Of course they are!<p>That's how this goes. Once the door is open for censorship, it all works just like lies do, and it's often associated with lies and or hurt egos, say lack of acceptance and respect, and it tends to spread, until it's ridiculous.<p>And let's get real here: This whole mess is because the government and big media don't like being near constantly ratioed.<p>They do have the option of improving how they work and what they say, but maybe they feel it is easier to just try and hide the problems. People went away from broadcast because of this crap, and reproducing it online means people will go somewhere else again.<p>What it won't do is transform things into being reputable.
The majority of YouTube traffic comes from mobile devices (this can be observed in Google Ads for any video campaign), which is losing market share because of Tictoc.<p>Google will do whatever it takes to monetize every inch of their investment. By turning off dislikes, users will be forced to engage with additional content.<p>This is also visible on the other side of the spectrum - Google is pushing heavily integrated campaign products (e.g. Performance Max Campaigns), which include non-performing channels as display and video (in comparison to search), which can't be turned off.<p>At this point they can, as they are a monopoly, but I hope they will get burned, as they are introducing more and more dark patterns, which result in lower than poor user experience.<p>My take on this - AdBlock relentlessly, support creators directly. Switch platforms eventually - there's choice out there.
Hacker News has a similar problem with comments:<p><pre><code> net_votes = up_votes - down_votes
</code></pre>
You need at least two of the above variables to get an idea of both the direction and magnitude of the voting. Hacker News provides only one: net_votes. YouTube used to provide up_votes and down_votes, effectively providing all three. Now YouTube has <i>reduced</i> its information to up_votes, so they're now down to one variable in the equation, as Hacker News has been all along.<p>The difference between 102+/100- votes and 2+/0- votes is large, but invisible on this site. I think it would be better for HN to go to where YouTube was, giving us an idea of both the net vote and the level of activity. Like up/down or up/total or net/total.
Did nobody watch the linked video? It's obvious he had comments restricted because his comment was deemed as abusive, and not because it was critical of "hiding dislikes".<p>"That's not abusive at all", you may be thinking. But calling others names, even something as nonsensical as calling them a "handjob", can still easily fall under their terms of use.<p>If you refer to the original video[1], people are nothing but critical of the change. Why aren't those being disappeared? Maybe because Youtube doesn't care what people post as long as they follow their terms of service.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxOuG8jMIgI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxOuG8jMIgI</a>
I really hope this backfires spectacularly on YouTube and the zealots who pushed for this change are held professionally accountable. I already click on fewer videos in search results and recommendations because I can no longer gauge how worthwhile they are to try and watch.<p>The end result? I'm sticking to my current channels. I can't be alone and knowing that YouTube takes recommended content so seriously, I have to imagine this is going to panic plenty of product managers at YouTube.
Likes and dislikes are a horrible way to judge a video, ime. I don't know who liked or disliked a video or for what reasons. A like by someone may be a good reason for me to watch the video where a like by someone else might be an excellent reason not to watch it. Similar for dislikes. Of the two, I guess I prefer likes. People who dislike videos are usually upset about something specific, often things I don't really care much about. People who like something generally actually like it, as far as I've seen.<p>When I'm considering whether I might like to watch a video, I do the unthinkable and just give it a go for a few minutes if it looks like it might be interesting or entertaining. I don't really need aggregated opinions from random people on the internet to help me make my decision on whether I like it or not. I couldn't, for example, tell you if I'm currently seeing dislikes on videos even though I've watched a fair few of them recently.
The "criticize their hiding of the dislike count" part is irrelevant. I've done no such thing and all my comments have been getting auto-deleted in the same way for a few months now, long before this dislike count thing happened.<p>It's something fucked up on their end, lots of users are affected (also since long before this dislike count thing happened), and they're in no hurry to fix it.<p>And there's no point posting on support.google.com about it because clueless "Product Experts", aka non-employees who don't actually know anything, will just parrot the same old "Oh your comment must've been detected as spam" "Oh your comment must've violated Youtube policies" "Oh the channel owner must've deleted your comment" nonsense.
Just in case someone in a position to do something about it is reading this, there's a graceful way out for Youtube. Leave dislike counts publicly available via the API. That way people who use the ratio to evaluate videos (very useful for reviews) can install a browser extension, but dislike mobbing will be minimized, seeing as most casual users will not bother installing such extensions.
