1MachineElf · 4 years ago

I also wonder if it has to do with the notorious Win11 announcement video: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Damage-control-Microsoft-delet...

hammock · 4 years ago

There has been no clear evidence showing that to be the case, and an independent factchecker concluded that was misinformation. Please refer to youtube.com/help for the most accurate updates.

wpurvis1 · 4 years ago

If anything I'd assume its about the YouTube rewind getting massively downvoted year after year

dcow · 4 years ago

Exactly. Seems like you could just throttle votes or abstract the metric to smooth out spikes and account for brigading in either direction...

scoopertrooper · 4 years ago

Seems like a middle ground solution might be to restrict the display of downvotes to videos that meet a certain viewership threshold. That way organic voting would make brigading more difficult.

pugets · 4 years ago

YT can counter brigades by giving viewers even more statistics about a video. Example: what’s the like to dislike ratio of a video in the past 7, 30, or 90 days, compared to all-time?

Steam (a video game store) does this already. They categorize reviews as either being recent (made in the last 30 days) or all-time. If a game has excellent all-time reviews, but mixed recent reviews, then you can suspect something has recently upset the playerbase.

crowbahr · 4 years ago

That's not the solution proposed by youtube though: They're _never_ allowing you to "prove yourself" the way that hacker news does.

cute_boi · 4 years ago

actually this is good because it helps to mitigate bot somehow.

dcow · 4 years ago

How is that ironic? It's a well established spam prevention measure not a complete removal of a useful metric. It exists prominently on e.g. stack exchange sites and has been a common feature in general on reputation based forum software. What's perhaps ironic is that you can't see vote counts on HN comments _at all_ unless you're the author. So HN has already implemented this feature they just did it sensibly and included upvotes (on comments, at least) too. Most ironically, the front page shows only up-vote counts, something people are citing as a ruined experience in the case of YT removing the dislike count yet is par for the course for submissions on this very site.

mattowen_uk · 4 years ago

To have full rights in a civilised society, you need to prove that you can be a good citizen first. What's wrong with that?

mattowen_uk · 4 years ago

My opinion on this, is that they should hide BOTH the counts, and only the creator can see it.

Keep the actual buttons, as they signal to YouTube what you do and do not want to see in future, but the actual counts only have use to the creator... and even then a simple ratio or percentage alongside the video in the Creator Studio is enough; there's no need for actuall numbers.

What's not been mentioned is that YouTube add a small % of fake clicks to the like/dislike buttons, and also hide the real counts for a while, if there's a rush on clicks (to dissuade click-bandwagoning).

adminscoffee · 4 years ago

yeah good is ruining everything they touch

ridaj · 4 years ago

Public dislike counts were opportunities for brands to own up to their ambition for authentic engagement. This is maybe the main thing lost here - without putting this at stake, and with full moderation powers on their video comments, brands basically only have a veneer of authenticity at this point. There's not as much at stake for them anymore, very limited downside / reason to care.

Igelau · 4 years ago

> engagement

That's the word. It isn't really "likes" in the sense that we normally think of it. It's ticks on the relationship of "engagement" to "dollars".

IIRC, Facebook was pretty upfront about this being why they didn't implement a "dislike" button; the information wasn't valuable to them.

politician · 4 years ago

There's no salvaging what SO has become - the place where good complex questions are promptly closed by uninformed moderators. The place where questions about new versions of software are closed as duplicates of questions about older obsolete versions whose answers are no longer relevant. The place where popular questions with hundreds of upvotes and strong discussions are closed as off-topic.

manquer · 4 years ago

It is likely I may know enough to judge a proposed solution is wrong or inadequate etc but not enough to write a better one. Vast majority of users who can down-vote would come under this category.

Encouraging them to write their own solution or even a critique/comment is not necessarily better.

You can also down vote questions not only answers, a question could be poor but it does not mean I can come up with a better one.

tester756 · 4 years ago

>Removing downvotes from SO seems like it would be a net good. Instead of downvoting, people could be more encouraged to post better and more correct solutions.

and way more spam, no thanks.

DoItToMe81 · 4 years ago

No, thanks. I use Youtube for technical videos and videos pertaining to certain tasks and the dislike ratio is nearly always an indicator of whether or not the video is misleading, incorrect or uninformative.

suyash · 4 years ago

but everyone can still the the count - that is the main point here

jonnycomputer · 4 years ago

I wish they'd cost reputation here too. Behavioral experiment after experiment has show people will engage in costly punishment to maintain norms, so don't need to worry about under-downvoting. But enabling downvoting to be costless (and anonymous) does have downsides.

xg15 · 4 years ago

To be fair, you can downvote comments here, which is often used effectively. Comments with a high dislike count are even specifically highlighted.

curtis3389 · 4 years ago

Hacker News has a downvote button, but you need enough karma to unlock it.

badRNG · 4 years ago

HN has a downvote button, but only for those who've engaged on HN for a bit prior to downvoting. It helps prevent abuse.

bogota · 4 years ago

HN does have a downvote button you just don’t have enough reputation to use it yet.

pizza234 · 4 years ago

There's a significant difference - misleading/malicious content.

A fake trailer can for example be spotted by the number of negative votes. If the negative votes concept is gone, using a low number of positive votes as indicator is less effective.

jeffbee · 4 years ago

It would be MetaFilter, a site with a noticeably higher level of discourse than HN.

TigeriusKirk · 4 years ago

It'd be a lot better, actually. Downvotes are social poison.

sytelus · 4 years ago

It is horrible, you just don’t know it it. There is always people like dang dedicating his life to fight all the spam. Look at “new” page and see how many dead links are being submitted each hour.

