The other thing they seem to have done around the same time is heavily bias towards showing only positive comments. This is quite damaging when searching for, for example, medical content.
At first when I found a video where every visible comment was “Omg! I’ve tried everything for years, and this is the first thing that worked. You’ve changed my life”, I was excited! Now, I realise that almost every physical therapy video contains the exact same comments. Presumably because they are the ones the algorithm pushes to the top.
This means it’s really hard to know which content is actually trustworthy, especially when there’s also no downvotes. And for a lot of thing this is really important.
It’s as if Amazon showed only the glowing five star reviews - suddenly you don’t know what the common problems are with the product you’re about to buy.
Don't think I would go to youtube for medical advise without doing real research afterwards.
Yes, the comments system is being heavily biased and that is great. People might not remember but youtube comment section was about the most toxic place invented by humans. It was so bad I don't think anyone thought it could be salvaged.
This is probably googles biggest achievement of late. Hardly perfect, but it truly have changed many millions of lives for the better.
But no, it is not and never has been a good place for discussions. Unfortunate, yes, but this is so much better than anyone could have hoped for.
I wouldn't take it being positive for granted. This is exactly the kind of setup that perpetuates echo chambers. Polarisation is a genuinely dangerous phenomenon; when we loose our ability to have a conversation with those we disagree with, dark times are ahead.
There should be a name for this new phenomenon. It's akin to forced hive mind cleansing of discussion. Bandwagon discussion? One-way communities?
I've noticed it for the last couple years too.
There is heavy censorship on interactivity in most web apps today. Searching is restricted, discussion is restricted and viewing other discussions is restricted. Restricted by YouTube's bias.
In the case of YouTube at least, to me this seems like it's probably overcorrection being done to try to manage the particular brand of extremely over-the-top negativity that's commonly seen in the comments section. Comments like this often require moderation for being abusive or otherwise breaking ToS but can't be handled right away, so they bubble the positive comments up to so at least the questionable comments are buried a bit and don't get as strong of a bandwagon effect.
If this is what's actually happening, it's a case of particularly nasty commenters ruining it for everybody.
No privacy, censoring, coercion and an artificial image of "happiness" everywhere, just like on the facade of North Korea's buildings (or the smile on Joker's face).
I noticed this with tutorials. “Omg I’ve been struggling forever with this and this is the best explanation”. Then turns out to be a very shallow overview of the topic that doesn’t actually explain anything and it’s not even a tutorial.
It's always the same "how can I contact u" "circuit diagram and code pls" "what is x project cost" <--- important for these countries. So many EE students in places just ripping off other people's projects & the uni doesn't know better or care aha
No. Because it does the same thing for comments by normal people. It's an actual feature of YouTube now. YouTube has been censored for a while. Writing anything even remotely critical is weighted down. You can only critically write good things about something, but that's not very easy to do.
There's a reason why youtube comments are echo chambers of "happiness for the video". It's like Reddit, where you are writing comments to pass the hive mind filter. Welcome to modern communal interactions, where having a valid or invalid opinion is bad only because it is different.
Amazon makes it very easy to see the 4/3/2/1-star ratings just by clicking the rating you want on the left after clicking the rating on the item page. Not saying all the reviews are legit, but they do let you see the poor ratings, which I find very helpful.
Well, all of the comments are going to say it's the first thing that worked. It's not going to be the second thing that worked, since once one thing worked the person doesn't need to keep looking for more.
Honestly, it isn’t hard to justify Youtube’s choices on this very specific issue. The dislike button presumably has a function beyond public shaming. I expect it’s primarily for tailoring recommendations and tuning their algorithms, but in any case it was clearly being abused by troll hordes.
If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video, or could identify other statistical aberrations, it stands to reason that such abuse would actively interfere with the legitimate functionality it was intended for and/or work against the interests of YouTube, advertisers, as well as authors and viewers.
I personally think that removing the public counter was an elegant solution in this case, as it suppresses the worst excesses of trolling while maintaining the original intent of the dislike feature, which should improve the overall experience for most users, generally speaking.
I watch a lot of Youtube videos for DIY stuff like car repair and home improvement.
The like/dislike ratio used to be a very good way to quickly see if the person who made it knew what they were talking about.
Now I instead have to spend a bunch of time reading through the comments to make that determination.
Not that bad DIY videos are useless. They can be a good way of reading a lot of comments on not how to do things. So they have their place. But I want to know that going in.
I completely agree with that, in the past if I saw a DIY video with a 50% upvote rate, I'd know that it should probably be ignored and to look for a better source. Now, I'm not sure. I have to comb through the comments to find out if that particular uploader missed something, left a bolt loose that should be tightened, etc.
That is not the norme, it happen but for very small number of videos, you can not getrid of important functionality on the site as a dislike buttn jut to prevent few of these incidents from happening
> in any case it was clearly being abused by troll hordes.
Citation needed. I've never seen any data published by the YouTube team that showed that downvotes were being "abused by troll hordes" to the point where this was such a large problem that it merited a site-wide removal of dislike counts.
With your amount of evidence (zero), I could just as easily claim that they removed the dislike counts purely because of the ratios of the YouTube Rewind videos.
