The dislike button on YouTube videos is one of the few remaining signals that what you are seeing is propaganda.
It hadn't occurred to me that this would happen (although it seems obvious) and it is unexpectedly frightening to me.
I suppose the fallback will be videos with comments enabled, where people can 'like' a comment who is saying something common sense and reasonable in response to the content.
I believe it is because they see themselves as 'above' YouTube. They don't take the risk of having a Emacs/Vim flame war in the comments and detracting from the points in the video. By disabling comments, the conversation is kept civil, because it isn't there.
They are not resourceful enough to curate a forum, so they prefer no forum at all.
I know K-12 educators who post videos primarily for their students and fellow local teachers, and they disable comments and voting because bored kids will fill the comments with crap, and scammers will target the kids.
Yes, but cause and effect are reversed from the teacher's perspective. They mark the video as "made for kids" because that's the easiest way to disable comments.
My first thought was that comments in many online spaces, including youtube, can simply be mean. If I was responsible for the online presence of a course I wouldn't want my lecturers to have to deal with random people commenting on their bad haircut or annoying voice, for example.
It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform. It's an expense to have someone going through comments.
Most organizations (education, government, for-profit, NPO, you name it) that use Twitter rarely if ever interact with any other Twitter account except for preplanned promotional stuff. If you noticed, Twitter added the ability to limit replies. That was solely to please the corporate world who don't like it when someone jumps on the stage that is their platform.
McDonalds doesn't like it when they tweet about their "green initiative" and PETA replies to the tweet with something about beef using x amount of land and y water compared to other food sources, or just a GIF of a cow getting slaughtered. BMW doesn't like it if they tweet about how much they spend on training techs for "world class service" but someone replies with a picture of an engine with a hole in the block because a dealer tech forgot to tighten the oil plug properly after an oil change. Limiting tweet replies means that tweeting for corporations is now a "safe space."
There's an entire business segment dedicated to providing tools to social media teams to alert them if someone who actually is "important" interacts with their social media account. Patrick Stewart tweets about his Juicero blows a fuse? He gets a replacement hand-delivered by a young marketing intern in a star trek uniform who gushes about how she grew up being a fan of "Bev."
You tweet about your juicero blowing a fuse? Nobody at Juicero even sees the tweet, because their social media monitoring tool looked at your profile, saw you rarely get more than 30 views and 2-3 engagements, and knew you represented zero threat to the brand.
It's because they want to reap the benefits of a social platform without actually participating in a social aspects of said platform.
If by they you mean Google then I agree. Google reaps the benefits, to the tune of billions, while deflecting as much accountability as possible. Google's entire m.o. is to build enormous scale through software automation without providing any human-level support to its users. Large changes (like the removal of dislike counts) are made only under pressure from powerful groups, unless Google deems such changes to be profitable.
It's a signal that the creator does not want do engage in moderate / discussion on YouTube. There's perfectly valid reasons for that (e.g. topic is controversial, video is only for embedding or archiving on YouTube, there's no social media manager, the video is for kids). It is not a good signal for the video being not worth your time.
Otoh creators can delete comments. So the comments existing and being positive about a video is not a good signal for the video being good either.
While I personally haven’t noticed comments being on or off as useful, just because a signal could have multiple factors doesn’t necessarily render it useless.
For example, a Yelp rating itself is useless until you also combine other signals such as the number of reviews, the type of restaurant, and the popularity of Yelp use in an area, and then I find Yelp ratings potentially very useful. Same with Amazon reviews, Rotten Tomatoes scores, or any scoring or review system.
Many young content creators have comments disabled (or by parental decree) so they don't have to experience intentionally hurtful or negative trolling some comment sections are well known in spawning.
Not exactly young here, but I disable contents for this reason among many others. I will not make my own videos a platform for intentionally hurtful comments, off-topic arguments between commentators, or rants.
Some other reasons:
I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior.