When you put dislike button, you are adding a degree of freedom in expressing an intent for the user. It is upto you, how you use this information. Most systems fail in this task and then they just remove the degree of freedom as their solution.

dang · 4 years ago

I assume this is sarcastic but flags on stories are a significant option.

FridayoLeary · 4 years ago

i don't know. The more i look at hn the more i appreciate the thought that went into it. Stories are far more black and white- either they violate the guidelines or not. The only thing a downvote would do is to make the story float all over the front page as there is an inevitable vote war. I would even say that most users don't like any given news story, which would lead to the situation that everything would get downvoted into oblivion. Comments OTOH lend themselves far more to moderation by downvotes. Remember we still get the "nuclear option" of flagging a submission.

smsm42 · 4 years ago

Not too horrible but a bit annoying. Fortunately, HN is not that site.

bellyfullofbac · 4 years ago

I guess we can make our own standard, someone should comment something like "This video is garbage." or simply "Dislike" and the amount of thumbs up on that comment can be taken as video dislikes.

I sometimes look for obscure how-to's, and I get garbage videos not even answering the question. If YouTube can get rid of all that garbage, then not having a dislike button is fine.

userbinator · 4 years ago

I find it ironic that your comment is downvoted ;-)

I agree, this "toxic positivity" can't be good for society in the long term. The continued drive towards stupidity and unquestioning, docile populations is going to slowly turn into a massive dystopia.

throwuxiytayq · 4 years ago

I need a FF extension that will display this to me visually.

tentacleuno · 4 years ago

They've disabled the visual ratio bar for me. Wish I could get it back.

thinkingemote · 4 years ago

I think it will lead to less liking behaviour. They didn't test for this.

dylan604 · 4 years ago

<shudder> reaching into the bowels of YT comments is something i regularly try to avoid. "put on a helmet and pads, and get in there"

post_break · 4 years ago

You can disable or delete comments.

pessimizer · 4 years ago

...until it's gone, or new youtube blue checks mark commenters that automatically get floated to the top.

tsian2 · 4 years ago

It might become an outlet for all the people who want to tell others whether they think a video is worth watching or not, making it harder to find comments with substance.

myohmy · 4 years ago

Oh no its better than that. All the downvotes count as engagement, so it will get recommended to other people who can only see that it has 100 likes and not 20000 dislikes.

Which means my videos can finally stop being brigaded by those damn round earthers! Spread the truth!

bagacrap · 4 years ago

eh, I would guess it's more like one PM wanted to get a promo by making a high profile change, and by claiming they were protecting some victim their case became politically unassailable

adamc · 4 years ago

A small part of why I stopped using Netflix... it became harder to assess what I wanted to watch.

dhritzkiv · 4 years ago

And a thumbs down, no?

That being said, there is no globally-visible '%age of viewers like this' value on each title. Instead, thumbs up/down seems to be used as probably one of many signals in the '% match' (how likely are you to enjoy it) metric.

deadmutex · 4 years ago

My take on it is that there is a number of diverse creators on the platform, and many YT users see a very different set of creators. E.g. You might see creators X, Y, Z and I might watch A, B, C for different topics. So, when it comes time to rewind, you can't please everyone since you'll have to pick a subset of creators. And then those who didn't see their favorite creators will be saying things like "Where was creator J? I watched so many of their videos, and they have a billion views, etc." And they might dislike the video, because they feel not represented. So, in my mind, the YT way to do rewind would be to do a custom rewind for each person (but there's no technology to automatically make a high quality video like that today).

Of course, this is just my theory about a segmentation of the population. Then there are people with their own agenda, and will use the dislike button as a protest for other things. Then once it reaches some threshold, some people just like to hit the dislike button to see how far they can push it.

Disclaimer: These are my own views, and not of my employer.

ainar-g · 4 years ago

Rewind is kind of old news. Now that time YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki received a Free Expression Award from an organisation sponsored by YouTube[1] is more recent and something else completely, ratio-wise. Currently at 56,502 dislikes vs 226 likes. Which is a ratio of over 250×.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDcvPf78g1k

fl0wenol · 4 years ago

They explained in a related post that people were being harassed for hiding it or hiding comments... (Replace people with "brands" and we can infer their true motivation)

deadmutex · 4 years ago

Yeah, I fear that some people will see massive dislike ratio on vaccination related videos and think "oh, yeah, vaccination is really unpopular. Maybe I should be listening to what people are saying against it. I don't want to get singled out. No one is getting vaccinated" etc. It seems like it becomes a circle jerk, and a way to "protest", rather than it being an actual signal.

Disclaimer: These views are entirely my own, and not of my employer.

benmw333 · 4 years ago

Genuine question - why are you "sick of it" - what does a large amount of downvotes actually "do" and why would that make you "sick"

deadmutex · 4 years ago

Note: the downvote ratio is a noisy (and sometimes misleading) signal.

From my personal perspective, most vaccine related videos have high % of dislikes. And bunch of videos implying Ivermectine as a cure videos have a high % of likes. I think the dislike ratio is not as valuable to many of these videos.

Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employer.

jeofken · 4 years ago

Who whips who? Media or parties?

native_samples · 4 years ago

Very unlikely they care about regulation. Wojcicki is a fully paid up technocrat globalist - she's ideologically aligned with that party.

pdq · 4 years ago

I believe he's referring to the other party, with videos like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcRVR63dnDA

And this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tYl5C9PufY

klipklop · 4 years ago

I am alluding to the current party in the White House that gets every video downvoted into oblivion. Some sites accused YouTube of deleting the downvotes.

