Oh I know, I am pretty cynical and not exactly outraged here. But although they don't care about what's good for us, they do care about what will keep us on the platform. And if it gets harder to find good stuff and filter out the dross, that could conceivably have negative consequences for YouTube in the long run.
I'm not outraged - I'm amused. The ultimate admission the only way they can spread their messaging is through force, not honest competition of ideas. How superior.
Nothing proves you have a worthy argument better than outright hiding from dissent.
Again, they don't care if you stay on the platform. If they did, they wouldn't touch it. The disagreement buttons were added in the first place because they increase and maintain engagement. After a few decades it's now all the sudden a problem?
Ha! The real problem is their desired narratives are being soundly rejected and it's embarrassing. So here we are.
> The ultimate admission the only way they can spread their messaging is through force, not honest competition of ideas. How superior.
> Nothing proves you have a worthy argument better than outright hiding from dissent.
I don't know the general trends across YouTube or why they would do this. Certainly, they've also been silencing views they and certain influential groups advising them don't like, and I've seen videos put out by connected establishment and moneyed milieu downvoted into oblivion. But value and truth are not determined through popular vote. It might coincide, or it might not.
So the only way I can understand your comment is to suppose that downvoting of "preferred" YouTube content has gotten so severe that the company wishes to prevent the communication of exactly how much disapproval there really is for the "official narrative" (while potentially keeping track of it themselves) because once someone knows he's not alone in his disapproval, he might just have more confidence to resist or leave a comment that spreads a message unfavorable to them. So yes, dislikes might increase engagement, but it might not be the kind of engagement they want to facilitate.
> downvoting of "preferred" YouTube content has gotten so severe that the company wishes to prevent the communication of exactly how much disapproval there really is for the "official narrative"
This is exact reason. Go to you tube home page and every day there is bar of "official sources" news on coronavirus (clips from news stations). Here are first four for this day:
People won't leave that easily. Nobody compares to YouTube. Facebook had no way of voicing disapproval for a long time and membership still increased. They are testing various options which might mean they're weighting the relative benefits and damage. And besides, they may be in a position where they have no choice if propaganda is more important than money.
Angry != disapprove because in the context of the other "emotions" it does not distinguish between disliking the post itself, or what it's referencing. If you post "Candidate X did Y" are you angry because the candidate did Y or because your friend posted something anti candidate X?
Come on, I'm trying not to dismiss your perspective just because it sounds a bit conspiratorial, but this is not convincing. Are you saying the YouTube execs (or whoever is leaning on them) are just acting emotionally with no strategy?
There is absolutely a strategy - there is a particular point of view they favor, and anything counter to it is removed.
Dislikes are embarrassing to, for lack of better terminology, their pet causes. Simply disabling them on certain videos or channels calls even more attention to them - so why not just remove them entirely.
The only thing surprising to me is that it took them this long.
It doesn't need to be that dislikes are embarrassing to their pet causes. There were a few instances where business partners would, e.g., post an ad campaign that got so many dislikes the dislike ratio entered the news cycle. I'm sure google gets pressure from their business/ad partners when that goes down.
What a silly conspiracy theory. If the wanted to hide embarrassing downvotes on certain videos, they'd just remove those downvotes, not the entire feature.
To be clear, they aren't removing the button, or a way for users to register their dislike or track that they already disliked a video (I assume), just the count of how many other people disliked it. As a matter of engagement, I'm not sure how much that statistic brings to the table. I agree it might make filtering out crap content somewhat harder, but I'm not sure how good it ever was for that. It might be that the vast majority of the time it indicated anything to the viewer it indicated that some campaign was underway, which generally is counterproductive as a viewer.
Personally, I upvote if I liked something, and I don't indicate anything if I didn't find it all that interesting or useful. Rarely if ever have I disliked something that youtube has recommended to me. The few times I have it's probably been because of some outside source noting it because it's objectionable. How useful of a signal is that to youtube or the creator? In that case it indicates what people that don't care about their content and aren't likely to watch any more of it think. That seems a poor source of feedback (and if we're talking about hat being useful to indicate to them that they shouldn't have done whatever they did, that's obviously served already by many other mechanisms, including comments).
Personally, I have frequently wished that the downvote button on youtube _comments_ wasn’t fake. (Last I heard, it currently doesn’t even send a packet to any servers when you click it. It used to, until google+ iirc [edit: see correction/update provided by voussoir in the reply. Turns out it does now. Thanks for the update/correction.])
The inability to downvote substantially alters what is said/ranked highly, I think.
A while back they significantly increased the number of ads and also now show YouTube premium popups constantly. I would imagine it's had very little if any negative impact. Google knows YouTube is the only game in town.
