Youtube cancels public dislike count on videos.

briany

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-to-youtube/

Load of c**p. But also, there's talk going around that this is a decision being taken to appease large corporations and political entities from getting unwelcome negative feedback rather than protecting your average Youtuber. As people have been saying, it's a good way to sort the wheat from the chaff when looking for pertinent videos, although some discretion does have to be used as videos can sometimes be subject to unjust downvote brigading by trolls. Will Youtube roll back this decision? I suppose we can only wait and find out, but there's little real alternative to the platform. Many video sites of course, but none with anywhere near the same breadth of content.

I've never checked or noticed the likes or dislikes on a video unless it's the only reason someone has sent it to me. The algorithm will be affected but considering the amount of shite it suggests to me I don't think the like/dislike ratio is the issue.

It's a poor decision but has been coming for a while. A lot of the mainstream media and official government videos in the US were getting down voted into oblivion.

I don't believe YouTube's explanation at all. Also I'm really noticing more and more adds with all the YouTube videos I watch, not sure if it's just a coincidence or is it a discreet attempt to push people towards the premium version?

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118148780#Comment_118148780

If you're on Android and aren't bothered leaving comments under videos, then you can use Newpipe (downloaded through the F-Droid app), which is a nice open source YT client. You can import your subs from your Google account and it has play in the background functionality.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118148813#Comment_118148813

Cool, cheers 👍

Strumms

So will they start editing negative comments ? Not at all democratic.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118148780#Comment_118148780

The ads thing happened I think a few months back, a youtuber I follow mentioned that ads were put into everybody's past videos retroactively. Even if the channel had previously opted out of ads, there they were again.

Shao Kahn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118148780#Comment_118148780

No need for premium, just use youtube with no account.

No adds, and the algorithm struggles to track you.

The whole recommendation thing is a big scam with youtube anyway. Their whole business model, is based on a captive audience strategy. Zombie users watching whatever they make you watch!

Flinty997

They want to push the stuff that makes money. Regardless of what it is. It's algorithms push everything I hate into my feed. Tries to hide the stuff I'm interested in.

This is all more of the same.

Strumms

“On Wednesday, YouTube said the removal of dislike counts was because the company wants to improve the inclusivity, respect and safety of its service,” calling it "one of many steps we are taking to continue to protect creators from harassment.”

if I watch a video and express dissatisfaction with it by disliking it... I could be contributing to harassment ? Am I disrespecting? Am I being non inclusive? Hmmmm

When you hear idiots throw around phrases like inclusivity you know it’s just another woke fückhead desperately seeking likes and attention..

soon you’ll watch a football game and be banned from social media platforms if you negatively critique a player... “ you are endangering the mental health of said players, their family and supporters, your comment has been deleted and it’s being sent via complaint to An Garda Siochana...

these eejits are now impinging on our freedom of expression.

Markus Antonius

Newstalk will be delighted.

Potential-Monke

I no longer give a flying hoot about YouTube. 14 ads it tried to show me before a video the other night. I refuse to watch them, so it tried to show me another ad 13 more times before it left the video play. Likes, dislikes, upvoting, to hell with it all if you can't even watch the fecking video (this only applies on the PS5, I have AdBlock).

But, it's a positive for people insofar as people can't downvote to make the video look unappealing, but it's a negative because as mentioned in the OP, it will protect companies and their vested interested. Should go a middle ground and make it private on personal channels, and public on monetised, sponsored or advertising videos.

Quantum Erasure

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ussCHoQttyQ

I have no strong feelings one way or the other...

This was touted a few weeks ago was it not?

It's because every Biden/Whitehouse video gets ratio'd to fnck..

Real Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118149222#Comment_118149222

Don't forget St George and BLM crowd

VinLieger

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118148850#Comment_118148850

Its a private company, they can do what they want, why would you expect anything they do to be democratic?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118149366#Comment_118149366

Because when Youtube was launched and first became popular it was precisely because it was a "power to the people" site. People could upload videos, and watch videos without any restrictions. If you like the video - thumbs up. Didn't like it? Thumbs down. Got something to say? Leave a comment. No ads back then either. It was an incredible addition to the internet.

But like everything in Silicon valley, the bigger it got the more infested by parasitic SJW's it became. Now it's become this Orwellian project. Users are banned for ideological reasons on some trumped up charges (like the vague "community standards"). They because this colossus and are now using their power for biased political ends.