Now they are giving up and just hiding them now.

BitwiseFool · 4 years ago

I don't think the GP's narrative was that this exclusively happens to the Democrats. Just that it happens way more on the current White House's videos than it did on the last administration's. Plucking examples where Republican videos were downvoted intensely does not refute an argument the OP wasn't making in the first place.

bequanna · 4 years ago

Not organized at all, completely grassroots.

Check the like/dislike ratio for any mainstream media video which features an obvious politically slanted view on some topic.

The problem here is that people are using the like/dislike ratio to indicate what may be biased content masquerading as 'objective news'. It just so happens that this (accurate) method is flagging the left leaning propaganda that YT wants to propagate.

vfclists · 4 years ago

> Most pro-vaccine videos are also massively disliked on YouTube, despite the fact that the vast majority of people support vaccines.

You mean the vast majority support vaccines because they will lose their jobs if they don't "support" them?

systemvoltage · 4 years ago

> I'm guessing you're a conservative

Please stop. Most conservatives support vaccines. Your idea of conservatives has an insidious skew that's just plain wrong.

Andrew_nenakhov · 4 years ago

AFAIK YouTube is not available in China without VPN, so Beijing is likely not really concerned about it.

gpt5 · 4 years ago

There is definitely competition to YouTube. TikTok appeared out of nowhere and surpassed YouTube installation numbers. With that said, TikTok is even worse when it comes to dislikes.

pranau · 4 years ago

Seems like a story they spun with cherry-picked data to justify the removal of the dislike count.

scoopertrooper · 4 years ago

If that was truly their primary concern, why wouldn't they limit the scope of the change to smaller creators? Could it be that they were looking for a post-hoc justification for a desired policy change?

slingnow · 4 years ago

It sounds like you're very much predisposed to believing that all press releases are 100% truthful -- and you would never consider that they might be intentionally misleading.

bavila · 4 years ago

Couldn't smaller channels be getting hit by more dislikes because videos produced by smaller channels are actually just plain bad?

People who are just getting started on YouTube tend to have poor production quality and editing skills compared to established channels. That might have been acceptable in YouTube's early days when there were no standards, but now we're at a point where we've all seen thousands of videos on YouTube, and we all collectively expect high quality content.

Seems quite natural that smaller channels that are just getting started by people who are still learning will be disliked more often than large channels. Hardly a valid reason to eliminate the dislike button.

subsubzero · 4 years ago

100% agree, the only reason Wojcicki is still there is she is the sister of founder Sergey Brin's ex-wife and that family supplied the "garage" that started google.

Minor49er · 4 years ago

Odysee seems okay, but you need LBRY credits in order to do pretty much anything

RNCTX · 4 years ago

No one is going to use crypto for day to day anything, ever.

devortel · 4 years ago

Did you describe your child using weight instead of age?

ollien · 4 years ago

This would be interesting to scrape together before that part of the API goes away in December. I wonder how correlated the like/dislike ratio is to the like/view ratio. I'd imagine not very. I don't like very many videos, but I don't know about others.

alpaca128 · 4 years ago

That's already possible. Content creators can turn off comments and/or votes for any video.

politician · 4 years ago

Plausible deniability. If a creator turns off dislikes on a particular video, that's a strong signal that they're producing propaganda or have a thin skin. If YT does it for them, for everyone, then affected creators can just shrug and pretend like they definitely would never turn off dislikes.

tlear · 4 years ago

Because it has nothing to do with it. Explanation is a fig leaf. Check White house videos and see the real reason

water8 · 4 years ago

Lessco Brandon isn’t getting many upvotes these days

jjice · 4 years ago

Absolutely. This is exactly the kind of thing that creators should be able to opt-in to, just like disabling comments. Very disappointed to see this shielding of everyone's eyes from videos. If a creator wanted to opt to hide it, sure, but flat out hiding it is unfortunate.

ddingus · 4 years ago

Because hidden dislike numbers is information that compares people who hide dislikes to people who show likes unfavorably.

oooooooooooow · 4 years ago

You have always been able to hide the like/dislike count on your published videos.

Let's not be stupid about this. The only people benefitting from this change are the shady ones.

nickjj · 4 years ago

> 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?

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.

happytiger · 4 years ago

Same.

inChargeOfIT · 4 years ago

I still see dislikes but will be cancelling my premium the second they go away.

secondcoming · 4 years ago

Honest question... why do you pay for Premium when you still get in-content ads?

JetAlone · 4 years ago

I've cancelled mine as well.

arch-ninja · 4 years ago

Same, companies can only be influenced by their financials these days. I even buy subscriptions I don't need with the intention of cancelling them 2-3 quarters later (need to make sure the money shows up on the books first).

yc12340 · 4 years ago

Google will just stop showing statistics on cancelled subscriptions during shareholder meetings.

anonu · 4 years ago

Seems like a bit disproportionate reaction. Most of YouTube's value is in the videos.. not the dislike counter. Help me understand the trade-off here...

taylus · 4 years ago

Same, subbed for years and just cancelled. Was hoping they’d ask why but they don’t care.

bavell · 4 years ago

Same here and agree 100%. Seeing ads again will help me spend less time on the platform. I almost cancelled earlier this year but this made it easy for me to pull the trigger.

totalZero · 4 years ago

Canada is no paradise, but I haven't seen any indication that sponsored agents are gaming the system on videos critical of them.

nindalf · 4 years ago

That’s a serious charge to level against Cuba. Could you share evidence of it?

beepbooptheory · 4 years ago

Ok found it! Everyone can mark off 'China' on their HN bingo cards.

jjcon · 4 years ago

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)

Mountain_Skies · 4 years ago

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?

