Youtube is censoring the like count Opinion's

[Spotty]

12 minutes ago, Kisai said:

If youtube wanted to make a difference here it would remove the like buttons entirely and let people block channels, or keywords from ever being recommended.

You can already remove channels from your recommend feed. Just click the 3 dots next to a video in the recommended feed and hit "don't recommend channel". It does what it says it does too, you'll never see that channel show up in your recommended feed again. 

 

Unfortunately I don't think you can block keywords. I would love to block "Minecraft" if that were the case.

[Dujith]

7 minutes ago, Spotty said:

 

 

Dont tell me u are blocking Tom Scott? You monster!

[LogicalDrm]

*** Thread cleaned ***

 

If your post has been removed, it contained political discussion points, or had quote from such post. Some of the posts might get restored without political parts at later time.

[MultiGamerClub]

And people someone LIKED The video.. jeez.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, YoungBlade said:

Do you have any examples of small-time content creators getting brigaded for making "perfectly standard videos that everyone else does?"

 

The only things I've ever seen get large amounts of dislikes are either highly controversial takes or videos from large channels/companies that are receiving backlash. Both of those obviously can have brigading as well, but you make it sound like dislikes just come at random, and not because a large group of people legitimately dislike the content of a video or something that the creator of the video recently did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-disliked_YouTube_videos

Baby Shark and "Wheels on the Bus" are not controversial. People hate brigade childrens songs because they are tired of listening to them and somehow believe that disliking them will make them stop being recommended on youtube kids. CLEARLY it does not work that way, and never has. But other than Youtube Rewind's, which were hate-brigaded for incredibly petty reasons (of not including the same boring content creators every year, like PewDiePie) pretty much everything that is "most disliked" is music videos that people are tired of hearing.

 

Clearly the dislikes don't send any message at all other than "people are petty jerks"

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Spotty said:

You can already remove channels from your recommend feed. Just click the 3 dots next to a video in the recommended feed and hit "don't recommend channel". It does what it says it does too, you'll never see that channel show up in your recommended feed again. 

 

Unfortunately I don't think you can block keywords. I would love to block "Minecraft" if that were the case.

I was aware of the ability to remove individual recommendations, but that doesn't really help when you can't blacklist specific words or creators by words that appear in the title and picked up in the transcript. I'd dump the NFT keyword into the memory hole so fast and anyone who mentions it in a video that I'm not also subscribed to.

 

[YoungBlade]

44 minutes ago, Kisai said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-disliked_YouTube_videos

 

Baby Shark and "Wheels on the Bus" are not controversial. People hate brigade childrens songs because they are tired of listening to them and somehow believe that disliking them will make them stop being recommended on youtube kids. CLEARLY it does not work that way, and never has. But other than Youtube Rewind's, which were hate-brigaded for incredibly petty reasons (of not including the same boring content creators every year, like PewDiePie) pretty much everything that is "most disliked" is music videos that people are tired of hearing.

 

Clearly the dislikes don't send any message at all other than "people are petty jerks"

Do you have any evidence that those children songs were hate brigaded? Is there a subreddit somewhere that coordinates targeted attacks against children songs? I think a more likely explanation is exactly what you gave: parents who are tired of listening to the same song over and over and believing that hitting "dislike" on the video will make it stop autoplaying that song.

 

YouTube Rewind's massive dislike count was certainly helped by a targeted attack, but I disagree that the reasons were petty. Instead of focusing on things that were actually relevant to the platform that year, YouTube instead got random celebrities to appear and then made references to parts of YouTube that very few people actually watch in an effort to appeal to their advertisers. That is why the video got hate-brigaded: Rewind was supposed to be about the community, and instead it had become a vehicle to promote the platform to corporations. It was not just because PewDiePie wasn't in it.

 

Also, if you look at the whole list, none of those are small creators. All of them have at least hundreds of thousands of subscribers and most have millions. The only one in that entire list who was a small-time creator at the time was Rebecca Black, and I agree that the hate against her was unwarranted, but it was a rather unique case. Again, it's the only one in that list. Also, as far as I know, it was not done through a coordinated hate-mob, but instead happened organically as YouTube recommended the video a lot and people shared it with others.

[tkitch]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-disliked_YouTube_videos

 

Baby Shark and "Wheels on the Bus" are not controversial. People hate brigade childrens songs because they are tired of listening to them and somehow believe that disliking them will make them stop being recommended on youtube kids. CLEARLY it does not work that way, and never has. But other than Youtube Rewind's, which were hate-brigaded for incredibly petty reasons (of not including the same boring content creators every year, like PewDiePie) pretty much everything that is "most disliked" is music videos that people are tired of hearing.

 

Clearly the dislikes don't send any message at all other than "people are petty jerks"

Can we get a brigade going to rewatch "Gangnam Style" to get it past Baby Shark for most views on YT?   

[rattacko123]

Not a fan of this change. Turns out Emplemon's prediction was right 

 

[Mark Kaine]

17 hours ago, Spotty said:

You can already remove channels from your recommend feed. Just click the 3 dots next to a video in the recommended feed and hit "don't recommend channel". It does what it says it does too, you'll never see that channel show up in your recommended feed again. 

 

Unfortunately I don't think you can block keywords. I would love to block "Minecraft" if that were the case.

Besides that this doesn't work for me, I dont even get that option either  anymore (you'd also need to be logged in at all times...) i agree,  keywords blocking , especially for yt, would be pretty great.

 

I use a channel blocker which is a godsend to me, without it I would have probably stopped watching yt altogether by now,  there's a lot of criticism i have, by the by far worst thing is their recommendation algorithm,  it is far too limited and narrow  -- as a matter of fact i never watched a minecraft video and I've never seen a recommendation for it either (that is how bad, or in this case maybe good it is...) 

 

I need  a site blocker too though,  I just realized,  I don't want to get linked to stuff like fb or Instagram etc, ever, which somehow happens semi regularly 

 

edit: I just checked,  both options magically appeared again -- i haven't checked for months,  but fact is, it didn't ever work, I kept getting the same channels over and over, and its tedious too since Google asks for a reason- thats of no business to them imho, also its not an actual block either as i understand,  these channels would still be able to watch my channel afaik (i don't actually know if my channel blocker works this way, i would sure hope so, might be technically difficult though)

[SolarNova]

All the positivity of this move is aimed squarely at corporate image.

Any large youtube channel, especial a company/corporation or individual with significant links to a group, will love the fact that the primary negativity in an easily discernible visual identifier is now gone, shielding them from the 'bad PR' of it.

 

Thats the good bit for those channels, (and bad for viewers)

 

The bad ....period:

 

This also removes a viewers ability to easily identifies straight up bad videos, or those that are obviously contentious/disputative/controversial and thus may not want to get into.

Slants overall public view on any topic that is controversial towards acceptance towards the video point of view rather than what may be the general majority consensus.

 

 

Now lets get some a example of how this could cause a bad ,really bad, issue.

 

Spoiler

Just this morning i read a small report that a University assistant professor in the US was trying to normalize pedophilia by advocating to give it a new softer term, one which in his view is a good thing to protect these people from stigmatization.

Now, lets say this individual made a full blown youtube video on the subject pushing forward this move. Without the downvotes being viewable, any random person coming across this video will only see upvotes, which could easily be construed as the idea having support amongst viewers and thus the average person.

Now my opinion on the matter not withstanding i find it hard to believe the average joe would have anything more than an immediate knee jerk reaction like 'this is a absolutely disgusting idea WTF is this man doing in a University" and thus downvote it.

Its not a stretch to say that is easy to see how only seeing upvotes on a video like that could be seen as support for the idea.

 

"oh buts that a ridiculous scenerio!" ...no this just happned, it just wasnt on youtube.

 

 

So, i only see this move as an attempt by YouTube to protect certain people or viewpoints that they dont want to see openly rejected by the majority of normal people.

[Rex Hite]

I think almost all online consumer ratings are a toxic mess. It's really just more data mining where the consumer is yet again turned into a resource.

In the bigger philosophical  picture, with a planet on fire and huge swaths of populations demonstrating no understanding of what's in their own interest, maybe it's long past time when we ought not give a fuck what the consumer thinks. It would be a start. I say this as a business owner with a "high" rating. It's meaningless because while I am in the business of satisfying my customers and making a living, I'm not in the business of pandering.

[tikker]

23 hours ago, Kisai said:

Baby Shark and "Wheels on the Bus" are not controversial. People hate brigade childrens songs because they are tired of listening to them and somehow believe that disliking them will make them stop being recommended on youtube kids. CLEARLY it does not work that way, and never has. But other than Youtube Rewind's, which were hate-brigaded for incredibly petty reasons (of not including the same boring content creators every year, like PewDiePie) pretty much everything that is "most disliked" is music videos that people are tired of hearing.

I think it would be interesting to see a form of dislikes / views ratio for those videos. Wheels on the Bus and Baby Shark have 3.3 and 9.6 BILLION views. 12.4 million dislikes after 9.6 billion views is a much better statistic than 19 million dislikes with only 221 million views (2018 rewinds). Granted people can watch a video multiple times and only dislike it once (not sure how views are counted exactly), but they can also only like it once. It would probably be less likely that someone would view a video they dislike multiple times. Statistics should also apply that simply as views and people reached increase so will dislikes.

 

Their opening of wanting to give people a voice doesn't make the most sense to me. People are allowed a voice, that doesn't mean others will or should like it. Probably a strawman argument, but what will they do about like brigdading on shitty videos once this goes through? Or will they do nothing because "more" likes == more views.

[Ein0r]

Rejoice! From now on there will only be great EA Games trailers and Youtube Rewinds, with only positive comments! When your corporate overlord tells you to be happy then be happy goddamit!

 

But how likely will it be that some of those dislikes will just convert to negative or even hateful comments? Which then might negatively affect the creator? Mentally, or however, I dunno. If you get 100 dislikes on average on your video, then you might only get 50 dislikes once the public dislike  count disappears. And those missing dislikes will become 10 or 20 negative comments.

 

[Commodus]

The fantasy is that most people use dislike counts to gauge the quality and relevance of a video. The truth is that a lot of people use dislikes to attack either newbies or ideas they don't agree with, quality be damned.

 

If you want an example, you just have to look at some news videos (Global News and CityNews, among others) discussing vaccines in a positive light. Anti-vaxxers not only pile on the dislikes, they're actually convinced they're striking some noble blow against mainstream science. The size of those media outlets likely dampens the impact of those dislike campaigns, but that still hurts the reach of those videos.

[tikker]

16 minutes ago, Commodus said:

The fantasy is that most people use dislike counts to gauge the quality and relevance of a video. The truth is that a lot of people use dislikes to attack either newbies or ideas they don't agree with, quality be damned.

I mean, not to defend dislike attacks or anything, but "relevance" and "quality" doesn't matter. If you dislike the video you click the dislike button. Otherwise it should not be like or dislike buttons but "relevant/irrelevant" or "good quality / bad quality" buttons. If they don't do or are not what people think they do or are, as was mentioned earlier in the thread, then it's a poorly designed UI/system. It could be a multi-billion dollar Marvel movie, if you don't like it you click dislike. As with anything you simply see or hear the negative side more often than the positive side.

 

If hypothetically people were only allowed to dislike a video because it's generally agreed upon that it's a bad guide then what's the point. The reasoning goes the other way: many people disliked it, so it may not be that good. Use your own judgement in the end, however.

[Kisai]

39 minutes ago, tikker said:

 

 

Their opening of wanting to give people a voice doesn't make the most sense to me. People are allowed a voice, that doesn't mean others will or should like it. Probably a strawman argument, but what will they do about like brigdading on shitty videos once this goes through? Or will they do nothing because "more" likes == more views.

You can still leave comments, now the video creators will just delete vile "KYS" type of comments or have to turn comments off entirely if it's a children-oriented video.

 

Like you have to realize, that this might have the unintended consequence of people brigading in the comments instead, because we keep seeing it happen every time someone goes off on a game dev/artist/cartoonist for something that someone else was responsible for.

 

[YoungBlade]

4 minutes ago, Kisai said:

You can still leave comments, now the video creators will just delete vile "KYS" type of comments or have to turn comments off entirely if it's a children-oriented video.

 

Like you have to realize, that this might have the unintended consequence of people brigading in the comments instead, because we keep seeing it happen every time someone goes off on a game dev/artist/cartoonist for something that someone else was responsible for.

 

Except that the downvotes were always a sure-fire way to notice when a comment section was being heavily currated. If a video had a bad like/dislike ratio (or if the votes were turned off) yet the comments were all in favor of what was being said, it was obvious that the creator had set it to only show approved comments, and that the only comments getting approved were ones that validated the creator.

 

With this new system, how do you know if that's happening? You only see upvotes and then a bunch of comments saying that the video/creator is good. How will you know if what you're seeing is representative of what people actually believe or is just curated nonsense?

[tikker]

46 minutes ago, Kisai said:

You can still leave comments, now the video creators will just delete vile "KYS" type of comments or have to turn comments off entirely if it's a children-oriented video.

Hmm, maybe I misunderstood their video then. I though they were talking about giving the creators a voice, but the viewers makes more sense in hindsight.

 

46 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Like you have to realize, that this might have the unintended consequence of people brigading in the comments instead, because we keep seeing it happen every time someone goes off on a game dev/artist/cartoonist for something that someone else was responsible for.

With "this" do you mean the removal of the dislike button or keeping it? The comments are already a wild west sometimes depending on the kind of channel (between what I watch I tend to see nice(r) comment sections with creators that actually somewhat interact with the community and care a tiny bit about what goes on in there).

[mwagen]

I don't like this change, but the more I think about it I don't really see it as that controversial. Hate brigading can be a bit ridiculous, and using the dislike button as a form of bullying should be mitigated somehow. For example, imagine some 10 year old kid likes making videos about Legos or Minecraft or whatever, then some bully at his school discovers his channel and gets all his friends to dislike his videos for no other reason than it being an easy way to hurt somebody's feelings. Countering those kinds of juvenile reactions are good things because that can be pretty devastating to kids at that age, or any age for that matter. We hear it often from prominent youtubers how hard it is to deal with mean reactions to their work, and we should all empathize with that. 

 

But if the primary goal was to reduce those kinds of juvenile reactions then I don't really see this helping that much. Perhaps people will feel less inclined to jump on the hate wagon if the dislike count isn't visible, but as long as the dislike button is there people are gonna click it, hate brigading will continue, and of course the comments section still exists for people who really want to take the time to make sure their hate is visible.

 

I think what I would have done instead is to experiment with requiring specific reasons for clicking like/dislike such as objective evaluations on information accuracy, sentimental agree/disagree options, etc... edit: and when you post a video you're required to more specifically identify what kind of content the video contains to help in collecting more specific evaluations.

[Roswell]

Did it get delayed? I can still see dislike counts on the app and on my laptop.

[The_russian]

17 minutes ago, Roswell said:

Did it get delayed? I can still see dislike counts on the app and on my laptop.

They said the change will start gradually rolling out starting on the day the blog was posted, I didn’t see if the rollout was by region or video type or something else, but they aren’t going to disappear for all videos everywhere at once.

[Quackers101]

you can see it on some content. not everything has it.

[BondiBlue]

1 hour ago, Roswell said:

Did it get delayed? I can still see dislike counts on the app and on my laptop.

No, it's gradually rolling out. I can still see it when signed in. 

[Kisai]

11 hours ago, tikker said:

Hmm, maybe I misunderstood their video then. I though they were talking about giving the creators a voice, but the viewers makes more sense in hindsight.

The thing is, there's certain kinds of balance you need to maintain on a social media network, you can't aim for absolution because there will be push back.

 

Ideally

Youtube would have the thumbs up / thumbs down button. But the number shown is the combined number of likes and dislikes with no distinction. You are free to change your like to a dislike or vice versa at any time. If the video creator chooses to, they could show the break-out of like/dislike publicly, but I assure you that pretty much nobody would do this, no matter how good your content is, because you'll always have a few petty jerks ruining your 100% like rate. Remember, on other sites, specifically eBay (which pretty much founded the idea of positive and negative feedback) , people ONLY used negative feedback as a threat. Because on eBay if you have less than 98% positive feedback, you're considered a cheat and will get suspended. There's no coming back from that, but you can appeal the feedback (or rather, extort, as it really got used.)

 

That is what everyone should have learned from eBay's feedback system. That positive feedback is meaningless, but negative feedback is only used as a cudgel to punish people into doing what they want.

 

11 hours ago, tikker said:

With "this" do you mean the removal of the dislike button or keeping it? The comments are already a wild west sometimes depending on the kind of channel (between what I watch I tend to see nice(r) comment sections with creators that actually somewhat interact with the community and care a tiny bit about what goes on in there).

 

Yes, but understand that the comments can always be moderated, or you can make every video "approval only" and only approve comments, or commenters you curate. I make a point of not having free-for-all comments because I don't have time to moderate videos if someone decides to start hate brigade or spam older videos. Every comment left results in notifications or emails from youtube. So it could quite easily demoralize a creator receiving a bunch of KYS messages in their comments, approved or not.

 

That's pretty much why comments are being removed or heavily curated on sites that don't employ human moderators. Yes it's fun to engage with the creator, but if a creator gets big enough, they aren't going to hire someone to filter low quality comments for them, they're just going to make it invite-only and they will only surround themselves with people who aren't terrible.

 

That's one of the reasons why anyone who is mad at the removal or disabling of negative feedback/dislike buttons should self-reflect on how you were using it. If you were using it to punish, you're part of the problem. If you were using it as a genuine "sorry, but this experience was bad for me, despite me being the target audience." People are more likely to just hit like on stuff that made them feel good, but hit dislike on stuff that they aren't the target audience for, instead of not watching it.

 

I said a while back, that the correct mechanism for even using the like/dislike button should have required that the entire video be watched, because using the button without having watched the video is how brigading is enabled by the platform. YT already tracks where you leave off in every video, just stack that value with an attention statistic (eg "you watched this video was watched for X minutes/hours/days") and use "complete watch" of the video to count as a neutral like, and you can change that neutral to a positive or negative at the end. So positive, neutral and negative all count as "number of likes", but a "bad video" would only be algorithmically determined by how many people actually watched the video completely. That would also incentivize the creators to not "fill time", and incentivize watchers to watch the entire video if they want to leave feedback.

 

The same can be applied to comments, where the entire video must be attention watched (for the sake of argument, attention is only counted if the tab is visible and unmuted) where if you want to leave a comment, you must have watched at least the "attention point" of the video which can be defined by the creator as either the entire video or only the part you want comments about. Because you know all the low-quality comments are either because they didn't watch the video (only read the title) or didn't watch the entire video, and thus commented on something that the creator already said.