My bet is that people will start posting a comment saying "upvote this comment if you want to downvote", the comment will rank first and it will be as if you have a public dislike count
The youtube automatically deleting comments thing is strange, it happens to me quite often for no clear reason. I once left a commend on a veritasium vid where I got something wrong. Replies kept coming about what I got wrong. But anytime I edited the comment, or leaving a reply myself. The exact thing happened to my edits or replies as happened in the video.<p>It is not like I can't leave comments anywhere like the guy in the vid, it just, sometimes happens with specific things, with no clear indication as to why it happens.
It's just flabbergasting how much YouTube has regressed.<p>I remember when YouTube comments still had a neat and convenient little "translate" feature. Made it actually possible to practically cross the language barriers in comment discussions.<p>That lead to many interesting insights and discussions, and then, it was suddenly just gone. Which in practice meant that a whole bunch of people that used to be able to communicate with each other, crossing language barriers (How wonderful!), now suddenly couldn't anymore..<p>It's like the exact opposite to what the web was supposed to do, and the trend has been steadily keeping up. Removing the downvotes is also removing a form of signaling, and thus communication.<p>And the trend is not just reserved to YouTube, it's even more and more of a thing in places where it absolutely doesn't belong; Many modern video games do not have an "all talk" function anymore, out of fear nasty things might be written and then read by too many people, possibly leading to controversy in the bored "gaming press".<p>At this rate I wouldn't be surprised to even see YouTube comments go away for good.
Sounds like his account has been put into some sort of shadowban mode, which is needed for the {human|bot} spammers out there (not that I know why it would be applied to them).
What gets me is the silent deletion. I generally don't post swear words but recently I posted "ass" and I refreshed it was gone. This could be on a personal user setting but still. It's funny though you could comment/not look at something again so does it matter that your comment stayed... idk.<p>It doesn't tell you "that's not allowed" or something. It updates the UI so you think it went through but it actually didn't.
The submission topic is misleading.<p>The issue is that someone is complaining that Youtube is auto-deleting their comments.<p>Unless you know someone inside Youtube who has the technical knowledge and access to dig into this there is no way to know exactly what happened to your account: how your account's auto-deletion state got triggered.<p>It could be due to some completely different reason not related to the content of their posts being remarks against the Youtube change with regard to downvotes.<p>Maybe the comments were simply too repetitive in their content, and triggered a mechanism against repetitive posts (being predicated on the hypothesis that repetitiveness is an earmark of spam).<p>Or maybe the comments used offensive language; could be that YT has some mechanism to put serial posters of comments that use certain words on ice for a while.<p>If you look into the Youtube support forum, a large number of people have or have had this problem.<p>It may resolve itself if that person just stops commenting for about a week.
Looking at a lot of timber framing technique videos this week and realized how badly I miss the dislike as a signal that the video-taker is doing something wrong or dangerous.
Honestly, this was bound to happen sooner or later. YouTube wants to become as mainstream as televisions are for households. It will do anything to please its corporate advertisers. Some people claim YouTube has done this due to various political reason, for example the ruling in Kyle Rittenhouse's case.<p>I fail to understand why people think that's true. I see a far simpler explanation, which is that advertisers don't want people to know people think of their products. Let's just take the Juicero company\1 for example as we all know its product really "missed the mark" 2. Assume the fact that they released their juicer via a huge amount of digital ads. A lot of people would probably think their product is good just because they like their ads 3 as they seem to be competently made. But since we all know the product is extremely bad, people would probably give their ads a thumbs down on YouTube. However by removing the dislike button, determining if the product is good or bad by seeing the likes or dislikes on its video would become impossible.Of course over time the press would have shown the product as being a complete waste and word of mouth would be terrible, so the company would eventually implode as it did in real life.<p>1 I know its defunct<p>2 <a href="https://www.failory.com/cemetery/juicero" rel="nofollow">https://www.failory.com/cemetery/juicero</a><p>3 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAsEEW7WUHA&ab_channel=Juicero\\" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAsEEW7WUHA&ab_channel=Juice...</a>*
This whole conversation has been baffling to me.<p>I am a huge fan of YouTube, and I consume way too much YouTube. I mean, there's also problems with YT, make no mistake, but I'm admitting my bias, and also proclaiming my experience level.<p>A year or more ago, someone alleged to me that the like:dislike ratio is informative, and I've been watching it since then on videos that I was watching anyway. I've also been watching it especially closely since they announced this any people said they value the ratio. Nearly every video I see on YT has near the same ratio, about 90:1. 30:1 is extremely rare, 150:1 is even more rare. I don't doubt that there are worse videos out there than 30:1, but YT never shows them to me.<p>When I want to just binge on woodworking crafting videos, they suggest good stuff in my feed. With a 90:1 ratio. When I want to teach myself something, I search for that specific topic and they suggest good stuff. With a 90:1 ratio.<p>And when they do suggest crap, like often my feed will contain some "how to do basic web dev" video that is full of distortions or outright errors (as a moderately senior web dev, this is an area where I am not subject to Gell-Mann error), those videos STILL have the same damn like:dislike ratio, so how could I use that ratio to protect me from errors?<p>How the hell are other people allegedly finding these videos with dislike numbers as high as 10%? (I mean, before this month. Obviously now you cannot do the experiment I've been doing.)<p>As a side note, my Dislike Count only went away a few days ago. I dunno when it went away for other people.
