First it was the complete corporate takeover of their search algorithm in the last few years, now they're removing the final way that users can express displeasure from political organizations and content creators.
This is yet another nail in the coffin of Youtube, it's almost ready to go into the ground as Rumble and Odysee take off and Youtube slides into corporate/censorious irrelevance.
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.
Hmm. For me the dislike button was informative. If feels like they are trying to create a world where everything can only be good, better, even more better, which just doesn't represent reality.
Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.
I mostly agree with you, with the caveat of brigading being a very real thing that lowers the information value. But then why show upvotes either because positive brigading is just as damaging to the information as downvote brigades.
I don't even buy YouTube's claim that "brigading" or "dislike attacks" is a real thing or a problem. If they have a minimum number of minutes that a video needs to be watched before a vote is counted, then that vote is legitimate, full stop. YouTube are simply unhappy about which videos users dislike, whether it's the White House's videos, important brands, or YT's own videos.
Agreed. Sometimes you know within a couple of seconds that a video isn't what the title and thumbnail claims it is, and that's a great reason to hit "dislike".
For instance, an hour-long video claiming to be what you're looking for, but actually consisting of a still image and a URL to a scam/spam site.
> I don't even buy YouTube's claim that "brigading" or "dislike attacks" is a real thing or a problem. If they have a minimum number of minutes that a video needs to be watched before a vote is counted, then that vote is legitimate, full stop.
I've seen dislike attacks happen. And if it takes a non-trivial procedure to make them count, people will document that procedure. For instance, hypothetically:
"Alright everybody, here's the link. Remember, mute the tab right away but don't mute the video itself; wait 2 minutes (the timer that starts when you click the link will go green to let you know), then click the dislike button."
I've seen much more complex instructions offered as part of gaming a poll, as well as sites built to help semi-automate or simplify the process.
The key distinction that would be useful for YouTube to measure: did you encounter the video and then dislike it, or did you visit a video you were referred to for the sole purpose of disliking it? I don't think hiding dislike counts serves that purpose, though.
It's interesting data, but the obvious response from YouTube would be "we run sophisticated click fraud detection algorithms and periodically remove interactions determined to be from fraudulent accounts; given the current political climate White House videos attract more of these types of fraud than other videos on our platform and thus the effect is more pronounced on their videos". The numbers in question are small enough (~1k missing interactions) that it doesn't seem totally unreasonable.
It looks like the creator is counting any decrease in dislikes over time as manipulation, without a firm understanding of how large scale systems work.
Say for example I used a batch of 100 HN accounts to mass downvote your comment. After a while an hourly job runs that looks at all those votes in aggregate and determines they were coordinated (for simplicity sake they all came from the same IP) and removes them. You'd see a large shift in the net score of your comment all of the sudden. This isn't HN manipulating anything, it is them doing their job to prevent abuse on the platform.
Spikes don’t really mean anything. If a video ‘goes viral’ it will all of a sudden get a lot of responses. And sometimes those will all be bad if it’s a bad video or unpopular opinion. Interpreting that as bot voting or manipulation should have nothing to do with spikes.
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.
Steam has a useful chart which shows the votes/reviews over time with the ability to filter by language, purchase type, play time etc.
Youtube could implement something similar to help shine a light on brigading
The steam review graph is brilliant and an example of getting it right. YT seems to have succumbed to it's incumbent position in the market and has stopped innovating - it now seeks only to maintain the status quo and apparently thinks dislikes are a threat to that.
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.
You can't, however, determine if what upset the player base is "the game developer is a woman" or "the game developer is gay" or "a streamer with a toxic following got mad at the game".
It is low signal all the way through, and relegating likes and dislikes to a signal for recommendations is wise.
"Total War: Rome 2 has suffered a Steam review bombing run over women characters and a recent update - but it turns out the game is working as intended.
"Creative Assembly's PC strategy game, which came out in 2013, saw hundreds of new negative Steam reviews this week over the frequency with which women generals show up in the game and related claims about historical accuracy."
"The reason behind the Chinese users' anger is the inclusion of a symbol banned in their country. On the main street of the game's Haven Springs setting is a shop called Treasures of Tibet, which displays a Tibetan flag prominently outside the store."
Valve has come out on more than one occasion to let customers and studios know that they are constantly working to mitigate brigading.
EDIT: While not the norm, as you were alluding, gamer toxicity and brigading can also be relatively mainstream. A popular website among such circles is
Neither of the articles claim what you're claiming though ("game dev is a woman/gay", etc). What assumption have I made that you think is incorrect? I just made an observation that in my extensive history on the platform I've never encountered what you stated.
Really though, my main point I actually care about making is that the steam review system is far superior to a simple like/dislike system which YT implements.
At the bottom of your first article:
> Meanwhile, Total War: Rome 2 has an "overwhelmingly negative" recent reviews rating, with a "mostly positive" overall rating.
Ahh, so it seems the steam rating system is working! Even though these games got "brigaded", users are still able to see the overall and historical ratings to get a better picture of what's going on.
This actually lets you see the rating before the brigade started. And if the game is actually good, the brigaded ratings will amount to a blip amongst the other reviews. Case in point, here is the current steam page for R:TW2, with "very positive " overall rating: https://store.steampowered.com/app/214950/Total_War_ROME_II_...
"Neither of the articles claim what you're claiming though ("game dev is a woman/gay", etc). What assumption have I made that you think is incorrect? I just made an observation that in my extensive history on the platform I've never encountered what you stated."
-- Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean that it didn't happen. My personal experience of using steam since its inception (HL2 launch on Steam, 2004), so roughly 17 years, is that I've come across this on a more than a few occasions. I tend to collect digital goods in a hoarding method, so I'm up to over 3700+ games in my library and I check a lot of them out when I can, even if I have no time to really play them anymore. The firs thing I read?
REVIEWS!
As mentioned - this is not the norm, and I agree with your general premise, but please don't dismiss what actually happened and what I witnessed (no, I don't have screenshots because I wasn't documenting it happening in real time when it occurred). The examples I brought up were illustrative of some gamers' groupthink mentality (including oneangrygamer.net, which has in mid-2021 disabled comments because they were ridiculously toxic - misogynistic, sexist, homophobic and racist)
Also - I'm not OP, FYI. I was backing OP's point.
I can't be bothered to respond to the rest of your post, unfortunately, because it comes across as vapidly dismissive.
Look up GamerGate if you'd like more information on brigading and misogynistic groupthink among related sub-communities.
How many times can you get away with this before steam wises up? My guess is not many. They also have your CC. Makes it a pain for anyone but criminals to successfully brigade en-masse.
I don't want video game recommendations from someone that wants to sell me a video game, because they have a financial incentive to sell me a $60 game that I'll like instead of a $10 game that I'll love. No, I would much rather trust the opinions of people who have bought and played the game. I want to know if 99%, or 90%, or 65% of players gave it a good recommendation.
Long-time Netflix subscribers might be having déjà vu right now. Old Netflix had a ratings system, and users could filter content by average rating and see the top-rated movies and shows. Netflix later replaced that system with a recommendation engine. Not only does the recommendation engine not get my taste right, but it sure seems to recommend to me a lot of Netflix Originals.
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.
When is a thing merely a privilege, and not a right? Particularly when both can be conditional or qualified? I'm not sure this isn't playing a game of semantics--just because its called a privilege and not a right in the American context, does not mean that an argument that driving is not a right and merely a privilege.
Rights are restrictions people have placed on the government or has imposed on itself, as enumerated in say, a charter or constitution. These are not gifts from the government as list of things you can do, but a list of things they can’t do. Bestowed on birth, and infringed upon only when necessary as agreed upon by the people for reasons.
