The other thing they seem to have done around the same time is heavily bias towards showing only positive comments. This is quite damaging when searching for, for example, medical content.

At first when I found a video where every visible comment was “Omg! I’ve tried everything for years, and this is the first thing that worked. You’ve changed my life”, I was excited! Now, I realise that almost every physical therapy video contains the exact same comments. Presumably because they are the ones the algorithm pushes to the top.

This means it’s really hard to know which content is actually trustworthy, especially when there’s also no downvotes. And for a lot of thing this is really important.

It’s as if Amazon showed only the glowing five star reviews - suddenly you don’t know what the common problems are with the product you’re about to buy.

Honestly, it isn’t hard to justify Youtube’s choices on this very specific issue. The dislike button presumably has a function beyond public shaming. I expect it’s primarily for tailoring recommendations and tuning their algorithms, but in any case it was clearly being abused by troll hordes.

If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video, or could identify other statistical aberrations, it stands to reason that such abuse would actively interfere with the legitimate functionality it was intended for and/or work against the interests of YouTube, advertisers, as well as authors and viewers.

I personally think that removing the public counter was an elegant solution in this case, as it suppresses the worst excesses of trolling while maintaining the original intent of the dislike feature, which should improve the overall experience for most users, generally speaking.

Something else strange is that they removed the dropdown option to sort videos in a channel in chronological order ("oldest first").

Wouldn't it make more sense to install an extension that shows the dislike count again? https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ I've been using it since YouTube removed the dislikes and it's worked very well...

YouTube monopoly is really hurting internet and the world.

YouTube at this point is globalized TV controlled by one country: U.S.

It got so bad that for countries that do not have their own platforms, YouTube become as worse as adversarial subversive NGO that dictates one narrative and suppresses other narratives. i have seen in recent years countless examples of channels wiped from platform for holding opinionated views not aligned with Neo-liberal west.

Removing features so that you watch what they want you to watch.

Websites or services that act as personalized recommendation middle-men with a less "trashy" presentation for the recommendations themselves are a great idea. Essentially, I'd like "Rate Your Music" for all sorts of things. There's a reason why a handful few are trying to get those "Action Button" Youtube videos submitted to Letterboxd.

I guess I also believe that plenty of platforms with user-generated content have boundless stuff to see, and making the platforms themselves responsible for recommendations gives them almost too much responsibility. I understand it's part of the business plan, but recommendations would become less toxic of a phenomenon if they weren't forced onto your regular user experience as you engaged with the platform.. and better if they were more individual and something you'd have to access separately. Like movie reviews in the paper!

I don't get why the Reddit crowd cares so much about disliking... Mostly without even a comment or something.

Everytime on groups that share a userbase with Reddit, and on YouTube, you get haters. You don't know who, you don't know why, they just downvotes and burry your comment and they're not able to comment back.

It kills online discussions, make an echo chamber for the leading opinion, and kills any content that's a bit different.

For exemple, some awesome song about Assassin's creed was featured on YouTube, a few years ago, next to related content. (Assassin des templiers)

The quality and the realisation were sublime.

But it got tons of thumbs down because it was in French, and haters only want content in English (filtering your exposition to international content was not the point of upvotes and downvotes!)

So downvotes are pointless imo. It's great they get rid of it (and HN should do the same for the quality of the discussion)

Innovative Idea:

Instead of a single dislike button, force the user to select a dislike reason, with choices such as:

- title doesn't match content

- content is in unexpected language

- content is in low visual quality

etc.

I think they didn't just remove dislike counts, but are actively suppressing negative comments.

If I watch a speech of someone from the German (right-wing) AfD party, which I very rarely do and start reading the comments, I feel like I'm visiting an echo chamber. Zero negative comments which simply can't be the truth.

I also started working on a similar website several weeks ago. It's called tuberank, feel free to check it out!

https://tuberank.org/en

Smart idea... Hope it catches up

They made a mistake by removing the star rating system.

You can download the dataset of dislikes and analyze it in ClickHouse:

https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/getting-started/example-datas...

Funny idea: What would happen, if a bunch of relatively well known Youtubers made it their mission to say at every video ending, that one should upvote for disliking a video and that they consider upvotes to be dislikes? If it became big enough of a movement, would upvoting also be removed?

I understand that not everyone will appreciate or connect with crafted and dedicated videos, and respect the diversity of opinions. However, given the rarity of positive feedback in a niche, the negative ratings without constructive criticis felt particularly impactful.

Ia there a way to search for youtube comments? I watched over 200 videos from some series and remember a particular comment under one of those videos.. but it seems those are not indexed by google, so you cannot search for youtube comments

Youtube is bracing itself for Twitter's land grab.

Personally I think Youtube is screwed.

Getting a TypeError: Le.find(...) is undefined when going to https://www.favoree.io/search

needs a bit more work :)

Is it going to put its thumb on the scales to counteract "review bombing/troll campaigns" for widely disliked but powerfully backed YouTube videos the way RT does?

How long before youtube removes everything but "what's next" and turns into a TV channel?

Unfortunate to be called something like that instead of an alternative for IMDB's ratings or something.

Rotten Tomatoes is clearly meant to be just a parody website. Look at its name. It can't be taken seriously.

There is a Firefox extension that brings it back...

Well why we don't have a review platform for YouTubers? Because it's free

There are browser extensions that get you the dislike counts, and they are accurate.

This just shows how little power we have over corporations, and how they can just get away with the stupidest things because "people will just forget about it." It's honestly sad.

somebody should take youtube private and get rid of all the shit videos

Didn't click surely LGBT people have less than 10% approval on this unless its a pre-misstep Milo Yannopoulos type