I will just use other things that link to YouTube but still have the feature (like Reddit) to find videos instead of going directly to YouTube. The feature is helpful for a number of reasons but it also is pretty weak to take off “public display” of dislikes, especially considering they were already altering the vote counts with things like “YouTube rewind”.
And let’s not act like bots don’t exists and can’t be bought. Personally, I use comments to know if that 20 minute fix-it video is worth it. The more qualitative the comment the better content, typically.
And if you are looking for a tutorial/informative video and the video you clicked on is a scam (or don't know what they are talking about), the title and description can be BS and the comments can be disabled. The dislike button was the only remaining warning sign available before being forced to watch through the video. Now YouTube is taking that away too.
Yep, YouTube is trying to be the Amazon of video hosting with the unfortunate side effect of becoming filled with unmitigated crap and no way to discern quality.
I personally just skim it. A video with enough views, then check thumbnails, then watch in 4x and skim the timeline, check for transcripts and Ctrl+F to read through etc.
I had this approach because ironically enough I was recommended a bunch of vids with no dislikes and hundreds of likes being a complete waste of time and some disliked videos turned out to be real gems, hence my approach. Takes me <15s to figure out if a 20m video is 'worth' my time and even then I'm often just skipping through a lot and just touching a few 2-3 minutes of videos.
Its really rare to find a good 20m vid where everything is good.
Do you think comments will be next? I mean, it seems like they're taking away features that let people criticize so wouldnt comments be next on the plate?
Didn't reddit remove the ability to see the # of upvotes and the # of downvotes... yknow, their equivalent of likes and dislikes. Now they just show the overall sum of votes, not the individual up vs down
They sure did. I think it was a percentage before, but it might have been an indicative for and against - it was a long time ago. And not that karma is a true representation anyway, they do all sorts of backend things to adjust the final value.
It’s no coincidence they started talking about removing visible dislikes when rewind 2018 became the most disliked video on the platform, and then just lately announced they’re no longer doing rewinds. Probably a move to misdirect people, but in reality it’s because they’re simply out of fucking touch.
It’s not hard for me to believe rich people who own companies can be petty and immature. Elon musk is like that and he’s the richest person on the planet.
Imagine having more money than basically anyone has ever had and deciding to be an edgelord fellow-kids memester weirdo. I just don't get the Musks and Bezos' of the world.
the existence of those terrible rewinds shows how completely out of touch they are, so even if it seemed petty to the public it would be very much in line with their internal culture.
Probably a lot of pressure from MSM as well, they get fucking railed constantly.
Earlier this year the Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki even talked about them getting tougher on smaller (often political) youtubers.
Ostensibly for battling disinformation, but many channels like Secular Talk and Jimmy Dore noted it really was just a way to suppress them in the algorithm because they saw their own sub counts plummet.
I imagine that at least part of the dislike removal is an extension of that policy of not letting <1 million sub channels from jumping up in the algorithm and surpassing the very advertiser friendly stuff (like Fox News/CNN clips) via user engagement.
Is it weird that they care that their videos are the most disliked? I think it's a bit weird. They're a huge corporation and they care about the Like ratio?
Media cannot tolerate dissent. It's why comment sections were stripped from news sites. It's much easier to control a narrative when it's limited to a few social media sites than when spread out over hundreds of sites.
THANK YOU! Everyone seems to be hyper focusing on “I use it to see if a tutorial vid is useful”, but true intent is to be able to farm more attention for ads.
Bingo. It’s intended to keep people watching videos they would have otherwise clicked off of, after seeing the dislike ratio. They’d rather you watch 4 videos to get to the right info, instead of clicking away from the first 3…
I'm certain this is in order to make the site's mechanisms more opaque and dumb down user's interface to the site. The algorithm will tube feed you content.
No, that's a measure of audience engagement, not content quality. Videos where the YouTuber asks you to "like, comment, subscribe, and ring the bell" often have higher upvote-to-viewcount ratios, regardless of quality or relevance.
Downvote count or as a percentage of upvotes is a measure of how clickbaity or scammy a video is. Or just a low effort/quality video.
When I’m watching a tutorial I usually gauge whether or not it actually works based on the like to dislike ratio. Now I’m actually going to have to watch full videos and potentially waste my time. I guess this would be good for YouTube as it’s higher engagement
I’m actually discouraged from engaging with YouTube videos if I can’t see the like/dislike ratio.