There is a youtube alternative that some creators are using called odysee. <a href="https://odysee.com/" rel="nofollow">https://odysee.com/</a> . It still has the dislike button.
It's stunning how often things like this get wildly upvoted. The video shows nothing at all about "YouTube deleting comments who criticize their hiding of the dislike count"; the guy shows a comment of his that has nothing to do with the dislike count getting deleted, although he asserts without evidence that this is related to a different comment he made (which was <i>not</i> deleted) regarding the dislike count. A lot of people are successfully exploiting HN to spread false stories about controversial events.
Let's just host the downvote count somewhere else... all we need is a KV store, right? If we assume there are 10^10 videos there (it's surprisingly hard to find the exact numbers) and the downvote count won't go over 40 bits, then storing that data would need less than a terabyte in total.<p>(Only half-serious. I've seen a few "upvote this comment to dislike the video" and similarly clever workarounds already, so there does seem to be some bits of opposition and creative thinking left.)
Just grab an extension or userscript to reveal them,
Here's a good browser extension That is working as of today-<p><a href="https://returnyoutubedislike.com" rel="nofollow">https://returnyoutubedislike.com</a><p>I absolutely oppose heavy censorship but some is required otherwise it would turn into crazyshit.com, the only way to have a censor free platform is to be rid of the scum bags that post scams, child porn etc.... Its unfortunate politicians managed to creep their way into youtube and impose biased censorship but its no surprise with how Google is already under the governments thumb with how biased their search results are. Youtube will never be what it was before and I doubt an alternative can take its place without the same thing happening. Thats part of living in a corrupt society, where Wallstreet reigns supreme,the rich exploit and profit off loopholes in our laws instead of doing the right thing, politicians are allowed to be bought through campaign donations and the media isnt held accountable for blatant tabloid like lies. Things will get substantially worse when Meta goes live and studies its users as they go on VR. On the bright side it could be worse, at least were not in a police state like China, Iran where they are trying to ban pets since its Haram or a country with no widespread internet access like North Korea.
Do people actually look at the votes before watching a video? I don't think I've ever done that on YouTube. The outrage over this just seems so manufactured to me.
<a href="https://returnyoutubedislike.com/" rel="nofollow">https://returnyoutubedislike.com/</a><p>So frustrating not having the dislike button
Is this youtube staff purposefully deleting critical comments?<p>Or is it anti-spam algorithms getting triggered by people flooding the comments sections of videos with the same inane comments? And/or getting flagged by creators and other youtube users?<p>Frankly, I can't see most creators wanting their youtube video comments full of "BRING BACK THE DISLIKE BUTTON", and I could see lots of their fans being annoyed by such comments as well.<p>My guess is that 95%+ of youtube users are more annoyed by an extremely vocal minority disrupting things than they are the removal of the dislike button.
The same thing is happening to me right now. Maybe something is wrong in Youtube! My comments are about Youtube and it's under a video that the person is angry that their views are going down (JayzTwoCents). But I can see it being deleted! I have seen multiple content creators also mentioning something like "if you leave a comment and it gets deleted it's not me, youtube is doing it and I don't know why" in the past week.
