The decision to kill the dislike button is very much strictly anti consumer and marks the beginning of the enshitification of youtube, especially the enshitification of the comment section. It use to be that if someone had the most dogshit opinion, they would be disliked into oblivion and nobody would see it. Now even the worst opinions imaginable will be pushed to the top if it can find 100 like minded mouth breathers, effectively normalizing it in the eyes of the average viewer. Same goes for whole videos too. I desperately wish we would come up with a real federated alternative to it, because right now its actively contributing to the decline of humanity.
PeerTube?
Luckily I have “Return YouTube Dislike” on my modded YouTube client
Afaik these add-ons only count the dislikes from other people who use the add-on. It’s a half-measure and doesn’t reveal real dislike count.
Correct, it extrapolates the dislike count from the people that use the add-on on the total amount of views. It’s by no means accurate, but gives a general sense of community sentiment towards a specific video. But I still miss the time I could look at a videos vote ratio and easily determine whether or not it was a scam or legit
I witnessed it appear and then disappear, a strange feeling indeed.
Money… It looks better not to show dislikes and it puts users into echo chamber.
That’s pretty much all social media’s pipeline right now, just take a look at Bluesky and you’ll see aside from reporting a post/comment there’s no way to downvote/dislike.
Does anyone know is there a reason why they got rid of dislike? I’d have thought they’d want it to help improve recommendations?
If I recall correctly, they said it was to preview “review bombing” of small channel. They said that a few weeks after YouTube’s own channel published one of the most disliked video ever (YouTube rewind).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-disliked_YouTube_videos
December 13th 2021(og dislike removal day) happened like 3 years after rewind 2018 dislike bombing
It’s the children who are wrong.
It was routinely being gamed, made it kinda useless for semi popular stuff when you couldn’t tell if something was actually garbage, or just had upset the wrong people.
Honestly I’d rather have that now, a sizable minority of users hate AI videos.
They want more money. Helping the user is only good if it makes money. Anyway, down votes give viewers more information, and probably YT wants to doctor the data in a way that downvotes block.
For example, I would always downvote AI content if allowed. So would countless others. But YT wants people to watch it, right? So they gotta suppress our negative feedback.
I remember Reddit used to have the ability to show both upvote and downvotes. I miss that feature.
Lemmy has this feature which is really nice… -20 points doesn’t show +20 and -40. It mentally feels a lot better to know that 20 people agreed with you even if more people disagreed
I often wonder if that is the reason Reddit dropped it, to make controlling and influencing the user base easier? A joke example, seeing +100 to -99 votes regarding the sacrilege or glory of pineapple on pizza is a lot different then just +1 or -1
Reddit’s shadow ban system is another part of why I don’t trust them. Plenty of times I’ve seen posts where metadata says there are multiple comments but instead its empty without even the
[]trail. Could be just their distributed database taking its sweet ass time to become consistent or maybe those people are on some sort of shit list?For myself I know I keep saying something that results in me getting some extra attention from an LLM because I keep getting sub 30 second instant bans and warnings for ambiguous comments that sound threatening but aren’t. I lost a 20 year old account because of the comment “We should never have killed that fucking bear” being determined as advocating violence.
I kept getting shadow banned constantly. My comments ending up with 1 view no up or down votes. For completely arbitrary reasons as well. And I got completely banned from a few communities by accidentally using extremist terminology (?).
And yes I don’t doubt they removed it for a reason, it makes it a much less friendly place. Like you’re putting down and directly affecting the other person rather than just disagreeing. It’s hard to explain.
This is my third account in the piefed/lemmy universe and the experience feels a lot like the years immediately after Digg imploded but before the incident with the first censorship revolt (I forget what that was even about). That’s when the first big change to the “Hot” algorithm was made that made it easier to moderate but also made the site more stale.
Thinking about what that website was like then vs now is more than a bit depressing actually. I knew a handful of the original reddit dev’s at a professional level after meeting them at a couple PyCon’s. Still have a couple of the Reddit stickers they would randomly hand out to people. I don’t think I ever met Aaron in person but I talked shop with him a lot about the python framework he had made. Bleh.
Out of curiosity, what’s the purpose of multiple accounts?
Identity management and security.
So this username is DevDave but hilariously there are about five (down from seven) different David’s fighting over this handle. It’s hilarious because as soon as one of us signs up with this handle to a new service, we send a friend invite to the others as a not to subtle “First!” with both middle fingers. Yes it does narrow things down from ~8 billion to five, but since we are all in tech and are interweaving its hard to know who is actually who and it creates an interesting level of chaos. Otherwise this my random bullshit account and I don’t type anything here I wouldn’t say out loud in public.
The others are more isolated/specific due to reasons.