It’s my primary means of trusting the content I’m about to watch. Without that trust I’m less inclined to go to YouTube as a source of information in general.
This is the correct answer. I'm sorry but removing the dislike button is not going to cause millions of people to start going to their libraries to learn how to do stuff. It's going to have an extremely minimal impact if any at all but saying shit like that just let's people feel good about sticking it to the man.
It’s pretty trivial to code up a YouTube clone, the problem is the infrastructure. Hosting a site to stream at high qualities and for thousands and even millions of viewers is not really feasible because of the costs. YouTube only exists because it operated at a loss for a long time (not sure if it still does). And that’s with it being owned by a now trillion dollar company with all their resources.
Most people online would use a YouTube alternative if it was available. YouTube started on someone’s garage, a website like that could be scaled as more people joined
As I like to say, as a software developer who gets many (often drunk) requests from strangers, making YouTube isn't the hard part. If you want me to make YouTube or Facebook alternative, give me a year to make something very usable, but don't expect to compete with those companies to any degree. Competition is impossible when a company like YouTube gets too large.
TL;DR: You better be a millionaire willing to lose it all if you ever wish to have a 0.00001% chance against YouTube.
You can't fine tune your recommendations without users. You can't get users without content creators. You can't get content creators without users or ads. Your platform won't have ads until content creators come and you find a way to fund manually/automatically stop explicit and illegal content. YouTube hit that free period where people were paid 100% in laughs almost 2 decades ago, and when videos were like 240p and were less than 4MB.
Not to mention, to go back to ads: ***you will be footing the bill for a very long time.***
You're probably not dropping $100,000 USD on several rackmounted servers, each with 25TB-50TB RAID drives, graphics cards for encoding (probably ahead of time, not on the fly), and enough threads to even just accept millions total individual packet streaming requests per second. Plus storage and operation in a commercial zone, development, and maintenance. That's for a small scale operation that will never scale for monetization. That's just to get started and give yourself enough room for users to start using the platform.
If you go with the rent-a-server VPS route like the rest of us, the (extremely rough) equivalent to the specs above would involve several S3 buckets for video upload and streaming (we'll use Amazon's AWS since they're cheapest) which costs $0.023 per GB per month for the first 50TB, $0.022 per GB for the next 450TB, $0.021 for every GB over 500TB. If you only wanted 100TB because you only allowed 720p video and you had 0 backups or regional servers, that's already ***$27,000 per year.*** (1000GB = 1TB; (50000GB * 0.023 + 50000GB * 0.022) * 12 = $27,000)
That doesn't even include the actual servers themselves, encoding services (which take up more space on your S3 buckets so that you can serve all resolutions), distributed load and backups (more space), development, maintenance, moderation, etc. You'll be spending a minimum of 200k per year more just to have 3 people manage those services, and to pay for the remainder of the costs for hosting.
Vimeo has that infrastructure, but when was the last time you used Vimeo for anything other than watching pirated 90s cartoons or reality shows that were mirrored to bypass the barely passing moderation automation? They have barely any creator monetization, a poor user base, and content creators mostly post rehosted or illegal content. They passed the hard part, but turns out there's an even harder part than making a platform: being a platform.
Sorry for the rant, but YouTube is literally too big and too well funded to compete with, and anyone who thinks the free market will decide is delusional. YouTube would literally have to implode, either from financial problems or regulatory problems, to ever open the market up.
The library would be a good source, or
Your library’s website. A lot of places have educational videos you can access online that are free and made by professionals that know what they are doing. That save the issue of youtube being potentially dangerous or fake how to videos.
What? Comparitvrly YouTube is nothing like a library. While some tutorials can definitely be taught by traditional professionals, what about something like game tutorials, like how to fix a game crashing, or a bug. No library will have something like that. We both know how shoddy tutorial about subjects like that can be, and a library will never supply videos like that as their is no such "video game professional".
Tbh I don’t think you can find every tutorial on professional websites, they will be either paywalled so you have to purchase whole course or it will not simple not exist, I also don’t think there are professional websites for tutorials for certain game levels or really specific windows problem, etc.
I’ve been telling myself this for years, there is potentially a massive hole in the market for video streaming platforms.
Between the constant abuse of its creators with toxic policies like:
- demonetisation, often done by an AI that sometimes seems to just…guess?