Privileges are features that may be taken for granted as rights but are not enumerated protections. You have no right to drive, it’s a privilege that we all agree is handy.
I don’t think you are playing with semantics, but this is not a difficult concept.
GP makes a completely baseless claim that you don’t have “full rights” until someone says you do. They are talking about privledges.
Parent said full rights. Some rights must be earned or granted after some time period. A society that immediately gave children the right to drive and carry handguns would likely not stay civilized for long.
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).
I also found it informative. If I see a clip explaining something that has a large number of dislikes, I immediately back out and look for another one. Most of the time, those dislikes are warranted.
I honestly don't know if it's a generational thing or overall cultural shift, but it feels like negativity (at least in the workplace is where I've seen this) is either less tolerated or less shared. There's a bias towards being positive about everything, even for things that aren't... great. It feels like self censorship, and this isn't even for things that are political, just subjective.
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.
Facebook said it lowered engagement iirc, same reason why they removed likes count on Instagram, it reduced engagement, people posted less if they feared being judged by the number of likes.
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.
A good intermediate solution would be to only record downvotes that come with a comment.
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.
If you see SO as community for developers these are all problems yes, however if you see it as a high quality wiki or KB, most of these issues are not problems for readers[1] . All knowledge repositories go through this problem, Wikipedia sites are equally notorious for making it very hard to contribute. As a KB grows older and larger, it becomes hard to balance the need to keep the current KB clean and enable creation of new content.
Typically administrators respond by making it harder for the contributors rather than taking risk of poorer quality for the users, to contribute you have to become effectively professional and abide by institutional rules you may not agree with. Distributed editing tools only solves part of the problem and cannot not solve how to keep generating professional quality content without paying.
Strong moderation is what differentiates SO from Quora, I rather live with SO style rules as a contributor than suffer poor Quora type content quality as a user.
[1] I am cognizant of outdated version problems you raised, my anecdotal experience is in general the quality of answers that are present for a reader has not dropped massively in last 10 years.
If you see SO as a high quality anything, I'm not sure what to say. It's filled with people answering the question they wish was asked instead of ignoring the question they're not satisfied with.
I don't know a platform today that has better content than SO for technical questions.
My code throughput have reduced a lot in recent years with changing roles and I prefer reading the actual documentation, I am no longer solving a immediate/specific problem. Even then I still click search hits on SO few times a week, and most times after clicking through a few questions I can find what I need.
Your(others) experience will vary from my mine of course, but I don't see anyone attempting a better model or better content short of source documentation .
Like Google their main competitor is their former selves.
As the mix of us who knew early versions of Google and Stack overflow gets diluted year by year by new users who don't know how well these systems used to work this will become less and less of a problem for them so they can sleep well at work.
Until someone disrupts them. I'm happy to say it feels we are getting close to that moment now ;-)
The best use of SO for me is:
- Write an elaborate question about an apparently unsolvable problem
- Realise the mistake while trying to explain it to the SO crowd
- Close the website
At some point I wanted to have a high score to see if it would affect my daily rate (it didn't) or if I could use it somehow (same as having tons of stars on GitHub - another useless errand).
I started replying to a bunch of questions and the sheer stupidity of most of them made me realise I wasn't ready for that. Most of the content on SO is not great. There are definitely few gems in there and I certainly enjoyed "the <center> cannot hold", but most of the times the docs are better.
On a side note. I never understood people that copy code from Stack Overflow. I can understand people who are not familiar with a programming language - but surely if you're a minimum proficient it would be faster to just write what you need to do or look for a library to do it?
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.
IMO it's perfectly acceptable to not only not downvote but to ignore a question or answer if you don't know/don't want to put in more effort to figure it out. Maybe someone else has faced the problem and understands how the questioner came to write the question they did?
Many times it is not hard to figure out why the question was written in a bad way. Spending time in the review queue can give a good sense on bad types of content that are typical on the site.
Common issues I come across are very vague statements without an actual question, very broad advisory /opinionated questions, very specific solve this bug in my day job/code , no examples/illustrations added, or a big log or code dump - i.e. no effort to separate out the actual problem statement, do my homework kind of questions, typically there will already be comments asking for improvements without much impact.
I wouldn't down-vote a question that I don't fully understand ( I guess that is true for most users too), at the same time I want to make sure bad content is not encouraged. It is just internet points for both users, nothing to fret about.
>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.
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.
Downvotes on Stack Overflow/Exchange require users to meet a reputation threshold (much like HN) and each downvote removes 1 reputation from the user that gives the downvote.
Dislikes on YouTube and similar platforms don't have any cost or barrier to entry.
And the point of the comment above yours is that public voting systems are easily manipulated and you should always take them with a grain of salt. most people can't or don't know how to do that.
Everyone can see the count on Stack Overflow, but there are several mechanisms in place to protect that count from all sorts of abuse (bots, tactical voting, second accounts etc.).
The same is simply not true of YouTube or any other kind of social media upvote/downvote system - anyone can sign up for an account, and their votes immediately count and have equal weighting.
The same is not true of Stack Exchange or HN, where you have to put a lot of effort in with a community to be able to downvote something.
> The same is simply not true of YouTube or any other kind of social media upvote/downvote system - anyone can sign up for an account, and their votes immediately count and have equal weighting.
I don't think this is true for YouTube - you need a Google account, and you can't create a Google account without verifying your phone number. (Unless you can create numerous accounts with one phone number? But that seems like an easy loophole to close.)
Google does let you create multiple accounts with a single phone number. There's legitimate reasons to have multiple email addresses. I have a handful of different ones that I use for different identities I have online.
I've argued against it in the past (since it's very important context to any reader) but to no avail. An upvote and a downvote rarely cancel each other out. They have different units and shouldn't be summed together. A score of 25 could mean the answer is perfect but has only seen moderate traffic, or incredibly dangerous but has seen high traffic.
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.
Same. It feels like a passive-aggressive elitism, and not simply an anti-abuse feature.
Given the site we're on, I don't have a problem as much with the elitism (I'm not the target demographic, after all -I'm older and not working in tech) as much as with the "passive-aggressive" part of the rhetoric behind withholding downvote capability.
It IS an anti-abuse / anti-sockpuppet feature. I can see why you think it is elitism since, in a way, it is. But I don't understand why you think it's "passive aggressive".
You should be able to downvote comments, since you have more than 501 karma. The analog for downvoting submissions is the "super downvote" of flagging (and in turn vouching), which requires 31 karma.
"Karma is meant to be spent" -which is a bit of a conundrum to me because I can't figure out how to "spend" karma without simply spamming every thread I see in hopes of getting up-votes (which I'm pretty sure is the opposite of what the karma system's intent is).
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.
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.
Yeah, and it seems like you'll still be able to flag videos on YouTube too. The change makes YouTube more like HN, which I personally feel is a good thing.
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.
> If feels like they are trying to create a world where everything can only be good, better, even more better, which just doesn't represent reality.
It's part of a trend towards fake, cloying, passive-aggressive forced positivity across the whole industry. It's a California thing.
Time was, if you didn't like a bit of code, you could say so. Nowadays, you have to wrap criticism in right zillion levels of disingenuous praise before you can even start getting to the point -- and the you get fake "thank you for the excellent feedback!!!!1!!" typed with gritted teeth and fantasies of backstabbing later on.
I've always found the in-your-face New York style more genuine, more honest, more efficient, and ultimately, kinder and more respectful.
Yup. If I'm watching a positive review of a [insert-object] I'm planning on buying and it has 10k likes visible while hiding 2k dislikes I'm probably going to get horribly misled.
