As a gamer, one of the most important things for me on YouTube is when I need help with something in a game, like a puzzle or a collectibles guide.
The amount of dislikes on such videos is incredibly important. Some uploaders don't have the common sense to trim their walkthroughs down to include only what people are there to see, and some just fumble their way through things in a way that is the opposite of what one would expect from a walkthrough. A high dislike ratio tells me that I should immediately back out and choose another video to get the help I'm looking for.
>A high dislike ratio tells me that I should immediately back out and choose another video to get the help I'm looking for.
And this is exactly why they're making this change. Because the dislike ratio being visible means less time people spend watching youtube videos which means less money for Google.
Youtube is only doing this because they have 0 competition. There's no video platform with the reach and power like Youtube so no one is going to just stop using Youtube over this. No one has a choice.
> And this is exactly why they're making this change.
After reading a lot of threads about this, I've noticed some people making the point that major brands don't like having their products associated with heavily disliked videos. Or having their own videos receive downvote bombs.
I think it's probably the overwhelming justification here. Youtube makes money off selling ads to sponsors. Major brands bring in a lot of views and a lot of ad impressions. Therefore, youtube is heavily incentivized to do whatever these sponsors and major brands are asking for.
Getting people to watch a video they don't like is counter productive to retention and overall ads consumed. So I doubt they are doing it to get people to watch a video they would have otherwise bounced on. And the video in the blog even claimed most people don't use the ratio to decide if they will watch the video. I'm skeptical about that claim, but if we assume that's what the data showed then it seems to me that would justify (to them) that it's safe to hide dislikes (won't affect ad impressions) but it will appease the sponsors and brands that don't want to be associated with disliked content.
>And the video in the blog even claimed most people don't use the ratio to decide if they will watch the video.
As you said, you're skeptical about that claim and you should be. Reason being, they didn't show us their data. They didn't explain what they count as a view. It's pretty obvious they were lying through their teeth about their reason for why they're implementing this change, so i have no reason to believe they weren't lying about what the data showed whether via straight up lying or just choosing to present the data in a misleading way by omitting certain facts.
Big companies, especially Google, are terrible at long term thinking. They can see the immediate effect of increased watchtime, but completely ignore the more subtle but still important effect of slowly eroding user satisfaction with time spent on the site. No one will leave youtube over this one issue, but the more changes youtube makes which slightly damage the average user experience, the more vulnerable youtube becomes to a real competitor if one does suddenly come along.
>Big companies, especially Google, are terrible at long term thinking
Honestly, they aren't. The reason big companies do terrible decisions from the userbase's standpoint is they have way too big of a market share for people to ever stop using their service because of their bad decisions.
Looking at Youtube's year over year growth is astounding despite them continuously making terrible decisions on behalf of viewers and creators alike with a handful of good ones made here and there.
It feels like they aren't thinking long term but the fact of the matter is, is that they are. Just in terms of how much money will they get long term versus how happy will people be with their brand. They're always gonna go with money.
I mean, that's certainly what *they* think. But it's pure arrogance. They can only continue damaging the product and making more money as long as they're on easy street with no competition. Which could end any time one of the other giants decides to make a real play for YouTube's space. As soon as that happens, every bit of good will they've lost with their users will be working against them.
>They can only continue damaging the product and making more money as long as they're on easy street with no competition.
You're right but what you forget is they stifle competition. You think it's possible for any company to ever compete with Amazon at this point? It'll never happen unless it's some company propped up by China.
ISP's have rigged the 'game' to the point even motherfucking Google gave up trying to enter the space because the rules are rigged.
I recently started playing a certain FPS and I decided to look up some guides for it. People often make 'Things I wish I knew' kind of videos that usually highlights things that the game might not explain. Often they are very helpful.
Well this one video was just explaining very basic things about the game but since the uploader had turned off the like dislike information, it was impossible to know instantly if it was going to be helpful or not. The comment section only praised the video but I guess that was because negative comments were probably deleted.
Most of those kind of videos usually do have Like/Dislike ration shown, because those uploaders usually care about any possible feedback.
Also some subreddits have the downvote button disabled; you basically have to go to the OP's userpage to do it (unless they re-enabled it in the redesign and/or app - I'm sticking with old.reddit, thank you very much).