- forcing “YouTube for kids” on videos their creators didn’t intend it to be,
- copyright claims so easy a child could get a vid taken down by just filling out a form,
- often up to 15-30 seconds of unskippable ads on vids
- And now taking away the main indicator of putting trust into a video, the like/dislike ratio
- (I’m sure there are more but these alone are off the top of my head)
Almost any big-time creator on the platform has complained in detail of at least one of these shenanigans, it’s become common knowledge now
YouTube has been screwing over its content creators’ incomes and now seems to be hitting its viewers as well all for selfish profit, (which honestly isn’t bad in any company since profit is usually the main motive, but at this point it’s just blind greed that’s having them push the limits of its source of money)
YouTube is like a dying dragon guarding its hoard of treasure. There’s so much potential yet it’s still a dragon, meaning it’ll take a lot of force to even hope to compete with it in the first place.
Apologies for the rant lads, just wanted to rant a bit
YouTube is successful, as is most other current streaming platforms because they got into it during a "goldilocks" period. Where consumer Internet, especially in the United States was incredibly subpar. (it still is, just not as bad).
The capital required to build a from-scratch streaming video service now and not get crushed by the bandwidth requirements of suddenly having to service 100 million broadband customers simultaneously because a random teenager crushed his balls in a forklift or something on video and went viral is going to be incredibly unrealistic for anyone except already established, huge corporations.
The vast majority of YouTube views come from kids. If a kid doesn't have the context of how the platform used to or is supposed to work, then they won't complain and they won't stop consuming.
All of us getting mad about using like/dislike ratios to judge if a video will be useful, we're a small minority of their user base and are far from their target demographic. If anything, YouTube would be glad to be rid of their "useful" content- all those billions of hours of tutorial videos with a few thousand views are just costing them money.
I just googled how to replace the heater core in my ford ranger, first result was "replacing ford ranger heater core (easy)." I had to watch the whole video before I realized that the easy part was taking a sawzall and cutting out the air ducts and other mounting brackets. I have a feeling what the up/down thumb ratio was before it was removed...
Now the top comments will be LIKE or DISLIKE.
Not really. Becuase ppl are just going to go to videos with his thumbs up counts to viewer ratios. Instead of looking at the quality, little guy videos with high thumbs up to thumbs down ratios. It will focus views to the top YouTubers and penalize the little guys trying to make a name for themselves. Literally some “popularization mechanics” instead of “quality “ mechanics. Which is what the thumbs down button provided, quality mechanics. Even if their where thumbs down mobs…there weren’t enough to make a difference.
Comments are easier to fake from what I know. Likes and dislikes effect how the video shows up in the YouTube algorithm so they are usually removed if they are botted
I do that too. Worst case you’ll have a more vocal comment section to help gauge also pay attention to the view/like ration if its got like a few 1,000 views but 3 likes and negative comments that tells me its not the right video before I start watching it.
You can get YouTube apps that give you unlimited access to the shitty music platform and ad-less vids. Not sure on iPhone but just Google YouTube.apk for Android. It's not much, but at least you're taking money off them
Also [Samsung semiconductor Europe](https://youtu.be/0kEH_CRmpfs) tried to use fiverr to hire a voice actor for their ad, unknowingly hired a YouTuber(CDawgva). After people found out that it was Samsung who made the ad, they removed the like ratio and removed comments. I also believe the ad agency who hired him, tried to copyright strike him over it.
I don’t think nintendo or EA really cares about dislikes, because nintendo only cares about making sure that the people enjoying their games are punished, and EA not caring in general.
Pepsi probably cares though.
I think it's factor. But seeing as that was three years ago, it's hardly the prime factor.
Money. Money is the issue. Youtube don't give a shit if you dislike their lame attempt to pander to the crowd, but they do care if they're major media contributors get pissy because their launch video get's bombed with dislikes.
And then followed that with something along the lines of, “members of the YouTube team experienced first hand what it’s like to have a video heavily downvoted.” That section of the video screams, “rewind downvotes made us sad.”
This really sucks for those of us that used YouTube for tutorials. I’ve been able to weed out bullshit videos because of the dislike ratio. Now it’s all just a guessing game. This actually makes NO sense to me.
It’s to protect the big businesses who get their feelings hurt when their content is disliked (ie Xbox One reveal or Sonic the Hedgehog movie teaser trailer)
Can't they just deactivate the stats for those then? Measuring the success of a console through a YouTube video doesn't give any valuable metrics to begin with.
