YouTube to try not publicly displaying the number of dislikes on a video

[jtmoseley]

14 minutes ago, thechinchinsong said:

I mean, its still an option. If you're a creator that cares about not looking at likes/dislikes, then its up to you to disable that option, I don't see why Youtube has to change this for people who DO think this the like/dislike system is decent. If you don't like the likes/dislikes, disable it. If you're okay with it as is, then leave it as is.

If only specific people turn off dislikes, it comes across as disingenuous, as untrustworthy. I don't trust a tutorial video with comments and dislikes off.

 

If everyone has it off, it's just the way it is. That's the difference.

[steelo]

So, youtube is becoming more and more unappealing and irrelevant to mainstream users who don't drown themselves in political nonsense.

 

If I have no idea whether a video is well received, I have little motivation to view it. This is especially true with tutorial videos where I need accurate information. Currently, if a video has a disproportionate number of dislikes, I know the video probably provides misinformation. 

 

Something tells me this will increase garbage videos tenfold which will do nothing but harm the youtube platform. It's a shame because youtube started as something that was VERY promising, but it is pretty obvious that in the past few years, it has been taken over and politicized.

 

But, hey...At least Disney is happy about this latest decision!

[Actual_Criminal]

The good thing about dislikes is that for informative type videos, if it has a bunch of dislikes (ratio compared to likes) you know it's either:

 

-Incorrect and wrong
-A scam of some sort
-Troll or just a bad video

 

I personally find this a bad idea. Now people can post mis-information and just disable comments and people will fall victim.

[Kisai]

7 minutes ago, Actual_Criminal said:

The good thing about dislikes is that for informative type videos, if it has a bunch of dislikes (ratio compared to likes) you know it's either:

 

-Incorrect and wrong
-A scam of some sort
-Troll or just a bad video

 

I personally find this a bad idea. Now people can post mis-information and just disable comments and people will fall victim.

Again, dislike brigading is a thing.

 

You can actually use report for scams/violent/misinformation but YouTube has historically allowed algorithms to suspend accounts Willynilly.

Look no further than the gamer gate fiasco to see why dislikes and comments should be moderated by default. Getting brigaded by idiots who don’t even watch the video and react to the title, or thumbnail is bad engagement.

 

YouTube turned comments off on content flagged as “for children” for this reason

[FakeATF]

On 3/30/2021 at 1:57 PM, NumLock21 said:

YouTube don't want to hurt the feelings on youtubers. What's next? Give everyone participation play buttons?!

Woohoo! Where's my PP button!

 

wait

[thechinchinsong]

5 hours ago, jtmoseley said:

If only specific people turn off dislikes, it comes across as disingenuous, as untrustworthy. I don't trust a tutorial video with comments and dislikes off.

 

If everyone has it off, it's just the way it is. That's the difference.

Exactly. It depends on if you prefer the first scenario or second scenario. I imagine there are just as many people who prefer the first scenario (what Youtube is right now), compared to the second scenario (where dislikes/likes are completely removed from public view).

[DeScruff]

I feel like this will be annoying.
Too many times I look up a video on how to *insert obscure thing here*  and the results lead to a lot of videos that just waste your time, are telling you to do it completely incorrectly (The Verge PC build anyone) or might actually cause more harm.
Can't tell you how many times Ive seen videos on electricity, that tell you to do some VERY dangerous things.
Like someone with no hint of sarcasm or humor telling you to do the kinda stuff you would see on ElectroBOOM, that causes the, well... BOOM. Usually you can tell by the Likes vs Dislikes if something falls into those categories.

 

[Kisai]

58 minutes ago, DeScruff said:

I feel like this will be annoying.
Too many times I look up a video on how to *insert obscure thing here*  and the results lead to a lot of videos that just waste your time, are telling you to do it completely incorrectly (The Verge PC build anyone) or might actually cause more harm.
Can't tell you how many times Ive seen videos on electricity, that tell you to do some VERY dangerous things.
Like someone with no hint of sarcasm or humor telling you to do the kinda stuff you would see on ElectroBOOM, that causes the, well... BOOM. Usually you can tell by the Likes vs Dislikes if something falls into those categories.

 

I have never seen a video's likes or dislikes matter. All it does is tell youtube's algorithm which content is more engaging, while simultanously doing nothing about misinformation or clickbait.

[DeScruff]

42 minutes ago, Kisai said:

I have never seen a video's likes or dislikes matter. All it does is tell youtube's algorithm which content is more engaging, while simultanously doing nothing about misinformation or clickbait.

In my experience with looking up obscure things that only results in 3 or 4 videos with maybe a few hundred views, if a video is misinformation/clickbait, you will probably see 3 likes 35 dislikes. - Which yeah as you pointed out, tells Youtube its more engaging so it ends up on the top of the list vs the actual answers which get no likes/dislikes.

Most of the time likes/dislikes don't matter, but as long as such videos keep being the first results its better to at least have some indication that 'na this is bad don't watch' then nothing.

[FakeNSA]

On 3/30/2021 at 1:08 PM, Tieox said:

I can see this move going about as well as taking a dump on your mother in laws brand new designer sofa, slapping her with a wet kipper and asking for a cup of her fancy coffee.

 

 

 

Can I just say, the visceral descriptiveness of this made my day.

[Jet_ski]

This is a crap move by YouTube. As a viewer sometimes we need validation that others disliked a video like we did. We can’t booo on YouTube anymore! What are they thinking.

[Sauron]

They should get rid of the rating system altogether, it's mostly meaningless. With rare exceptions, popular channels will just get a bunch of autolikes from their subscriber base and the occasional dislike bomb.

[tikker]

Hmm bad choice YouTube. Either hide both or show both.

[bcredeur97]

can we just go back to 2006

[Orcblood]

I'll i will say here is Boooooo. bad move.

 

Edit: Also reminder that Odysee.com is awesome and a great alternative. 

[MichelPostma]

This seems like a weird one to me.

Obscuring data for the sake of it not being the most fun to see...

 

Anyway, I have a tendency to always dislike videos that don't display the numbers.

Since in my opinion if you only want to be open to praise and not also be open to public critique then I'll dislike that.

 

So pretty much I'll be disliking a lot more videos now unfortunately.

[Vishera]

10 minutes ago, MichelPostma said:

Since in my opinion if you only want to be open to praise and not also be open to public critique then I'll dislike that.

It's called lack of transparency :D

[MichelPostma]

1 minute ago, Vishera said:

It's called lack of transparency

That's true.

 

Also I fear that this will lead to 2 important things happening which YouTube would not like:

1. Easy Harassment targeting;  This option, when chosen by creators, signals to the world that they are specifically hurt by the dislikes so that they don't want them displayed (but still want the likes). This will make them an easy target for anyone who wants to go out and do some good old cyberbullying as they now have an identifier to go after and a place to attack, as they know that any dislikes, whilst not shown publicly, will still be seen by the creator. 

2. Harder to Identify bad videos; YouTube Rewind, Bad apology videos, Anti-Vax, Scams, Clickbait reaction videos, there are many just plainly bad videos on YouTube which people may click on. Generally a like/dislike ratio helps people to identify whether this video they watch is generally accepted or not. Displaying only likes completely removes this ability.

 

[pythonmegapixel]

2 hours ago, MichelPostma said:

 

1. Easy Harassment targeting;  This option, when chosen by creators, signals to the world that they are specifically hurt by the dislikes so that they don't want them displayed (but still want the likes)

 

Just to reiterate- from what we know currently, this will apply to all videos. Of course, that might change, but for now, creators have no choice in the matter.

 

Creators can currently choose to hide both the likes and the dislikes, but not one or the other.

[TruthBomb]

Bill Gates likes this. 

[Kisai]

19 hours ago, MichelPostma said:

That's true.

 

Also I fear that this will lead to 2 important things happening which YouTube would not like:

1. Easy Harassment targeting;  This option, when chosen by creators, signals to the world that they are specifically hurt by the dislikes so that they don't want them displayed (but still want the likes). This will make them an easy target for anyone who wants to go out and do some good old cyberbullying as they now have an identifier to go after and a place to attack, as they know that any dislikes, whilst not shown publicly, will still be seen by the creator. 

That's what already happens, again, look at the fallout from gamergate. The default should be to not display likes or dislikes on videos to prevent scraping by third parties first, (which btw even if comments are turned off, they can all be retrieved via API) , and there should be a requirement to have actually watched the video to leave a like or comment in the first place. 

 

Someone who turns likes off in their videos, doesn't care, or doesn't want that engagement. That's fine, but you deciding to dislike a video because the uploader has opted to disable an engagement metric is just you being petty.

19 hours ago, MichelPostma said:

2. Harder to Identify bad videos; YouTube Rewind, Bad apology videos, Anti-Vax, Scams, Clickbait reaction videos, there are many just plainly bad videos on YouTube which people may click on. Generally a like/dislike ratio helps people to identify whether this video they watch is generally accepted or not. Displaying only likes completely removes this ability.

 

You can report scams and misinformation already, dislikes have nothing to do with that. Dislikes disproportionately penalize smaller creators in discoverability and do absolutely nothing to big ones. 

 

[Commodus]

On 4/2/2021 at 2:07 AM, MichelPostma said:

That's true.

 

Also I fear that this will lead to 2 important things happening which YouTube would not like:

1. Easy Harassment targeting;  This option, when chosen by creators, signals to the world that they are specifically hurt by the dislikes so that they don't want them displayed (but still want the likes). This will make them an easy target for anyone who wants to go out and do some good old cyberbullying as they now have an identifier to go after and a place to attack, as they know that any dislikes, whilst not shown publicly, will still be seen by the creator. 

2. Harder to Identify bad videos; YouTube Rewind, Bad apology videos, Anti-Vax, Scams, Clickbait reaction videos, there are many just plainly bad videos on YouTube which people may click on. Generally a like/dislike ratio helps people to identify whether this video they watch is generally accepted or not. Displaying only likes completely removes this ability.

 

To add to what Kisai said:

 

In theory it's harder to identify bad videos, but in practice dislikes are frequently used to trash good videos that bad people want to suppress. Anti-vaxxers will brigade a news video discussing the importance of a new vaccine, for example. Now, those efforts have limited effect, but ideally they'd be discouraged from doing it in the first place.

[Theminecraftaddict555]

this is a fairly nuanced topic IMO.

 

1. I don't blame people that people use like-dislike ratio to determine the quality of a video or how dogshizzles it is but at the same time there have been many legit videos that have good information or is fighting against REAL misinformation that get disliked bombed to hell. And there are absolutely god terrible tier videos that have a good like-dislike ratio.

2. I don't blame people saying that removing dislikes is removing criticism or removing feedback from the community and just benefits the creator more. But at the same time, this can also backfire on the creator since many viewers clicking on the video, seeing the dislike ratio gone, can turn them away for obvious reasons.

 

I honestly don't know whether or not this is a good idea. 

[Bombastinator]

19 minutes ago, Theminecraftaddict555 said:

this is a fairly nuanced topic IMO.

 

1. I don't blame people that people use like-dislike ratio to determine the quality of a video or how dogshizzles it is but at the same time there have been many legit videos that have good information or is fighting against REAL misinformation that get disliked bombed to hell. And there are absolutely god terrible tier videos that have a good like-dislike ratio.

2. I don't blame people saying that removing dislikes is removing criticism or removing feedback from the community and just benefits the creator more. But at the same time, this can also backfire on the creator since many viewers clicking on the video, seeing the dislike ratio gone, can turn them away for obvious reasons.

 

I honestly don't know whether or not this is a good idea. 

I think it’s more likely to be bad than good since hiding information from the public historically very rarely benefits the public.

[yian88]

I wonder what took them so long, after they clearly took money from various corporations like EA, to hide or reset likes/dislikes.

I expect in the future all websites that implement a like/dislike to no longer have a dislike only like buttons. If required they will motivate this with PC politics "no hate buttons", expected to see that aswell.