VinLieger

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118149450#Comment_118149450

So your complaining about a private company having an agenda because it doesn't suit your own agenda? FYI the only agenda youtube has is to make money.

pjohnson

Barring compyright infringement its pretty hard to get banned from Youtube in reality.

Manach

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118149465#Comment_118149465

I think the various Youtube purges and demonisation of various non-establishment political channels make this a questionable assertion.

pjohnson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118149496#Comment_118149496

Not really. If you get demonitized you need to rethink what you were doing rather than blame everyone else.

whomitconcerns

Just sign up for YouTube premium. I'm "in India" so it only costs the equivalent of 1.50 a month for 5 users.... Ahem

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118149463#Comment_118149463

No - I'm complaining about a private company having an agenda. Full stop.

I would prefer politics to be removed from business and from sport also. If you start picking sides you end up in a divisive race to the bottom of the barrel.

MilkyToast

Some of the alternatives are improving. Rumble, Odysee and Bitchute, among others. Spotify may also expand its video hosting capabilities in the future, but I'm not sure they will be able to hold an ideologically neutral line in terms of the content they platform unless they have a Coinbase-style purge of the dribbling moron cohort on their staff.

Ultimately, Google and Facebook (and Twitter) are ancient behemoths now, in internet terms. And while their current market share makes them powerful and their Bill-Gates-esque habit of buying up innovative competition to shut it down gives that power teeth, they have become very "uncool", and all the while they reveal themselves as being committed to pushing a particular narrative.

Whether people agree with that narrative or not, the more forward-looking (or perhaps, backward-looking) and intelligent can generally see the problem with an unholy alliance of internet behemoths, corporate media companies and governments coming together to decide what people ought to be allowed to watch or listen to and which ideas are not permitted. So it's natural and right that people will look for alternatives to censorious corporations.

The main problem with that thus far has been that the same corporations and governments have control of the infrastructure that underpins "the internet". The mantra has always been "If you don't like it, build your own Twitter/Facebook/YouTube!" - which was all well and good until Parler tried it and ended up being kicked out of Bezos-owned Amazon Web Services, taking their site offline, and smeared by the corporate media as being the place where Jan 6 2021 protests on the US Capitol were organised. The fact that far more communication between protest attendees occurred on Facebook and Twitter was neither here nor there, because the ultimate goal of the shut down was to stop those who had been deemed beyond the pale by corporate media and tech behemoths from having any place to speak online.

That was bad for Parler but good for the future of the internet, since it has spurred people outside of the mainstream and committed to principles (as distinct from laws) of free speech to begin creating infrastructure of their own, getting involved in Fediverse projects and the like, so as to circumvent the ability of the world's richest few to control all online speech and communication.

At the same time, the effect of big tech companies pushing even marginally off-narrative opinions (no matter their merit or accuracy) away from mainstream social media is slowly creating a mainstream social media landscape that is excessively populated by extreme left-wing posters and increasingly hostile to anyone remotely moderate. That leads more and more people to seek out alternatives, and more and more of those alternatives to consequently become much more rich and diverse places for discussion. People who are not authoritarian by nature generally prefer a wider Overton window, see the merit in "sunlight as disinfectant" for bad ideas, and understand that enlightenment ideals of open debate and discussion are the best way to avoid the sort of epistemic ghettoisation that leads to radicalisation. When they find it, they stick around.

So yes, YouTube are a private company and they can do what they want, but in any case I don't see their removal of the dislike button as being that big of a deal. IMO they have already passed the peak of their relevance.

Flinty997

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118149519#Comment_118149519

Unfortunately de-monetization is quite random without any logic.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118149597#Comment_118149597

Good luck with that. Pretty much every single private company in existence has an agenda. Every single one. "Not having an agenda" is an agenda in, and of, itself.

Youtube is in the advertising business.....all they care about is clicks and revenue generated from those clicks. They don't care if those clicks come from the left, right, centrists, libertarians.....it all spends the same. What they DO care about, is their name being dragged through the mud when they're associated with anything negative. So they have their own Ts and Cs to keep people broadly in line with what's acceptable and what isn't. Nobody is banned for anything, unless they're in breach of those Ts & Cs. If you want to keep your account, then don't act the maggot and you'll be fine.