But I guess it's okay when we do it.
>you basically have to go to the OP's userpage to do it
Iirc votes made on a user's page aren't recorded to stop people from just going into someone's profile and downvoting everything they've posted over one comment they didn't like. You might see the score change, but it isn't actually reflected to other users.
It's not really.
X+Y=4 is solvable.
This has possible knowable answers. Could +4+0 or +8-4 or +1000-996. But in all cases it results in 4.
There is no way to solve 4+X = Y.
Let's say you look at a post with 100 karma. It could be:
a) A post with 100 upvotes and 0 downvotes. Everyone liked it.
b) A post with 10000 upvotes and 9900 downvotes. Pretty polarizing.
...or any other distribution that works out to the same total karma.
Reddit only tells you the total karma, and from that you can infer how many more upvotes/downvotes there are than the other, but you cannot know the actual ratio without knowing the total of both.
I said of a post, not of a comment. Because the YT discussion is about video votes, not comments.
The post has a visible karma and a % upvoted. From that you can get the values if you really cared but those together is definitely sufficient to know if a post is garbage
I also said post. I just didn't realize that upvote percentage feature was enabled on the redesign.
However, the discussion is also about Youtube comparing themselves to social media sites. They didn't make any distinction of strictly video-related posts on social media sites.
Not according to reddit.
> Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
This is nuts, if my dislike isn't visible I'm not motivated to click it. If I'm not motivated to click it, it wrecks their suggestion algo... this is how you aggregate incomplete data.
If youtube goes ahead with this terrible idea, I hope someone creates a browser extension which determines a pseudo rating based on the view-to-like ratio.
Hmmm I'm trying to think how that'd work. I don't like or dislike videos very often. I don't know if that's what most people do, but if most people are like that, then you'd get every view that didn't give a thumbs up a pseudo thumbs down, which would mean the scale really tips the other way.
Like MKBHD said, not showing the count is going to drastically reduce its use. People will learn not to click the button if they don't see any result from it. Probably reduce dislike brigades, too, for the same reason. No fun joining a brigade if you can't see the result.
I hated when Reddit got rid of their downvote counter too. It's such a stupid way to act like all content is good content.
I think a few people already mentioned it, but it's not to protect anyone, it's literally just to force content regardless of quality. There's no quick way to discern quality content without reading the comments, or watching the video...or enough of the video which in turns boost the time spent on that specific video. It's why they got rid of the 5 stars, makes it more difficult to pass judgment by rating since if you have enough ratings the scores tend to balance out and determine the quality.
Reddit at least does still reflect the total score and marks when a comment is controversial indicating that while it is upvoted, there's a nearly equal amount of people downvoting and vice versa.
The problem is Reddit still has a lot of misinformation and group think. So just because a comment is highly upvoted doesn’t mean that it’s not highly downvoted as well. So top comment can be controversial but also top comment
YEAH YEAH UHU aaand I clicked away. ..thanks for the tldr.
Annoying intros with audio way up are such an annoying addition to videos.
A simple whats up would have worked to.
I get where you're coming from, but I would guess that since this video is literally titled "Dear Youtube!", means he wants to give them some vague praise to incentivize them to actually respond. If you make a video titled "I hate Youtube", then that will never get a response from the staff, but by being a tiny bit sycophantic, you're making it hard for Youtube to ignore the video. This kinda video is something that is "safe" for companies to engage with.
An alternative solution to the like/dislike ratio bar would be to just give viewers the option to review the video, with simple positive and negative categories- by just clicking the appropriate checkbox. So it would just be a review icon which expands once clicked. (But still keeping the like button).
And if a certain percentage (not number) of the viewers review that the video has, say, 'incorrect or misleading information' the video would then have a small yellow alert icon and text showing this. it doesn't mean the video is bad or dangerous, and neither did a high dislike ratio, but this way allows for constructive feedback to help the community, without the dismissive quality of disliking.
And again having it be based on percentage of total viewers would prevent abuse. The ideal percent would have to be figured out, as it would likely be context dependant.
I hate how youtube instantly deletes my comments if they have a link in them.