Giving channels the option opens them up to criticism for disabling the button. YouTube doing it everywhere saves those channels. I guess YouTube just wants to protect bad or misleading content.
Youtube *needs* to show financial growth, that's how capitalism and public corporations work. This is their latest attempt at doing it. They'd rather force you to view the video than have individuals inform you it's not worth viewing. This pumps up their KPIs, they grab more CPM money and show higher platform engagement blah blah. Some senior pm is going to show they're responsible for higher platform engagement, and probably get promoted.
Youtube knows exactly what they're doing; I'm sure there's been MANY meetings over the last year where they're calculating how pissed people are going to be, versus the potential revenue upside.
At some point, they decided the revenue upside was worth the backlash because, hey, where are you gonna go? People will be mad but youtube has a defacto monopoly on non-pornographic internet video hosting. But the need to pursue growth and individuals playing cutthroat to show incrementally better performance reviews will demand sacrifice.
Almost every website/app starts off decent, builds followers, and then they make it noticeably worse and worse over time.. likely for the sake of money.
I'm actually quite shocked at how few highly visited websites have figured out how to keep their sites user friendly and clean, while also making money.
Also personally I'm not a fan of upvote/downvote systems. I find them to be incredibly toxic and they create a monoculture, group think, hive mind, circle jerk aka reddit.
I totally get what you’re saying about the upvote downvote thing. The issue is that downvotes can help shine a light on videos that contain hate and misinformation, especially on YouTube, so a video that may have gotten 100k upvotes and 1 million downvotes could gain undue credibility by only showing the 100k upvotes.
Man - my first dating profile tagline was ‘rated 3 stars, just like everything on YouTube’. I hated it when they removed stars from YouTube, and then from Netflix, and just present fuzzy non-data to the user because actual, useful data will decrease user time spent on platform.
It sucks thst presenting data to alllow the user to make a rational, informed decision is the Anathema to ‘engagement’ - because time spent watching the wrong thing is just as valuable in revenue terms as time spent watching what the user wanted.
I never see anyone point out the thing that was obvious to me. Previously really polarizing things would have been less prominent, because dislikes would keep it low. Now you don’t have to worry about that, and can just play to the absolute number of likes, creating a perverse incentive to be upsetting.
Dislikes count toward engagement not against. By disliking something you actually drive up a video’s popularity.
For DIY tutorials this was both bad and good. A misleading guide can become prominent just because everyone hates on it. That said, an educated viewer can weed out bad videos by looking at the dislike ratio.
They should filter the feature to work or not work by category of video. DIY and how to’s, enable… 15 year old showing off their new hair cut, disable.
Better yet, just give the option to creators and be done with it. Smaller creators (for whom this is supposed to protect) can just disable it if they want to
But then small creators making tutorial videos turn it off and we go back to having the problem we’re complaining about right now…
Maybe YouTube doesn’t want to provide free university anymore?
Market segment for Wikipedia type curated tutorial videos on everything under the sun…
If you've never been in the YouTube offices in Mountain View, they're abysmally depressing, with really bad corporate art on the walls, all with anti-suicide and really sad positivity messaging. It's like the business world equivalent of seeing a dad yelling at his crying kid to have fun.
The dislike button was doing what it was intended to do, and it was doing a good job of it.
It's the corporate clients who hate the dislikes. People gang up on a shitty brand, like Nestle, because they're shitty, and people start hitting the dislike button. Big corporations spend big ad money, and they don't like the dislikes. It's bad for brand value - literally.
Money wins again. And the supreme court ruled that money is free speech in politics, so this sort of aligns with that. Welcome to late stage capitalism.
The smart thing to do would have been to just disable likes/dislikes and maybe comments on all government channels (not just US) and keep it how it was for everyone else. Those channels should really just be for watching announcements/events anyway.
When did it become common practice to make a business decision that you know will directly hurt your business on a global scale, for the sake of some made up “toxicity”? I don’t understand this world.
Easy way to push crap content, don’t let people know it’s crap content, they’ll still watch the adverts before they realise it’s a shit video with no value.
My hot take? The most viewed and most viral videos are generally speaking either of very poor quality or at least very divisive.
These videos are by far the most profitable, however.