I am more than ready to degoogle myself, if only my pinephone were fully functional :/. I need a phone that can support ANY OS of my choosing, not the one the vendor provides/allows, I am a paying google customer, drive and youtube, the former mostly due to the music, I guess its time to go back to the good old days. ARRGH!!! ;)
As of Dec 6, 2021, no changes for me, I'm still seeing dislike thumbs-down on youtube (and its count), I can click it and see the increment. They might only be removing it for individuals they don't want clicking dislike? Evidently that would be many of you.
Why am I still allowed? I'll take a guess ...<p>They like my dislikes since I frequently 'dislike' videos I actually like as a strategy, I do so specifically for truth-tellers that I figure youtube doesn't like, for two reasons:<p>(1) I write algorithms and thus know it causes pain for YT algorithm writers, going ... crud, the pattern is not as easy as expected so now I have to write another exception/condition. Each one makes their code more complex of course and a little bit less maintainable.
(2) To help protect the content creator from rising to top of the list for getting canceled as the higher the views combined with the ratio of likes/dislikes the more likely humans in the office will be talking about them and drool over dropping the axe.<p>I'm subscribed to over 200 channels but many are truth-tellers. Others are science/engineering/computing but some are even lefties, and of those, when they are pushing the official narrative bull, sometimes I upvote (the opposite of what I really think).<p>For 1+ years I've been saving my comments to be able to prove in court some day that I am civil yet often shadow-banned (2.48 MB today). Anyone can sue via the Sherman Antitrust Act etc etc in Federal court for collusion and so on.<p>(YT likes people trying to viciously tear each other's throats out, good times, but posting intelligent informative content does not serve to create a wonderfully dumb underclass. Yesterday for example, someone had asked how to really understand voltage, was asking for help and my reply was deleted immediately).
There is a higher order evaluation in play here.<p>There are content creators who make the occasional video that gets ratioed. And there are others who have a majority of their videos ratioed.<p>When people see that, they ask why?<p>And you look at big media, and government, and I think this removing dislikes doesn't make any sense from our point of view, but it does from theirs.
This whole controversy strikes me as a sign of intellectual rot. YouTube has so many levers to control what you watch that getting mad about this is like getting mad the captain of the titanic won’t tell you how many deck chairs there are as the boat is going down. It simply doesn’t matter. It’s just one more in the long line of tweaks and AB tests YouTube uses to increase engagement. The learned debate club you’re looking for on YouTube is a mirage. If you find a video via YouTube search or recommendations you’ve already lost. If you find a video through a link from a trusted friend the dislike count doesn’t matter. Please, I’m begging you, find something important to care about
Lets say that there is a video that says you can cure any cancer by eating specific food. Now, you will have people that believes this and you have video with 400-1k upvotes.<p>Person sees the video and how liked it is. In the past he would have seen 3k dislikes and perhaps started to think, what's wrong with the content?
Perhaps they would not buy my book..<p>But not anymore, now we can sell the ideas much easier. And if we think positively, buying likes is much cheaper now than before. No need to worry about those dislikes so much. Just buying enough of them for making the content more believable!<p>Thank you YouTube for making these business practices easier.
I don't think this is so bad. Overtime users will find a way to cope. There are also a number of secretive things YT is doing that users will never become aware of. Focusing on just the thing that gets publicity creates bias. YT is what it is and it will evolve the way Google wants it to. Either use it or not. Giving this much attention to one feature makes Google even more careful next time they make a change that negatively impacts users to do it in a more hidden way.<p>Kind of like the more a weak person's immune system deals with a virus the more mutation the virus makes and in the end the stronger it becomes.
Why not make this an opt-in feature? That way, big media companies with a YouTube presence who constantly have often post videos with high dislike ratios can hide the fact (although, we'll know this because of the hidden dislikes).<p>It's quite annoying when I'm looking at neutral, nonpolitical content, and I can't get a sense of whether or not other viewers hate it. I look at a decent amount of tutorial content for various things, and the like-dislike ratio is fairly indicative of whether or not the content is wrong or if I should even continue watching it.