Also, disabling comments helps me to communicate that they are not a channel I monitor for feedback or questions. I just don't have the time to monitor them, and in Youtube's case this means I either have a potential commenting cesspool on my hands or no comments at all.
To some people this is a huge red flag maybe, but I would wonder if they really understand what it's like to be a publisher on the platform. Again and again I have seen good channels derailed by the absolutely broken commenter-publisher feedback loop...
> I find it irresponsible on Youtube's part, to maintain a commenting platform with such a tremendous budget, and yet without meaningful discussion moderation tools that could be found on much lower-end platforms. These tools are a minimum bar for basically not promoting abusive behavior.
It is not in the interests of almost any site or platform operator to limit drama, trolling, etc. They want the page views, the time spent in-app/on site, the emotional energy and investment.
Look at celebrities. The job of their publicists is to negotiate with other publicists to manufacture some inconsequential tiff that puts the names of their clients in the media.
You say this like it's a bad thing, and not a person setting boundaries for how they are willing to interact with an audience.
But you drop "censorship" front and center about some random dude's YouTube channel and you're doing some sterling fearmongering throughout the thread in general so I'm going to be honest, I gotta think this is less about any sort of freedom to speech and rather about the privilege of being granted time on somebody else's soapbox--the demand to listened to.
You must not frequent the same subset of videos I watch.
The amount of trolling (or just outright stupidity, hard to tell sometimes) on e.g. CS conference videos or lectures by women is insane. I entirely understand that the organizations putting those videos up don't want to deal with that nonsense.
Aren't the channel owners allowed to delete comments? So comments being enabled could mean it's a good video or it could mean the author is removing comments. You can't tell which it is.
I suspect that your notion of what qualifies as propaganda differs significantly from most people.
Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate.
The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.
I think the problem is that the dislike count itself is too aggregated. What you really want is to know if people similar to yourself like / dislike certain content.
This is very similar to the problems where YouTube fits you into filter bubbles, and Netflix struggles to tell you good recommendations. TikTok supposedly does a better job then others at this, likely due to having lots of signals from short videos.
>The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.
We have this problem with movie reviews as well. I lost all faith in Rotten Tomatoes when I saw Knock Down the House's viewer ranking go from the upper 80s to single digits over the course of two years. As more and more people found out that AOC was a star in the film, the score went down. It is a great film in my opinion. I wrote a script to scrape the reviews and provide details about the reviewers. So many 1 star reviews were new accounts that had just rated this film + maybe the Ilhan Omar film. Furthermore most of them don't even explain why they rated it that way(we all probably know why). This led me to think, what else is being manipulated? Are studios just buying up good reviews?
Recently they have introduced "Verified Reviews". This attempts to link your Rotten Tomatoes account with the movie theater so you can get a Verified Review checkmark if they have confirmed that you actually bought a ticket to the movie. Users can then filter on Verified reviews. This is a good first step and will probably help to curb abuse.
> Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate.
And who exactly are these nebulous people? This sounds like something O'Brien from 1984 would say about Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers.
Any asymmetrically engaged group is going to lead to metrics that aren't generally useful. In little bubbles, sure, but to everyone else it's just digital pollution.
Imagine that there was a group that really, really hated the color green, and they're so passionate that they fly "We Hate Green" flags outside their house, completely tie their identity with hating green, go to we hate green rallies (imagine having that little respect for your own time?), wear we hate green shirts, make up childish "We Hate Green" code words (e.g. Let's Go Purple!) for when they are among the greenies, and these people seemed to have endless idle time to sit brigading every bit of content to downvote it or leave nasty comments because something in the video was green. That is just noise to everyone else. Everyone else -- the majority of the public -- finds no value in their hyper-polarized, agenda-driven contributions.
And I'm not just talking about people who like green, but people who are indifferent or even anti-green but they don't find any value in having a review bombed because this idle group was mad that they thought it was "green woke".
Reddit did this same thing, for the same reason. Can't have people disliking an advertisement posed as a submission! that would hurt Reddit's appeal to advertisers.