>If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video, or could identify other statistical aberrations, it stands to reason that such abuse would actively interfere with the legitimate functionality it was intended for and/or work against the interests of YouTube, advertisers, as well as authors and viewers.
But if you can see that these dislikes were from trolls, then you can account for that and not have the algorithm register them.
> then you can account for that and not have the algorithm register them
It’s an unsolvable problem which is why they disabled it entirely. If you “account” for “bad” input the only consequence is that those responsible for that bad input figure out how to get it classified as good input.
How was it being abused by troll hordes enough to warrant that change? Only time I've seen videos with huge downvotes were for negative product sentiments (e.g. pay to win schemes), bots clearly compiling videos of product specs and reviews off Amazon and passing off as their own, or when the video was clearly clickbait. I spend an unhealthy amount of time on YouTube and I don't remember coming across videos that seem "abused by troll hordes" - okay, maybe for some products, but not widespread as you would lead me to believe.
Also, couldn't you have stopped people from rating your videos if you felt you were being targeted? Maybe if the search results on YouTube and Google were actually better than they were 5 years ago I'd buy into the downvote interfering with their system. The only good thing on YouTube is their recommendation algorithm, and I don't buy that dislikes would have altered that system. In fact, didn't that exist before this change?
once thing that anecdotally comes to mind was that Westworld videos used to be heavily downvote brigaded because some sort of 4chan mob didn't like Thandiwe Newton.
I remember it because I originally put the show aside because all the trailers had such extremely high downvote ratios. It seems to be somewhat common with content around videogames as well that provokes online groups for one reason or another.
Public shaming is essential. Anyway it still happens, even more brutally, in the comments.
What they should have done is add more detail on the nature of the downvotes, like the Steam store does for negative reviews. That is, have graphs of positive and negative ratings over time to make any downvote brigading obvious. Maybe have a way to exclude "less-verified" votes, or allow the viewer to look at only e.g. YouTube Premium votes (which are more likely to be real people given the cost). And so on...
Perhaps they could do as on Stack Overflow, and let a downvote cost one point from your accrued points? Or perhaps that's too much of a re-design. It could regulate spam downvotes though. (I think the biggest problem with SO is that your point pool is visible, with gold and silver and so on, which leads to anyone with a high enough sum being treated differently, although that might actually not reflect competence or expertise.)
It actually makes perfect sense considering YouTube's business model of advertising and "engagement".
While advertising-based business models are ultimately always at odds with the user, they can (and have successfully) coexisted in the past - a product can have a certain amount of advertising/user-hostility and still remain usable. That's what YouTube used to be until now - they had to keep the advertising/user-hostility somewhat tame in order to keep growing their marketshare.
The problem is that in a monopolized vertical, there is nothing preventing the product from going "all-in" on advertising and we're now seeing the late/terminal stages of this cancer in action.
Removing dislikes and having people watch videos that are known to be bad still counts as "engagement", especially if people have to waste time watching the video fully before realizing it is bad. Even better, if they end up doing so and then have to try a different video then it's even more engagement.
The nasty side-effects of this change (up to life-threatening consequences in case of DIY videos for example) aren't their concern nor liability.
I was an old YouTube "Paid" subscriber. I can't remember what it was before "Red" or even if it was a thing? Anyway it's been quite a while. The dislike removal annoyed me but the straw was the whole "Shorts" thing.
My subscription feed almost 10x'd overnight to the point that it had no value. I started unsubscribing from the "short" spammers which were genuinely good channels and this got my subscription feed as to be very little. Not enough to be worth paying for so I cancelled.
I put the money to Audible now.
I find it staggering that youtube didn't know I was a paid member as far as a product. I wasn't allowed to filter shorts. I was still (before) Sponsor Block being fed in-video ads. So the only thing they ended up offering me was a very limited paid UBlock/SponsorBlock experience which is already free. I don't think I have actually lost anything by not paying "premium".
I have the same gripes about the "shorts" thing, but YouTube without a premium sub is just unwatchable due to the adds and not allowing background play on mobile.
Saying that it was weighed against the intrest of advertisers is not correct. It was a political descision made to stop political opponents from leveraging the dislike ratios of certain online videos to their favor in debates.
There is no proof that it was because of invalid dislikes, made by bots or anything like that. Calling the source of the dislikes trolls is unsubstantiated.
Why Youtube cares about politics is a large topic, but I don't think it is in any way shape or form correct to state that it was a advertiser/investor/monetary driven descision. Sites have likes/dislikes because it increases engagement, even negative engagement is engagement.
I think just having to watch a significant portion of the video before you can leave a like or a dislike would have largely mitigated the brigading issue. Besides, it would have made the reviews more thoughtful overall.
Maybe removing the dislike count is a simple and effective solution, but I would not call it good or elegant because of its downsides.
I can't think of anything that's been ratio'ed hard where it would make me think that the dislike count needs to be hidden everywhere. For instance , Rings of Power trailers got hit pretty hard, and some of the more woke hollywood adaptations, but those things also bombed (at least given expectations) so it's hard to say the ratio didn't represent public sentiment.
There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that the dislike count was "abused by troll hordes". Your arguments are very weak and remind me of the rhetoric used by totalitarian regimes in justifying their censorship.
