Agreed. Here is a video titled "How a simple Django application works" that is 8 minutes long. It has 29 likes and 27 dislikes. It's a pretty poor quality video, in my opinion.
So if there was a similar video with the same views and likes but 0 downvotes you think it'd be significantly better? I'd guess the difference was noise.
I mean "maybe," right? It just seems like a sample-size problem rather than indicating any bias one way or another. And of course, as far as these things go, you only find out the quality after you watch some or all of it.
Perhaps youtube is the wrong medium for a lot of things and dislikes may not be the best way to express that.
Youtube is borderline stupid right now for most channels that don't have organic growth... what they should do is re-open monetization and live streaming to everyone as its creating its own hell hole if you ask me with the 9 minutes of smash the like button and 1 minute of content we're seeing on every channel that isn't organically growing or making money through other means.
They've changed the sidebar algo/design in the past six months or so and I tell ya, I used to actually use it, but not anymore at all. It's basically been remodeled into the same "front page" business case as Soundcloud, Amazon, and any other "choose from a variety of things that may or may not be sponsored (but almost always are) and only ever relate to your watch history by chance."