Manuel_D · 4 years ago

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.

propogandist · 4 years ago

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.

loudtieblahblah · 4 years ago

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

throwawaylinux · 4 years ago

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.

Klaster_1 · 4 years ago

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.

maest · 4 years ago

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

washadjeffmad · 4 years ago

Then why not keep counts and ratios optional?

epolanski · 4 years ago

Harassment could be solved in way saner ways, like detecting unusual peaks of dislikes at some content.

heavyset_go · 4 years ago

> 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.

chelical · 4 years ago

Without the like vs dislike ratio, I'm less likely to use Youtube. I'm already using Bing and Google to search for videos b/c they absolutely botched their search experience.

enaaem · 4 years ago

Channels can already disable the like and dislike bar.

pharke · 4 years ago

The changes they've made over the years have made a huge difference in the amount I use it. I used to often spend a lot of time discovering new channels and videos and overall just enjoying entertaining content. Compared to today, I've uninstalled the YouTube app from my phone and when I visit the site in a browser I generally ignore the homepage and just search for updates on the content I'm interested in, watch one video if I can find anything that looks relevant and then close the page. If their goal is to show more ads, they're shooting themselves in the foot.

mysterydip · 4 years ago

> I really don't understand this move... this will seriously limit our ability to filter bad content.

I think that is entirely the point.

scotty79 · 4 years ago

Before facebook, reddit and such I imagined discussion platform where you'd have 3 options, upvote for agreeing with the content, downvote for disagreeing and third option for spam and incomprehensible things and things devoid of any value positive or negative.

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.

heavyset_go · 4 years ago

> Exactly, how will I figure now that a 20 min video has no content promised in the title?

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.

sdk16420 · 4 years ago

SponsorBlock has a video highlight part option now, as more users start submitting it, you could use that to judge.

radlad · 4 years ago

I'm not sure. Reddit, Hacker News, etc. all offer ways for content to be downvoted. This allows for user moderation, which has pros and cons, but seems to work better against disinformation than platforms like Facebook which only allow "likes."

rhizome · 4 years ago

Howto videos have a wide range of qualities and the up/down ratio is indispensible so you aren't sitting through 18min of someone practicing their English or another rattling off a cocaine bender about washing cars.

MonaroVXR · 4 years ago

>More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content.

Like the new Nintendo Switch Online Expansion pack video.

There's a huge community, that instantly dislikes the video.

yodsanklai · 4 years ago

> In my experience it's more of a "controversial opinion" indicator than a "bad video" indicator.

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.

rgrs · 4 years ago

> brigaded by adversial community

Not necessarily. There are other cases where consumers could use dislike as form of brand boycott

radmuzom · 4 years ago

> More often that not when I see a video with tons of dislike it's because it's been brigaded by an adversarial community and not really an indicator of the value of the content.

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.

varelse · 4 years ago

I just installed an extension to block all the recommendations because it wouldn't stop recommending Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro videos to me. And they have nothing new to say to me.

Edit: Oh no! I admitted that because I don't want to those videos I got rid of all recommendations. So off-topic I know!

numpad0 · 4 years ago

Just mash that dislikes until there is no more content creators with anything remotely uncomfortable to you. Unsarcastically. Let the algorithm designers spend their life struggling to deduce what they could ask you in plain human language for immediate response. I'm guessing that is how engineer performance is measured and rewarded for there.

AndrewUnmuted · 4 years ago

There have been many other high-profile examples of fiascos dealing with the 'dislike' button on YouTube.

Most notable, I think, would have to be the Biden administration's [0] challenges they're facing with the official White House YouTube account.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mczlz7/whats_...

qqtt · 4 years ago

It's probably not so much about Nintendo specifically as one advertising partner, as much as it is about encouraging the advertiser ecosystem to be comfortable with continually spending money on Youtube as a platform.

If Youtube removes dislikes, there is less risk for these viral "dislike" moments to happen, which can make content producers and advertisers nervous.

Additionally, Google probably puts way more resources than you might expect into things like moderating the usage of the dislike button and making sure it isn't exploited by bots, nefarious actors, etc.

Not much downside from the business side of Youtube in taking steps to sunset the button.

godshatter · 4 years ago

What are the downsides to toxic positivity?

kyle_martin1 · 4 years ago

And hide the White House's like to dislike ratio. Check out some videos-- the ratio is horrible: https://www.youtube.com/c/WhiteHouse/videos

thamer · 4 years ago

Unlike with the "k" suffix for thousands that we have today, YouTube used to show the unabbreviated number of likes and dislikes even for larger numbers of votes.

This video was remarkable for the fact that it maintained pretty much a perfectly equal number of likes and dislikes for years (rarely off by more than 1). It was a tacit agreement among viewers: if you saw a mismatched count, it was your duty to vote towards restoring the balance.

The two numbers are probably off by several hundred these days.

prvc · 4 years ago

I don't like this one, as each voter has decisively chosen one side. In aggregate, the voters are ambivalent rather than neutral. Better had it received no votes at all.

pessimizer · 4 years ago

I think you're misinterpreting as psychological turmoil what is actually light anonymous fun being made of people's tastes in service of a punchline.

IceDane · 4 years ago

Maybe you are right and he didn't read the article, but I think his points still stand.