"Public shaming" is the result of creating content that most likely deserves to be publicly shamed. This has also not disappeared, but is now in the comment section. This is just as "elegant solution" as SWAT team shooting all the hostages in order to be able to injure one hostage taker.
Most likely the reason to remove the dislikes is either because
a) YouTube for some reason wants more user engagement in the comment section
b) To protect American corporations (advertisers) from the uncomfortable reality that 95-99% of the people don't like their woke-content.
YouTubers already had the tool they need to combatting this kind of troll by disabling rating and comment.
Disabling dislike has the unfortunate side effect of making scam videos a lot harder to identify. And before people comment, no, manually disabling rating and comment was not the same as the current system, and would absolutely sound the alarm bell on informative/educational/infomercial videos in the old days.
This example showcasing malicious TOR browser being distributed, and might already get someone politically jailed or even killed: https://youtu.be/XS-r2Vpkxas
I myself sincerely cannot find any justification for the current system.
Maybe on some type of videos. For the type of video I watch (non polemic content) it was a very useful indicator of what to expect. My youtube experience has degraded since they removed it and I think I watch less videos as a result.
> If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video
Why not only allow using the dislike button upon watching the video or some proportion? But then what's the proportion? I'm sure I can dislike something almost immediately. I can even dislike the idea of a video, can't I? I'm a Youtube user, I'm not sure why I wouldn't be allowed to dislike any video that I dislike, for whatever reason, because I dislike it.
This is an odd thing to hypothesize at this point. YouTube has the data now, until they release the stats and let us know if the move actually had the desired effect, talking about it like this is entirely pointless.
Has hiding dislikes stopped pile ons? (I bet it hasn't)
It's been a while since they removed it. It's probably because playing rarely-played videos costs more in bandwidth. You can still find them, of course, but it's more work.
It's one reason why I love channels that take the time to make meaningful playlists: they're in whatever order the channel decides, which is often oldest-first in the context of a regular series.
I think they also realized they didn’t want to be a video archive service but a “come back for the new thing” service. Otherwise they’re just holding everyone’s home movies
True. The most recent videos of popular channels would be cached in multiple locations to improve latency, but rarely accessed videos would exist at only one (or two for redundancy) data center.
I feel that this change served creators (too): Long-running channels transform over time, in production value, niche, style, messaging, etc. Creators want you to look at this new image instead of their old one.
(Imagine looking through your old vs new social media posts... which would the current-you agree with more?)
No, they removed it. While I believe they haven't shared the reason they do it, I think it's probably due to backend changes to reduce costs of hosting older less popular videos (maybe moving them to nearline storage?). Some previous discussion here:
Wouldn't it make more sense to install an extension that shows the dislike count again? https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ I've been using it since YouTube removed the dislikes and it's worked very well...
It's not _guessing_ per se. The dataset includes dislikes from before YouTube removed it from the API, from then onwards any dislikes in the interface while using the extension get sent to their backend and get registered. The numbers are _extrapolated_ (but not guessed) of course since not every YouTube will be using the extension. Take a look at the FAQ [0] where this is better explained.
> the actual number doesn’t even reach 10% of what RYD displays. This isn’t just a slight miscalculation; it potentially changes the impression of the video itself
> there are also cases where the actual number of dislikes for a video on the channel are 5 times higher than what RYD estimates. Sometimes it’s too high and sometimes it’s too low
Return YouTube dislike is available as a toggle in setting with Yattee on iOS/macOS. The app is available on tvOS as well, it runs Piped or Invidious as the backend and filters out all the ads too. Very nice on the Apple TV.
That's not a very honest way of phrasing whats happening there. Sure it "leaks" that you are retrieving this VideoID from this IP, but you make it sound like it's sending your youtube viewing history to some random website.
Either way, I'm fine with this type of "leak" of data, as it's fundamental to an open web and can't be easily solved without cryptographic/hashing hoops. What's next, you want anonymity from the server that you're requesting content from, really?
YouTube monopoly is really hurting internet and the world.
YouTube at this point is globalized TV controlled by one country: U.S.
It got so bad that for countries that do not have their own platforms, YouTube become as worse as adversarial subversive NGO that dictates one narrative and suppresses other narratives. i have seen in recent years countless examples of channels wiped from platform for holding opinionated views not aligned with Neo-liberal west.
Removing features so that you watch what they want you to watch.
My experience in the Netherlands is completely different than what you are saying.
When not logged in, the front page is full of right to extreme right content, always a click or two away from conspiracy theories and/or Thierry Baudet, the leader of the FvD, which is basically a neo nazi party.
I need to try to use YouTube logged out, I have never done that to be honest.
What I saw is that objective and tolerant (compared to some rest of YouTube in my opinion) channels from my subscriptions were erased by YouTube, aka Deplatformed[0]. Other channels mostly about politics with pessimistic negative worldview connotations and selective biased view(IMHO) continue to grow to this day (context: all russian speaking channels). For example channel of Artemy Lebedev ( tema.ru/travel/ ), in recent interview he shared that since then he continued to upload, and YouTube erased so far eight of his newly created channels, but he does not care. I bet that latest one[1] will be also soon erased. Another channel is GoingUndergroundTV (interviews with politicians), it is now hosted on Rumble.
