[gknoy]

I find what you said really interesting, mainly because I don't think I've _ever_ used likes or dislikes (or their ratio) as a metric for choosing what to watch. The most I've interacted with dislikes is when seeing some helpful low-production-value video, or some artist's music stream, I've wondered why 1-3% of the viewers disliked it. I mean, even when I've found _better_ or _more informative_ videos, I've never been tempted to dislike the previous ones I'd watched that weren't as good.

[BitwiseFool]

I have a great example that illustrates my use of likes/dislikes as a filter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRCSX-u01eM

The video is titled: "Boeing C-17 Globemaster Jet Crash All Hell breaks loose". It has 2,302,640 views and I took a screenshot of the like/dislike metrics before the change took place. 1.6K Upvoted, 21K Downvoted.

The spoiler is that the plane taking off never actually crashes. It just looks like it will because of the camera angle. The uploader wrote "I made this video to start a conversation and it has certainly started a conversation ..." but has disabled comments. The video is a complete and total lie and the ratio reflected that. Without comments, you have nothing else to warn you about the video. From now on, you will have to rely on the fact that a video viewed two million times only has one and a half thousand likes as a proxy.

Granted, I know some videos are prone to have bad-looking ratios because they are discussing contentious topics. I give those a wide berth and don't immediately dismiss them because they have a 60-40 like dislike ratio.

[0des]

I still see the up/down counts.

[oriki]

This. I find that the vast majority of cases where I'd pay any attention to the dislike bar are just cases where people are getting dogpiled for whatever reason (whether they deserve it or not, or if anyone deserves to be treated like that on the internet, is another matter entirely) but I've heard reasonable arguments from people talking about tutorials and other informative videos that the like:dislike ratio is a convenient sniff test for if the video is worth watching.

[jjoonathan]

Clickbait is bad enough without removing one of the last few tools left in the arsenal to fight it.

[oriki]

I feel like we have different definitions as to what clickbait is - when I see a clickbait video, I can simply identify it by it's title and thumbnail, I've never needed to look at the like:dislike ratio to confirm that it's clickbait. What kind of videos do you find as clickbait?

[jjoonathan]

An interview where they spend 30 minutes off-subject and 1 minute on-subject. A tutorial with 10 minutes of detailed explanation and a "now draw the owl" step buried 3/4 of the way through. A thumbnail that promises a level of complexity, sophistication, or accomplishment that winds up never actually happening in the video.

Content farms aren't the only ones in the clickbait game these days.

[smaryjerry]

For entertainment it’s not that big of a deal but still annoying not to see the ratio to total counts, but for educational content or how to videos it is absolutely critical. Have you ever tried to search got to fix a washing machine or basically anything? Even with likes and dislikes you have to go through tons of videos that are just plain bad advice before you can figure it out. 90% of the time the dislikes help you weed out the straight up clickbait material and the other 10% it tells you when what the person did will actually make a problem worse.

[jjoonathan]

Dislikes indicate politics, clickbait, or unhelpfulness. Politics is obvious, but clickbait and unhelpfulness can waste a lot of your time before becoming obvious. Dislikes help combat this.

[smaryjerry]

And let’s be honest, most political videos don’t have enough dislikes from both sides.