This is a ridiculous decision. When someone puts something into the public space and everyone dislikes it, that should visible to anyone. This is just going to make ridiculous conspiracy videos and other harmful material like racist propaganda seem more legit than it is viewed by the rest of the public.

tpoacher · 4 years ago

Agreed, but, moot point.

What use is a gun if you remove the bullets?

rileymat2 · 4 years ago

To be fair, most of his comment is about the count and not the button itself. Which they are removing.

Grakel · 4 years ago

RTF comment. He found the count informative, as do many people.

louissan · 4 years ago

I have RTFA'd. Yes they are not indeed, which is nice.

but as I wrote a few minutes ago ..

./dislike > /dev/null

mach1ne · 4 years ago

Politics and profit tend to go hand-in-hand. I don't see how removing the dislike count will in any way increase the click rate.

Be the true reason whatever, but this is another concrete step into the direction of censorship initiated by the Big Tech during the pandemic.

addingnumbers · 4 years ago

> Remove negative counts, make people more likely to click on videos

How were you seeing the dislike count before clicking videos before?

I might be mistaken but I thought under normal circumstances you couldn't see the dislike count until the video was already starting anyway.

saltminer · 4 years ago

This...unfortunately makes sense.

If I can tell just by the dislike count if a video is a fake tutorial or w/e, I'm likely to leave immediately. If I'm on my phone (don't have adblock), I'll have closed the video before the preroll ad even lets me skip it.

Now, I'll have to sit through it and make youtube some money before I can determine if a video is any good or not.

Edit: Think about all those scam channels on YT. Disabling likes/dislikes looks fishy, but now they don't have to worry about that since only the likes are visible. This is a massive win for the "GTA online free money"-type channels.

Guvante · 4 years ago

You have to load the page to see the dislike count. They already got ad revenue by the time you see it.

I am sure they have better data than anybody as to how often a video is loaded for the first time and disliked within a few seconds of starting.

While once in a while this could be caused by a bad video start it probably mostly isn't caused by the content of the video.

By looking at behavior of users and pattern matching it probably wasn't hard to see that certain users were "making the number big".

Additionally as the article details they likely targeted those users with a new "don't show the number" feature and saw an improvement in the unwanted behavior (unnecessary dislikes).

The reality is that while dislike is fantastic from a quality filter standpoint human behavior likes making numbers big and sometimes they do weird things you have to correct for.

quotemstr · 4 years ago

No, that's just not believable. YouTube (and Google more generally) are full of people who believe they need to control the public conversation for the public's own good. They've gone to the best schools, lived cosseted lives in safe, sparkly clean neighborhoods, and never had to shower after work instead of before work. They're totally out of touch with what regular people think, yet believe they know better than regular people and have not only a right, but a duty to guide the public conversation in what they see as the right direction.

YouTube people have spent years censoring inconvenient thoughts (e.g. the lab leak hypothesis), juicing rankings in favor of mainstream media, and outright banning their ideological opponents.

If they believe that they're just making the internet less "toxic", it's because they don't differentiate between people with different value systems and monsters to be silenced.

There is zero chance this lately instance of censorship is profit driven. It's yet another favor Google is doing for an establishment that's rapidly losing credibility with the public and control of the narrative.

jaywalk · 4 years ago

"Dislike attack behavior" could just be a video that is widely disliked. It doesn't necessarily mean there's any sort of coordinated attack on it, so your "shitty behavior" comment doesn't really fly.

gameman144 · 4 years ago

> because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count

How is this any different than users targeting a video with lots of likes to drive up its count, though?

If YouTube were hiding both the public like and dislike counts, I wouldn't give this a second thought. But to say "seeing counts influences people" as a reason for hiding dislikes, and not extending that same argument to likes as well just seems a bit shallow.

Public counts are useful because they provide a gauge of perceived quality. If I see a video with lots of likes and no dislikes, it's fair to assume I'll like that video. If I see a video with lots of likes and I can't see the dislikes, I have absolutely no idea whether I'll like it or not; maybe it's a really good video and everyone liked it, or maybe the majority of people disliked it but I just can't tell. If you're removing my ability to gauge quality anyway, then why not just remove the like count as well?

This change is essentially shifting from "three out of five dentists prefer Trident" to "three dentists prefer Trident". The loss of information is so substantial that the remaining information is essentially useless.

dmonitor · 4 years ago

If nobody can see the dislike number, what is the point of disliking a video? It doesn't make the video less likely to appear on feeds. Having the number makes disliking a video feel like you've actually done something rather than just piss in the ocean.

dalmo3 · 4 years ago

It's a bit obvious that removing the visible effects of an interaction will discourage that interaction.

Would you write a comment if it was only visible to the creator?

gregmac · 4 years ago

This seems like the wrong target to me. Why not go after the user?

If there's a user that is going around disliking a ton of videos, especially on a single channel, and/or without watching some minimum time or % of that video, it seems likely that user is being abusive; so perhaps shadow-ban that user's votes?

Similar with new users.. disallow use of dislike completely until they've been around a while and built up some reputation/history (by watching, upvoting, etc). If the user is possibly a bot (I assume there's algorithms to determine confidence of bot vs real user), require more verification.

I'm sure there's a reason they're not taking this approach, but I find it hard to believe they're choosing they way they are based on the reason they're giving here.

unethical_ban · 4 years ago

This is some next-level conspiracy. Like most, it's feasible and perhaps in the realm of possibility, but there are probably 30 explanations above it in the "that makes sense" queue.

Notably, their rationale they posted. Isn't it possible that they both see a positive outcome for creators not to get votebombed, and remove negative publicity from corporate partners like Disney?