That makes sense. I kind of just assume everyone can find out my identity if they try hard enough. So my infosec is as if I’m speaking to a stranger on a nearby train. They could probably follow me home but I don’t give them a reason to and I don’t say anything incriminating.
The astonishing part is how they manage to both be overly heavy-handed on moderation and STILL keep floating a fuckton of racism and other bigotry to the top.
The racists don’t block ads
accidentally using extremist terminology
That’s similar to how I learned about Reddit’s stance on punching Nazis.
Nice
Terrible news: you actually can get the breakdown, including who voted up or down.
I don’t see a problem with that. I don’t personally care who specifically voted for anything, but I also don’t mind if someone knows I was the one who did it
So, what are good alternatives to YouTube and how do I get there?
It breaks my heart that it’s come to this. I used YouTube my whole life to learn. It’s like a living breathing encyclopedia for art, math, science and culture. More than 2 decades of pure human knowledge is on there. I’ve learned more than I could ever hope to learn from just using books and my library. Some things are best absorbed visually.
And now, I find myself thinking the same thing as you. I don’t want to leave these decades of knowledge behind. Some channels have been dead for years but what they taught is irreplaceable. It’s so incredibly unfair that such a collective effort of the world can be bought up by a giant corporation and exploited.
I guess the same goes with what AI did to decades of written knowledge. Decades of people creating content just trying to help others, and it’s being looked at with dollar signs.
Doesn’t seem fair.
Any service only cares about engagement so the dislike was never really useful because the core of engagement is rage bait. The only way to truly downvote content is to not engage with it whatsoever. Ex. The only way to dislike Instagram is to not use the platform
You mean it can’t detect hatewatching?
The problem is that sometimes you can’t know whether the content is worth engaging until you view it. At least YouTube shorts still have the “Don’t recommend channel” option.
Yea, about that. I have a channel that no matter how many times i say “don’t recommend me this channel” i would keep getting it, to comedic effect. Like i would press the button and then immediately get the same channel 4 times in a row. I have now pressed that button maybe 30 times and it is still showing up. Fuck YouTube.
True but one can mitigate engagement. View < comment < like < share < follow and so on (not exactly sure of the order but you get the idea). Maybe the best would be to block the account after following or report the content, that is short of leaving the platform all together.
Yes! I’m not on insta or TikTok, but people will share horrible things like “can you believe they said this?” And yes, quite frankly I can because here you are commenting on it and sharing it. It’s like people don’t understand the concept of engagement. If someone has a video abusing their child, just report the video and potentially send it to the authorities if needed. Don’t comment and share the video!
YouTube could only envy Pornhub.
Pornhub has way better content
AND they even have porn, too!
Better volume controls also
This is crucial
When you remove the value of dislikes, it also removes the value of likes to users.
You see them on SmarTube. But I imagine, like most voting on the internet, it snowballs from whatever tilt it initially showed. People be herds like that. They’ll dislike or disagree with something, but change that opinion once they see what “most” others think at that time. Even if it’s 2 Likes and 1 Dislike.
And that is a fantastic pathway for engagement and ad revenue. “Markets” or market segmentation, are just our fancy terms for herds.
Everyone is upvoting this comment so I must downvote to prove I’m not part of the herd
Name something more useless than the dislike button in comments
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This has always confused me.
I’ve never liked, disliked, rated, commented, or shared a Youtube video. Because I’m using Freetube, I technically don’t even subscribe anymore. Why are y’all so eager to maintain the algorithm? Does “disliking” a video feel like agency?
If you really wanna punish Youtube creators, watch their video for less than 30 seconds. That won’t count as a view, but I bet the algorithm clocks it as a dislike.
There are creators I follow who don’t make videos full time because the money isn’t there yet for them, but they make good videos. Sponsoring them on Pateron helps them financially, but doesn’t help them grow. if I can signal that this is good content and more people should see it, that helps the creator out and encourages more of that type of content to be created.
Just like I thought. You think it’s your civic duty to train Google’s algorithm in the hopes that it may favor the stuff you like.
You’re a model consumer. I’ll bet you pause the ads when you leave the room.
Yeah, you know, you’re right. Fuck me for wanting the people who make good content to be paid and recognized for their hard work.
they actually changed the algorithm. it used to be preference based, but now its attention based. the people who want the dislike back want the older algorithm back because likes/dislikes used to matter, the shit would sink and the gold would float. ragebait wasn’t the norm back then.
Because it doesn’t make sense from user perspective. I watched Justin Bieber Baby, I watched Rebecca Black Friday and I started watching Bohemian rhapsody but didn’t continue as I’ve heard it alot lately. YouTube assumed I liked the two other songs and hated Queen.
See the problem? YouTube suggestions were so much better years ago, now it feels like way too much scrolling to find something good
What a goofy take lol