While if it's a video of a political debate I would expect there to be a ton of dislikes by default, so I suppose it wouldn't matter much in that scenario.
And in howto/explanation-videos, if dislikes aren't shown, there's no signal for people telling them whether or not it's a good explanation.
I suppose you could devise a dislike count yourself by calculating the likes/views ratio. But why... people are deliberately putting their content up publicly for display and as such are opening themselves up for scrutiny/criticism/dislikes. It can't be all praise and hugs and kisses. That's how we treat children.
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.
> 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.
The problem with Youtube as I see it is that these comments never rise to the top. It's always compliments and ass-kissing and high-fives that make it there.
> The problem with Youtube as I see it is that these comments never rise to the top. It's always compliments and ass-kissing and high-fives that make it there.
That's because they have engineered their comment system in a way that comments the AI perceives as negative are shadow-banned or buried deep down so people don't get a chance to read them.
I really don't get this modern culture of positiveness, people cannot take a negative remark of any kind, kids should not play with anything that can hurt themselves, we are forbidden to say anything that can be interpreted in a negative way,...
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.
A loose remaining proxy will be the ratio of like count to view count. Perhaps one of those will be axed next. I don't understand why complaining creators don't just turn off voting.
I don't think you can just turn it off. You can hide both likes and dislikes and disable comments e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdvidv6RXJY but the buttons still function just without score.
Of course most creator's don't want to do what you say anyways. Like's help them, dislikes don't. Dislike counts are (well were) for users.
Feel like this is a necessary feature. A compromise would be to turn it off for ads but leave it on for everything else...I'm lost now, gonna be hard to quickly determine garbage from good insight.
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.
well this will be good for flat Earthers videos, they always end up with lots of dislikes :) now more people can fall for the countless bs on youtube based on the like count and no counter showing dissent....
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!
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
This isn’t about small content creators. It’s almost certainly about big brands (advertisers) that hate it when their high budget movie/game/trailer/whatever gets publicly downvoted.
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.
This could also be a pride thing for Youtube/Alphabet. For the past few years the Youtube Rewind video [0] has somewhat infamously gotten heavily downvoted, mostly I think as a reflection of how frustrated viewers are with Youtube and maybe Alphabet as well. I'm sure the executives feel some catharsis taking away an avenue for users to express that frustration.
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.
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×.
And now Susan is proving those downvotes were more than justified. It's not just that though, also all the left-wing stuff being downvoted is hurting feelings over at Google HQ. They desperately want to believe the public is overwhelmingly on their side.
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)
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.
I think my above question was just answered here. I think YouTube is more aligned with the cultural movement of "positive things only" and only with certain ideas, i.e. COVID vaccine. I think it is a smart business idea for them.
> I think YouTube is more aligned with the cultural movement of "positive things only" and only with certain ideas, i.e. COVID vaccine.
I don't think you can conclude that from the above. My point was that dislike ratios attacks basically abuse the feature that previously provided valuable signal to the user on whether the video was of good quality. Now, this removes the incentive for dislike ratio attacks to abuse this feature.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employer.
This post comes off as being sarcastic. Here is a question: are you OK with hate speech on social media? If yes, then I don't think we can agree on much. If no, then please re-read your statement and see how it applies to hate speech.
>"Here is a question: are you OK with hate speech on social media? If yes, then I don't think we can agree on much."
And now we circle back to the classic question, who determines what constitutes hate-speech and who is responsible for making the judgement? The kinds of people who end up as censors tend to be the most sensitive and the false-positive rate is very high. There is no shortage of partisan activists willing to indiscriminately label things as racist or hateful these days.
Additionally, what constitutes misinformation that costs lives? I remember back when claiming sanitizing surfaces did not reduce the spread of COVID was misinformation and grounds for a ban on social media platforms. Turns out, sanitizing surfaces really doesn't slow Covid at all. So much of what we know to be 'true' is actually in-flux and subject to change as more time and research goes on.
My point is, wanting to restrict hate-speech and misinformation is not a dangerous thing in and of itself, but it should be done with great caution and hesitancy because you run the risk of censoring true information and preventing people from expressing ideas that run against the orthodoxy of the censors. I hope that people don't view things as black and white as 'allow hate-speech, yes or no?'
> and health misinformation is costing a lot of lives today
Thats a pretty cynical view of humanity - should we ban motorcycles because they are costing peoples lives? What is so bad about letting people make their own choices?
> are you OK with hate speech on social media
I believe in "free speech".
For example, is it even possible for you to tell me an objective definition of "hate" speech or "misinformation"? I bet you can't since it ends up being whatever Alphabet, or Meta's truth and morality departments agree on.
Without ways to express yourself the internet will just turn into TV - where people who agree with the megacorps get to hear their own echos all day.
> Thats a pretty cynical view of humanity - should we ban motorcycles because they are costing peoples lives? What is so bad about letting people make their own choices?
Ridiculous analogy. We're talking about preventing the spread of a lethal contagious disease. If driving a motorcycle made everyone around them unsafe then it would be a valid comparison.
> driving a motorcycle made everyone around them unsafe
Not totally untrue
> We're talking about preventing the spread of a lethal contagious disease
Getting vaccinated doesn't stop the spread... if you believe everything you hear our government officials say then I have a war in Iraq and a truck-load of cloth masks to sell you.
Lets bring it back to that specific example someone brought up, which is vaccination. Do you think it a good thing, personally, for less people to be vaccinated?
Do you think censoring people would help encourage vaccines?
The key point here is the treatment of those opposing certain views as clearly stupid and in need of protecting is toxic and non-productive. Is Joe Rogan a mindless Trump-voting retard?
You're not going to reach people by silencing creators - you're just going to make their viewers feel prosecuted, angry, and confused. They'll just move to other platforms and probably vote for Trump again...
The way to reach them would be through dialog etc. which is getting more impossible by the day.
It was a simple question. Do you want less people to be vaccinated?
The other person suggested that less people might be vaccinated, and your response was to talk about "bad think", and "changes or influences others", where the specific topic is "changes or influences others" to cause less people to be vaccinated.
This implies that you, for some reason want less people to be vaccinated, and that it was a good thing to "changes or influences others", in such a way as less people get vaccinated.
> other person suggested that less people might be vaccinated
And I am suggesting more people might get vaccinated if they are treated as intelligent and allowed to engage in dialog instead of being shadow-banned and removed.
I am saying its a good thing that videos are allowed which encourage people to not get vaccinated or contain information about vaccines not coming from a news network, because the alternative (censorship) is barbaric and unhelpful.
But that would be bad if that happened right? If people got encouraged to not get vaccinated, that would be bad?
> is barbaric and unhelpful.
You think that it is barbaric that a dislike button is not available on one single platform? Because that is what the other comment was about. It was about the dislike button.
It was not about videos being removed en-mass. Instead it was about a dislike button, on one platform.
> If people got encouraged to not get vaccinated, that would be bad?
Yea of course, and thats my point. I think banning these videos and the ability to show discontent makes the problem worse and further divides us on political lines. What exactly is your argument here?
> You that that it is barbaric that a dislike button is not available on one platform?
The removal of the dislike button is another step in an undeniable trend toward censorship against anything mega corps and governments decide is not moral or truthful.
People can tell when they are being herded around and silenced, and they dislike it.
Great, so then you would agree then, if someone's "opinions especially if it changes or influences others." caused other people to not get vaccinated, that that would be very bad, and that it would be a good idea to make sure this person is less successful, in their ability to influence others to do that.
No. I would not agree with that. I am opposed to limiting peoples' "ability to influence". People need to have a voice and debates and discussion need to be allowed to happen.
