The only explanation for getting rid of dislike count that makes sense to me is to make big brands happy as their videos can't be made to look bad with a high dislike count and they can't be "dislike bombed" for things that may be unrelated to the content (eg the recent Activision-Blizzard scandals).
Why? Because in every other way (and every way for the viewer), this makes Youtube worse. So it's a hell of a price to pay to appease big corporate interests. That's why I have such a hard time comprehending this move.
It definitely changes how people use the dislike button since there's no feedback for it. Maybe that too was by design? It's true that people are generally terrible at using dislikes and downvote buttons. Ieally it would be a quality indicator but really it's just used for "I don't like what you're saying", "I don't like you" or "I don't like something about you". And that's probably not a great signal.
Side note: for anyone with such functionality, it would probably greatly improve the overall user experience to identify these low-indicator downvoters and shadowban them. Don't take away the downvote UI. Just make it do absolutely nothing as in it shows them they downvoted / disliked but just don't count it for anything. These people are toxic.
Anyway, I actually hope to see more low-quality generated content on Youtube as it's probably going to be the only thing that causes this decision to be reversed.
I think this hits almost bullseye for the reasons of this change, but I'd add the White House along with the brands who'd rather have their dislikes hidden.
However, shadowbanning is for cowards. Would you also ban the people who only cast likes without any dislikes? Both groups have the same signal-to-noise ratio and can be equally harmful.
I kinda doubt this, to be honest. In real life, I discount the opinions of people who only ever have negative things to say. Seems as though serial dislikers might deserve the same treatment.
Emotionally, I really get it. We feel positive towards positive thoughts and vice versa for negative ones. But in the context of information, a "recommender" that recommends everything is equivalent to one that recommends nothing: both are worthless (ie can't provide any new information)
I am generally of the opinion that Youtube is up there with Facebook in responsibility for eroding democracy worldwide with their filter bubbles so while I get a lot of value from all the educational and entertaining content I consume on there, there is little love lost from me.
However, in this case I think there is another explanation which I think at least is the official one: dislikes were used to bully people. I don't know what the scale of the problem was but I can imagine it was a genuine problem and that they genuinely wanted to solve it. That's not to say that there weren't financial concerns as well, but I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt here.
By the way, I think the rationale was similar for hiding vote counts on this very site and I guess they concluded that it worked, given that they stuck with it.
I think you're very much overestimating how much big corporations care about Youtube dislikes. Unless if there is a massive conspiracy of advertisers unilaterally demanding Youtube remove its downvote count, which there is no evidence for, advertisers have no leverage against Google. What's far more likely is that visible downvotes are a signal for people to not watch a video, and Youtube wants people to watch more videos, so they watch more ads.
There’s already more legitimate content on the platform than anyone could watch even if they spent their every waking hour on it, so I doubt boosting viewership is the goal.
Deliberately shaping public opinion in unpopular directions therefore seems like the most likely motivation.
The other, slightly less nefarious possibility is that they don’t actually want us to watch videos and drive up bandwidth costs. Good engagement means people just sit and watch the video instead of clicking something else and be served another ad. When people clicked a video and saw that it was overwhelmingly disliked, they would leave immediately, but now they are forced to sit through the whole ad to see what the video is about.
It’s also possible that people with good taste are more likely to be using ad blockers, so a content connoisseur is really just a parasite in the eyes of Google.
> What's far more likely is that visible downvotes are a signal for people to not watch a video, and Youtube wants people to watch more videos, so they watch more ads.
I think you are also overestimating how much people look at downvotes. Most people click, watch and move on if it's not good. Have you ever seen a Tiktok user?
They own the system, they could just shadowban bullies' votes. They could have just done it on videos that were statistical outliers, too - raised a "bullied" flag.
It'd be pretty easy to isolate different voting mobs, too, and group them together. You could use them to just ban the mob that is targeting the video, and let members of other mobs' votes still slip through. I might even inform the user if I were cocky about the system: "You have been prevented from voting on this video because your account has been associated with a mass-downvoting group from reddit.com/r/ronpopeillives. If you feel you have received this message in error, send an email to appeals@devnull.youtube.com."