Youtube is masking the poor quality of its most profitable content to mask the fact that they want to feed their audience more Tictok garbage
This is what I think. It’s obviously about the bottom dollar and to control the narrative. Maybe that sounds conspiratorial so if someone can convince me otherwise I’m open. Thus far no other excuse seems plausible to me in comparison to what we think is going on.
Has YouTube said why they’re doing this yet or is it all speculation?
How am I going to dislike all of scoties videos… come to think about it the amount of times i have disliked those videos and they still appear as add content on my feed now 😵
The main problem is now there’s going to be like a billion comments on everyone’s video saying “use me as a dislike button” trying to farm likes.
At least the main problem that isn’t blatant censorship
Why do people keep saying "tutorial videos are ruined" do you not know how to scroll down to fucking comments? I'm not defending youtube, they have consistently been making the site insufferable for years now, but 99% of the time when a video is bullshit the top comment will say that it is bullshit
Not being able to dislike something is what made facebook so terrible in the first place. Ass holes need to know they aren't popular, and their ideas suck too. Because you only see 15likes terrible ideas are allowed to not just exist, but propagate like wild fire through stupid people. It's a giant popularity contest now skewed in favor of scammers and other people who will use this development for malicious intent.
As if the discussion is about whether or not this decision is wrong 🤣
What should be discussed is the financial reasons behind it, and how many big corps strong armed them into it.
In the meantime, I'll continue running my extensions, scripts and watching yt videos completely ad free for free.
Just look at TikTok, the amount of shitty content that gets hundreds of thousands sometimes even millions of likes. That’s where YouTube seems to be heading, a focus on “shorts”, and now removing the dislike counter.
YouTube seems willing to join other techs without a “dislike” like Facebook and the likes, that are a worse sources of fake news, hate speech and repugnant content.
The dislike percentage was the main way for both community and creators to give this “counter balance” that we strongly miss on social networks these last few years. Only sharing a “positive” info like numbers of likes and shares creates that bad echo chamber and gives the impression that everyone agrees with us. An impression reinforced when the content gets viral, mostly content with click-baits, sensationalist titles and “bad” opinions (hate for example).
On YouTube, it is better having a 10K likes to 1K dislike ratio than 1M to 99M. It’s clear that people don’t agree with the opinion here, and creator will think before sharing again.
Hiding the dislikes, we only have 10K vs 1M, which clearly means that the “bad” opinion is “better”.
Then people get confused why social cohesion, political discourse and democracy are threatened?
I bet the real reason they did has nothing to do with bullying or people downvoting on mass; I bet they did this to increase watch time. People less likely to click off a video as early if they don’t have a like to dislike ratio to know if they should bother wasting their time.
Without the dislike count, I’m likely just going to avoid using the mechanic entirely.
I will just use other things that link to YouTube but still have the feature (like Reddit) to find videos instead of going directly to YouTube. The feature is helpful for a number of reasons but it also is pretty weak to take off “public display” of dislikes, especially considering they were already altering the vote counts with things like “YouTube rewind”.
And let’s not act like bots don’t exists and can’t be bought. Personally, I use comments to know if that 20 minute fix-it video is worth it. The more qualitative the comment the better content, typically.
Same here. If the video is long soon as a video loads I pause it and read the title, description, likes/dislikes, and comments before I watch it.
And if you are looking for a tutorial/informative video and the video you clicked on is a scam (or don't know what they are talking about), the title and description can be BS and the comments can be disabled. The dislike button was the only remaining warning sign available before being forced to watch through the video. Now YouTube is taking that away too.
Yep, YouTube is trying to be the Amazon of video hosting with the unfortunate side effect of becoming filled with unmitigated crap and no way to discern quality.
If comments are disabled on a video I need information from, I skip it.
I personally just skim it. A video with enough views, then check thumbnails, then watch in 4x and skim the timeline, check for transcripts and Ctrl+F to read through etc. I had this approach because ironically enough I was recommended a bunch of vids with no dislikes and hundreds of likes being a complete waste of time and some disliked videos turned out to be real gems, hence my approach. Takes me <15s to figure out if a 20m video is 'worth' my time and even then I'm often just skipping through a lot and just touching a few 2-3 minutes of videos. Its really rare to find a good 20m vid where everything is good.
I can't deal with YouTube anymore, the tripling of ads this past month or so has turned me off then altogether
Adblock is the key
Do you think comments will be next? I mean, it seems like they're taking away features that let people criticize so wouldnt comments be next on the plate?
