Poll of the Day > Do you support youtube removing public dislike numbers from videos?

(+) Yeah! (+)

iirc they are thinking of doing that

No

If your content is shit, you should be publicly ratio'd.

If you remove dislikes, get rid of likes too.

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No, not being able to down vote stupid shit is probably the main reason I don't use those other sites.

I don't really care. I can do the work of reading the description and flicking through the video to see if it's worthwhile. If you're using the thumbs up/thumbs down to colour your judgement of a video, I don't think you're being very objective in your own thought process.

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You can already remove likes and dislikes from your YouTube videos.

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Kotenks posted...

No. I use the dislike bar to know whether a video delivers on its title. Prevents me from sitting through a 20 minute tutorial that doesn't work.

Yeah. I've gotten good at analyzing the like to dislike ratio to see if a video delivers well enough. If less than 80% of people or so like a video, I can assume the video is either not as good as promised, or just bullshit.

Cotton_Eye_Joe posted...

You can already remove likes and dislikes from your YouTube videos.

Yep, and I avoid those videos since it typically means something is wrong.

BlackScythe0 posted...

No

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Dont really care. Any sort of downvote does get used to brigade so I cant really fault them for deciding to remove it.

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J_Dawg983 posted...

Dont really care. Any sort of downvote does get used to brigade so I cant really fault them for deciding to remove it.

Then take away the likes too since that just as "artificially" exploitable.

Have we learned nothing from Rotten Tomatoes yet?

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No. Not sure why we keep doing this. One reason Ill never use that change.org garboni. They dont allow you to vote against a petition. So all you see is how many people are in favour, not how many people dont want it. They hit their magic number of positives, and maybe someone takes notice, with disregard for how many might not want the change.

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No, I hate when it's likes only.
If a video is crap, I want to know beforehand. If, for example, EA puts out a godawful trailer for a game or boneheaded PR statement, I want the dislikes to reflect that fact.

It's already bs they got rid of the star ratings for the binary like/dislike system. But there's nothing youtube loves to do more than make their product worse.

J_Dawg983 posted...

Dont really care. Any sort of downvote does get used to brigade so I cant really fault them for deciding to remove it.

Upvotes can be brigaded, too.

BlackScythe0 posted...

Yep, and I avoid those videos since it typically means something is wrong.

Yup. Especially if both likes/dislikes and comments are disabled, that almost always means something is suspect. Like, taking video footage and cutting part of it out to present a false narrative, then avoiding the two ways (dislikes and comments) of being called out on it by users.

streamofthesky posted...

No, I hate when it's likes only.
If a video is crap, I want to know beforehand. If, for example, EA puts out a godawful trailer for a game or boneheaded PR statement, I want the dislikes to reflect that fact.

If it says EA, that is the dislike, bud.


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The real problem is that dislike ratio is a mostly meaningless metric anyway. Because dislikes count as "engagement", which means the more disliked your video is, the more likely it is to be recommended to other people, which is sort of the opposite effect people disliking it would actually want.

Sure, you could argue that massive downvotes on videos on YouTube "sends a message" to coporations or companies that people object to, but most corporations ignore that anyway because it rarely translates into lost revenue in any meaningful way.

And has been pointed out, it's too easy to brigade, bot, or otherwise manipulate numbers regardless.

But I'd agree that a "like" rating without a corresponding "dislike" rating is just stupid BS. If the corporate overlords are so bothered by mean Internet folks disliking their videos that they have to beg YouTube to protect their hurt feelings, just do away with the rating system entirely.
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Pretty sure Youtube is doing it only because their videos (and crap videos from big corporations) are getting massive amounts of dislikes, not because the feelings of an independent content creator are getting hurt.

Hell, most of them will say they use dislikes to gauge if they should change the way they make their content or if they should keep doing what they are doing.

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it's true that lots of stuff gets dislike-bombed but maybe trying to stop that from happening would be a better option than just going nuclear on it

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Also, not only can likes be brigaded just as easily, but sometimes companies outright take down a video and re-post it just to clear out the massive dislikes and negative comments and hope the people that already checked it out and hated it won't notice and come back again.

That's at least as manipulative and shady as brigading.

There was a site I had discovered some years ago, that I won't list here, that used to have both likes and dislikes for its cyoa style stories. Unfortunately, a lot of those stories had some troubling themes, which some folk could at least dislike until a few days after I made an account just to like the better parts AND dislike the worst of what I saw. Then dislikes were taken away a few years ago, allegedly for some sort of fix, but the likes remain; those worse parts of the stories and themes mutated further over time.

Now then.

On one hand, I am reminded of an episode of Seth Macfarlene's better-Star-Trek-than-Star-Trek show where it saw a society that literally equated the value of life to likes versus dislikes. I don't see that coming quite to fruition here, but I mean to say we should rely on likes and dislikes to see value or lack thereof in content, or people.

In regards to Youtube, however, there used to be a more ranged rating system. It wasn't perfect, but it was nice to gather a general idea of how people with similar interests viewed a video related to said interest. Or, rather, it was nice trying to do so, grain of salt and all. Youtube reduced it to the over-simplified like and dislike, much to the disappointment of its userbase. To eliminate the rating function entirely might have been another thing, but no, you're asking about the removal of dislikes.

And we have two precedents to why this is a bad idea.

One is related to Blizzard and Overwatch. From what I vaguely recall, they cut the ability to share valid opinions on things, and turned around and said, "We haven't heard anything bad, so clearly we're doing good." It's like not hearing a no, and taking that as a yes, but who would dare share that kind of mindse-- oh right, the second example.

When a certain someone, who shall remain nameless and bound for eventual obscurity, took office four years ago, the official website closed its online source of feedback from the public. Over the following years, any attempt to bring up misdeeds or lack of popularity were met with "fake news" or falsified numbers that clearly didn't exist, because the means to collect such data was dividing by zero at that point - no source available.

So then, should Youtube remove Dislikes? Not unless it means to do the same with Likes and replace it with a new system, preferably with something better, but I do not see Youtube or its handlers doing this, due to a rule of corporate dumb. I would be sad with the removal of both Likes and Dislikes if only for one reason, however, and that is the even ratio maintained, to this day, for the following Futurama clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxK_nA2iVXw

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Certainly not. If anything I'd support expanding its use to thumbnails as well.

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No the airing of discontent is what the founding fathers of the internet intended.

Nope. YouTube needs to know that the majority do not support the idiotic agendas they are trying to push.

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