There are literally a million right-wing / Conservative / Tory / whatever-way-you-want-to-frame-it YT channels out there uploading content daily. They manage to keep going by not falling foul of the policy around acceptable content. It's really that simple. There's no panel of blue-haired lesbian vegans sitting around a table deciding which conservatives to ban next, there's just a team of underpaid techs reviewing flagged content and reconciling it against what is and is not allowed. Mess around and it's the ban-hammer for you, my friend.

Also, re: your last line.........both sport and politics are all about picking a side. It's literally their raison d'etre.

Brid Hegarty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118148936#Comment_118148936

ad block on chrome zaps the ads for me. But I can't do this on my iPhone 5 without the latest iOS software... even when not logged in.

Sudden Valley

I think as long as you can give negative comments and they can be upvoted then this doesn't really matter that much. I don't see youtube disappearing or being caught by its competitors Any time soon.

Parachutes

Like many things, the internet was a bastion of freedom to people when it was in its infancy and like everything else governments and large corporations don’t want this, This is just another step on regulating the internet and social media. This is just the way things are going to go, all it will take though is for someone to sense a gap for a video sharing site that was like the old YouTube but without all the extremist nonsense on the likes of bitchute and everyone will jump ship.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118150344#Comment_118150344

The Internet is far too large and nebulous to be one thing or the other, imo. There are services which exist on the Internet that over time allow for less expression by its user base, but there are also places like 4Chan/8Chan which allow users to do virtually anything they want, although being allowed to do anything you want definitely has a very dark side to it as well.

As for Youtube, removing public dislike counts will be a change that p*sses off a sizable chunk of its users, but that sizable chunk would almost certainly still be a drop in the ocean compared to its overall base, who'll continue using the service. Internet users are basically like jellyfish - and I don't mean that in some superior way - I just mean that they will somehow drift to and congregate at the place where they need to be and offers the most to them. They won't just do so on principle.

Philipmcnill

The assumption of the Internet would be total freedom of opinion and speech. Unfortunately, censorship and manipulation by large corporations has shattered this premise. As always, it's just about making money. Lary Page who discovered Google made the mistake of dismissing this invention practically for free. It was to serve as the good of mankind, as were the seat belts, which the inventor also did not patent the design. History teaches that if you do not patent something because you have good intentions, there will always be someone who will make money on it.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118150930#Comment_118150930

It's the same implementation of free speech as in actual real life. I can say what I want, but no-one's obliged to let me use a platform they own in order to do so. It's why you generally can't get on the DJ's mic at a disco and start ranting non-stop about abortion, even if you paid in.

Going back to Youtube, they have every right to remove the public dislike count if they so wish. I just think that it's a decision coming from the wrong place.

VinLieger

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118149597#Comment_118149597

So what do you propose making it illegal for all companies to have any agenda whatsoever? Also your entire position is contradictory and absurd, people pick sides everywhere, everyday.

Montage of Feck

The internet wasn't supposed to be like this!

Montage of Feck

"In 1994, Carmen Hermosillo published a widely influential essay online, "Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace",[4] and it began to be argued that the use of computer networks had led not to a reduction in hierarchy, but actually a commodification of personality and a complex transfer of power and information to corporations."

Strumms

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118152547#Comment_118152547

businesses used to tailor their services to help the public...give the public what they want.

now businesses want the public to tailor their use of their services to suit the business...

Junkyard Tom

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118149450#Comment_118149450

Should it be taken into public ownership and controlled democratically by its users, do you think?

silverharp

Nature finds a way

https://twitter.com/BerishaShow/status/1458761096844791814

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118152842#Comment_118152842

The kind of creator who would be pleased by the decision to remove dislikes is also the kind of creator who could exercise their ability to disable comments on their videos.

In the past, there was some cause to disable comments, because some sections could be very toxic and argumentative, but they'd usually leave the like ratio up, maybe only because it would look too obvious that they were too scared of any dissenting opinions if they had manually disabled it for that video.

Strumms

Wonder will YouTube censor the word dislike to *******

a bit like the word fûck is censored here...

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118152745#Comment_118152745

Honestly not sure whether that would work. Could be too messy.