I challenge anyone to tell me they do NOT think that brigading downvotes/dislikes is a thing on forums and Youtube.

LarrySellers · 4 years ago

The change was being explored years before Biden was president

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/youtube-doesnt-like-...

dylan604 · 4 years ago

> maybe pipe down a little bit

like downvoting a cat video is the only type of video being downvoted. If a "tutorial" is bad, people can downvote it. If the next view sees lots of downs, they can avoid it and go to the video saving them time, and no longer rewarding with ad share for a worthless video.

> maybe pipe down a little bit

CoryAlexMartin · 4 years ago

If you think cat videos are the most impactful videos on Youtube, you must have stopped paying attention to the website 15 years ago.

louissan · 4 years ago

Oh I could not give a dead flying flamingo about likes and dislikes on YT.

It's the intent behind all this that I find repulsive. As someone justly mentioned above, this all comes down to uninterrupted flow of content towards (less) able to resists psyches.

End result: $++;

criley2 · 4 years ago

I don't believe reddits obfuscation efforts did anything but significantly hamper spammers who relied on accurate counting to be able to determine when their spam accounts were shadowbanned and the reach they had.

Reddit has always had a significant problem with downvote meaning "disagree" or "dislike", which according to redditquette is incorrect usage. In practice, the downvote is about enforcing groupthink on reddit and enforcing subreddit culture, and it is just as powerful today as it has ever been. Sort by "controversial" and you'll see.

paulpauper · 4 years ago

misleading/bad content can get up-votes too though

jb1991 · 4 years ago

I'm confused, as I see downvotes on other user's comments on Reddit. Did they walk back that move?

warning26 · 4 years ago

This is incorrect; Reddit still shows downvotes, as well as upvote/downvote ratio, even if you're on the "new" Reddit.

If you're on the old Reddit, some subreddits used CSS to hide the downvote button, which I think is dumb, but you can easily get around that by going to the new Reddit long enough to downvote.

foogazi · 4 years ago

> If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be.

Really ? There’s always your own evaluation of the content - as well as snopes, comments, other opinions, other media sources

unclebucknasty · 4 years ago

>If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be.

Why are dislike counts more credible than like counts?

>It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others.

How would you discern that from a creator producing genuinely disliked content? And, what difference would it make if you could? Genuinely asking.

cgriswald · 4 years ago

> If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be.

There are many ways of doing so, with their own pros, cons, and time requirements. At best you're losing a relatively low quality way of quickly filtering out some videos.

> It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others.

You seem to want it both ways. It is judging videos by this ratio that allows the harassment to have an effect.

There may also be an emotional component to it; a private downvote likely stings a lot less than a public one. It prevents people from piling on or joining in the harassment. And it can allow YouTube to shadowban harassing accounts.

For the people who could actually affect change, it hides nothing. YouTube and the creator both get to see the numbers, and in extreme cases, they'd be available for law enforcement.

> The beginning of the end of being able to trust YouTube stats (as if that wasn't already an issue).

These stats were never trustworthy for viewers.

noisem4ker · 4 years ago

The activity feed is no more, I think, and liked videos only end up in a private playlist now.

dontcare007 · 4 years ago

which means the ones that do have it wield wield an inordinate inordinate amount of power

adminscoffee · 4 years ago

you nailed it on the head. some players want to control public opinion rather than changing their business model or philosophy closer to what the people want

politician · 4 years ago

Or upvotes on comments that contain the message "Dislike".

otrahuevada · 4 years ago

Given that they've decided to go ahead and remove it, I'd wager that the amount of people for which the public dislike count of a video is the one thing that makes their visit worthwhile is not huge.

Also, publishers still get to see it, it's only viewers that won't. Which probably means we'll all have to engage a lot more with the algorithm to route around garbage, but I kind of do that already so I'm not convinced it's a dealbreaker.

> Helps who?

>> "Earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike count to see whether or not changes could help better protect creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks – where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos"

Creators, apparently.

jarek83 · 4 years ago

Seems like Google does not know internets. No wonder, they are like a cancer to Internet for long time now.

chungy · 4 years ago

Coca-Cola doesn't have the same sway as YouTube. You can drink it or not, and it ends there.

YouTube is trying to manipulate people in order to remove dissent.

beckman466 · 4 years ago

yes you're right, who cares about our digital infrastructure, it's not like it is an industry where some of most valuable companies in the world are in, right? /s

mahart · 4 years ago

I have found videos that were marked disliked by me that I never intended to dislike. Pretty sure it was all from trying to scroll on mobile and a click accidentally getting registered.

lelandfe · 4 years ago

Another example of this: pronunciation videos.

Downvotes are a massive indicator if a chosen video is inaccurate.

echelon · 4 years ago

Some heavily downvoted videos are great.

Here's a classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXmv8quf_xM

Currently rated 3.7k likes, 15k dislikes. It's so good.

ipaddr · 4 years ago

Big assumption, have you run the data? I doubt it would be a good proxy.

Make a video on a taboo topic. During the first wave you end up with tribal zealot commenting and liking with low/medium viewership.

This pushes the video in the mainstream which causes more views but smaller likes counts. The top comments increase with flamewars in the comments.

Without the dislike the popularity could be negative.

asciimov · 4 years ago

With this move I expect non-positive comments days to be numbered. Any feature that doesn't align with brand positivity is fair game to be removed.

ryanisnan · 4 years ago

Really?

