Youtube is censoring the like count Opinion's

[Kamina]

Hiding your like/dislike ratio has always been a option. I don't see why viewers should be affected on what is good or not. Sounds like they want to monopolize a narrative for the public by any means necessary, even if that means con artists and terrible content creators taking advantage of dislike count removal. 

 

I miss it when the internet was built by nerds. Now it's run by idiots.

[tikker]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

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.

Not sure what this relates to w.r.t. to my quoted sentence, but I agree I think? You do need balance. Only allowing likes does tread into that absolution territory in my eyes though, and now we're seeing said pushback.

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

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.

The combined number of likes and dislikes conveys no information. It'll just become another higher==better number I think. A 100% like rate also makes me suspicious, just as much as a 100% dislike rate. You'll never get 100% likes and 0 dislikes. Yes, ratings matter, but not showing numbers because you are afraid people won't like you for your 95% instead of 100% like ratio is questionable on its own. That shows signs that you are purely doing it to game the algorithm, get as much likes as possible and don't like your own content.

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

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's stupid and a problem with eBay, not the like/dislike system.

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

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.

Exactly, I'm not sure if I mentioned it in this thread or another, but good news doesn't make good news. The same goes for reviews, likes etc. People will much more easily leave a negative review, comment or dislike on something they don't like than the opposite on something they do. I consider that more a societal issue that for some reason we have developed a problem with stuff being disliked. We only allow liked and more liked.

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

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.

I wasn't talking about moderating the comments, but that's a solution, and something that simply needs to be done. Aside from the usual bots spamming everywhere, however, there is definitely a difference between communities.

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

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.

I mainly follow some gaming channels, but depending on what you call big, big creators that haven't shut the gates on paradise there still have lovely communities. If it starts going wrong you have two options really: stop looking at comments and let it go, or try to address it somehow.

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

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.

Even if they aren't the target audience, maybe they got a video recommended to them by YouTube, tried it out, didn't like it in the end and thus pressed the dislike button. With regard to your last sentence, that clearly shows there is possibly a huge misunderstanding on the platform of what likes and dislikes are for. People maybe think it is for them, to tailor the recommendations. If that's not what it's for, then that is poor design by YouTube. If the (dis)likes should be specific to the channel, limit it to subscribers or something.

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

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.

Yeah making negative feedback a bit more work may be good I think. Same for tweaking the algorithm.

[Avocado Diaboli]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

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.

I'd actually advocate for the system Valve implemented with Steam reviews, with a slight change. All upvotes and downvotes are tallied and the relative number of upvotes and downvotes determines the final rating a video has, though maybe not as granular as Steam, which has Overwhelmingly Positive, Very Positive, Positive, Mostly Positive, Mixed, Mostly Negative, Negative, Very Negative and Overwhelmingly Negative as possible ratings. The one thing I'd change from Steam's system for something like YouTube is that I'd hide the number of total likes and dislikes, as that obfuscates the required number to tilt a rating one way or another, which would somewhat disincentivize targeted campaigns.

 

That way you'd still have a means to check at a glance if a video that has a more informative character, like a tutorial or a fix for a problem, is legitimate while hiding some of the information used by trolls to harrass people.

[Quackers101]

as for review ratings like on steam, they would be another thing as well.

As on steam a lot of people would want a third option that might not be needed on youtube or such content.

As in up or down vote, but a middle vote for it "it's passable, but reason A and B might not be for everyone".

Edited November 14, 2021 by Quackers101

[TheEggComputer]

me who has a 4 year old version of the YT app on my phone is very happy rn as it doesn’t get these kind of updates

[Grungble]

On 11/15/2021 at 4:06 PM, danthe_only_man said:

me who has a 4 year old version of the YT app on my phone is very happy rn as it doesn’t get these kind of updates

can I have it

[TheEggComputer]

14 hours ago, Grungble said:

can I have it

if I knew how to give it then i would lol, but unfortunately i do not

[Grungble]

9 hours ago, danthe_only_man said:

if I knew how to give it then i would lol, but unfortunately i do not

sad

[thrasher_565]

On 11/11/2021 at 3:37 AM, Arika S said:

It is actually stupid to remove it. The like to dislike ratio is super important, it's how i know if a tutorial i'm about to watch is legitimate or just a bunch of fluff.

 

And these are the kinds of people that shouldn't even have a channel. if you're scared of criticism, don't be a youtuber.

even if it has alot of like's till hard to tell if its a legit review or just a paid advertised meant

 

they way most negative review that dont get taken down  has to be more pros then cons that's it. is saying  something has less cons then pros make it wroth it?

 

not all youtubes make advertising bad. some have it the same length in the same spot every time so you can skip it.

 

On 11/11/2021 at 6:44 AM, Spotty said:

Youtube just wants people spending more time watching youtube even if the videos are junk. If people see a high dislike ratio that might stop them from watching it

Amazon: "We have determined that negative reviews on products for sale on Amazon.com reduces sales, so we have disabled negative reviews from showing. Only 5 star product reviews are displayed" /s

 

The difference is disabling likes/dislikes on a video is a change the creator has to make and everyone knows that if a creator has disabled the like/dislike ratio then it probably means the video is garbage. I think that's why Youtube are removing the dislike counter from every channel whether they want it or not so the few creators who do want it aren't criticised for disabling dislikes. They can just sit back and go "I would really like to show the like/dislike ratio but it's out of my control sorry" while actually being glad it isn't showing the 5k dislikes their video received.

odds are there just going to go watch another video so... instead of be like fuck it im not watching youtube then.

 

On 11/11/2021 at 9:30 AM, pythonmegapixel said:

 I think that this thread has a stupid title. How is this censorship?

 

 

This seems like a bit of an irrelevant comment. YouTube aren't turning off negative feedback, you can still write something in the comments if you want. It's not even turning off the blanket ability for someone to say "I hate this" without providing any constructive feedback - you can still press the dislike button.

 

Honestly I think it's often true that the real snowflakes are the people who throw the word "snowflake" around as an insult whenever someone decides something that they happen not to like.

do you read thousandths of comments to determent if its legit?

 

On 11/11/2021 at 5:48 PM, Sauron said:

In principle I don't really care, it's true that negative ratings can hurt a community (which is why we don't have them here). In the specific case of youtube, however, it's a bit different because the algorithm still pushes videos that are terribly rated and if you can't tell the difference then you might be subject to misinformation... plus, if creators can't see dislikes they can't really get at-a-glance feedback from their communities.

negative videos are then new meda. people watch negativety more then good. just look at the news...

 

On 11/11/2021 at 7:43 PM, YoungBlade said:

I don't think this was requested by most prominent people on the platform. I think it was requested by businesses. A lot of companies already disable the like/dislike and comments altogether because they are afraid that any negativity will hurt their brand. But if only likes are shown, it benefits them, because they can be seen as being open to feedback while only presenting the positive feedback. If Google's AI gets good enough, soon you'll have the ability to only allow positive comments, and companies will enable those, too.

 

The thing is, the videos I'm most skeptical of are the ones where likes and dislikes are disabled, yet the comments are all positive. That is an obvious sign of curating comments on the part of the creator and immediately makes me distrust them. If you don't allow disent of any kind, you obviously are not a person of good character.

just dont buy them then if the company cant handle negativity. says alot about the  company imo.

 

On 11/11/2021 at 10:11 PM, Beerzerker said:

Agreed!!!
Nothing wrong in just saying whether you like something or not because everyone has things they do or don't like.

No one is going to like everything, not everything is going to be liked by everyone or even by a majority, that's just life and how it is no matter who you are. 
And if you can't deal well....
That's you and no one else.

 

something like maybe 10% of people like but probably more if people dislike it.

 

On 11/12/2021 at 12:20 AM, SlidewaysZ said:

What a bunch of babies over at YouTube! If you go through life without wanting anyone ever criticizing you your going to have a real sucky life. This is just straight up stupid imagine a world where the only reviews were 5 star ones and besides that turning off comments and disabling dislikes is censorship approaching the levels of China.

kinda like 5 star in china...

 

On 11/12/2021 at 7:11 PM, YoungBlade said:

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.

there is a subreddit somewhere that coordinates targeted attacks targeted attacks against children ads on videos... or ads on videos with children in it. and one guy took them down...along with the ad ad revenue.

 

On 11/12/2021 at 6:19 PM, 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"

children videos are the most viewed video on youtube period.  why because they click on a video recommend its not like kids are searching for videos... 

 

On 11/13/2021 at 5:42 PM, tikker said:

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.

you can even dislike a video with out even watching it...

 

On 11/13/2021 at 5:55 PM, 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.

 

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.

the news loves the dislikes because people had to watch to dislike...

Edited November 18, 2021 by thrasher_565

[thrasher_565]

On 11/13/2021 at 9:32 AM, mwagen said:

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.

people click the dislike button because if they leave hate messages they get deleted so...

[LogicalDrm]

*** Off-topic removed ***

[Quackers101]

seems like more videos have this now, not sure if they are pushing it more and more? if anyone else sees it too.

[TheEggComputer]

On 11/17/2021 at 9:43 PM, Grungble said:

sad

well looks like they broke my 1.5 year old version now. Interestingly, the 4 year version still works (2 different cell phones used in this experiment both iPhone 7s flashed with specific versions)

Edited December 2, 2021 by danthe_only_man
typo

[whm1974]

YouTube is considered Social Media? That is news to me as I thought it someplace to watch User created Content. Sometimes very useful ones at that.

[Sho2048]

11 hours ago, whm1974 said:

YouTube is considered Social Media? That is news to me as I thought it someplace to watch User created Content. Sometimes very useful ones at that.

It has been for a long while now, but yea, sometimes the community consider themselves more important than the creators for some reason

 

[GeoIV]

So, I hate that the counter for dislikes have been removed (and therefore the ratio)

 

This has already had detrimental effects on my search for information (looking for good info on several house repairs/upgrades)

 

I don't know that there is anything we can do to convince Google, unfortunately. 

So, since Google doesn't want to show me the useful data, I stopped "liking" videos. Instead, I comment "like" if I don't have anything else to say, just so the video gets some interaction and hopefully helps the creator in some way (I am a YouTube Premium subscriber, so hopefully that helps too).

 

I realize this isn't likely to accomplish much, but something is better than nothing...

[Tan3l6]

Yeah, dislikes are finally gone - long live "Return Youtube Dislike" plugin!

[Skiiwee29]

@GeoIV I have merged your thread into the thread discussing the removal of the dislike numbers for Youtube. 

[Mitko_DSV]

On 11/12/2021 at 9:57 AM, Spotty said:

The dislike ratio is still worsening, and will likely continue to do so at least while we can still see it.

Currently the video is at 9.5k / 44k, which is around 82% dislike ratio. To put that in perspective Youtube Rewind 2018 which is the most disliked video on Youtube has a dislike ratio of 86%.

 

 

Well.... 23k likes and 404k dislikes, that's nearly 95% dislike ratio. I'm using an addon to show the dislikes.

YouTube automatically translated it to Bulgarian for some reason, but it's the same video.

[Mark Kaine]

On 11/15/2021 at 10:06 PM, coneve1414 said:

me who has a 4 year old version of the YT app on my phone is very happy rn as it doesn’t get these kind of updates

They will just remove the dislikes anyway... if they arent sent out how's your app going to display them? (I might be wrong but I don't see how that would continue to work without the data being sent)

 

On 11/18/2021 at 5:43 AM, thrasher_565 said:

people click the dislike button because if they leave hate messages they get deleted so...

I disliked a yt video yesterday and got immediate notification that yt will notify the uploader about *me* *specifically* disliking their video... which prompted me to immediately remove my dislike... and I have just decided to never ever again like or dislike a video again (until yt brings back the dislike button *and* respects my privacy,  who disliked a video is of no concern to the uploader, that just invites salty, bully'ish behavior in "retaliation"...)

 

On 11/17/2021 at 4:16 AM, Grungble said:

can I have it

Funny enough I never use the yt app, it's just pretty terrible imo, yt mobile is much better in my browser,  not logged in,  i get better and more relevant "suggestions" too, oddly enough... 

 

 

On 11/18/2021 at 4:29 AM, thrasher_565 said:

you can even dislike a video with out even watching it...

 

On 11/18/2021 at 4:29 AM, thrasher_565 said:

the news loves the dislikes because people had to watch to dislike...

 

It's either or, you cant have both... lol.

 

 

 

[Spotty]

2 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

I disliked a yt video yesterday and got immediate notification that yt will notify the uploader about *me* *specifically* disliking their video... which prompted me to immediately remove my dislike... and I have just decided to never ever again like or dislike a video again (until yt brings back the dislike button *and* respects my privacy,  who disliked a video is of no concern to the uploader, that just invites salty, bully'ish behavior in "retaliation"...)

Are you talking about this popup?

 

That's not saying that it's sharing with the creator that *you* specifically disliked the video. It's just saying that dislike counts are now only shared to the creator so when you dislike something that's feedback that only the creator gets.

The Learn More link goes to this page: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9072033

Quote

Community and comments

• Making the dislike count private: Starting November 10, 2021, YouTube is making the dislike count private. Creators can continue to find their dislike counts in YouTube Studio. Learn more.

 

Though I wouldn't care if creators saw that *I* disliked their video. Most of the time I dislike something it's simply because the Youtube algorithm keeps recommending a video to me that I have no interest in.

[Mark Kaine]

45 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Are you talking about this popup?

 

That's not saying that it's sharing with the creator that *you* specifically disliked the video.

Yeah, pretty sure that was what it said... I might have overreacted there,  but tbh nothing what youtube "says" is ever clear to me (could still be interpreted however tbh) 

 

[Results45]

Apparently..............it works! I'm satisfied 

 

 

[mr moose]

In my day, if you didn't want negative criticism you didn't produce shit.    People these days are being raised to think negative criticism is a personal insult or something and thus dangerous.  Poor kids don't know how to fail and fix it.