I don't believe this at all. In any system where likes and dislikes have value to recommendations or whatever you have to identify and neutralize those who try to game the system. For example:
1. Sock puppets
2. Brigading
3. Bullying (which is really the dislike version of brigading)
That should be relatively easy to do at scale. Not perfectly but good enough. Once identified just count those votes as nothing. Present them as if the user has still pressed like or dislike but just don't count it.
Instead what Youtube has done has disincentivized people from disliking, which removes a very useful quality signal. Some will still dislike but less will if there's no feedback.
Dislikes provided a very useful signal to viewers about scams, poor videos, wrong information and so on. This provided a disincentive to post such information. So Youtube has removal that signal from users and effectively opened the floodgates to low-quality and scam videos.
That's just crazy.
And to pin that on "bullying" is (IMHO) ridiculous.
> Because in every other way (and every way for the viewer), this makes Youtube worse
It makes YouTube worse for the viewer, but YouTube doesn't have to care because they have a monopoly, so realistically speaking nobody will leave.
Thus they get to appease the brands/big channels with virtually no downside. Even better, the lack of a quality filter provided by dislikes mean people may have to trawl through more shit before they find what they want to watch, thus increasing engagement metrics.
This is the same reason most monopoly-level social media platforms take a relaxed stance on spam or malicious/illegal content (besides edge-cases which have legal or PR consequences) - the spam still drives (and itself counts as) engagement and the network effects are strong enough to overcome the annoyance and keep people on the platform anyway.
> The only explanation for getting rid of dislike count that makes sense to me is to make big brands happy as their videos can't be made to look bad with a high dislike count and they can't be "dislike bombed"
It was already possible before November 2021 to turn off the publicly visible like/dislike count on any video (getting essentially what we have now) and many big brands did exactly that.
Dislikes, as a visible measure, were widely bombed by Internet trolls and ignorant cretins. The (vast) majority of people don't engage with those tools, so a small, coordinated minority can easily have a massively outsized influence. It was grossly misrepresentative to the wider YouTube userbase. The far right, for instance, was hugely overrepresented because everyone else has a life and isn't spending their day dogpiling on White House or other videos to click a down arrow (neither an up arrow -- the rest of us aren't pathologically broken, and we have better things to do with our life and to define our identity with). COVID was actually a great benchmark because factual, scientific COVID videos were downvote bombed with regularity. Conspiracies and nonsense videos were left alone, because the rest of us aren't ignorant nuts.
They were used to bully people and diminish voices. It was a completely toxic element of the system. No, it isn't dumb corporate videos (who were prone to just hiding it at the outset, making the trolls hulk smash and angrily declare that unfair) that they're defending, and that notion is pretty comically dumb.
This whole post and the noise around this issue is so absurd. YouTube isn't worse because a bunch of ignorant assholes can't bully gay and minority people, or ply their misogynistic or backwards ways. There are loads of easy ways to automate videos and basically spam YouTube, and the system hasn't overcome that yet. Visible downvotes would do nothing when these players are uploading literally millions of videos.
I tried to downvote your comment for making unsubstantiated claims like "The (vast) majority of people don't engage with these tools". But was unable to because I don't have enough karma. Do with that what you please.
I remember watching some video and looking at dislikes: why is this downvoted this much? Pretty run of the mill video with nothing outrageous or even particularly controversial. Oh it got posted _there_...
Still, I don't think this is the reason. Visible votes simply modify what other people vote on and youtube wanted full control over what users watch instead of the few who actually votes. It is simply not a good metric most likely. Was it improved by removing the dislike bar? I would be surprised if was...
Why? Because in every other way (and every way for the viewer), this makes Youtube worse. So it's a hell of a price to pay to appease big corporate interests. That's why I have such a hard time comprehending this move.
It definitely changes how people use the dislike button since there's no feedback for it. Maybe that too was by design? It's true that people are generally terrible at using dislikes and downvote buttons. Ieally it would be a quality indicator but really it's just used for "I don't like what you're saying", "I don't like you" or "I don't like something about you". And that's probably not a great signal.
Side note: for anyone with such functionality, it would probably greatly improve the overall user experience to identify these low-indicator downvoters and shadowban them. Don't take away the downvote UI. Just make it do absolutely nothing as in it shows them they downvoted / disliked but just don't count it for anything. These people are toxic.
Anyway, I actually hope to see more low-quality generated content on Youtube as it's probably going to be the only thing that causes this decision to be reversed.