At least when you search for a video topic, you are likely to get a wide range in quality. Regularly surfaced content has a variable amount of dislikes, and almost always the dislike count is signal and not noise.

educaysean · 4 years ago

I rarely engage with YT recommended videos so I can't verify the accuracy of your claims. Either way, however, it sounds like reworking their recommendations algorithm would be a more reasonable way to deal with this issue than simply hiding the like/dislike ratio. How is this change going to meaningfully affect which videos show up as recommended?

summerlight · 4 years ago

That's not really meaningful unless you can change the trolling dynamic as whole, which needs a platform level change.

notriddle · 4 years ago

The problem with that is, as mentioned in other comments here, most of the people who hide likes/dislikes are just propaganda outlets and fragile jerks whose videos are crap. YouTube is a success because normally the system works.

But, unfortunately, the system doesn't always work, and when it fails, it's usually because you're being actively targeted and the system isn't doing anything to stop it. So you're stuck between "leave the like bar visible, and nobody watches my videos because state actors are using bots to dislike my videos" and "hide the like bar, and nobody watches my videos because most people who hide their like bar are asshats." Either way, nobody watches your videos, and it doesn't necessarily mean your videos suck.

In other words, nobody hides the like bar unless they are either being massively downvoted, or they expect to be massively downvoted. Which means that a hidden like bar might as well be 100% red.

summerlight · 4 years ago

As I stated in a follow up comment, this change explicitly targets the trolling dynamic as whole, not just giving individual some controls. Most creators (and trolls as well) don't even know that option exists, so that option alone doesn't do anything meaningful. As always, the default option is what really matters.

I personally suspect that this is a step toward removing the dislike button at all (which is an obvious way to eliminate this attack vector) but they're just not ready to remove the button due to some other factors.

Spivak · 4 years ago

I can understand the frustration about being affected by a change that feels like "punishing the class" but sometimes there aren't really any better options. The problem is that the existence of a button that hurts the creator means that there is a natural incentive for people to weaponize it as such. Every forum has had to come up with a solution to brigading and review bombing are there are really only two answers -- identify and police downvote brigades and review bombs or eliminate downvotes altogether.

The forces that push a platform to the latter is there being a constant stream of outrage when platforms identify a brigade and delete their votes to avoid poising the the data. It's easier to just change the system to eliminate the problem entirely. This isn't really an isolated incident, even in the tech space people have been rallying for "removing comment sections" because they've been a cesspool since their inception. YouTube is one of the last platforms to make this change.

gfodor · 4 years ago

What you’re seeing could be a sign that the audience of HN has changed, or it could be that what you are referring to as “conspiracy theories” aren’t that.

mike741 · 4 years ago

your comment amounts to name-calling and adds little to no value to the conversation in comparison to the comments you want censored.

freddie_mercury · 4 years ago

Next time you see someone talk about how high quality the discussion is at HN and how it isn't like the rest of the internet.... Just remember this thread.

astura · 4 years ago

Hacker News has been like this for a while now, maybe a little less than a year, and it's getting rapidly worse every day. I've found myself spending significantly less time here as a result, hacker news seems like it's not for me anymore.

krapp · 4 years ago

You're allowed to be batshit insane on Hacker News so long as you maintain a civil tone, and don't bore the mods (don't be crazy and repetitive - be a quirky new kind of crazy every time you rant about whatever triggers you.)

themacguffinman · 4 years ago

Vague vote counts is a mitigation against bots, it does not protect against human brigading which is what YouTube is trying to address here.

kevinh · 4 years ago

In theory? Yes. In practice? I'd be very surprised if there was any distinction at all.

iso8859-1 · 4 years ago

I have seen a lot of education videos having comments disabled, e.g. Oregon Programming Languages Summer School.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9dO_XBt0k8

I believe it is because they see themselves as 'above' YouTube. They don't take the risk of having a Emacs/Vim flame war in the comments and detracting from the points in the video. By disabling comments, the conversation is kept civil, because it isn't there.

They are not resourceful enough to curate a forum, so they prefer no forum at all.

sireat · 4 years ago

Usually that is a signal but not always.

Official Rammstein videos have comments disabled but for a different reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc would attract ugly comments from all extremes

erickhill · 4 years ago

Many young content creators have comments disabled (or by parental decree) so they don't have to experience intentionally hurtful or negative trolling some comment sections are well known in spawning.

ngngngng · 4 years ago

There are quite a few tame religious videos that attract a lot of trolls and turn the comments off.

orangeoxidation · 4 years ago

It's a signal that the creator does not want do engage in moderate / discussion on YouTube. There's perfectly valid reasons for that (e.g. topic is controversial, video is only for embedding or archiving on YouTube, there's no social media manager, the video is for kids). It is not a good signal for the video being not worth your time.

Otoh creators can delete comments. So the comments existing and being positive about a video is not a good signal for the video being good either.

Griffinsauce · 4 years ago

Sometimes but it often happens when a comment section gets brigaded as well.

Negative feedback is not always given in good faith.

Quekid5 · 4 years ago

You must not frequent the same subset of videos I watch.

The amount of trolling (or just outright stupidity, hard to tell sometimes) on e.g. CS conference videos or lectures by women is insane. I entirely understand that the organizations putting those videos up don't want to deal with that nonsense.

flyinghamster · 4 years ago

Or, the author doesn't want to bother with a brigade of trolls and spammers descending on it.

globular-toast · 4 years ago

Aren't the channel owners allowed to delete comments? So comments being enabled could mean it's a good video or it could mean the author is removing comments. You can't tell which it is.

aeternum · 4 years ago

I find it is an incredible indicator for low view-count videos. If dislikes are greater than likes it's a pretty good indicator you should just skip.