It's really not that hard to connect the dots why all this happens, for example person like Garry Kasparov could not ever be deplatformed from YouTube, not matter how biased and one sided world view he projects to audience of his former country, becouse he is not a strange man to certain establishment (He attends private 2023 Bilderberg Conference with figures like Henry A. Kissinger)
I noticed the same thing in the US. When logged in I get mostly suggestions of stuff I tend to watch, which includes a few left leaning commentators and some more centrist news sources like NPR. If I check logged out, I get tons of right wing, own-the-libs type content with a lot of "men's rights" stuff.
OK, I'll ask -- can you give some specific examples of
wiped channels? What is an example of an NGO promoting one narrative and what are the other narratives being suppressed? What are countries this is happening in?
I'm genuinely interested in the specifics here. I always want to be knowledgeable about different narratives.
Because my impression was that YouTube will serve you up recommendations on any topic you watch, because its goal is to serve ads, not to further a neoliberal narrative over others. But if YouTube is hiding certain narratives, I definitely want to be aware, to understand what kinds of categories they fall into. Can you share what you've observed?
Edit: best I can tell (looking through comment history) is that the commenter is upset specifically with YouTube banning content and channels that "denies or trivializes" Russia's invasion of Ukraine:
> YouTube has also been able to operate in Russia despite cracking down on pro-Kremlin content that has broken guidelines including its major violent events policy, which prohibits denying or trivialising the invasion. Since the conflict began in February, YouTube has taken down channels including that of the pro-Kremlin journalist Vladimir Solovyov. Channels associated with Russia’s Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs have also been temporarily suspended from uploading videos in recent months for describing the war as a “liberation mission”. YouTube’s chief product officer, Neal Mohan, said: “We have a major violent events policy and that applies to things like denial of major violent events: everything from the Holocaust to Sandy Hook. And of course, what’s happening in Ukraine is a major violent event. And so we’ve used that policy to take unprecedented action.” [1]
This has also been my experience. Whenever I view the YouTube homepage signed out or in an incognito window, the video/creator selection is almost wholly alien and often very unaligned with my personal views.
I'm very interested in this as well. When I clear cookies and go to YouTube I always see crap for kids, Mr. Beast, and lots of feel-good stuff. The 3 front page recommendations right now on a fresh browser are about a shelter dog getting adopted, a movie called The Policeman, and a video with different versions of the song "one, two, buckle my shoe".
I experience this with Twitter too - people complain their default twitter is alt-right, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, etc. and I don't see any of that in a fresh browser. It makes me wonder what people are watching and visiting so much that the algorithms throw alt-right stuff in their faces with such regularity. I follow Elon Musk and all the other expected tech people a tech person would follow and I don't experience this version of Twitter and Youtube everyone seems to complain about.
My take: YouTube provides the tools, then people use them in a biased way. If liberals in your country are good at technology and conservatives are not, the liberal point of view will look like it's being pushed.
Something happened yesterday to me that really drove it home. An AI scam started showing up for me. Before I realized a scam, I made a comment pointing out that what they were saying was incorrect. They deleted my comment, reported my email address to YouTube as a scammer so shutting me down real quick. It was then I noticed they had 50k subscribers despite only being a couple of days old and they had a product to sell in the description. Clearly, the people behind this account were tech savvy.
tl;dr: The viewpoints of tech savvy groups in your country are going to win out. Info promotion and suppression is not a conspiracy of tech companies.
This is quite a narrative. I think the correct perspective is: YouTube caters to local governments, which often want to limit what their population has access to. Many countries regulate their speech much more heavily than the United States.
You watch what your government wants you to watch.
I don't know about monopolisation (other than Google/YT's massive reach) but their shadow banning of comments is something I find worrying. You can't say something without double checking if it's been binned, and it doesn't have to be that controversial.
I made a comment on some chap making a living from scraping and mentioned mozrepl, tried submitting about 5 variations of it but it never stuck. So all those millions of comments on there, who's to say what the middle ground is (other than the filter).
Why is it always the same types of people peddling the same noise?
You're constantly posting russian propaganda here, with links to russian propagandist telegram channels, foxnews.com, RT, propagandist twitter accounts, propagandist youtube channels... and of course you're singing the wonders of Elon Musk next to this.
"Blah blah the west, liberals, etc" -- please. You'll jump at the opportunity to defend Russia and whine about "The West" the first chance you'll see. Don't pretend you're in favour of anything just in this world.
Pretending there isn't a difference between "opinionated views" and collaborating with Russian military while spreading disinformation doesn't help you.
The examples you've provided have done the latter.
Stop using indirect language to hide your beliefs.
Websites or services that act as personalized recommendation middle-men with a less "trashy" presentation for the recommendations themselves are a great idea. Essentially, I'd like "Rate Your Music" for all sorts of things. There's a reason why a handful few are trying to get those "Action Button" Youtube videos submitted to Letterboxd.
I guess I also believe that plenty of platforms with user-generated content have boundless stuff to see, and making the platforms themselves responsible for recommendations gives them almost too much responsibility. I understand it's part of the business plan, but recommendations would become less toxic of a phenomenon if they weren't forced onto your regular user experience as you engaged with the platform.. and better if they were more individual and something you'd have to access separately. Like movie reviews in the paper!