Otherwise you are not changing people's minds, you are simply making their voices disappear from your computer screen.
Is it a good thing that an average person is getting fewer and fewer ways to participate in the exchange of ideas? Has this ever worked well in history where less speech was enabled was actually progress?
Is the future of humanity only that corporate-approved ideas and protests are allowed in the public square? Could this ever backfire in the future?
An average person might get their speech silenced when they get some fact wrong. Does the mass media suffer that same fate when they get something wrong? What are the consequences of effectively creating unequal classes of people?
Just a few random questions and thoughts that this line of thinking leads to, in my opinion.
In this thread, a number of posts seem to be some people hyperventilating at the thought of "hate speech" and "misinformation" being allowed on the Internet.
Short of building a time machine and going back and heeding Senator McCarthy's warning, the solutions are very simple in my opinion.
1) Really teach people that words have no power over you unless you let them.
> Sticks and stones may break my bones
> But words shall never hurt me.
Internalize this and voila: any "hate speech" that exists is de facto powerless to harm you.
Society has unfortunately taken the opposite approach and acts as if the existence of hate is harmful by itself and magnifies it to an extreme.
2) Teach people that everything you read online should be considered fake news until you verify it.
Voila. You're immune to fake news, medical misinformation, authoritarian government propaganda, and anything else that's not real.
Society has unfortunately taken the opposite approach and wants to have the political establishment "fact check" and decide what's true for you.
Whitehouse youtube also had an embarrassing number of dislikes.
Dislike is incredibly useful to the user. Seeing a high dislike count on video (with some exceptions) indicates a video is likely not what it purports to be.
Yup. I guess I'll use Youtube less, then. The downvote ratio contains so much information as to what video is garbage.
Less than 80% approval -> I don't watch.
I use a Ratings Preview chrome extension to show me the downvotes next to the thumbnails, and it will be rendered useless. I guess I'll just stop getting into Youtube rabbitholes now.
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.
This feels like one of those changes where they already decided to do it and used an experiment to justify their decision. The binary choice between showing only raw dislikes or no dislikes as well tilts the table towards an extreme change.
There's lots of interesting design choices they could have made of not encouraging dislike storms while still giving valuable info to viewers like highlighting if any video has an unusually high dislike to like ratio or attaching comments to dislikes and highlighting highly upvoted reasons why certain people are choosing to dislike a video etc.
I can't help but think that this is just corporate bullshit.
Purely rationally speaking, I think whether or not a dislike amount is shown or not is not gonna be impactful for the things YouTube should optimize to become a better software product and company.
In order to battle fake news, misinformation and fostering a happy and global community, much more fundamental changes are appropriate. But those are inherently incompatible with the liquidity model Youtube/Google/Alphabet have chosen: Increasing shareholder value & profit.
I feel they should do the same with the Like button. There is cognitive bias towards crowd approval/disapproval. But they aren't likely to implement that since it would cut revenue from the "we'll I'll watch this suggestion since 100K people liked it" group. Where removing the Dislike just works in their favor.
This Trump rally from The Hill, where he tells his followers to get the vaccine that he got, garnered 1.5k likes and 1.3k dislikes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huQdxDnQkac
Here a Fox affiliate covers a recent Trump rally, but it has 10 times more likes vs dislikes! Didn't anyone tell them about the grand Youtube conspiracy?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi4niom7se8
Yes we should totally take google at their word when they say it's not politically motivated.
They can say whatever reasoning they want, that does not necessarily make it true. Google has a well defined history of lying publicly or hiding the things they do. Dragonfly, PRISM... These things take brave whistle blowers that have their lives ruined to reveal.
If I said, "I am going to eat this fried twinkie because it is for my health" would you take that as a factual statement (that twinkies are healthy) just because some PR department repeated it on my behalf? Google saying they are not doing this on behalf of the current administration means nothing. Nobody reasonable expect them to really be honest with the public/users anymore.
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.
It's just blind speculation. There is absolutely no historical precedent of Big Tech corporations implementing censorship controls at the behest of governments. Anyone claiming otherwise is spreading misinformation and should be censored.
>Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration. [...] The government and Google shared engineers, lawyers, scientists, communications specialists, executives, and even board members. Google has achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government: a true public-private partnership. [0]
>MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, I would say first, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that [The White House is] in regular touch with social media platforms — just like we’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets — about areas where we have concern [1]
>So it is possible YouTube removed dislikes it deemed "spam" from videos posted by the White House account, including the Jan. 20 press briefing video. But there is no evidence YouTube deliberately removed authentic dislikes from the video to support the Biden administration or silence critics. [2]
That is speculation, not circumstantial evidence. Thank you for providing sources that say "there is no evidence YouTube deliberately removed authentic dislikes."
You have to make reasonable inferences when evaluating the potential for collusion between what are arguably the two most powerful entities in the world.
Government already admitted to pointing Facebook to accounts to be deplatformed. Government and social media collusion is now best assumed to be going on. All that matters now is how much the companies are incentivized to push back. The answer: not much.
If this change happened or not due to such collusion is secondary to the thing worth noting: it would not be surprising if it did, it would be consistent with the governments positioning if it did, and it would also be hard to prove if it did, and if it was proven it would be vociferously defended by legions of commentators and the media. All that would need to happen was for the government to suggest the downvotes on pro-vax vids were contributing to deaths and ergo liability, and suggest the whole feature serves as a mechanism for disinformation they may be liable for in general, perhaps criminally so if the feature can be traced back as a proximate cause of something like the capital riot. Poof.
Wait, so should platforms do nothing against creators that are brigaded and review bombed?
A video being organically downvoted to oblivion is way different than a bunch of users organizing on 4chan, Reddit, or being directed by their favorite parasocial media personality to go bomb a video/product.
If I was YT I wouldn't want to bother policing this crap and just take away all the incentive to do it in the first place.
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.
I can’t say I’ve checked but I’d have assumed every partisan political video gets a tonne of downvotes. I assume you’re referring to some sort of recent organised thing though?
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.
or perhaps its merely co-incidental but because some people/activists are always so thirsty about politics _any_ event can be correlated to their political lens.
Most pro-vaccine videos are also massively disliked on YouTube, despite the fact that the vast majority of people support vaccines.
I'm guessing you're a conservative, and you don't want dislikes to go away because you think it's great that pro-democrat videos get downvoted, but you can't base real public opinion on YouTube dislikes. It's massively astroturfed
Well the country clicked over to greater than 50% of people with at least one dose on May 25, 2021 so it seems like the majority did support vaccination before the mandates.
You're living in a bubble if you think that people only support vaccines because of Mandates. Even in America, which is one of the more vaccine hesitant countries, the majority of adults got the vaccine long before any mandates were introduced
I personally think this should only apply in specific circumstances, such as smaller creators or creators likely to be targeted by harassment (e.g. women, racial minorities, openly LGBT, etc). However, I can also imagine a counterargument that hiding dislikes here would be considered some kind of indicator that a person is worth harassing for lols. I'm not sure exactly how to balance that.
I am very ambivalent about this decision. I have saved multiple hours just by watching ratio of like and dislikes. At least show us the ratio and better hide the like count too. (but we know they wont hide like count because they want to keep user engaged to earn more advertising $$$)
Just to appease few creator taking away the functionality just seem abysmal to me.
I'm not even ambivalent. It is clearly hostile toward the viewers, but helps content creators (or some content creators).
Google is an ad-supported company. They are there to sell you soap, and have no more morality than P&G or Walmart. Their slogan might as well be "Evil for a buck".
