[f1refly]

> IMO the dislike count is useless for filtering out "bad" content

I don't know what kind of content you consume on youtube, but this does not reflect my experience at all. I'm regularly researching repair/modding manuals or enthusiast videos and the dislike count is a very, very good way of telling how good a video will be. Sometimes things are done in a really bad or even dangerous way, or the whole video is just someone describing the problem and then skipping the actual fix.

The only other place I've seen dislikes is at pr videos that went viral for their outright offensive hypocrisy or otherwise badly formulated message, which I wouldn't call a bad use either.

[tauntz]

I do agree with you! Repair guides (and similar how-to's) are one of the genres where the dislikes are actually an indication of the quality of the content.

I'm just making an assumption that most of Youtube content that's consumed, is in genres where the dislikes are more a signal of "I don't agree with you/your political view/taste of music/etc". I hope I'm wrong.

[jonnycomputer]

Dislike buttons in special interest topics are probably a more informative signal than they are otherwise, but I've never personally spent much time looking at the likes one way or the other. Comments are usually much more informative. E.g. "these instructions for the EG1772Z worked for my EG1781T, except that I had to pry off the plastic plate that hides the access bolt first." or "Ok video, but if he had done X first, he could have finished with half the trouble." or "Be careful prying the case loose. I broke the plastic tabs with my screw driver."

[ehsankia]

I see quite a lot of news clips, and in that case, negative ratio is almost always the result of brigading. Here's an example I ran into this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kqEMLiE5CU

Out of nowhere, 95% dislike ratio. Any other video on that channel has maybe 400 votes total, this was has 5K dislikes out of nowhere, very clearly some group of antivaxxers brigaded it. The video is perfectly normal and nothing out of the ordinary, so the vote count is just misleading and useless.