I've never understood the need for it. If I'm going to dislike something, I won't click on it to watch in the first place. If I hate something so much I'd watch it just to "dislike" it, well its one of those thing's I find so objectionable that I'm likely to watch it to comb for a violation to report. If I then don't find a violation to report it for, I slap myself for adding to their views in the first place... and move on with my life. Then again, I click "like" on about .001% of Youtube videos I actually watch and enjoy... so I don't see much use out of any engagement tools.
Youtube is now removing the dislike feature
- Thread starter Specter Von Baren
- Start date
We are long sailed past the wild west of the internet. YouTube Kids killed commenting on children shows meaning no more funny memes about Sing and Taron being Elton John in every way possible, Lowtax killing himself serve as the end of the 2001 era of offensive internet as he leaves a miserable legacy.
This is just life moving on as usual as people can no longer get ratioed which I approve of.
It's a righteous move. Online trolls and people looking to ratio activists Downvoted videos and in case no one realize it, 11/11/2021 marks a day where the wild west of the internet died
Not really, removing a dislike button isn’t really gonna stop trolls from harassing someone.
It does remove easy avenues of attack which is the main motivation of removing downvotes.
How many times I get Downvoted because I provided unpopular takes on a topic elsewhere
How many times does attempts at activism and corporate responsibility get Downvoted by people who wants the irresponsible status quo to continue?
By taking one step at a time, we can detoxify the internet and bring an end to the wild west.
This won't affect my life in the slightest. I have no opinion on this decision.
^This. When I click on a video about puppies and see 200 dislikes, my first question is "who doesn't like puppies?" My next question is "who dislikes puppies enough to make their dislike known by actively disliking a video about puppies?" Given there are more than enough opinionative assholes online, YouTube dislikes come off as more a measure of opinionative assholes and less a representation of the quality of the content I seek out.
They can already do this. Youtube's excuse is, "It paints a bad image when someone disables their likes and dislikes". So people organically find a way to circumvent restrictions placed on them just like they will with this. It's like so much of what the government decrees, it doesn't actual "fix" what they don't want, it just makes things more tedious for everyone.
...I'm going to offer a contrary opinion to the "corporations are to blame" knee-jerk. You have no idea how valuable that information is.
Let me put it this way: if I'm running a display ad campaign, I want as much data as I can get on how people interacted with it. I want to know how many people saw it, I want to know what keywords led them to it, and I want to know how many people clicked on any part of the ad. I want to know how many people followed a referral link (and what percentage that is of people who viewed it), I want to know what those people did after getting to the landing page, and I want to know when and where the ads had the most traffic. The like/dislike button is another point of data giving you early warning about how your content is being received. That is something you want to utilize, not suppress.
Let me put it this way: if I'm running a display ad campaign, I want as much data as I can get on how people interacted with it. I want to know how many people saw it, I want to know what keywords led them to it, and I want to know how many people clicked on any part of the ad. I want to know how many people followed a referral link (and what percentage that is of people who viewed it), I want to know what those people did after getting to the landing page, and I want to know when and where the ads had the most traffic. The like/dislike button is another point of data giving you early warning about how your content is being received. That is something you want to utilize, not suppress.
I think you misunderstand something. Corporations are not a single entity. You're talking about the perspective of someone working in a certain job within a corporation, someone who is meant to analyze data. Those people aren't the ones that push for this kind of thing.
Sorry everyone, as I think I'm partially to blame for this as I would take every given opportunity to dislike any ad that played during my video that allowed me to vote.
I used to pay a lot of attention to the like/dislike bar, particularly when I spent a lot of time watching near random videos online for sanity reasons back when I lived by eating, sleeping and working and never speaking to other humans ever. I used it as a gauge of whether I should watch a video basically.
Know what I noticed? Barring the few times some kind of organized gank went down, you have to fuck up like whoa to get any amount of dislikes. Seriously, even videos about things that are extremely objectionable on a moral basis rarely attracted any significant amount of dislikes. The only thing that would usually trigger it was when someone did something vastly out of character, or acted in a way contrary to how their audience thought they would/should act. My guess is that people either don't click or just don't even see stuff they would actually personally disagree with - watch youtube long enough and you'll definitely hear discussions about the dark magic that is the "Algorithm" (cue musical sting).
