, you'll have to watch it partially only to notice that it is bad. And then dislike it (and then have this dislike action have no effect whatsoever in future recommendations, apparently).

I absolutely hate it that they removed the dislike counter, it was so valuable.

I don't know what you think the decision making process was on that, but you're wrong.

Such decisions are not made on one single metric. these are multi faceted decisions.

Could dislike counts/ratios per like/view/minute been part of the decision? Absolutely. Did certain topics were worse than others? Again, yes.

Is this a whole story? No. Could this have been part of the decision process? It would be hard to convince me it wasn't at least due to human nature.

OK thanks for the clarity.

I would guess that for a given class of videos, there's going to be a fairly regular amount of dislikes that are going to be because of behaviour like "I am not interested in this video". So if you come across a video in that class of videos (e.g., car repairs), and it has a much higher ratio of dislikes to likes, it's probably a good indication that there's more to those dislikes than just "I'm not interested" -- more likely the video is factually wrong, poor quality, etc.

If it's a "how-to" video the dislike counter would show that this method doesn't work anymore or never worked well in the first place

Especially for software or websites, for some reason I can't find niche stuff easily on search engines, but there's an Indian guy that just tells you how to use a website. If the website doesn't work anymore I'd like to see a decreasing thumbs up ratio.

I did find a website that let me watch a video with violence in it without logging in to youtube. It looks like they just mirror the video you access from youtube. But this kind of a site will easily get shut down with some legal notice from YouTube.

I actually want a thumbs graph, to see if the video has been gaining likes or gaining dislikes recently.

> In previous HN discussions, it's become apparent that some people use it to say "I am not interested in this video".

THEY HAVE "NOT INTERESTED BUTTON"

IT'S JUST FUCKING HIDDEN https://imgur.com/a/fXjiBCu

All they need to do is to put it beside dislikes

If only we had a way to spend billions of $¥€ on putting the greatest minds in the World into a single company who could solve this at the drop of a hat.

It has to be control, right, surely Google are competent to fix this overnight of they wished?

That implies that the current functionality is broken, for Google's purpose.

My guess is, they calculate that they make more money with this configuration than the alternative.

The _only_ problem with dislike button was that if affected ad buyers (game/movie publishers) and YT corporate - the worst crime of all.

>On December 13, 2018, YouTube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind became the most disliked video on the video sharing platform, with 15 million dislikes rapidly surpassed the music video for Justin Bieber's song "Baby"

You can dislike random people, but Susan hearing her pupil star employees content is shit is where you cross the line. Especially when it happens again next year: "YouTube Rewind 2019: For the Record"

How much do these factors matter, though? Similar arguments can be made about uselessness of the like button. Some press it to indicate good, relevant content, some press it to support the topic, some like factual content, some use likes for later reference in "liked videos".

If you pivot a bit to Facebook videos, you can see heavily "liked" videos where huge portion of top comments are literally some form of "waste of my time", "idiotic video" and so on.

It’s not of zero use, even if it’s imperfect. The perspective shared in the comment you’re replying to is a great example of this, unless you deny the validity of their reasoning or experience.

I think the solution would be to just make the down-vote do nothing but increment the visible counter, and also make it so that users that can't comment if they already voted. This allows people to simply signal their disapproval without fighting repetitive flamewars in the comments or suppressing content they don't like.

Or maybe if you're running a forum where you want to promote controversial content and hide boring content, just make the downvote act identical to the upvote, so users are incentivized to downvote and argue if they think it is argue-worthy and just ignore if they think it is too boring to discuss.

In the spirit of POSIWOD, I suggest POBIHOU: the purpose of a button is how it's used.

Designers may have an intention. People will apply their own needs and usage to features, in the spirit of desire paths.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path>

If people are using "dislike" to indicate that they're not interested in content, particularly in a context in which there are few other ways to do so, then that is what the button means.

You might extend that more broadly to any aspect of a UI/UX.

In a past life I designed some elements of a content moderation / feedback system. Among the more amusing aspects of that was encountering people who told me that I was using the system I'd designed wrong.

That should be POSIWID and POBIHIU, I suppose...

As an aggregate, having a largely positive or largely negative feeling about something still provides good information to whomever's asking. It may not be ALL the information, but it's still hugely valuable.

It's not dissimilar to the buttons asking if you enjoyed your washroom visit. Sure, it seems vague and stupid, but if one of your 30 washrooms is suddenly reporting 50% "dislikes", you know something is wrong.

I know people get upset about the political implications of She-Hulk or COVID or Rings of Power dislikes, but surely one would think the positive information for the content creator outweigh the negatives here. There were times when all of Justin Bieber's content sat at around 5%. This was probably an annoyance for his PR team, but I doubt many of them thought the feature should be removed entirely.

Fact is that it already worked well, no point in trying to find unnecessary confusions

Same arguments can be made for the like button. I do like it because, funny, informative, correct information etc.

No use case defined = use as you see fit.

I see a future in which there are no likes and dislikes but sentiment is inferred and weighed according to its objective importance.

The not interested option already exists, it's just buried. Maybe youtube could bring that to the surface..

If, in fact, that option actually does anything. I'm far from sure that it does. It doesn't seem to affect anything for me.

I'm ready to pay that prize for a functional site.

I think that's part of the problem with black box algorithms controlling a large portion of the internet.

The exact same applies to the like button too but you don't see anyone removing that.

Here is a third, I dislike when the video is clickbait, or far from what I expected.

> Now it takes me at least 2 mins longer

You mean 2 more minutes of engagement!

I know, let's try using the provided search filter feature to sort by rating. Surely this will give some useful listing that prioritizes user deemed quality!

Testing this with "Subaru repair" (no quotes), the top result has 11 views from 2 years ago.

(On the topic of Subaru https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAochkcRfK4)

I agree about the dislikes tho.

I used to calculate the ratio of likes:dislikes, and a lot of my hobbies were in the cool 1,000:1 range. Now I do the same with views:likes; 10:1 isn't uncommon for some niches!

90/9/1 rule

I was doing the same things but, depending on the total views and the type of video, it was too inconsistent...

I've been using Return Youtube Dislike addon for Firefox.

Idk how accurate it is, but you can gauge the sentiment (mostly positive, mixed, mostly negative)

I believe that uses a separate database that was seeded from scraped youtube data but now it's only updated by those who use the addon. So it would have a much smaller sample size for recent activity.

I'm not sure about this because when going through Youtube shorts I regularly see videos with +100K dislikes, and any "viral" video has dozens of thousands of dislikes. I don't think this many users installed an extension to bring back dislikes and happened to dislike these particular videos.

The extension estimates the "true" dislike count based on the like/dislikes it has in its database. E.g. if the database contains 100 dislikes and 900 likes, but the video has a million views, it'll estimate 1000 dislikes. I'm sure there's some cleverness in there for videos where it doesn't have a tonne of information yet.

I agree that removing the dislike count was dumb, but why would it have anything to do with quality? It's "dislike" as in "not like", not "low quality". I hit that button if I don't like the video for any reason, most frequently because it's boring, subject doesn't interest me, I don't like the person or they say something I don't like. I don't hit it if the video is merely low quality.

I haven’t ever used the dislike button. It never functioned as a “don’t give me more of this”. I did use the “not interested” option to do so, but as others have said “dislike” is ambiguous, not to mention the opportunity for abuse.

How is this a useful response to the perspective shared in the GP?

Even if you don’t use it, it’s still a useful signal. Are you saying this isn’t the case? For example, did you find the dislike ratio to be a misleading signal, when it was around?

I shared to express that it wasn’t a signal universally understood. I never saw the dislike button as anything other than people hating on a video. There’s no context to it. You don’t know if the dislikes are people who don’t like the content or the author or the subject or the channel. In other words, for me it was never a useful signal. It only reflected how terrible the internet can make people behave.

I understand if my perspective is a minority opinion, but I think it’s a valid one.

I found the like/dislike ratio to be very useful, personally. Since it was removed and I have no signal as to whether or not the video is any good, the number of crap videos I end up playing has increased substantially. It's really annoying.

Yes, certain videos would get bombed -- but that, too, tends to be obvious and tells you something useful about the video: namely, that it's controversial in some way.

I've used it to mark spam videos that had no real content except for music and copy/pasted text from some other source

The reason dislike count had to be removed is that it enables hate campaigns against things (e.g. the recent controversy around the trailer for the live action The Little Mermaid movie, to name one among many).

Organized hate campaigns have a disproportionate representation in review sites, so they break rating systems. Also, the dislike count acts as a positive signal to hate-bombers ("we're winning", "let's make it to 50k dislikes") more than it helps anyone actually engaging with the content in a more healthy way.

One could also argue that the like count also creates a pernicious culture around subscriber / watch-count ("help us reach 1M subs!") that negatively affects young content producers and adds nothing of value to the world. But that's a much more complex conversation.

Perhaps this is just democracy at play, doing what it's meant to do.

I've found that people who interpret a high number of dislikes as "hate campaigns" are usually the ones who agree, if not, applaud the content being disapproved of by a larger group who is frustrated with the subject matter and is using their voices to show their disapproval.

This is just as valid the other way around, where you should equally have the opportunity to express your disapproval of a video on the basis of political issues if you so please.

Review-bombing certainly exists, but I don't believe it's the norm when there's a high amount of dislikes out-ratioing the likes.

And even in the case of review-bombing: to me, it's a clear indicator of societal sentiment around a topic or aspect of whatever it is. I think we should be paying more attention to it, and spend more time publicly discussing these moments, treating high dislike counts as a valid point of view.

Unfortunately there is a certain political leaning who has grown quite comfortable with gaslighting those who hold and express majority opinions that aren't popular with late night TV hosts and celebrities, who further encourage hatred, violence, suppression, and ridicule towards this populace as they watch the wealthy and powerful deconstruct every bit of their culture and values, where the only replacement is woke garbage that they've clearly expressed not wanting through their votes, and yes: dislikes.

Democracy is eventually unfriendly to those who twist it into a guise for fully endorsed mob rule — and it will bite back.

YouTube is famously watch time centric.

> Now it takes me at least 2 mins longer to get to the same judgement

Sounds like metrics at work.