Seems like it'd be useful to hide the dislike count only after the video gets a certain number of likes.

gorwell · 4 years ago

I'm surprised you're getting downvoted. I thought HN was well aware of Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Maybe not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

See also Revolt of the Public, which explores the consequences of the internet breaking monopoly control over the flow of information. As you point out, it's the alternative channel that gave rise to unauthorized voices. What we're seeing play out is a fight between the dissenting public and the ruling elites. Removing dislikes is just the latest in a series of moves to reassert control over information.

https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millen...

varenc · 4 years ago

Notably, HN does this too for the YC company job ads shown on the HN front page. Allowing users to comment on your job ad will inevitably lead to negative content so HN disables it.

(Though compared to reddit ads, these job listing have a very light touch. And they’re just a free perk for YC companies)

farias0 · 4 years ago

Yes! I'm against this decision, but dislikes are so unreliable as indicators of propaganda that they might as well not be there. All they indicate is how the video was received by its audience (duh), and decent propaganda is designed to rig this game.

The only times I remember seeing a high dislike-to-like ratio are on things that went viral in the wrong circles, so internet decided to mass-downvote the for inconsequential reasons, like Rebecca Black's Friday or the announcement for some video game that isn't made to appeal to the "core gaming public".

pcwalton · 4 years ago

Exactly. Public opinion polls show that the COVID vaccine is widely accepted. Yet every COVID-related video on the front page has an 80% or more dislike ratio. Antivaxxers have hijacked the dislike tool to spread their propaganda, and the correct response is to take their toys away.

er4hn · 4 years ago

I think the problem is that the dislike count itself is too aggregated. What you really want is to know if people similar to yourself like / dislike certain content.

This is very similar to the problems where YouTube fits you into filter bubbles, and Netflix struggles to tell you good recommendations. TikTok supposedly does a better job then others at this, likely due to having lots of signals from short videos.

nebula8804 · 4 years ago

>The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.

We have this problem with movie reviews as well. I lost all faith in Rotten Tomatoes when I saw Knock Down the House's viewer ranking go from the upper 80s to single digits over the course of two years. As more and more people found out that AOC was a star in the film, the score went down. It is a great film in my opinion. I wrote a script to scrape the reviews and provide details about the reviewers. So many 1 star reviews were new accounts that had just rated this film + maybe the Ilhan Omar film. Furthermore most of them don't even explain why they rated it that way(we all probably know why). This led me to think, what else is being manipulated? Are studios just buying up good reviews?

Recently they have introduced "Verified Reviews". This attempts to link your Rotten Tomatoes account with the movie theater so you can get a Verified Review checkmark if they have confirmed that you actually bought a ticket to the movie. Users can then filter on Verified reviews. This is a good first step and will probably help to curb abuse.

datenarsch · 4 years ago

> Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate.

And who exactly are these nebulous people? This sounds like something O'Brien from 1984 would say about Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers.

coolso · 4 years ago

> How does the dislike button indicate propaganda?

Take the Gillette ad as a great example. No dislike button? Now the “lack of downvotes” can be used to indicate the normalization of such propaganda and imply people support the message.

spentu · 4 years ago

I have same way of estimating tutorials and similar content. There are quite many people posting videos without real understanding what they are teaching..

deadmutex · 4 years ago

Isn't the bar higher for NBC, ABC, CNN, FOX, etc?

I.e. If they say something false on purpose, they're likely to get sued out of existence. Whereas, some random guy can just say "oh, I was only joking, or this is just entertainment, or it's just freedom of speech man... YOU are responsible for checking my dis-info" after spreading lies on purpose.

Personally, for these reasons, I trust the mainstream news sources MUCH more than the random person on the internet that may or may not be trying to sell me some snakeoil on the side (e.g. Alex Jones).

Disclaimer: These are my own views, and not of my employer.

schleck8 · 4 years ago

Definitely true, I also noticed this with the BLM protests. There were almost no uncommented videos, all just tv recordings from the large channels. And the few uncommented videos I found were from news stations as well.

tomstockmail · 4 years ago

This only proves the point to remove the dislikes as clearly those are coordinated dislike attacks. The subject matter in that video doesn't even have anything worth liking or disliking; it was pretty standard stuff. The screenshot you show has the person shown disliking it - whomever took the screenshot has an agenda. And that Twitter account speaks for itself.

oliv__ · 4 years ago

Whose public health exactly? The people who have willingly chosen not to take the vaccine?

Or are you meaning we must "protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated"?

bequanna · 4 years ago

Ah, right. We must censor speech for the "greater good".

The underclass must not be allowed to organize or disseminate "dangerous" ideas.

saiya-jin · 4 years ago

Any good gained with this will be overshadowed by losing super important feedback from real users about negativity of the content. Kids videos, tutorials, whatever. How will you know you are getting the best result for your search instead of some search-optimized garbage that already lured tons of people before?

webinvest · 4 years ago

The public health of who exactly? The people who have refused to or chosen not to get vaccinated?

It’s like a seatbelt. You can require that everyone have access to one but you can’t require that everyone use one.

bequanna · 4 years ago

> Was it "politically motivated" then?

Absolutely. 2019 was only 2 years ago. YT's politics are the same now as they were then.

Also, "dislike mobs" are hardly a thing at all. Almost always a large number of dislikes on content like "rewind" videos expresses widespread genuine disapproval of content. In the rewind example, users likely found this content cringy and felt pandered to.