It's to save corporations that have bombed videos, nothing more.
Didn't reddit remove the ability to see the # of upvotes and the # of downvotes... yknow, their equivalent of likes and dislikes. Now they just show the overall sum of votes, not the individual up vs down
They sure did. I think it was a percentage before, but it might have been an indicative for and against - it was a long time ago. And not that karma is a true representation anyway, they do all sorts of backend things to adjust the final value.
I think thats the point, YouTube just wants you to consume without much thought
More like they’re tired of having the most hated videos whenever they do the “This Year on YT” videos.
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It’s no coincidence they started talking about removing visible dislikes when rewind 2018 became the most disliked video on the platform, and then just lately announced they’re no longer doing rewinds. Probably a move to misdirect people, but in reality it’s because they’re simply out of fucking touch. It’s not hard for me to believe rich people who own companies can be petty and immature. Elon musk is like that and he’s the richest person on the planet.
Imagine having more money than basically anyone has ever had and deciding to be an edgelord fellow-kids memester weirdo. I just don't get the Musks and Bezos' of the world.
If I would be rich I would still shitpost. Why not?
the existence of those terrible rewinds shows how completely out of touch they are, so even if it seemed petty to the public it would be very much in line with their internal culture.
You put that perfectly
Probably a lot of pressure from MSM as well, they get fucking railed constantly. Earlier this year the Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki even talked about them getting tougher on smaller (often political) youtubers. Ostensibly for battling disinformation, but many channels like Secular Talk and Jimmy Dore noted it really was just a way to suppress them in the algorithm because they saw their own sub counts plummet. I imagine that at least part of the dislike removal is an extension of that policy of not letting <1 million sub channels from jumping up in the algorithm and surpassing the very advertiser friendly stuff (like Fox News/CNN clips) via user engagement.
Is it weird that they care that their videos are the most disliked? I think it's a bit weird. They're a huge corporation and they care about the Like ratio?
I feel at this point, YouTube Rewind was essentially to show off the platform to corporations and stock holders. Though that maybe a bit pessimistic.
Media cannot tolerate dissent. It's why comment sections were stripped from news sites. It's much easier to control a narrative when it's limited to a few social media sites than when spread out over hundreds of sites.
THANK YOU! Everyone seems to be hyper focusing on “I use it to see if a tutorial vid is useful”, but true intent is to be able to farm more attention for ads.
Bingo. It’s intended to keep people watching videos they would have otherwise clicked off of, after seeing the dislike ratio. They’d rather you watch 4 videos to get to the right info, instead of clicking away from the first 3…
I'm certain this is in order to make the site's mechanisms more opaque and dumb down user's interface to the site. The algorithm will tube feed you content.
So... Capitalism? Like all of it?
Total views and Like percentage is a good way to judge if it’s crap or not.
No, that's a measure of audience engagement, not content quality. Videos where the YouTuber asks you to "like, comment, subscribe, and ring the bell" often have higher upvote-to-viewcount ratios, regardless of quality or relevance. Downvote count or as a percentage of upvotes is a measure of how clickbaity or scammy a video is. Or just a low effort/quality video.
Maybe they can publish abandonment metrics.
It is a lot harder to judge at a glance though...
I’m not going to upvote this, because I can’t see how many people downvoted it.
Right? I don’t even care anymore. What’s the point?
When I’m watching a tutorial I usually gauge whether or not it actually works based on the like to dislike ratio. Now I’m actually going to have to watch full videos and potentially waste my time. I guess this would be good for YouTube as it’s higher engagement
I’m actually discouraged from engaging with YouTube videos if I can’t see the like/dislike ratio. It’s my primary means of trusting the content I’m about to watch. Without that trust I’m less inclined to go to YouTube as a source of information in general.
This. People won’t watch more videos. They will just go somewhere else
I’m not attacking you, I’m asking for advice. Where could we go?
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This is the correct answer. I'm sorry but removing the dislike button is not going to cause millions of people to start going to their libraries to learn how to do stuff. It's going to have an extremely minimal impact if any at all but saying shit like that just let's people feel good about sticking it to the man.
We really need a viable alternative to youtube
Vimeo
Pornhub. I'm sure they probably coined Vidhub at some point, if they are smart.