Well, the algorithm exists to spoon feed people stuff they'll watch to make sure they keep watching. It doesn't need to be stuff they enjoy - hatewatching is still watching and it nets ad revenue just as well - but assuming most people don't actively seek to make themselves less happy its easy to imagine that a lot of this stuff just doesn't get seen by people would dislike it. From that perspective the like/dislike bar is less a gauge of how good the video is and more a gauge of how good the algorithm is doing at funneling the right people to your video. You can short circuit it by making a channel all about loving animals and then post a video of you intentionally farting directly in a cats face, but if your channel was originally all about farting in the faces of cats then your like/dislike ratio would probably be fine.
So removing the like/dislike? Well, you better believe they're still collecting that data - it acts as a survey to determine how good of a job they're doing directing people to the right videos. As far as the visible metrics, I don't know as it makes much of a difference. Nobody likes microsoft. Just assume any video they post is pretty universally disliked.
Know what I noticed? Barring the few times some kind of organized gank went down, you have to fuck up like whoa to get any amount of dislikes. Seriously, even videos about things that are extremely objectionable on a moral basis rarely attracted any significant amount of dislikes. The only thing that would usually trigger it was when someone did something vastly out of character, or acted in a way contrary to how their audience thought they would/should act. My guess is that people either don't click or just don't even see stuff they would actually personally disagree with - watch youtube long enough and you'll definitely hear discussions about the dark magic that is the "Algorithm" (cue musical sting).
Well, the algorithm exists to spoon feed people stuff they'll watch to make sure they keep watching. It doesn't need to be stuff they enjoy - hatewatching is still watching and it nets ad revenue just as well - but assuming most people don't actively seek to make themselves less happy its easy to imagine that a lot of this stuff just doesn't get seen by people would dislike it. From that perspective the like/dislike bar is less a gauge of how good the video is and more a gauge of how good the algorithm is doing at funneling the right people to your video. You can short circuit it by making a channel all about loving animals and then post a video of you intentionally farting directly in a cats face, but if your channel was originally all about farting in the faces of cats then your like/dislike ratio would probably be fine.
So removing the like/dislike? Well, you better believe they're still collecting that data - it acts as a survey to determine how good of a job they're doing directing people to the right videos. As far as the visible metrics, I don't know as it makes much of a difference. Nobody likes microsoft. Just assume any video they post is pretty universally disliked.
Didn't know they could. Which only begs the question why disabling dislikes does anything. This can only be for manipulative algorithmic purposes, I'd assume.
I'm not sure how telling dislikes are, though. I mean, consider how many people sit through an entire video's content... just to ultimately dislike it. I've started hundreds of videos and stopped them after a minute or two and they weren't even worth my time to officially dislike them. It takes a second to dislike a video. It also takes a second to like a video, but a like is more telling since it means someone ostensibly sat through it and enjoyed it enough to throw their hat in the ring of "yes, I want to see more stuff like that." I'm probably what most would considered a liberal; I could go on YouTube right now and click on as many conservative videos as I can find and dislike them within 5 seconds of the video even playing. Conversely, as a liberal, I could find as many liberal videos that align with my thinking, and I'd probably watch those videos in their entirety to appreciate the echo chamber of my beliefs, and I'd "like" them. Point being, I think dislikes should be less heavily weighted than likes for the simple fact that they can be easily weaponized.
Honestly, I think disable both likes and dislikes and just let total time watched be a measure of a videos content. If a 5 minute video has 1,000 views but only 4% watched the whole 5 minutes, then you know it's probably not worth its runtime. But if another 5 minute video has 90% of views that ran the whole length, it's content is substantive or at least engaging enough that most people watched the whole thing.
Maybe the solution is to not make liking/disliking a video so easy as a click. Maybe require the "voter" leave a comment that shows they actually watched the video and had actual opinions based on its content before their "vote" applies. That'd definitely weed out some of the casual, drive-by opinions of every stripe.
Or just not care. It's fucking YouTube. Anyone living off of endorsed wages via YouTube needs to get a real job and quit bitching about how a largely free service robs their pockets.
I have opinions.
It hasn't died, it has just taken a new form. Removing the dislike bar changes absolutely nothing. There are still jackasses and assholes out there. All they have to do is circumvent a way to get around that, and once they do, the same thing is going to happen. Nobody gains or benefits really much, aside from Google and YouTube themselves.
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Just to be clear, the haters would never bother to watch the video. They would just dislike it
It's like when Youtube banned the comments section on children's videos. Sure, it stops the paedophiles from commenting. Doesn't stop the paedophiles from using that video for their pleasure.
It Still eliminated an aspect of meme culture though. No more sick jokes or jokes in general on children shows
This works both ways and now you can't downvote hateful propaganda, conspiracy garbage and misinformation either.
HAHAHAHA
YouTube once again using the Spaceballs Managerial Method, or SMM, it seems.