> We’ve also heard directly from smaller creators, and those just getting started with their YouTube channel, that they are unfairly targeted by dislike attacks.
ah yes, google looking out for the little folks...
someday, a technical solution like not allowing downvotes until a channel gets so many views or subscribers may be feasible, but until then, this will have to suffice
Statistically speaking there are much more small creators than large ones, so "we heard directly from smaller creators" can be used in every situation!
Reminds me of when Garth Brooks was pushing for laws that would ban the resale of CDs. After receiving a lot of criticism, he said it wasn't to protect his album sales but to keep struggling artists with a small number of CD sales from having to compete with used CD stores. Of course the odds that any given used CD store would have your favorite obscure band's CD were quite low but they were guaranteed to have all of the Garth Brooks CDs.
Which is bullshit - the reason they're removing it is _BRANDS_ that are sick of having their poorly thought out, poorly produced, cynical cash-grab trailers be disliked.
Probably told Susan that they'd stop advertising and start suing unless they did this.
It’s not clear from the article, and the linked manage your recommendations page, if and how dislikes affect the recommendation algorithm.
I want the dislike button to send a negative signal to the recommendation algorithm, but it seems to act more like an elevator door close placebo button. [0]
What about cases where the dislikes are against a gov figure and the count gives you confidence in numbers. Plus now authoritarian governments get to serve out even more propaganda talking about videos that are liked and the opposition has no way to see that the opposite also happens.
So the opposition grows even more silent. Afraid to act because it might lead to negative repercussions and there is no scale of the dislike for a propaganda piece.
Not to be conspiratorial but after Facebook's reaction to propaganda from certain parties in countries that are not America. It feels like Youtube is bowing to pressure but hiding it behind a "helping small creator" facade.
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.
"And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced — its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing."
> Plus now authoritarian governments get to serve out even more propaganda talking about videos that are liked and the opposition has no way to see that the opposite also happens.
Well, yes, that is their agenda. The web as it was was not nearly as friendly for those with money and power.
Now, authoritarian governments and scumbag celebrities will project power over us, just like in the real world.
There are secret whitelists so that influencers like Logan Paul can fully monetize commuting crimes on YouTube (like desecrating a corpse)[2].
Celebrities are permitted to engage in targeted harassment or fraud, and people that call them out are banned.[1]
And of course, governments can engage in all sorts of war crimes, and big tech will censor anyone that tries blowing the whistle[3].
Facebook is happy to censor anything for dictators, but perhaps they will soon go the extra mile and just report people directly to the secret police. They could have a nice dashboard that shows up for local death squads of anyone that questions the leader.
And frankly, this is the future most of us welcomed. We defended all of this because muh private platforms. We consented to letting these big tech platforms set the rules. We welcomed anyone with an incongruent opinion banned.
The internet used to be a domain where scumbag fatcats didn't control everything, and you had some chance of speaking truth to power.
It will only get worse. Find out Dupont is dumping toxic waste in your back yard? Just a word from their PR dept and all of your accounts will be banned. Think you can speak directly to the people? Your domain name will be seized, your Cloudflare account closed, and any app permitted on peoples devices will have to ban you if they don't want to be removed.
actually, facebook would rather not censor. they have to do so because Google and Apple makes them. if both of those companies ban facebook ap, FB is gone, completely. if just 1 of the two ban fb, facebook is barely alive.
If an opposition needs google videos dislike buttons to exist, it's already too late and already too silent.
What they can do is make opposition videos and get their own support, it'll be just as useless but it wont be brigaded visibly by the massive dictatorial support.
Whenever rich powerful people or companies says "Helping Small Creators", "Investing millions in small business", "Helping Small Companies", "Donate to support this cause" its almost a sign that something is shady. By removing the like count user will probably not engage that much which means loss of revue through adverts. However if they remove dislikes there is high probability of engagement because you don't know if the video is bad.
And this feature is not even required AFAIK. Creators can simply disable like & dislike if they think they are being targeted.
I wonder if they tried a different alternative where anyone can upvote, but only content creators with certain karma (say, 501 upvotes) are allowed to downvote. Some news sites do this and I wonder if things worked out better this way.
Marvel movies aren't generating the buzz they once were, and Disney is an important YouTube partner that has earnings expectations to met, so... gotta do something about the "review bombing from bigots".
The overwhelming sentiment to the decision here is negative, but I don't quite understand that reaction.
If YouTube was just looking out for big brands and/or advertisers, they could have restricted the change incredibly simply. By making it a global change they're saying "ok now we understand how our UI actually led to some pretty bad outcomes in ways we failed to anticipate, and we're fixing that".
It’s because they aren’t objectively bad outcomes. For the content creators it may be bad. But if the content creator is creating, say, authoritarian propaganda, the outcome for the audience is good when the dislike count goes through the roof and helps spread the message that whatever has been published is being rejected by the audience.
* clickbait headline videos that don't deliver - ie, content in thumbnail never shows
* obviously some political content has been getting dislikes which is embarrassing and risks govt coming after them. Trump threatened this and dems are also now making noise here, so these platforms are vulnerable.
* Dislikes were pretty rare, usually in my case I had to be really annoyed at something to dislike it. I didn't mind scams that were properly described, but some stuff is annoying because it's a bait and switch.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 425 ms ] threadThis is yet another nail in the coffin of Youtube, it's almost ready to go into the ground as Rumble and Odysee take off and Youtube slides into corporate/censorious irrelevance.
Imagine Stack Overflow only having the option to upvote Questions and Answers. The ratio of likes vs dislikes of a TED talk does help me to decide if I should stop watching a video which just isn't getting better.
I think that unintentionally removes down votes on obviously bad videos that people do not waste much time watching.
For instance, an hour-long video claiming to be what you're looking for, but actually consisting of a still image and a URL to a scam/spam site.
I've seen dislike attacks happen. And if it takes a non-trivial procedure to make them count, people will document that procedure. For instance, hypothetically:
"Alright everybody, here's the link. Remember, mute the tab right away but don't mute the video itself; wait 2 minutes (the timer that starts when you click the link will go green to let you know), then click the dislike button."
I've seen much more complex instructions offered as part of gaming a poll, as well as sites built to help semi-automate or simplify the process.
The key distinction that would be useful for YouTube to measure: did you encounter the video and then dislike it, or did you visit a video you were referred to for the sole purpose of disliking it? I don't think hiding dislike counts serves that purpose, though.
[1]: https://81m.org/
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20211023061808/https://81m.org/
Say for example I used a batch of 100 HN accounts to mass downvote your comment. After a while an hourly job runs that looks at all those votes in aggregate and determines they were coordinated (for simplicity sake they all came from the same IP) and removes them. You'd see a large shift in the net score of your comment all of the sudden. This isn't HN manipulating anything, it is them doing their job to prevent abuse on the platform.
Or, you know, some of those votes are fraudulent (bots, dupe accounts, tactical voting, etc) and they're being removed?
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.
It is low signal all the way through, and relegating likes and dislikes to a signal for recommendations is wise.
The steam review graph is a fantastically useful tool for users with a huge SNR and I don't understand why you think otherwise.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-09-25-total-war-rome...
"Total War: Rome 2 has suffered a Steam review bombing run over women characters and a recent update - but it turns out the game is working as intended.
"Creative Assembly's PC strategy game, which came out in 2013, saw hundreds of new negative Steam reviews this week over the frequency with which women generals show up in the game and related claims about historical accuracy."
and another one:
https://www.techspot.com/news/91212-life-strange-true-colors...
"The reason behind the Chinese users' anger is the inclusion of a symbol banned in their country. On the main street of the game's Haven Springs setting is a shop called Treasures of Tibet, which displays a Tibetan flag prominently outside the store."