> Websites or services that act as personalized recommendation middle-men
These are impossible without a legal precedent to make adversarial interoperability legal again. While it was never explicitly made illegal, copyright law and the CFAA have successfully been used to curtail it.
Software that wraps common services such as YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/etc and added its own features on top (such as custom recommendations, etc) is routinely attacked and taken down. That's why there are no mainstream alternative clients for any of those services.
I don't get why the Reddit crowd cares so much about disliking... Mostly without even a comment or something.
Everytime on groups that share a userbase with Reddit, and on YouTube, you get haters.
You don't know who, you don't know why, they just downvotes and burry your comment and they're not able to comment back.
It kills online discussions, make an echo chamber for the leading opinion, and kills any content that's a bit different.
For exemple, some awesome song about Assassin's creed was featured on YouTube, a few years ago, next to related content.
(Assassin des templiers)
The quality and the realisation were sublime.
But it got tons of thumbs down because it was in French, and haters only want content in English (filtering your exposition to international content was not the point of upvotes and downvotes!)
So downvotes are pointless imo. It's great they get rid of it (and HN should do the same for the quality of the discussion)
YouTube is plagued by low quality content with clickbait titles, descriptions, and images. Often they outright lie about the content. Any DIY is a crapshoot. Even if it's not a lie, often it doesn't work or it's actually dangerous. Videos with lots of downvotes is a quick and easy indicator not to bother watching the 10 minute video to discover if it's good quality. YouTube's intention here is clear: if one can't determine in advance when a video is poor quality, they'll be forced to watch those poor quality videos until they find a good one. This increases time on the platform and their advertising revenue.
The YouTube dislike button existed long before modern Reddit culture (lol) did. If anything, the Reddit vote system is quite different since it does not really show the absolute number of up and down votes, and they are even slowly moving towards phasing out the % of up/down votes display counter on posts. It never was available for comments in the first place.
Plus, dislike also boosted engagement and could be good for your video, so again very far from the Reddit karma system.
Dislikes have problems, and I'm not too bothered about it on YouTube since I literally never looked at it, but I do think that being able to quickly indicate something is low-quality content is valuable. Think of Twitter, where your only feedback is likes from people who agree with you, so your followers just reinforce your own thing in a positive feedback loop that echo chambers yourself much more than something like Reddit or HN.
Yeah, but especially on YouTube, you tell YouTube that you didn't like the opinion or the content, so that the AI only serves you the same things on a loop.
And not only to you, but you also to the creator, who might be doing something great,
As well as to everyone, as you burry the video if it's too downvoted.
If you don't like something, just move on.
Or reply to it.
Because if you just downvote without commenting, the creator of a video doesn't know if it's low quality, or if there are just haters out there.
The problem with toxic positivity is toxic positivity. Without constructive feedback, content will skew towards safe and seeking approval rather than important or courageous. It's impossible to be real if there's only one candidate to vote for.
Perhaps we should consider alternative indicators to replace positive votes as well, although this may prove to be an even more difficult challenge.
The crux of the issue may lie in the semi-permanent nature of online communities. In real life feedback usually fades into obscurity given enough time or isn't given much importance anyway. However online it's different because anything you said can be retrieved and resurfaced infinitely, influencing the mindset of interactions.
I cringe thinking about things I said and made in the past (but have learned from), although it isn't sitting on a forum for me or anyone else to resurface, giving me peace of mind.
>Everytime on groups that share a userbase with Reddit, and on YouTube, you get haters. You don't know who, you don't know why, they just downvotes and burry your comment and they're not able to comment back.
I mean, this is exactly how HN works in any controversial thread.
I’ve almost rage quit the site like 3 times from having written a fully thought out high-quality reply and gotten “you’re posting too fast” garbage.
Really dang, you couldn’t have said that when I hit <reply> instead of <post>, so I don’t waste my time typing a long comment only to have it hit a brick wall?! Ugh
Dislikes were a fantastic way to determine if a video had a misleading thumbnail or title at a glance. Now you have to waste time determining if the contents of the video are factual or not, which can become infuriating, especially for technical work that demands accurate information.
All Youtube has to do is review one of the dislike reasons and if it's not true ignore the rest of the dislikes for that reason. If a bunch of people dislike it because the title doesn't match the content, but it does match, ignore other dislikes for that cite that reason.
Readit News
At first when I found a video where every visible comment was “Omg! I’ve tried everything for years, and this is the first thing that worked. You’ve changed my life”, I was excited! Now, I realise that almost every physical therapy video contains the exact same comments. Presumably because they are the ones the algorithm pushes to the top.
This means it’s really hard to know which content is actually trustworthy, especially when there’s also no downvotes. And for a lot of thing this is really important.
It’s as if Amazon showed only the glowing five star reviews - suddenly you don’t know what the common problems are with the product you’re about to buy.
Yes, the comments system is being heavily biased and that is great. People might not remember but youtube comment section was about the most toxic place invented by humans. It was so bad I don't think anyone thought it could be salvaged.
This is probably googles biggest achievement of late. Hardly perfect, but it truly have changed many millions of lives for the better.
But no, it is not and never has been a good place for discussions. Unfortunate, yes, but this is so much better than anyone could have hoped for.
I've noticed it for the last couple years too.