For now, but if they keep treating users like shit, it creates a bigger and bigger opportunity for competition to pop in. You might be thinking it's super hard for someone like you or I to create a YouTube competitor. That's probably true, but what about Amazon or Netflix? Can you imagine if Netflix had a YouTube-like platform where, if you're a subscriber, you get no ads?
That's a good point. Who really knows, but possibly Google just doesn't see that coming, or at least not any time soon. A true competitor to YouTube would really do consumers and creators a lot of good though.
Seems like it should be a market inevitability. There are just so many things wrong with YouTube. The main obstacle is the bandwidth cost, and that's not an issue for any major tech company.
I think Facebook could actually properly compete with YouTube if they wanted, it's just that their insistence that you have to be logged in to access content makes it much less appealing as a platform, because you can't just link people to videos easily.
Netflix charges a monthly price. They could have an open YouTube-like service (no subscription required) which adds value to their offering, and tries to bring people into a paying Netflix subscription.
It's not just the ads that are the problem with YouTube. It's also the way they can just demonetize anything that doesn't please advertisers, and the way their recommendation algorithm works. They don't even show me a lot of the videos from people I subscribed to on the app's homepage. Wtf?
This is unlikely, because youtube has one thing that no other platform does, creators. How many youtubers would actually be willing to post on another website, let alone exclusively? How many fans would actually follow them? For already risk averse youtubers this is unlikely.
Many, actually. There are quite a few active alternatives now, such as Nebula for science YouTubers and Odyssey. Last I heard Linus Sebastian was working on an alternative as well.
It seems that most content creators are quite worried about the way YouTube handles (de-)monitization and copyright strikes. Many CCs are also streamers and use YT only as a side channel. Sure, YT still has a large footprint, but it's not as solid as it used to be.
There are, but generally for specific interests, and not nearly enough to challenge youtube's market domination. Without something dramatic youtube effectively has monopoly control of supply and demand.
> they do care about what will keep us on the platform
Yes they do. Watching 2 useless DIY videos and then a 3rd DIY video that finally helped you out, just kept you on the platform 3x longer than if you had filtered out the badly rated one and watched the helpful video first.
Checkmate. YouTube/Google/Alphabet Wins! 3x the ads. 3x the money. 3x the evil. Do not pass go, Google collects your $200. Time to hide the dislike counts... case closed.
They probably think that dislikes aren't actually a good signal for whether or not a video is relevant to a uer.
Crappy videos could automatically be filtered out of their search and recommendations because people abandon them early. They may have determined that's enough to help user's find what they need.
It also helps the issue of dislike brigading since you won't be able to "dislike" a video at all.
Not sure if that's the right move or not but I don't think it's necessarily a bad one.
YouTube premium never shows me adds, and downvotes have reliably gotten the AI to stop suggesting a musician or autoplaying a song that I don't like, regardless of their rough membership in a genre I otherwise want to hear.
It makes me feel guilty to downvote someone or their work who's probably a good person, but it's the only reliable way to tune the AI. I get a lot of enjoyment out of music on youtube premium, but would stop using the service if they started airing ads on the pay service, or began serving music in such a way that I couldn't tune the suggestions and automatic play queues.
Perhaps, but this is the last Google product I still use. If they break YouTube like they did search, chrome, cellphones, and email, I guess I am off to find something else which must hurt their bottom line eventually.
I'm curious what you mean by search being broken? Do you mean the quality of search results or something with search functionality. I ask because lately I've found the quality of certain search results to be increasingly disappointing. I'm not sure if that corresponds to some known change they've made recently though.
The phrase is defined as “a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product.” When YouTube was created, it was intended to show videos to users. There were no ads yet. So the intention is for the viewers to be the users.
The core intention of YouTube is to have a platform to advertise on. Without the viewers, the advertisers would have no interest in the platform. If there were no advertisers, that would not sway the viewers from having interest in the platform. The ads are there as a means to the end, it’s not the end itself.
If there were no advertisers, they would not be able to pay the expenses required to deliver something that meets user's expectations, and they would lose interest.
Not necessarily. There are other models that could work for YouTube, like the subscription model, and they could always go back to YouTube being an unprofitable arm of Alphabet like it was.
In the short run they can get away with ~anything. In the long run though, anything that upsets users makes the rise of a true competitor marginally more likely.
I am actually paying to get rid of advertisements, not to get rid of useful features. This will just get me to stick with my channel subscriptions, as the recommendations are already often better and better scams.
Unfortunately even then Google doesn't view you as the customer in any substantial way. Advertisers have been, and continue to be, who they want to keep happy. The reality is that, in aggregate, most users are willing to take a fair amount of abuse as long as it's free.
It would have been an interesting experiment to show dislikes for premium users and see how many people pay for those feature, but I think that would have been too controversial compared to the ads that are accepted practice already.
Cable television subscribers originally payed to get rid of ads. Then the channels realized they could get you to pay and watch ads. You will be monetized in every way possible.