This was one of the major inflection points for worsening quality of content on reddit, and it will be for Youtube too. For exactly the reason you've described.
Notably, HN does this too for the YC company job ads shown on the HN front page. Allowing users to comment on your job ad will inevitably lead to negative content so HN disables it.
(Though compared to reddit ads, these job listing have a very light touch. And they’re just a free perk for YC companies)
It's a signal that people don't like what they are hearing. If the propaganda aligns with their interests, the majority will like it. It's not a good signal for gauging propaganda in my opinion.
It seems most people are engaging with YouTube in the same bubbles as any other social media platform.
The "propaganda" videos I see (when searching for them) on YouTube don't have large dislike ratios, they are very much liked by the people who consume that content. An example is PragerU videos.
> How does the dislike button indicate propaganda?
Take the Gillette ad as a great example. No dislike button? Now the “lack of downvotes” can be used to indicate the normalization of such propaganda and imply people support the message.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and your comments in this thread have moved the thread noticeably in that direction.
Fair enough, though I'm a little confused at the gigantic threads that have remained unflagged that basically make the same statement (albeit from the "other side" - that YouTube is defending Democrats, the White House, etc).
It is impossible to discuss this without it becoming ideological, and the asymmetry is exactly why it is a massive problem.
I'm not sure which threads you're talking about, but it's probably a combination of (a) they're not breaking the site guidelines as much and/or (b) they haven't gotten moderator attention (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) - we don't come close to seeing everything and we don't necessarily read the threads in sequence.
The "you made me do this!" tactic is as old as time. In your case, the claim is that YouTube not hosting ignorant anti-vax content, and Biden making a factual claim about the unvaccinated, made people (at least proxies that substantiate your story) not get vaccinated. Therefore, YouTube and Biden are actually to blame!
Nonsense.
I was going to put the cart back in the corral, but then I saw the sign asking me to put the cart back and that offended me because now it's a demand and not a courtesy! The store is to blame that I left it rolling in the lot.
Whatever terrible, selfish thing people do, there is an argument they make where actually it is everyone else's fault.
The issue with depending on comments is that the next step is to disable them whenever the sentiment turns decidedly negative.
Your use of the word "frightening" is an understatement in my opinion. Using the dislike button to add to the dislike count is a form of speech, and YouTube is silencing it. Given the growing disconnect between reality and content produced by the mainstream media, politicians, etc., YouTube should be increasing options for the masses to warn others about content, not decimating them.
Yes! I'm against this decision, but dislikes are so unreliable as indicators of propaganda that they might as well not be there. All they indicate is how the video was received by its audience (duh), and decent propaganda is designed to rig this game.
The only times I remember seeing a high dislike-to-like ratio are on things that went viral in the wrong circles, so internet decided to mass-downvote the for inconsequential reasons, like Rebecca Black's Friday or the announcement for some video game that isn't made to appeal to the "core gaming public".
The media had ruled and controlled the western world with propaganda for the whole 20th century, from newspapers in early 1900s to TVs in late 1900s. We had a very brief period of people escaping the matrix through the internet and communicating through alternative channels, that little blip of media sandbox escape brought Trump and the Brexit and the corporates and media have been working hard to regain control of means of communication ever since.
Be glad you got to live through this very brief period of awakening because they are about to return everyone back into the darkness again.
See also Revolt of the Public, which explores the consequences of the internet breaking monopoly control over the flow of information. As you point out, it's the alternative channel that gave rise to unauthorized voices. What we're seeing play out is a fight between the dissenting public and the ruling elites. Removing dislikes is just the latest in a series of moves to reassert control over information.
You'll find that HN, just like any other community, is largely conformist on major social/political issues.
It came as a shock to me at first, but now I simply accept that people are wired for self-preservation via cognitive compartmentalization.
People here will argue vim/emacs for weeks, but will happily repeat mainstream media talking points on every major social/political issue.
This is why I restrict my usage of online communities based on expertise now. I will find world class programmers/scientists on HN, but those same geniuses will be hilariously ignorant on history/politics.