Valve has come out on more than one occasion to let customers and studios know that they are constantly working to mitigate brigading.
EDIT: While not the norm, as you were alluding, gamer toxicity and brigading can also be relatively mainstream. A popular website among such circles is
https://www.oneangrygamer.net/
Reading the posts and comments can be quite revolting.
Really though, my main point I actually care about making is that the steam review system is far superior to a simple like/dislike system which YT implements.
At the bottom of your first article:
> Meanwhile, Total War: Rome 2 has an "overwhelmingly negative" recent reviews rating, with a "mostly positive" overall rating.
Ahh, so it seems the steam rating system is working! Even though these games got "brigaded", users are still able to see the overall and historical ratings to get a better picture of what's going on.
This actually lets you see the rating before the brigade started. And if the game is actually good, the brigaded ratings will amount to a blip amongst the other reviews. Case in point, here is the current steam page for R:TW2, with "very positive " overall rating: https://store.steampowered.com/app/214950/Total_War_ROME_II_...
-- Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean that it didn't happen. My personal experience of using steam since its inception (HL2 launch on Steam, 2004), so roughly 17 years, is that I've come across this on a more than a few occasions. I tend to collect digital goods in a hoarding method, so I'm up to over 3700+ games in my library and I check a lot of them out when I can, even if I have no time to really play them anymore. The firs thing I read?
REVIEWS!
As mentioned - this is not the norm, and I agree with your general premise, but please don't dismiss what actually happened and what I witnessed (no, I don't have screenshots because I wasn't documenting it happening in real time when it occurred). The examples I brought up were illustrative of some gamers' groupthink mentality (including oneangrygamer.net, which has in mid-2021 disabled comments because they were ridiculously toxic - misogynistic, sexist, homophobic and racist)
Also - I'm not OP, FYI. I was backing OP's point.
I can't be bothered to respond to the rest of your post, unfortunately, because it comes across as vapidly dismissive.
Look up GamerGate if you'd like more information on brigading and misogynistic groupthink among related sub-communities.
What you are thinking of is metacritic where anyone can post, it is very prone to brigading, but steam reviews isn't.
Long-time Netflix subscribers might be having déjà vu right now. Old Netflix had a ratings system, and users could filter content by average rating and see the top-rated movies and shows. Netflix later replaced that system with a recommendation engine. Not only does the recommendation engine not get my taste right, but it sure seems to recommend to me a lot of Netflix Originals.
That’s literally not the case anywhere though. Maybe China’s social credit system, maybe, but even then I think you start with a presumed “innocence”.
I can’t think of any system of rights that are afforded after evidence merit and not birth. That’s not what rights are.
Not going to ask you what full rights means, as it implies you consider rights a gift from a government and not restrictions on a government.
Privileges are features that may be taken for granted as rights but are not enumerated protections. You have no right to drive, it’s a privilege that we all agree is handy.
I don’t think you are playing with semantics, but this is not a difficult concept.
GP makes a completely baseless claim that you don’t have “full rights” until someone says you do. They are talking about privledges.
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).
I honestly don't know if it's a generational thing or overall cultural shift, but it feels like negativity (at least in the workplace is where I've seen this) is either less tolerated or less shared. There's a bias towards being positive about everything, even for things that aren't... great. It feels like self censorship, and this isn't even for things that are political, just subjective.
Hiding dislikes is something Brands want.
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.
I constantly got heavily downvoted slideshow + text-to-speech autogenerated garbage videos that were ranked above good videos on search results
A good intermediate solution would be to only record downvotes that come with a comment.
Typically administrators respond by making it harder for the contributors rather than taking risk of poorer quality for the users, to contribute you have to become effectively professional and abide by institutional rules you may not agree with. Distributed editing tools only solves part of the problem and cannot not solve how to keep generating professional quality content without paying.
Strong moderation is what differentiates SO from Quora, I rather live with SO style rules as a contributor than suffer poor Quora type content quality as a user.
[1] I am cognizant of outdated version problems you raised, my anecdotal experience is in general the quality of answers that are present for a reader has not dropped massively in last 10 years.
My code throughput have reduced a lot in recent years with changing roles and I prefer reading the actual documentation, I am no longer solving a immediate/specific problem. Even then I still click search hits on SO few times a week, and most times after clicking through a few questions I can find what I need.
Your(others) experience will vary from my mine of course, but I don't see anyone attempting a better model or better content short of source documentation .
As the mix of us who knew early versions of Google and Stack overflow gets diluted year by year by new users who don't know how well these systems used to work this will become less and less of a problem for them so they can sleep well at work.
Until someone disrupts them. I'm happy to say it feels we are getting close to that moment now ;-)
At some point I wanted to have a high score to see if it would affect my daily rate (it didn't) or if I could use it somehow (same as having tons of stars on GitHub - another useless errand).
I started replying to a bunch of questions and the sheer stupidity of most of them made me realise I wasn't ready for that. Most of the content on SO is not great. There are definitely few gems in there and I certainly enjoyed "the <center> cannot hold", but most of the times the docs are better.
On a side note. I never understood people that copy code from Stack Overflow. I can understand people who are not familiar with a programming language - but surely if you're a minimum proficient it would be faster to just write what you need to do or look for a library to do it?
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.
Common issues I come across are very vague statements without an actual question, very broad advisory /opinionated questions, very specific solve this bug in my day job/code , no examples/illustrations added, or a big log or code dump - i.e. no effort to separate out the actual problem statement, do my homework kind of questions, typically there will already be comments asking for improvements without much impact.
I wouldn't down-vote a question that I don't fully understand ( I guess that is true for most users too), at the same time I want to make sure bad content is not encouraged. It is just internet points for both users, nothing to fret about.
and way more spam, no thanks.
You as a user should watch the video no matter what and then rate the creator, not skip it if you see a large amount of dislikes.
Dislikes on YouTube and similar platforms don't have any cost or barrier to entry.
The same is simply not true of YouTube or any other kind of social media upvote/downvote system - anyone can sign up for an account, and their votes immediately count and have equal weighting.
The same is not true of Stack Exchange or HN, where you have to put a lot of effort in with a community to be able to downvote something.
I don't think this is true for YouTube - you need a Google account, and you can't create a Google account without verifying your phone number. (Unless you can create numerous accounts with one phone number? But that seems like an easy loophole to close.)
I've argued against it in the past (since it's very important context to any reader) but to no avail. An upvote and a downvote rarely cancel each other out. They have different units and shouldn't be summed together. A score of 25 could mean the answer is perfect but has only seen moderate traffic, or incredibly dangerous but has seen high traffic.
Here's a good list of controversial answers on SO: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/466/most-.... They would mostly look like great answers from the net score.
What downsides?
Why can't we just say we don't like what we don't like?
Stories can only be flagged, which as I understand can lead to bans/losing the privilege if it's abused.
Same. It feels like a passive-aggressive elitism, and not simply an anti-abuse feature.
Given the site we're on, I don't have a problem as much with the elitism (I'm not the target demographic, after all -I'm older and not working in tech) as much as with the "passive-aggressive" part of the rhetoric behind withholding downvote capability.
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.
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.
It's part of a trend towards fake, cloying, passive-aggressive forced positivity across the whole industry. It's a California thing.
Time was, if you didn't like a bit of code, you could say so. Nowadays, you have to wrap criticism in right zillion levels of disingenuous praise before you can even start getting to the point -- and the you get fake "thank you for the excellent feedback!!!!1!!" typed with gritted teeth and fantasies of backstabbing later on.
I've always found the in-your-face New York style more genuine, more honest, more efficient, and ultimately, kinder and more respectful.
While if it's a video of a political debate I would expect there to be a ton of dislikes by default, so I suppose it wouldn't matter much in that scenario.
And in howto/explanation-videos, if dislikes aren't shown, there's no signal for people telling them whether or not it's a good explanation.
I suppose you could devise a dislike count yourself by calculating the likes/views ratio. But why... people are deliberately putting their content up publicly for display and as such are opening themselves up for scrutiny/criticism/dislikes. It can't be all praise and hugs and kisses. That's how we treat children.
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.
The problem with Youtube as I see it is that these comments never rise to the top. It's always compliments and ass-kissing and high-fives that make it there.
Twitter tends to gravitate towards the opposite.
It's all fascinating though.
That's because they have engineered their comment system in a way that comments the AI perceives as negative are shadow-banned or buried deep down so people don't get a chance to read them.
In the 90's there was an add-on that allowed anyone to comment on any webpage: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~orit/utok.html
Although imagine having such a tool nowadays and opening cnn.com, it'd be like walking into a MAGA rally.
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.
There is a red line between caring for the others, and what is nothing more than plain censorship via "toxic positivity".
If they actually believed in the rationale behind this change, they would get rid performance reviews for engineers at Youtube too.
Of course most creator's don't want to do what you say anyways. Like's help them, dislikes don't. Dislike counts are (well were) for users.
Which means my videos can finally stop being brigaded by those damn round earthers! Spread the truth!
"Hey, Reddit did this thing. We're a little like Reddit; should we do the thing?"
"I dunno... AB test it."
AB test shows net effect is fewer dislikes, much like Reddit saw
"Cool; let's roll it out."
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.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJOTdZBX1g
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDcvPf78g1k
Disclaimer: These views are entirely my own, and not of my employer.
I don't think you can conclude that from the above. My point was that dislike ratios attacks basically abuse the feature that previously provided valuable signal to the user on whether the video was of good quality. Now, this removes the incentive for dislike ratio attacks to abuse this feature.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employer.
We should hide the dislike count so the mindless don't submit to "bad think"
My point: There's always a balance, and health misinformation is costing a lot of lives today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MczumO5PHXg.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employer.
And now we circle back to the classic question, who determines what constitutes hate-speech and who is responsible for making the judgement? The kinds of people who end up as censors tend to be the most sensitive and the false-positive rate is very high. There is no shortage of partisan activists willing to indiscriminately label things as racist or hateful these days.
Additionally, what constitutes misinformation that costs lives? I remember back when claiming sanitizing surfaces did not reduce the spread of COVID was misinformation and grounds for a ban on social media platforms. Turns out, sanitizing surfaces really doesn't slow Covid at all. So much of what we know to be 'true' is actually in-flux and subject to change as more time and research goes on.
My point is, wanting to restrict hate-speech and misinformation is not a dangerous thing in and of itself, but it should be done with great caution and hesitancy because you run the risk of censoring true information and preventing people from expressing ideas that run against the orthodoxy of the censors. I hope that people don't view things as black and white as 'allow hate-speech, yes or no?'
Agree (This is my personal view, and not of my employers)
Indeed. It is.
> and health misinformation is costing a lot of lives today
Thats a pretty cynical view of humanity - should we ban motorcycles because they are costing peoples lives? What is so bad about letting people make their own choices?
> are you OK with hate speech on social media
I believe in "free speech".
For example, is it even possible for you to tell me an objective definition of "hate" speech or "misinformation"? I bet you can't since it ends up being whatever Alphabet, or Meta's truth and morality departments agree on.
Without ways to express yourself the internet will just turn into TV - where people who agree with the megacorps get to hear their own echos all day.
Ridiculous analogy. We're talking about preventing the spread of a lethal contagious disease. If driving a motorcycle made everyone around them unsafe then it would be a valid comparison.
Not totally untrue
> We're talking about preventing the spread of a lethal contagious disease
Getting vaccinated doesn't stop the spread... if you believe everything you hear our government officials say then I have a war in Iraq and a truck-load of cloth masks to sell you.
Lets bring it back to that specific example someone brought up, which is vaccination. Do you think it a good thing, personally, for less people to be vaccinated?
The key point here is the treatment of those opposing certain views as clearly stupid and in need of protecting is toxic and non-productive. Is Joe Rogan a mindless Trump-voting retard?
You're not going to reach people by silencing creators - you're just going to make their viewers feel prosecuted, angry, and confused. They'll just move to other platforms and probably vote for Trump again...
The way to reach them would be through dialog etc. which is getting more impossible by the day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0PYlLQn_YM
The other person suggested that less people might be vaccinated, and your response was to talk about "bad think", and "changes or influences others", where the specific topic is "changes or influences others" to cause less people to be vaccinated.
This implies that you, for some reason want less people to be vaccinated, and that it was a good thing to "changes or influences others", in such a way as less people get vaccinated.
And I am suggesting more people might get vaccinated if they are treated as intelligent and allowed to engage in dialog instead of being shadow-banned and removed.
You previously suggested that it was be a good thing to "change or influences others" to not get vaccinated.
That is the statement that I am taking issue with. When you implied that it would be a good thing for less people to be vaccinated.
But that would be bad if that happened right? If people got encouraged to not get vaccinated, that would be bad?
> is barbaric and unhelpful.
You think that it is barbaric that a dislike button is not available on one single platform? Because that is what the other comment was about. It was about the dislike button.
It was not about videos being removed en-mass. Instead it was about a dislike button, on one platform.
Yea of course, and thats my point. I think banning these videos and the ability to show discontent makes the problem worse and further divides us on political lines. What exactly is your argument here?
> You that that it is barbaric that a dislike button is not available on one platform?
The removal of the dislike button is another step in an undeniable trend toward censorship against anything mega corps and governments decide is not moral or truthful.
People can tell when they are being herded around and silenced, and they dislike it.
Great, so then you would agree then, if someone's "opinions especially if it changes or influences others." caused other people to not get vaccinated, that that would be very bad, and that it would be a good idea to make sure this person is less successful, in their ability to influence others to do that.
Otherwise you are not changing people's minds, you are simply making their voices disappear from your computer screen.
Is the future of humanity only that corporate-approved ideas and protests are allowed in the public square? Could this ever backfire in the future?
An average person might get their speech silenced when they get some fact wrong. Does the mass media suffer that same fate when they get something wrong? What are the consequences of effectively creating unequal classes of people?
Just a few random questions and thoughts that this line of thinking leads to, in my opinion.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and not of my employer.
I think we can do better than letting free human discourse be controlled by a handful of megacorps and Susan Wojcicki.
Disclaimer: I don't need to repeat an annoying disclaimer in every post.
I would be open to hearing better ideas, please elaborate.
Short of building a time machine and going back and heeding Senator McCarthy's warning, the solutions are very simple in my opinion.
1) Really teach people that words have no power over you unless you let them.
> Sticks and stones may break my bones
> But words shall never hurt me.
Internalize this and voila: any "hate speech" that exists is de facto powerless to harm you.
Society has unfortunately taken the opposite approach and acts as if the existence of hate is harmful by itself and magnifies it to an extreme.
2) Teach people that everything you read online should be considered fake news until you verify it.
Voila. You're immune to fake news, medical misinformation, authoritarian government propaganda, and anything else that's not real.
Society has unfortunately taken the opposite approach and wants to have the political establishment "fact check" and decide what's true for you.
Dislike is incredibly useful to the user. Seeing a high dislike count on video (with some exceptions) indicates a video is likely not what it purports to be.
Less than 80% approval -> I don't watch.