I'd just prefer they keep things simple, as they were up until 5 years ago. The ideology really seems to have accelerated in the past 5 years. It's like corporations were desperate to avoid blame for Trump being elected so they bowed down to the SJW crowd demanding demonetizations, censorship, and now this. Sure, they are within their rights legally speaking. I just don't trust the motivation behind it. I believe the decision was made for political reasons.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118151765#Comment_118151765

I'm not sure making it illegal would work. I just think Youtube is not some family-run newsagents. It's pretty much got a monopoly in the market. It's such a giant internet company, it's almost akin to a public utility at this stage. And I don't think a company that influential should be in the business of censoring information they don't like, then claiming some nonsense that they are doing it for the greater good.

TomSweeney

Orwellian, they want to try and hide the fact that people are downvoting woke garbage and other political crap.

It's pure social engineering.

Why else would they be doing this ?

melekalikimaka

hideo kojima was way ahead the time with death stranding

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118154749#Comment_118154749

Most likely a large amount of corporations lobbying tbh. Say it could be as much to do with film companies and anyone else selling a product not wanting down votes displaying.

They're a private company and entitled to do it. And honestly I'm pretty confident in my ability to discern what's ****. This equally benefits any side of the political spectrum if you're viewing down voting to be only way to discern bad quality content.

Melanchthon

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118154789#Comment_118154789

Yeah but it's annoying if your trying to us YouTube for anything useful in terms of non-political non-media stuff.

Varik

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118152968#Comment_118152968

Disabling comments is as said usually a last resort as it negatively effect the magic "engagement" that ads like so much.

briany

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118154940#Comment_118154940

It's been done to a large degree across Youtube. For example, Youtube made the move to disable comments on videos where it was a song and a still of the album art. If you wanted to engage in discussion about the song, you'd have to find a music video version, which not every song has. Some have a workaround where it looks like a still image, but there are probably a few moving pixels at certain points, making comments possible. Overall, if Youtube wants engagement for its advertisers, it was a totally stupid move to disable an extra reason for users to come back to a video. News outlets like BBC and Channel 4 have been doing it more and more on their own videos, but as I have said, I can see the wisdom there.

Netflix also changed their 5 stars to a simple thumbs up or down.

I think the entire review structure is inaccurate and just a way of angry people getting more air time than they deserve.

I mean, Google reviews, you could take 3 stars as more of a negative than a 1 star. Everyone knows 1 stars are just grumpy Karen's, who may not have even been to the place.

Or on YT people giving a thumbs down just because they find that it is not a video theme they want to watch, just to feed the algorithm. The video doesn't deserve a down vote for that.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118151765#Comment_118151765

Nobody picks sides more than Mr.Bear. He is even trying to turn this thread into a rant about the New SJWorld Order

seamus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118155016#Comment_118155016

This. I have no doubt this action has corporate motivations behind it, but we're also beginning to understand that exposing everyone to everyone else may not in fact be a great idea.

Very little good has come of providing dislike/downvote/disapprove reactions on the web. On a small scale, in niche communities they work - where everyone is part of a "community" and uses the button as an honest vote.

Exposed to the wider public - people who are not part of the community - it becomes something else. It becomes a way to manipulate opinion, to bully & attack. It's no longer an honest vote. It's a critique, and it's not an honest one. It's a drive by bitch from some curmudgeon, or an attack by someone who hates the way you look or the way you talk or the football team you follow, or what gender you identify as, or the fact that you use the word "identify".

It's given birth to these enclaves of hate. To the widespread use of social media to bully opinions you don't like into silence. Driven people to suicide.

We already know, and have known for years, that angry people are more likely to express an opinion than happy people, even when on balance there are happier than they are angry.

So providing an outlet for that anger to be taken out against other individuals serves no beneficial purpose except to cause a spiral of negativity. Anger feeding anger feeding anger.

The reality is that by default, reviews and upvotes/downvotes should not be active on any platform where people upload independent content. We don't need these to assess the value or popularity of something. Things become popular because people pass it amongst themselves. Views counters are useful as metrics, but every gobshite throwing their vote against it, doesn't actually serve any purpose anything except to give a place for angry people to get a kick in.

If people don't like it, they won't share it. If they do, they will. Therefore things naturally become popular without the need to be "voted" popular. This is how society has worked for millenia.