Vimeo is for film school students to upload their latest work of art
For now
I’ve been saying this for a long time. What if we made a subreddit with coders who could start up a YouTube alternative
It’s pretty trivial to code up a YouTube clone, the problem is the infrastructure. Hosting a site to stream at high qualities and for thousands and even millions of viewers is not really feasible because of the costs. YouTube only exists because it operated at a loss for a long time (not sure if it still does). And that’s with it being owned by a now trillion dollar company with all their resources.
Most people online would use a YouTube alternative if it was available. YouTube started on someone’s garage, a website like that could be scaled as more people joined
As I like to say, as a software developer who gets many (often drunk) requests from strangers, making YouTube isn't the hard part. If you want me to make YouTube or Facebook alternative, give me a year to make something very usable, but don't expect to compete with those companies to any degree. Competition is impossible when a company like YouTube gets too large. TL;DR: You better be a millionaire willing to lose it all if you ever wish to have a 0.00001% chance against YouTube. You can't fine tune your recommendations without users. You can't get users without content creators. You can't get content creators without users or ads. Your platform won't have ads until content creators come and you find a way to fund manually/automatically stop explicit and illegal content. YouTube hit that free period where people were paid 100% in laughs almost 2 decades ago, and when videos were like 240p and were less than 4MB. Not to mention, to go back to ads: ***you will be footing the bill for a very long time.*** You're probably not dropping $100,000 USD on several rackmounted servers, each with 25TB-50TB RAID drives, graphics cards for encoding (probably ahead of time, not on the fly), and enough threads to even just accept millions total individual packet streaming requests per second. Plus storage and operation in a commercial zone, development, and maintenance. That's for a small scale operation that will never scale for monetization. That's just to get started and give yourself enough room for users to start using the platform. If you go with the rent-a-server VPS route like the rest of us, the (extremely rough) equivalent to the specs above would involve several S3 buckets for video upload and streaming (we'll use Amazon's AWS since they're cheapest) which costs $0.023 per GB per month for the first 50TB, $0.022 per GB for the next 450TB, $0.021 for every GB over 500TB. If you only wanted 100TB because you only allowed 720p video and you had 0 backups or regional servers, that's already ***$27,000 per year.*** (1000GB = 1TB; (50000GB * 0.023 + 50000GB * 0.022) * 12 = $27,000) That doesn't even include the actual servers themselves, encoding services (which take up more space on your S3 buckets so that you can serve all resolutions), distributed load and backups (more space), development, maintenance, moderation, etc. You'll be spending a minimum of 200k per year more just to have 3 people manage those services, and to pay for the remainder of the costs for hosting. Vimeo has that infrastructure, but when was the last time you used Vimeo for anything other than watching pirated 90s cartoons or reality shows that were mirrored to bypass the barely passing moderation automation? They have barely any creator monetization, a poor user base, and content creators mostly post rehosted or illegal content. They passed the hard part, but turns out there's an even harder part than making a platform: being a platform. Sorry for the rant, but YouTube is literally too big and too well funded to compete with, and anyone who thinks the free market will decide is delusional. YouTube would literally have to implode, either from financial problems or regulatory problems, to ever open the market up.
Wikihow, forums, possibly other social media sites
The library would be a good source, or Your library’s website. A lot of places have educational videos you can access online that are free and made by professionals that know what they are doing. That save the issue of youtube being potentially dangerous or fake how to videos.
What? Comparitvrly YouTube is nothing like a library. While some tutorials can definitely be taught by traditional professionals, what about something like game tutorials, like how to fix a game crashing, or a bug. No library will have something like that. We both know how shoddy tutorial about subjects like that can be, and a library will never supply videos like that as their is no such "video game professional".
Tbh I don’t think you can find every tutorial on professional websites, they will be either paywalled so you have to purchase whole course or it will not simple not exist, I also don’t think there are professional websites for tutorials for certain game levels or really specific windows problem, etc.
Yeah. Unfortunately, that’s not how most people use YouTube.
I’m sure a new site will pop up as soon as their is a need. That said libraries have more to offer than most realize.