Such is life. HN is definitely not a one-stop shop, but it's unrivalled for anything STEM related.
I wonder if someone can produce an extension like SponsorBlock to add the functionality back. Surely this must be coming after this announcement.
For people that don't know SponsorBlock is a magical extension that uses crowdsourced data to automatically skip in video advertisements/end title/start tile junk that youtubers tend to do. What an amazing show of the power of software and intuitive thinking.
Except that groups have a proven track-record of assembling masses to brigade things they loudly hate. And since most people don't downvote, a determined group of downvoters can send a hyper-loud signal.
Personally, I think this is all flowing from a fundamental problem: there is no concept of "credibility" with upvotes and downvotes. As conservatives are fond of saying "facts don't care about your feelings", but all our social media use feelings to determine which "facts" get the loudest boost.
Any system that uses a raw number of votes (be they up or down) as a weighting score is basically encouraging botnets, brigades, etc. Like, every climate activist has a swarm of climate-change deniers following them around online and I consider their opinions worse than useless.
Exactly. Public opinion polls show that the COVID vaccine is widely accepted. Yet every COVID-related video on the front page has an 80% or more dislike ratio. Antivaxxers have hijacked the dislike tool to spread their propaganda, and the correct response is to take their toys away.
Yes, but my feeling is that we go a step further. And I suspect most social media companies are already doing this under the hood:
Just as Google graphs the relationships between sites and uses that to rank them, also graph the relationships between users and use that to rank them.
Like, important figure who's followed by numerous media experts and is consistently upvoted by respected people? Their opinion has weight. 1000 score per updoot.
Crank who has few followers, gets all their news from extremists on youtube, and does nothing but hurl insults at politicians all day? 0.01 score per updoot.
It's not democratic, but information isn't a democracy.
Let them keep upvoting and downvoting. And take that information for what it's worth.
Controversial videos, or those by controversial creators, are the ones that get brigaded. If you're inside a filter bubble and can't see a dislike count how will you know what you're looking at is controversial? Yes, the ratio is not representative of the general population but it's the signal that matters.
Would you rather not know something is controversial?
What mechanism would you prefer for nudging people outside of filter bubbles?
I'm happy to be generous and consider all videos with heavy dislike ratios as victims of brigading and not of public sentiment.
What does that even mean? What makes you think saying yes to vaccine but no to vaccine mandates means they don't "accept the vaccine"?
> Additionally, most people agree with the mandates
From the latest poll [1] (conducted between 11/05-11/07):
> Table POL11: Even if neither is exactly correct, which of the following comes closest to your opinion? Government mandates to receive a COVID-19 vaccine
44% of registered voters say they violate the rights of Americans
45% of registered voters say they protect the rights of Americans
> What does that even mean? What makes you think saying yes to vaccine but no to vaccine mandates means they don't "accept the vaccine"?
Most videos about the COVID vaccine that we're talking about are simply stating that the vaccines are effective and safe. Calling those "propaganda" and "lying" is not accepting the truth about the vaccine.
> From the latest poll [1] (conducted between 11/05-11/07):
Vaccine mandate support is ahead by 1 point in this poll, yet COVID videos with correct information about the vaccine on YouTube are 80%+ dislikes. Precisely my point.
> The dislike button on YouTube videos is one of the few remaining signals that what you are seeing is propaganda.
It is a dangerously noisy signal and this change is long overdue. Every COVID-related video on the front page of YouTube is spammed to high heaven with dislikes and "PLANDEMIC"s and "let's go Brandon!"s from right-wing antivaxxers. It's gotten to the point where YouTube is the premier distributor of antivax propaganda—only YouTube puts it one click away from the top of the fold even when not logged in—and it's a major threat to public health.
It hadn't occurred to me that this would happen (although it seems obvious) and it is unexpectedly frightening to me.
I suppose the fallback will be videos with comments enabled, where people can 'like' a comment who is saying something common sense and reasonable in response to the content.