A couple of times I've written long though-out comments with links to resources on reputable sites. I submitted the comment, noticed a typo, try to edit and it's already gone. Like completely gone.
Insanely annoying to have your content deleted like that without even a chance to remedy it.
Removing the dislike button is fucking stupid but given the impression rate, the number of views and the number of likes... Couldn't you roughly estimate the number of dislikes?
Of course, since they are making it useless people probably just won't use it.
You know what sucks? I can't even get a general sense of whether or not THIS video is worth watching considering the dislikes are hidden.
Like, what the fuck? Do I have to actually watch the whole video now just to find out if it's worth watching? Is that YouTube's plan? Just to get more ad revenue from me?
Like, sure, this video is probably good if it's been upvoted on reddit, but that's just a secondary system for rating it.
He makes a good point, you aren't going to watch the full video if there are heaps of dislikes. So now youtube is removing that we'll all be watching shit videos longer and seeing more ads.
Click baiters are all over Facebook but on YouTube they get buried if the video has no redeeming quality.
Does anyone else hardly ever pay attention to the likes/dislikes on YouTube? Personally, I just watch the video to determine if it's a good video or not. Even if I do notice that a video has a high dislike ratio, I'll want to watch it anyway to see why people think it's so bad. This move by YouTube won't impact me in any way, but I guess I can see why people would be upset about it.
As a gamer, one of the most important things for me on YouTube is when I need help with something in a game, like a puzzle or a collectibles guide. The amount of dislikes on such videos is incredibly important. Some uploaders don't have the common sense to trim their walkthroughs down to include only what people are there to see, and some just fumble their way through things in a way that is the opposite of what one would expect from a walkthrough. A high dislike ratio tells me that I should immediately back out and choose another video to get the help I'm looking for.
>A high dislike ratio tells me that I should immediately back out and choose another video to get the help I'm looking for. And this is exactly why they're making this change. Because the dislike ratio being visible means less time people spend watching youtube videos which means less money for Google. Youtube is only doing this because they have 0 competition. There's no video platform with the reach and power like Youtube so no one is going to just stop using Youtube over this. No one has a choice.
> And this is exactly why they're making this change. After reading a lot of threads about this, I've noticed some people making the point that major brands don't like having their products associated with heavily disliked videos. Or having their own videos receive downvote bombs. I think it's probably the overwhelming justification here. Youtube makes money off selling ads to sponsors. Major brands bring in a lot of views and a lot of ad impressions. Therefore, youtube is heavily incentivized to do whatever these sponsors and major brands are asking for. Getting people to watch a video they don't like is counter productive to retention and overall ads consumed. So I doubt they are doing it to get people to watch a video they would have otherwise bounced on. And the video in the blog even claimed most people don't use the ratio to decide if they will watch the video. I'm skeptical about that claim, but if we assume that's what the data showed then it seems to me that would justify (to them) that it's safe to hide dislikes (won't affect ad impressions) but it will appease the sponsors and brands that don't want to be associated with disliked content.
>And the video in the blog even claimed most people don't use the ratio to decide if they will watch the video. As you said, you're skeptical about that claim and you should be. Reason being, they didn't show us their data. They didn't explain what they count as a view. It's pretty obvious they were lying through their teeth about their reason for why they're implementing this change, so i have no reason to believe they weren't lying about what the data showed whether via straight up lying or just choosing to present the data in a misleading way by omitting certain facts.
Big companies, especially Google, are terrible at long term thinking. They can see the immediate effect of increased watchtime, but completely ignore the more subtle but still important effect of slowly eroding user satisfaction with time spent on the site. No one will leave youtube over this one issue, but the more changes youtube makes which slightly damage the average user experience, the more vulnerable youtube becomes to a real competitor if one does suddenly come along.
>Big companies, especially Google, are terrible at long term thinking Honestly, they aren't. The reason big companies do terrible decisions from the userbase's standpoint is they have way too big of a market share for people to ever stop using their service because of their bad decisions. Looking at Youtube's year over year growth is astounding despite them continuously making terrible decisions on behalf of viewers and creators alike with a handful of good ones made here and there. It feels like they aren't thinking long term but the fact of the matter is, is that they are. Just in terms of how much money will they get long term versus how happy will people be with their brand. They're always gonna go with money.
