> You can still dislike videos to further personalize and tune your recommendations.

2021 Dislike button: Feature to inform google to show _you_ other content.

Google is hijacking user interface concepts to slowly train users to train the machine about how to train them.

It would seem like people use the dislike button to signal that "I don't agree with the premise of the video" as much as it's to signal that "this video is actually crap". Same as with Reddit downvotes - it shouldn't be used for downvoting legit content that you don't agree with but.. we've all seen how that works in practice.

IMO the dislike count is useless for filtering out "bad" content - you have no idea if it's really a crap video or if it was just brigaded by people who live by "alternative facts" and don't like the specific video due to it having _actual_ facts (or.. politics). Other than certain genres.. like children videos/animations.. there's no political agenda there and dislikes are a genuine "this video is crap" indicator :)

Edit: as is rightfully pointed out in replies, tutorial/how-to videos are other some of the other genres of videos where the dislike count is actually really useful. I totally agree with this - I just gave one example of children videos but there are definitely others as well.

However I still think that in the bigger picture, these genres are popular amongst us, HN folks, but by far the most YT video views come from genres where dislikes are an indication of "I don't agree with you / I don't like this genre of music / I have a different political view / I'm too old to understand this crap that kids are consuming these days / etc". I hope I'm wrong though :)

1. Movie companies don't like releasing trailers and seeing their dislike numbers reaching orbit.

2. The current US administration doesn't like the vast number of dislikes on their videos compared to likes.

3. Advertising agencies don't want their ads related to videos that have high numbers of dislikes, so google is finding "middle ground" and only making the counts visible to the creator so advertisers have less to complain about.

4. People get their feelings hurt when they put a lot of work into a video, only for it to immediately get disliked or "brigaded" by people.

I think the whole fear of "people might dislike-brigade videos" is really only a concern for any online "celebrities" who upset their fans, and for large companies who for some reason think like/dislike ratios are any indication of actual opinion.

Possible solutions other than removing dislikes: - Youtube doesn't count a "view" unless some criteria are met - I assume watch-time is one of those. Just do the same with dislikes/likes. That will immediately get rid of the vast majority of spam up/downlikes. (Sidenote: if they don't have any current criteria for what constitutes a "real" like or dislike, that's on them lmao)

- Leave it up to the creator to show or hide likes/dislikes.

- Leave it up to the advertiser. If they don't want like/dislike counts to be shown on their videos, they get less ad revenue (which will never work, because Google likes money)

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I guess since Youtube "is a private company and can do what they want!" they'll just keep forcing up and coming competitors out of the industry through predatory practices and maintain their top status as a video upload platform.

1) I’ve never used this feature

2) People have nothing better to do with their time

3) Why do you care so much

Can someone explain why this is a good decision by YT without low blows? Why is this even a polarizing topic?

...so they just hid it from the user, and the actual number is still there if you know where to look? That's surprising.

The idea is that once you remove the risk of executives to be exposed to bad publicity will go away. I don't think it will work but it shows the users are not the real clients, the users are the product.

At least it doesn't feel that way.

No; because of brigading and pile-on effects, downvotes weren't a quality signal for quality. That was the whole problem.

I have had app at Play Store for a long time. It receives only low ratings, because there is one feature missing. App itself if free and has a lot of features. How does this encourage having app at Play Store at all?

It is similar at all other platforms. We need encouragement for all developers. Not dislikes.

If youtube won't host the information, it becomes a search problem: who has voted on this link? How have they voted?

Certainly the easiest path would be to create a new centralized site that hosts all these votes. Then create an extension to add these downvotes back in.

Ideally you'd probably want to also have folks be willing to track views too, since downvotes is pretty much a consideration of ratios; 22 downvotes doesn't sound like a lot if there's a million views but it's a lot if there's 100 views.

So now we have an extension that tracks every youtube video you view and submits it to some centralized site, along with upvote/downvotes.

It'd be excellent to try to evolve a more distributed p2p architecture for doing this, but short of recording it on a blockchain- and a roll-up side-chain probably won't help- there's not a lot of good ways to do this. An intermediary step would be to have folks create micro-pages that record their votes. Then we can search "link:https://youtube.com/1a2s3d4f" to use google to go find all the votes people have created.

It's sad & bitter Youtube is de-democratizing this way, is serving their customers & not the audience, but it does interestingly highlight what a hard problem it is to create real demoncratic systems online.

It would be better to get a count and ratio of like to dislikes but Google doesn't want that so comments it is.

The other option is an off-site like/dislike page that is hosted off of Google's servers and not subject to their tos. Maybe accessible through an extension. Abandon YouTube like/comments since they clearly can't handle the engagement and host the discussion on a third party page - one page with a like/dislike count for each YouTube video and with better forum type tools than YouTube comments offer. A good opportunity for a third party to build a tool that solves the problem outside of YouTube.

I'm guessing YouTube regrets putting comments and votes on its videos in the first place. Embedding YT videos still gives YT views (unlike, say, reposting a gif to 4chan) and I would think that they'd prefer FB/Reddit would just eat the controversy over curating comments and votes instead of having to subsidize it themselves.