I use a Ratings Preview chrome extension to show me the downvotes next to the thumbnails, and it will be rendered useless. I guess I'll just stop getting into Youtube rabbitholes now.
Maybe it is a blessing in disguise.
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.
There's lots of interesting design choices they could have made of not encouraging dislike storms while still giving valuable info to viewers like highlighting if any video has an unusually high dislike to like ratio or attaching comments to dislikes and highlighting highly upvoted reasons why certain people are choosing to dislike a video etc.
Purely rationally speaking, I think whether or not a dislike amount is shown or not is not gonna be impactful for the things YouTube should optimize to become a better software product and company.
In order to battle fake news, misinformation and fostering a happy and global community, much more fundamental changes are appropriate. But those are inherently incompatible with the liquidity model Youtube/Google/Alphabet have chosen: Increasing shareholder value & profit.
This Trump rally from The Hill, where he tells his followers to get the vaccine that he got, garnered 1.5k likes and 1.3k dislikes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huQdxDnQkac
Here Trump hints at a 2024 run on the Today show, but it has more likes than dislikes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU7MWvwTOzw
Here a Fox affiliate covers a recent Trump rally, but it has 10 times more likes vs dislikes! Didn't anyone tell them about the grand Youtube conspiracy?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi4niom7se8
Does that fit your narrative or no?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcRVR63dnDA
And this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tYl5C9PufY
...but the recent video of Biden getting sworn in has more likes than dislikes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2305DGsceE
He's been president for nearly a year. Youtube is really bad at this conspiracy stuff I guess.
Do you think anybody below the VP level of YouTube would be told? Guess what, no google employee talked about PRISM either.
They can say whatever reasoning they want, that does not necessarily make it true. Google has a well defined history of lying publicly or hiding the things they do. Dragonfly, PRISM... These things take brave whistle blowers that have their lives ruined to reveal.
If I said, "I am going to eat this fried twinkie because it is for my health" would you take that as a factual statement (that twinkies are healthy) just because some PR department repeated it on my behalf? Google saying they are not doing this on behalf of the current administration means nothing. Nobody reasonable expect them to really be honest with the public/users anymore.
Now they are giving up and just hiding them now.
Here's evidence that the videos are subject to organized brigades: https://libredd.it/r/Conservative/comments/l2d9ma/youtube_de...
>Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration. [...] The government and Google shared engineers, lawyers, scientists, communications specialists, executives, and even board members. Google has achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government: a true public-private partnership. [0]
>MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, I would say first, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that [The White House is] in regular touch with social media platforms — just like we’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets — about areas where we have concern [1]
>So it is possible YouTube removed dislikes it deemed "spam" from videos posted by the White House account, including the Jan. 20 press briefing video. But there is no evidence YouTube deliberately removed authentic dislikes from the video to support the Biden administration or silence critics. [2]
[0] https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...
[2] https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jan/25/did-youtube-r...
If this change happened or not due to such collusion is secondary to the thing worth noting: it would not be surprising if it did, it would be consistent with the governments positioning if it did, and it would also be hard to prove if it did, and if it was proven it would be vociferously defended by legions of commentators and the media. All that would need to happen was for the government to suggest the downvotes on pro-vax vids were contributing to deaths and ergo liability, and suggest the whole feature serves as a mechanism for disinformation they may be liable for in general, perhaps criminally so if the feature can be traced back as a proximate cause of something like the capital riot. Poof.
> so if the feature can be traced back as a proximate cause of something like the capital [sic] riot
Then they would have removed OAN's video claiming Trump won the presidency, but they didn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4c5dYDD9xw
A video being organically downvoted to oblivion is way different than a bunch of users organizing on 4chan, Reddit, or being directed by their favorite parasocial media personality to go bomb a video/product.
If I was YT I wouldn't want to bother policing this crap and just take away all the incentive to do it in the first place.
Solid analysis backed up by data..
I was just wondering if there was any evidence that the government was involved in UI change. There isn't.
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.
I'm guessing you're a conservative, and you don't want dislikes to go away because you think it's great that pro-democrat videos get downvoted, but you can't base real public opinion on YouTube dislikes. It's massively astroturfed
You mean the vast majority support vaccines because they will lose their jobs if they don't "support" them?
Please stop. Most conservatives support vaccines. Your idea of conservatives has an insidious skew that's just plain wrong.
- https://youtu.be/98RNh7rwyf8 - https://youtu.be/M0lJc3PMNIg
Just to appease few creator taking away the functionality just seem abysmal to me.
Google is an ad-supported company. They are there to sell you soap, and have no more morality than P&G or Walmart. Their slogan might as well be "Evil for a buck".
ah yes, google looking out for the little folks...
someday, a technical solution like not allowing downvotes until a channel gets so many views or subscribers may be feasible, but until then, this will have to suffice
Probably told Susan that they'd stop advertising and start suing unless they did this.
I want the dislike button to send a negative signal to the recommendation algorithm, but it seems to act more like an elevator door close placebo button. [0]
[0] https://www.quora.com/Does-the-close-door-button-in-U-S-elev...
So the opposition grows even more silent. Afraid to act because it might lead to negative repercussions and there is no scale of the dislike for a propaganda piece.
Not to be conspiratorial but after Facebook's reaction to propaganda from certain parties in countries that are not America. It feels like Youtube is bowing to pressure but hiding it behind a "helping small creator" facade.
Well, yes, that is their agenda. The web as it was was not nearly as friendly for those with money and power.
Now, authoritarian governments and scumbag celebrities will project power over us, just like in the real world.
There are secret whitelists so that influencers like Logan Paul can fully monetize commuting crimes on YouTube (like desecrating a corpse)[2].
Celebrities are permitted to engage in targeted harassment or fraud, and people that call them out are banned.[1]
And of course, governments can engage in all sorts of war crimes, and big tech will censor anyone that tries blowing the whistle[3].
Facebook is happy to censor anything for dictators, but perhaps they will soon go the extra mile and just report people directly to the secret police. They could have a nice dashboard that shows up for local death squads of anyone that questions the leader.
And frankly, this is the future most of us welcomed. We defended all of this because muh private platforms. We consented to letting these big tech platforms set the rules. We welcomed anyone with an incongruent opinion banned.
The internet used to be a domain where scumbag fatcats didn't control everything, and you had some chance of speaking truth to power.
It will only get worse. Find out Dupont is dumping toxic waste in your back yard? Just a word from their PR dept and all of your accounts will be banned. Think you can speak directly to the people? Your domain name will be seized, your Cloudflare account closed, and any app permitted on peoples devices will have to ban you if they don't want to be removed.
[1]: https://www.aroged.com/2021/10/09/whitelisted-streamers-foun... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42538495 [3]: https://www.engadget.com/facebook-turkey-emails-200407588.ht...
What they can do is make opposition videos and get their own support, it'll be just as useless but it wont be brigaded visibly by the massive dictatorial support.
And this feature is not even required AFAIK. Creators can simply disable like & dislike if they think they are being targeted.
If YouTube was just looking out for big brands and/or advertisers, they could have restricted the change incredibly simply. By making it a global change they're saying "ok now we understand how our UI actually led to some pretty bad outcomes in ways we failed to anticipate, and we're fixing that".
* clickbait headline videos that don't deliver - ie, content in thumbnail never shows
* obviously some political content has been getting dislikes which is embarrassing and risks govt coming after them. Trump threatened this and dems are also now making noise here, so these platforms are vulnerable.
* Dislikes were pretty rare, usually in my case I had to be really annoyed at something to dislike it. I didn't mind scams that were properly described, but some stuff is annoying because it's a bait and switch.