the content I watch (mostly intellectual or political conversations or lectures) rarely has a dislike rate of more than a few percent, so I don't understand what good the dislike button does.
>So frustrating not having the dislike button
I can understand the satisfaction of smashing the button on something you don't like... but does your frustration take a different form that translates into more/less usability?
(I can also imagine that a dislike button might help in an overall rating system like Yelp or Rottentomatoes, but then those systems don't serve me particularly well either. If something is hugely popular, that means middlebrow tastes like it, which isn't that useful. I don't want to watch or read Stephen King, and after all, people vote with their dollars for McDonald's. I suppose this could be a useful metric on youtube for gaming livestreams or skating videos or something?)
The dislike button is extremely useful to indicate scams and erroneous information.
Even outside of outright scams its still useful. For example, there's a Numberphile video (a high quality channel that explains math to ordinary people) where they go off the rails and make a bunch of errors to claim that the sum of 1 to infinity is -1/12. It's based on real concepts but the way they present it is completely incorrect. It had a dislike ratio of 20% whereas most of their videos have a dislike ratio of about 1%. By seeing such a high number of dislikes, it alerts the user that something could be off about this video and that they should not take what is said at face value.
>So frustrating not having the dislike button
I can understand the satisfaction of smashing the button on something you don't like... but does your frustration take a different form that translates into more/less usability?
(I can also imagine that a dislike button might help in an overall rating system like Yelp or Rottentomatoes, but then those systems don't serve me particularly well either. If something is hugely popular, that means middlebrow tastes like it, which isn't that useful. I don't want to watch or read Stephen King, and after all, people vote with their dollars for McDonald's. I suppose this could be a useful metric on youtube for gaming livestreams or skating videos or something?)