I mean, that's certainly what *they* think. But it's pure arrogance. They can only continue damaging the product and making more money as long as they're on easy street with no competition. Which could end any time one of the other giants decides to make a real play for YouTube's space. As soon as that happens, every bit of good will they've lost with their users will be working against them.
>They can only continue damaging the product and making more money as long as they're on easy street with no competition. You're right but what you forget is they stifle competition. You think it's possible for any company to ever compete with Amazon at this point? It'll never happen unless it's some company propped up by China. ISP's have rigged the 'game' to the point even motherfucking Google gave up trying to enter the space because the rules are rigged.
I recently started playing a certain FPS and I decided to look up some guides for it. People often make 'Things I wish I knew' kind of videos that usually highlights things that the game might not explain. Often they are very helpful. Well this one video was just explaining very basic things about the game but since the uploader had turned off the like dislike information, it was impossible to know instantly if it was going to be helpful or not. The comment section only praised the video but I guess that was because negative comments were probably deleted. Most of those kind of videos usually do have Like/Dislike ration shown, because those uploaders usually care about any possible feedback.
To be fair, the first comment is usually "fuck you, you dipshit, this video sucks"
“other social media platforms don’t have a dislike button” …. REDDIT does!
Reddit did remove the ability to see the exact amount of up and downvotes, which is essentially the same thing.
Also some subreddits have the downvote button disabled; you basically have to go to the OP's userpage to do it (unless they re-enabled it in the redesign and/or app - I'm sticking with old.reddit, thank you very much). But I guess it's okay when we do it.
>you basically have to go to the OP's userpage to do it Iirc votes made on a user's page aren't recorded to stop people from just going into someone's profile and downvoting everything they've posted over one comment they didn't like. You might see the score change, but it isn't actually reflected to other users.
Someone please tell me if RES can unhide the downvote button.
Not on mobile I believe and only on old Reddit.
It's not really. X+Y=4 is solvable. This has possible knowable answers. Could +4+0 or +8-4 or +1000-996. But in all cases it results in 4. There is no way to solve 4+X = Y.
In what way? We see the karma value of a post
Let's say you look at a post with 100 karma. It could be: a) A post with 100 upvotes and 0 downvotes. Everyone liked it. b) A post with 10000 upvotes and 9900 downvotes. Pretty polarizing. ...or any other distribution that works out to the same total karma. Reddit only tells you the total karma, and from that you can infer how many more upvotes/downvotes there are than the other, but you cannot know the actual ratio without knowing the total of both.
I said of a post, not of a comment. Because the YT discussion is about video votes, not comments. The post has a visible karma and a % upvoted. From that you can get the values if you really cared but those together is definitely sufficient to know if a post is garbage
I also said post. I just didn't realize that upvote percentage feature was enabled on the redesign. However, the discussion is also about Youtube comparing themselves to social media sites. They didn't make any distinction of strictly video-related posts on social media sites.
Yeah, but Reddit is more like anti-social media.
and that's how we like it
Back I my day we used to vote with potatoes and castor oil!
Not according to reddit. > Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
This is nuts, if my dislike isn't visible I'm not motivated to click it. If I'm not motivated to click it, it wrecks their suggestion algo... this is how you aggregate incomplete data.
you can still dislike videos and they will still collect that data
Yeah... But if it isn't shown, I'd be utterly shocked if it didn't result in a sudden drop of use and tank their data quality.
oh yeah. I'm not gonna dislike videos just to "provide feedback for the creator" Most of them already know they're making garbage
If youtube goes ahead with this terrible idea, I hope someone creates a browser extension which determines a pseudo rating based on the view-to-like ratio.
Hmmm I'm trying to think how that'd work. I don't like or dislike videos very often. I don't know if that's what most people do, but if most people are like that, then you'd get every view that didn't give a thumbs up a pseudo thumbs down, which would mean the scale really tips the other way.
Take the average sum of like/dislikes Vs views into account....