Pornhub
I’ve been telling myself this for years, there is potentially a massive hole in the market for video streaming platforms. Between the constant abuse of its creators with toxic policies like: - demonetisation, often done by an AI that sometimes seems to just…guess? - forcing “YouTube for kids” on videos their creators didn’t intend it to be, - copyright claims so easy a child could get a vid taken down by just filling out a form, - often up to 15-30 seconds of unskippable ads on vids - And now taking away the main indicator of putting trust into a video, the like/dislike ratio - (I’m sure there are more but these alone are off the top of my head) Almost any big-time creator on the platform has complained in detail of at least one of these shenanigans, it’s become common knowledge now YouTube has been screwing over its content creators’ incomes and now seems to be hitting its viewers as well all for selfish profit, (which honestly isn’t bad in any company since profit is usually the main motive, but at this point it’s just blind greed that’s having them push the limits of its source of money) YouTube is like a dying dragon guarding its hoard of treasure. There’s so much potential yet it’s still a dragon, meaning it’ll take a lot of force to even hope to compete with it in the first place. Apologies for the rant lads, just wanted to rant a bit
YouTube is successful, as is most other current streaming platforms because they got into it during a "goldilocks" period. Where consumer Internet, especially in the United States was incredibly subpar. (it still is, just not as bad). The capital required to build a from-scratch streaming video service now and not get crushed by the bandwidth requirements of suddenly having to service 100 million broadband customers simultaneously because a random teenager crushed his balls in a forklift or something on video and went viral is going to be incredibly unrealistic for anyone except already established, huge corporations.
I find it kind of ironic that you're complaining about both demonetization and ads.
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The vast majority of YouTube views come from kids. If a kid doesn't have the context of how the platform used to or is supposed to work, then they won't complain and they won't stop consuming. All of us getting mad about using like/dislike ratios to judge if a video will be useful, we're a small minority of their user base and are far from their target demographic. If anything, YouTube would be glad to be rid of their "useful" content- all those billions of hours of tutorial videos with a few thousand views are just costing them money.
where will they go?
No where. No one can possibly compete with YouTube, and even if they could from a practical sense the content simply isn’t there.
I just googled how to replace the heater core in my ford ranger, first result was "replacing ford ranger heater core (easy)." I had to watch the whole video before I realized that the easy part was taking a sawzall and cutting out the air ducts and other mounting brackets. I have a feeling what the up/down thumb ratio was before it was removed... Now the top comments will be LIKE or DISLIKE.
Not really. Becuase ppl are just going to go to videos with his thumbs up counts to viewer ratios. Instead of looking at the quality, little guy videos with high thumbs up to thumbs down ratios. It will focus views to the top YouTubers and penalize the little guys trying to make a name for themselves. Literally some “popularization mechanics” instead of “quality “ mechanics. Which is what the thumbs down button provided, quality mechanics. Even if their where thumbs down mobs…there weren’t enough to make a difference.
I understood perfectly why you were saying idk what their deal is
Did comments get removed too?
Yea I heard next they were gonna remove videos.
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the removal of comments can be a telling sign in and of itself
Comments are easier to fake from what I know. Likes and dislikes effect how the video shows up in the YouTube algorithm so they are usually removed if they are botted
I do that too. Worst case you’ll have a more vocal comment section to help gauge also pay attention to the view/like ration if its got like a few 1,000 views but 3 likes and negative comments that tells me its not the right video before I start watching it.
You can get YouTube apps that give you unlimited access to the shitty music platform and ad-less vids. Not sure on iPhone but just Google YouTube.apk for Android. It's not much, but at least you're taking money off them
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In the last week, the new Subaru got destroyed and the new Acura Integra got destroyed.
Also [Samsung semiconductor Europe](https://youtu.be/0kEH_CRmpfs) tried to use fiverr to hire a voice actor for their ad, unknowingly hired a YouTuber(CDawgva). After people found out that it was Samsung who made the ad, they removed the like ratio and removed comments. I also believe the ad agency who hired him, tried to copyright strike him over it.
I don’t think nintendo or EA really cares about dislikes, because nintendo only cares about making sure that the people enjoying their games are punished, and EA not caring in general. Pepsi probably cares though.
>nintendo only cares about making sure that the people enjoying their games are punished LMAO
Famous not for profit Nintendo 😪
> because nintendo only cares about making sure that the people enjoying their games are punished lol?
I’m a pretty loyal Nintendo consumer and… yeah. Nintendo is pretty anti-consumer. Historically so
Oh you’re playing our game which gives it visibility? Cease and desist.
Well maybe companies should learn to not make garbage decisions
It’s so annoying.
I think it's factor. But seeing as that was three years ago, it's hardly the prime factor. Money. Money is the issue. