I'm curious to hear from YouTube users who (used to) consider the dislike count before watching a video. I can't recall if it ever majorly factored into my watch habits. I usually only noticed it in cases when users were likely being harassed (crazy ratios), or if a creator strayed from what their audience expected (anything less than crazy). On a post dislike platform, I'd expect that lowered view counts would serve as an indicator of low quality content, or audience dissatisfaction.
I used to consider the dislike count. I am still inconvenienced by its absence.
To give one example: In the major categories of videos I watch (tutorials, niche historical topics, video games, music) it was very common for at least some type of "Trojan horse" content to show up (heavily amateur/improper/incorrect content, potentially troll content or in the music case bad rips/"remixes"/mislabeled songs etc.)
Previously, dislike count gave me a way of catching this trivially, even in cases when comments were disabled, before I wasted time loading the page or getting blasted with max volume noise (human screaming in one case IIRC) to the point of clipping my speakers (I hit this post-removal as well, thus this rant).
Low view counts are effectively meaningless as an oracle given that it's largely expected in many cases.
This change has for me as a user severely hampered Youtube's utility as a platform (I effectively no longer use it for discovery), and as a technologist, lowered my respect for the functionality/integrity of the software and its design choices. (I doubt they are unaware of this, but I also doubt I'm their target demographic, and find their stated justifications disingenuous at best.)
I would always consider dislike percentage before wasting my time consuming content. This is the same as negative reviews on a restaurant. A few of them won't stop me from going, but enough of them make me reconsider.
So the end result is I can't trust the quality of the content on youtube anymore, and have stopped using it for anything other than occasional music.
Video game tutorials and programming tutorials come to mind. Some
programming ones I watched had some really big security flaws and I only noticed when I saw the dislikes that something was wrong! Video game tutorials also are usually very poor quality and checking the dislike before watching is a good way to see if it’s a waste of time or not.
I prefer longer videos. If the videos looks like it was heading off the tracks, I'd check the ratio. If it is positive, I'd stick it out to see where the video was going. If the ratio was negative, I'd save my time by skipping the video.
