YT also removes millions of likes/views, for example on K-pop videos which are fake-streamed by their "armies" of fans.
There are tutorials on the net on how to "ethically", "honestly" increase view counts on your favourite band, with stuff like no more than 1 watch every 20 minutes:
The article implies something nefarious going on here, but there are plenty of entirely rational innocent explanations. i.e. the videos are attracting a large quantity of spam dislikes, and YouTube is bulk-removing them.
> the videos are attracting a large quantity of spam dislikes
Prior to the bulk-removal the dislikes are tracking the views; the dislike growth curve is a close function of the view count curve. That is unlikely to happen if the dislikes are bulk spam.
We'll be told it's 'spam' or 'bots', and Youtube will rely on this as the plausible explanation should they bother to address it at all, but the inconvenient truth is that the most likely explanation for the dislikes is viewers. Otherwise one must posit a sophisticated spammer that is carefully tailoring their dislikes to camouflage their activity.
I suspect the only meaningful response we'll get is a throttling of the API used to do the analysis.
Probably bots, people who do nothing but dislike videos, Indian sweatshops that are human bot farms, dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes, etc.
One way I have seen this done in the past is that you have contest sites. As a user you gain x number of entries for every action you take. One of these actions can be to go in and like or dislike a video for example. Sometimes the sites can even check that the action was performed.
Someone wanting more entries might create lots of fake accounts.
I'm sure there are many other ways to do this but that is one example on how spam dislikes can be generated.
Other comments here have pointed out that the drop is likely due to a periodic cleaning of bot votes, against the blog author's premature, sarcastic insinuation that some nefarious manipulation is being performed at YT (there is, but it's not nefarious but to combat third-party manipulation that misleads the user and abuses the platform).
Perhaps it is also of note that the author performs a naive analysis of limited climate data in a linked post to draw a conclusion against climate change.
There's still like 10x the dislikes then the likes. So a pretty crappy conspiracy if it doesn't even get a positive like to dislike ratio. Or it's a whole bunch of bots/spam mixed in with legitimate dislikes.
For a while YouTube didn’t report the exact number of views, likes and dislikes. So someone viewing a video would only getting an approximate value for each or with a deliberate small +/- offset. Is it possible that’s what’s going on here?
I find it hard to believe YT is engaging in “manipulation” of a stat that frankly doesn’t really matter if you’re an account like the White House.
>> of a stat that frankly doesn’t really matter if you’re an account like the White House.
I don't agree. I think these numbers matter more than we realize. I believe that many politicians today are using Twitter/Youtube/Facebook likes as modern Gallup polls. Manipulation of the numbers could result in actual policy changes.
Say there is a video about net neutrality, or the breakup of the social media giants. I honestly think all sorts of people in government will be looking to the popularly, or lack thereof, as a gauge of public support for the content of the video. So, imho, manipulation of likes/dislikes is becoming very serious.
I think you are mistaken if you believe anyone in government cares about number of likes and dislikes on any YouTube videos and uses this to base their position on any given policy.
Even if they cared about traditional old-school polls you’d probably have Medicare for All, the USA would be completely out of Iraq and Afghanistan and you’d be able to buy Cannabis legally. I doubt they’d ignore the known popularity of these things but suddenly care about social media likes and dislikes.
Assuming sarcasm, that was my first thought as well. Although it's possible there is something nefarious going on, I assume the White House attracts a disproportionate number of bots and this could potentially be accounted for by purge of dislikes by bots.
As bad as it looks, it could be an automated attempt to protect the system from manipulation. As such, I find the author's conspiratorial tone somewhat unjustified. (For example, the comment about 1 am probably has little to do with doing it when people are unlikely to notice it and more to do when maintenance is done.)
It seems obvious there would be plenty of "legitimate" dislikes coming, as probably a lot of people who followed this YouTube channel in the past 4 years were Trump supporters, and now the channel features Biden. Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition.
> It seems obvious there would be plenty of "legitimate" dislikes coming, as probably a lot of people who followed this YouTube channel in the past 4 years were Trump supporters, and now the channel features Biden. Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition.
I don't know about YouTube, but I've read that the 2017 transition and the 2021 transitions were different on Twitter:
2017: Obama's institutional twitter accounts (e.g. @POTUS) were archived, but Trump inherited the followers in his new @POTUS account.
2021: Trump's @POTUS was archived, but Biden's new @POTUS didn't inherit Trump's (and Obama's) followers. He had to start from scratch.
> Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition.
Presumably you could unsubscribe. Which is not the case with instagram. If you followed the White House account, or you decide to follow the archived account for Trump, you are periodically made to follow the current White House account for Biden. Even if you block the user, it will unblock and re-follow you.
Readit News
There are tutorials on the net on how to "ethically", "honestly" increase view counts on your favourite band, with stuff like no more than 1 watch every 20 minutes:
https://twitter.com/bstwings_views/status/129646245602223718...
So it's not easy to tell what's going on here, they could be inauthentic dislikes.
Prior to the bulk-removal the dislikes are tracking the views; the dislike growth curve is a close function of the view count curve. That is unlikely to happen if the dislikes are bulk spam.
We'll be told it's 'spam' or 'bots', and Youtube will rely on this as the plausible explanation should they bother to address it at all, but the inconvenient truth is that the most likely explanation for the dislikes is viewers. Otherwise one must posit a sophisticated spammer that is carefully tailoring their dislikes to camouflage their activity.
I suspect the only meaningful response we'll get is a throttling of the API used to do the analysis.
what exactly is a 'spam dislike' . I don't see how thats a valid explanation.
Someone wanting more entries might create lots of fake accounts.
I'm sure there are many other ways to do this but that is one example on how spam dislikes can be generated.
Perhaps it is also of note that the author performs a naive analysis of limited climate data in a linked post to draw a conclusion against climate change.
I find it hard to believe YT is engaging in “manipulation” of a stat that frankly doesn’t really matter if you’re an account like the White House.
I don't agree. I think these numbers matter more than we realize. I believe that many politicians today are using Twitter/Youtube/Facebook likes as modern Gallup polls. Manipulation of the numbers could result in actual policy changes.
Say there is a video about net neutrality, or the breakup of the social media giants. I honestly think all sorts of people in government will be looking to the popularly, or lack thereof, as a gauge of public support for the content of the video. So, imho, manipulation of likes/dislikes is becoming very serious.
Even if they cared about traditional old-school polls you’d probably have Medicare for All, the USA would be completely out of Iraq and Afghanistan and you’d be able to buy Cannabis legally. I doubt they’d ignore the known popularity of these things but suddenly care about social media likes and dislikes.
Dead Comment
I don't know about YouTube, but I've read that the 2017 transition and the 2021 transitions were different on Twitter:
2017: Obama's institutional twitter accounts (e.g. @POTUS) were archived, but Trump inherited the followers in his new @POTUS account.
2021: Trump's @POTUS was archived, but Biden's new @POTUS didn't inherit Trump's (and Obama's) followers. He had to start from scratch.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/technology/biden-white-ho...
Presumably you could unsubscribe. Which is not the case with instagram. If you followed the White House account, or you decide to follow the archived account for Trump, you are periodically made to follow the current White House account for Biden. Even if you block the user, it will unblock and re-follow you.
I'd be surprised if it hadn't. The bigger question is whether YouTube manipulated the dislikes back then, too.