I can see why people would be annoyed at being shadow banned. Alternatively get your circle of friends to upload videos to your own site and manage the comments/spam as you see fit. I am not convinced by the arguments that Youtube is needed to handle bandwidth unless you are popular in which case you can probably afford throwing a few small CDN's at the problem. The harder part would be finding advertising partners and embedding code for sponsors but apparently some youtubers are finding ways to do it.
I personally think there's a good compromise to prevent "dislike" campaigns while keeping roughly same amount of information (putting quality labels with simple anti spam modeling would work fine), but still it looks like YT wants to get rid of the button itself ultimately? Otherwise it's hard to explain why they didn't even try such middle ground first.
Here is a simple tip/formula for you: Thumbs Up / View Count. The higher the number, the better the "Like" quality.<p>Base on my personal experience during the last few days, a "Fairly Good" video should give you something close to 0.06 on the metric. (reminder: the sample matters, you have to do your own numbers)<p>I guess now they have to remove the view counts too LOL.
In the early days, the distinct feature of the web was bidirectionality. Unlike TV or radio, on the web the communication went both ways. The user could finally give their opinion and comment. We have gone full circle, with YouTube hiding dislikes, and even with some channels disabling comments, we have unidirectionality again.
Before the dislikes purge I more or less had 80/20 proportion of interesting videos vs bad videos after I clicked to watch them. Dislikes highlighted bad videos and made the choice easier. After dislikes were removed the proportion flipped. Now 80% are bad videos and 20% interesting ones.
I'm not liking any videos right now. Not sure what to do with the videos on my 'liked list'. Only original & creative content that's impressive is spared from a dislike. Gathered it's subjective.<p>My block-list & 'don't recommend channel' is growing faster now.
If anyone wants to restore the dislike count there is this chrome ext that works great <a href="https://github.com/Anarios/return-youtube-dislike" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Anarios/return-youtube-dislike</a>
I often use YouTube videos to learn coding stuff. Recently followed a bunch of tutorials to learn Flutter. Taking away dislikes had made it very hard for me to judge the quality of a tutorial and have wasted a few minutes of my time.
It's easy to imagine the next logical step - Google only shows you targeted comments - if you're right leaning, you only get right leaning views etc.<p>(I'm guessing Facebook has already experimented with this).
Lol.<p>Seems great from a board room, YouTube is too big to fail in 2years...<p>But this is just a signal that the platform is decaying to the latest generation of artists/creators...<p>Shame that for now they have a stranglehold on money and advertisers.
Just don't use YouTube regularly for infinite scrolling. I stopped 2 years ago and only head over for a specific video or two. I don't engage at all.
So... wait... YT is deleting all his comments... except the one that criticized the Dislike button? Wouldn't they just delete that comment?<p>Something is amiss here.
As a shallow person who likes shallow content, YouTube sucks. Their recommendations suck. They literally offer the same things over and over. There’s a billion videos and nothing to watch…
Dislikes still visible on incognito tab. Most fiction/speculative authors assumed tyranny would be from governments, not private companies. How wrong they were.
What do people want? On the one hand you have misinformation and psychological harm that social media causes people and all the people complaining about that, and on the other hand you have heavily curated/censored content to try and craft a specific experience on a platform, and all the people complaining about that. So what actually do people want social media companies to do? Hands off or hands on? You can't have both.
> "Please take a screenshot of the comments that are missing so that we can use it as samples for investigation."<p>I cracked up. This is the hell world we have been pushing for - it's arrived.<p>I have a similar IRL situation where I live. I need a vaccine passport to go into places where I can request an ID (which can only be done in person). I need an ID to apply for a vaccine passport.<p>One has to wonder whether these systems are broken by design.
I find this debate a little strange. My position is that youtube is a private company, they should be allowed to do whatever they want, and people should be able to choose a video service that meets their needs. If you feel that youtube is so dominant that this is cramming a "no dislikes" policy on the whole world, isn't the problem really that you think youtube is a monopoly, not dislikes per se?<p>Edit: I clearly didn't word this well, because people are responding to me with things I agree with. Let me try again. Certainly, everyone can and should complain about this if you want to! (You have my thanks in this case, I don't like it either.) I'm just saying that in a "normal" situation you'd be able to respond to this change by switching to a competitor. I don't think the complaints are strange but rather the <i>lack</i> of complaints about the fact that there are (sorta/kinda) no alternatives.