Completely disagree. Getting rid of that button has significantly cleaned up the associated comments sections. I’ve also noticed a general improvement in my recommendations. Great move imo.
How can you tell when a video contains something misleading? For example, I struggle to find quality DIY videos without the dislikes warning me away. Dislikes are a great way for the community to clean house.
DIY videos are my primary concern on this as well. It is also why browser extensions don't help me too much because my use case is usually in the garage, half way through a project having issues, on my phone furiously trying to get a solution to the problem I'm having.
I had this exact scenario yesterday trying to remove rounded/stripped lug nuts off my wheels. It would've been very helpful to be able to see if the video I was watching had 1000 likes but 6000 dislikes to know if what I was about to do was advisable or not. Yes, I read the comments and it ended up being a simple fix with the right tools, but the like/dislike ratio is a great way to filter dangerous/dumb/unhelpful videos.
Isn't YouTube already pushing down the bad-ratio videos, though? I know it's not the same as you being able to filter the counts yourself... but the data is being used to try to hide crap.
But YouTube is already using the dislikes to push content down, it's just not showing you the count (nor does it show you the many-other engagement signals it uses for its rankings and recommendations).
Personally, I see the removal of visible dislikes as a net positive. They were used to rain down negativity and meanness on well-intentioned videos. I think YouTube is now a happier place when a kid's crappy singing video gets quietly ranked down, versus being shown to have 34 classmates (or 34,000 strangers) that hated it.
same experience trying to find videos that answer a technical question - there's no immediate gauge on whether or not the video's useful, and it's easy (and often automatic on YouTube's part) to hide any comments with a negative sentiment
Sure, we all got fucked by that but just think of the political porn addicts who now get to have their feelings protected. Ensuring the integrity of their ideological bubbles is much more important than preventing videos with dangerous instructions in them from being promoted.
There's a lot more to YouTube than political videos. I'd estimate over 90% of "reviews" for exercise equipment are automated videos based on data scraped from Amazon. These used to get downvoted heavily, so you could quickly see which videos were worth watching and which ones were created by bots. Now you have to slog through a dozen bot videos to find even one created by a human, giving their actual review. But fuck those of us who use YouTube for something other than political porn because some politician got their feelings hurt by a high dislike count.
I'm not expert on YouTube's algorithms, how did getting rid of visible dislikes help improve recommendations?
I could see it having an impact on the comment section because rather than just dislike and move on people feel compelled to say what is wrong with the video, but I could also see the opposite effect where instead of just disliking and moving on now people spam the comment section with unhelpful attacks on the video/creator.
Because people would brigade videos they politically disagreed with even if it was good content. I’m seeing those videos now. Taking away dislikes has a chilling effect on brigading.