There is heavy censorship on interactivity in most web apps today. Searching is restricted, discussion is restricted and viewing other discussions is restricted. Restricted by YouTube's bias.
If this is what's actually happening, it's a case of particularly nasty commenters ruining it for everybody.
No privacy, censoring, coercion and an artificial image of "happiness" everywhere, just like on the facade of North Korea's buildings (or the smile on Joker's face).
Dead Comment
It's always the same "how can I contact u" "circuit diagram and code pls" "what is x project cost" <--- important for these countries. So many EE students in places just ripping off other people's projects & the uni doesn't know better or care aha
There's a reason why youtube comments are echo chambers of "happiness for the video". It's like Reddit, where you are writing comments to pass the hive mind filter. Welcome to modern communal interactions, where having a valid or invalid opinion is bad only because it is different.
If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video, or could identify other statistical aberrations, it stands to reason that such abuse would actively interfere with the legitimate functionality it was intended for and/or work against the interests of YouTube, advertisers, as well as authors and viewers.
I personally think that removing the public counter was an elegant solution in this case, as it suppresses the worst excesses of trolling while maintaining the original intent of the dislike feature, which should improve the overall experience for most users, generally speaking.
The like/dislike ratio used to be a very good way to quickly see if the person who made it knew what they were talking about.
Now I instead have to spend a bunch of time reading through the comments to make that determination.
Not that bad DIY videos are useless. They can be a good way of reading a lot of comments on not how to do things. So they have their place. But I want to know that going in.
Dead Comment
Citation needed. I've never seen any data published by the YouTube team that showed that downvotes were being "abused by troll hordes" to the point where this was such a large problem that it merited a site-wide removal of dislike counts.
With your amount of evidence (zero), I could just as easily claim that they removed the dislike counts purely because of the ratios of the YouTube Rewind videos.
Deleted Comment
Same but maybe they consider the people who downvoted their recent editions of Youtube Rewind troll hordes
Dead Comment
But if you can see that these dislikes were from trolls, then you can account for that and not have the algorithm register them.
It’s an unsolvable problem which is why they disabled it entirely. If you “account” for “bad” input the only consequence is that those responsible for that bad input figure out how to get it classified as good input.
Also, couldn't you have stopped people from rating your videos if you felt you were being targeted? Maybe if the search results on YouTube and Google were actually better than they were 5 years ago I'd buy into the downvote interfering with their system. The only good thing on YouTube is their recommendation algorithm, and I don't buy that dislikes would have altered that system. In fact, didn't that exist before this change?
I remember it because I originally put the show aside because all the trailers had such extremely high downvote ratios. It seems to be somewhat common with content around videogames as well that provokes online groups for one reason or another.
What they should have done is add more detail on the nature of the downvotes, like the Steam store does for negative reviews. That is, have graphs of positive and negative ratings over time to make any downvote brigading obvious. Maybe have a way to exclude "less-verified" votes, or allow the viewer to look at only e.g. YouTube Premium votes (which are more likely to be real people given the cost). And so on...
The reason to make it invisible is so more users waist their time on clickbait garbage.
While advertising-based business models are ultimately always at odds with the user, they can (and have successfully) coexisted in the past - a product can have a certain amount of advertising/user-hostility and still remain usable. That's what YouTube used to be until now - they had to keep the advertising/user-hostility somewhat tame in order to keep growing their marketshare.
The problem is that in a monopolized vertical, there is nothing preventing the product from going "all-in" on advertising and we're now seeing the late/terminal stages of this cancer in action.
Removing dislikes and having people watch videos that are known to be bad still counts as "engagement", especially if people have to waste time watching the video fully before realizing it is bad. Even better, if they end up doing so and then have to try a different video then it's even more engagement.
The nasty side-effects of this change (up to life-threatening consequences in case of DIY videos for example) aren't their concern nor liability.
My subscription feed almost 10x'd overnight to the point that it had no value. I started unsubscribing from the "short" spammers which were genuinely good channels and this got my subscription feed as to be very little. Not enough to be worth paying for so I cancelled.
I put the money to Audible now.
I find it staggering that youtube didn't know I was a paid member as far as a product. I wasn't allowed to filter shorts. I was still (before) Sponsor Block being fed in-video ads. So the only thing they ended up offering me was a very limited paid UBlock/SponsorBlock experience which is already free. I don't think I have actually lost anything by not paying "premium".
There is no proof that it was because of invalid dislikes, made by bots or anything like that. Calling the source of the dislikes trolls is unsubstantiated.
Why Youtube cares about politics is a large topic, but I don't think it is in any way shape or form correct to state that it was a advertiser/investor/monetary driven descision. Sites have likes/dislikes because it increases engagement, even negative engagement is engagement.
It was shortly after the CEO of YouTube posted a video in which she gave herself the Freedom of Speech of the Year Award.
The video was nearly 100% dislikes.
I guess it was a coincidence that dislikes were removed "due to being abused by troll hordes" shortly afterward.
On Hitler's birthday, nonetheless.
It would be great at filtering prank videos which pretend to be something else, then switch to a Rickroll or something.
Maybe removing the dislike count is a simple and effective solution, but I would not call it good or elegant because of its downsides.
In reality, it's more likely the dislike button was removed in order to force people to spend more time watching the video, increasing engagement.
same goes for the like button.
but, apparently hacking likes it's ok...
"Public shaming" is the result of creating content that most likely deserves to be publicly shamed. This has also not disappeared, but is now in the comment section. This is just as "elegant solution" as SWAT team shooting all the hostages in order to be able to injure one hostage taker.
Most likely the reason to remove the dislikes is either because
a) YouTube for some reason wants more user engagement in the comment section
b) To protect American corporations (advertisers) from the uncomfortable reality that 95-99% of the people don't like their woke-content.
Disabling dislike has the unfortunate side effect of making scam videos a lot harder to identify. And before people comment, no, manually disabling rating and comment was not the same as the current system, and would absolutely sound the alarm bell on informative/educational/infomercial videos in the old days.
This example showcasing malicious TOR browser being distributed, and might already get someone politically jailed or even killed: https://youtu.be/XS-r2Vpkxas
I myself sincerely cannot find any justification for the current system.
Maybe on some type of videos. For the type of video I watch (non polemic content) it was a very useful indicator of what to expect. My youtube experience has degraded since they removed it and I think I watch less videos as a result.
Why not only allow using the dislike button upon watching the video or some proportion? But then what's the proportion? I'm sure I can dislike something almost immediately. I can even dislike the idea of a video, can't I? I'm a Youtube user, I'm not sure why I wouldn't be allowed to dislike any video that I dislike, for whatever reason, because I dislike it.
Has hiding dislikes stopped pile ons? (I bet it hasn't)
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Huh? Why would that be the case?
(Imagine looking through your old vs new social media posts... which would the current-you agree with more?)
They appear to be bringing it back based on a recent video from their Creator Insider channel
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33559888
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43m7I9GOpM
[0]: https://returnyoutubedislike.com/faq
> the actual number doesn’t even reach 10% of what RYD displays. This isn’t just a slight miscalculation; it potentially changes the impression of the video itself
> there are also cases where the actual number of dislikes for a video on the channel are 5 times higher than what RYD estimates. Sometimes it’s too high and sometimes it’s too low
One shows dislikes. One provides a big picture review page for whole channels.
https://github.com/yattee/yattee
Works for firefox, chrome, opera, brave, edge, tapermonkey userscript.
Firefox android not supported natively, You have to use newpipe fork. I havent tried tampermonkey in ff android, be right back.
https://github.com/Anarios/return-youtube-dislike/blob/5c738...
Either way, I'm fine with this type of "leak" of data, as it's fundamental to an open web and can't be easily solved without cryptographic/hashing hoops. What's next, you want anonymity from the server that you're requesting content from, really?
Not sure how long it's been there, but it's been approved by someone, you think they'd remove it after that?
Edit: looking at the reviews of the extension, it has reviews from a year ago (until I stop going backwards) so seems you're wrong
YouTube at this point is globalized TV controlled by one country: U.S.
It got so bad that for countries that do not have their own platforms, YouTube become as worse as adversarial subversive NGO that dictates one narrative and suppresses other narratives. i have seen in recent years countless examples of channels wiped from platform for holding opinionated views not aligned with Neo-liberal west.
Removing features so that you watch what they want you to watch.
When not logged in, the front page is full of right to extreme right content, always a click or two away from conspiracy theories and/or Thierry Baudet, the leader of the FvD, which is basically a neo nazi party.
What I saw is that objective and tolerant (compared to some rest of YouTube in my opinion) channels from my subscriptions were erased by YouTube, aka Deplatformed[0]. Other channels mostly about politics with pessimistic negative worldview connotations and selective biased view(IMHO) continue to grow to this day (context: all russian speaking channels). For example channel of Artemy Lebedev ( tema.ru/travel/ ), in recent interview he shared that since then he continued to upload, and YouTube erased so far eight of his newly created channels, but he does not care. I bet that latest one[1] will be also soon erased. Another channel is GoingUndergroundTV (interviews with politicians), it is now hosted on Rumble.
It's really not that hard to connect the dots why all this happens, for example person like Garry Kasparov could not ever be deplatformed from YouTube, not matter how biased and one sided world view he projects to audience of his former country, becouse he is not a strange man to certain establishment (He attends private 2023 Bilderberg Conference with figures like Henry A. Kissinger)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming [1] https://www.youtube.com/@ArtemyLebedev-sd8nf
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I'm genuinely interested in the specifics here. I always want to be knowledgeable about different narratives.
Because my impression was that YouTube will serve you up recommendations on any topic you watch, because its goal is to serve ads, not to further a neoliberal narrative over others. But if YouTube is hiding certain narratives, I definitely want to be aware, to understand what kinds of categories they fall into. Can you share what you've observed?
Edit: best I can tell (looking through comment history) is that the commenter is upset specifically with YouTube banning content and channels that "denies or trivializes" Russia's invasion of Ukraine:
> YouTube has also been able to operate in Russia despite cracking down on pro-Kremlin content that has broken guidelines including its major violent events policy, which prohibits denying or trivialising the invasion. Since the conflict began in February, YouTube has taken down channels including that of the pro-Kremlin journalist Vladimir Solovyov. Channels associated with Russia’s Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs have also been temporarily suspended from uploading videos in recent months for describing the war as a “liberation mission”. YouTube’s chief product officer, Neal Mohan, said: “We have a major violent events policy and that applies to things like denial of major violent events: everything from the Holocaust to Sandy Hook. And of course, what’s happening in Ukraine is a major violent event. And so we’ve used that policy to take unprecedented action.” [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/22/youtube-u...