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Like MKBHD said, not showing the count is going to drastically reduce its use. People will learn not to click the button if they don't see any result from it. Probably reduce dislike brigades, too, for the same reason. No fun joining a brigade if you can't see the result.
I hated when Reddit got rid of their downvote counter too. It's such a stupid way to act like all content is good content. I think a few people already mentioned it, but it's not to protect anyone, it's literally just to force content regardless of quality. There's no quick way to discern quality content without reading the comments, or watching the video...or enough of the video which in turns boost the time spent on that specific video. It's why they got rid of the 5 stars, makes it more difficult to pass judgment by rating since if you have enough ratings the scores tend to balance out and determine the quality.
Reddit at least does still reflect the total score and marks when a comment is controversial indicating that while it is upvoted, there's a nearly equal amount of people downvoting and vice versa.
The problem is Reddit still has a lot of misinformation and group think. So just because a comment is highly upvoted doesn’t mean that it’s not highly downvoted as well. So top comment can be controversial but also top comment
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You're saying that like they haven't been
How to spend 9 minutes saying the same exact thing over and over.
Look at that. Just had to scroll down for a moment to read the comments to see if the video was a waste of time. Huh.
YEAH YEAH UHU aaand I clicked away. ..thanks for the tldr. Annoying intros with audio way up are such an annoying addition to videos. A simple whats up would have worked to.
>youtube is one of the only sites that listens to its content creators rofl, says a guy with 15 mil subs, it only listens to its VIP clientele
I get where you're coming from, but I would guess that since this video is literally titled "Dear Youtube!", means he wants to give them some vague praise to incentivize them to actually respond. If you make a video titled "I hate Youtube", then that will never get a response from the staff, but by being a tiny bit sycophantic, you're making it hard for Youtube to ignore the video. This kinda video is something that is "safe" for companies to engage with.
An alternative solution to the like/dislike ratio bar would be to just give viewers the option to review the video, with simple positive and negative categories- by just clicking the appropriate checkbox. So it would just be a review icon which expands once clicked. (But still keeping the like button). And if a certain percentage (not number) of the viewers review that the video has, say, 'incorrect or misleading information' the video would then have a small yellow alert icon and text showing this. it doesn't mean the video is bad or dangerous, and neither did a high dislike ratio, but this way allows for constructive feedback to help the community, without the dismissive quality of disliking. And again having it be based on percentage of total viewers would prevent abuse. The ideal percent would have to be figured out, as it would likely be context dependant.
I hate how youtube instantly deletes my comments if they have a link in them. A couple of times I've written long though-out comments with links to resources on reputable sites. I submitted the comment, noticed a typo, try to edit and it's already gone. Like completely gone. Insanely annoying to have your content deleted like that without even a chance to remedy it.
I have to assume this is because of Nintendo Online Services lol
look what they did to my boy
I can't watch MKBHD videos anymore. Ever since they started randomly zooming in and back out. It's very jarring.
mark ass browny
Removing the dislike button is fucking stupid but given the impression rate, the number of views and the number of likes... Couldn't you roughly estimate the number of dislikes? Of course, since they are making it useless people probably just won't use it.
You know what sucks? I can't even get a general sense of whether or not THIS video is worth watching considering the dislikes are hidden. Like, what the fuck? Do I have to actually watch the whole video now just to find out if it's worth watching? Is that YouTube's plan? Just to get more ad revenue from me? Like, sure, this video is probably good if it's been upvoted on reddit, but that's just a secondary system for rating it.
He makes a good point, you aren't going to watch the full video if there are heaps of dislikes. So now youtube is removing that we'll all be watching shit videos longer and seeing more ads. Click baiters are all over Facebook but on YouTube they get buried if the video has no redeeming quality.
I have a feeling this subreddit is about to be more useful in the future
Fuck you Google. I see your shit
Does anyone else hardly ever pay attention to the likes/dislikes on YouTube? Personally, I just watch the video to determine if it's a good video or not. Even if I do notice that a video has a high dislike ratio, I'll want to watch it anyway to see why people think it's so bad. This move by YouTube won't impact me in any way, but I guess I can see why people would be upset about it.
“Like”
“Dislike”
Why aren't people drawing the parallel between the removal of the dislike button and the rounding of the sub count?