That is not upsetting. Article you mentioned proves that YouTube is used as weapon of censorship, denying that is Westsplaining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westsplaining
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34907079 Is one example OP has posted about before, but light on details.
I experience this with Twitter too - people complain their default twitter is alt-right, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, etc. and I don't see any of that in a fresh browser. It makes me wonder what people are watching and visiting so much that the algorithms throw alt-right stuff in their faces with such regularity. I follow Elon Musk and all the other expected tech people a tech person would follow and I don't experience this version of Twitter and Youtube everyone seems to complain about.
Something happened yesterday to me that really drove it home. An AI scam started showing up for me. Before I realized a scam, I made a comment pointing out that what they were saying was incorrect. They deleted my comment, reported my email address to YouTube as a scammer so shutting me down real quick. It was then I noticed they had 50k subscribers despite only being a couple of days old and they had a product to sell in the description. Clearly, the people behind this account were tech savvy.
tl;dr: The viewpoints of tech savvy groups in your country are going to win out. Info promotion and suppression is not a conspiracy of tech companies.
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You watch what your government wants you to watch.
I made a comment on some chap making a living from scraping and mentioned mozrepl, tried submitting about 5 variations of it but it never stuck. So all those millions of comments on there, who's to say what the middle ground is (other than the filter).
You're constantly posting russian propaganda here, with links to russian propagandist telegram channels, foxnews.com, RT, propagandist twitter accounts, propagandist youtube channels... and of course you're singing the wonders of Elon Musk next to this.
"Blah blah the west, liberals, etc" -- please. You'll jump at the opportunity to defend Russia and whine about "The West" the first chance you'll see. Don't pretend you're in favour of anything just in this world.
The examples you've provided have done the latter.
Stop using indirect language to hide your beliefs.
I guess I also believe that plenty of platforms with user-generated content have boundless stuff to see, and making the platforms themselves responsible for recommendations gives them almost too much responsibility. I understand it's part of the business plan, but recommendations would become less toxic of a phenomenon if they weren't forced onto your regular user experience as you engaged with the platform.. and better if they were more individual and something you'd have to access separately. Like movie reviews in the paper!
These are impossible without a legal precedent to make adversarial interoperability legal again. While it was never explicitly made illegal, copyright law and the CFAA have successfully been used to curtail it.
Software that wraps common services such as YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/etc and added its own features on top (such as custom recommendations, etc) is routinely attacked and taken down. That's why there are no mainstream alternative clients for any of those services.
Everytime on groups that share a userbase with Reddit, and on YouTube, you get haters. You don't know who, you don't know why, they just downvotes and burry your comment and they're not able to comment back.
It kills online discussions, make an echo chamber for the leading opinion, and kills any content that's a bit different.
For exemple, some awesome song about Assassin's creed was featured on YouTube, a few years ago, next to related content. (Assassin des templiers)
The quality and the realisation were sublime.
But it got tons of thumbs down because it was in French, and haters only want content in English (filtering your exposition to international content was not the point of upvotes and downvotes!)
So downvotes are pointless imo. It's great they get rid of it (and HN should do the same for the quality of the discussion)
Plus, dislike also boosted engagement and could be good for your video, so again very far from the Reddit karma system.
And not only to you, but you also to the creator, who might be doing something great, As well as to everyone, as you burry the video if it's too downvoted.
If you don't like something, just move on. Or reply to it.
Because if you just downvote without commenting, the creator of a video doesn't know if it's low quality, or if there are just haters out there.
The crux of the issue may lie in the semi-permanent nature of online communities. In real life feedback usually fades into obscurity given enough time or isn't given much importance anyway. However online it's different because anything you said can be retrieved and resurfaced infinitely, influencing the mindset of interactions.
I cringe thinking about things I said and made in the past (but have learned from), although it isn't sitting on a forum for me or anyone else to resurface, giving me peace of mind.
I don't see why HN even needs downvoting when the comment slips down in relation to upvoted comments?
Downvotes unfairly weight opinions of those who are intolerant as people with higher tolerance will less likely or never use downvoting.
Digg at least made downvoting fun and not so serious.
I mean, this is exactly how HN works in any controversial thread.
I’ve almost rage quit the site like 3 times from having written a fully thought out high-quality reply and gotten “you’re posting too fast” garbage.
Really dang, you couldn’t have said that when I hit <reply> instead of <post>, so I don’t waste my time typing a long comment only to have it hit a brick wall?! Ugh
Another term for downvotes is: casual meanness.
If HN isn't willing to get rid of them, then they should at least cost you something: 10 karma points, maybe.
Upvotes provide you a signal that some people like it. Downvotes provide you a signal that some people dislike it. They are completely different.
Downvotes prevent unpopular things that have a fervent user-base from sitting on top.
Instead of a single dislike button, force the user to select a dislike reason, with choices such as:
- title doesn't match content
- content is in unexpected language
- content is in low visual quality
etc.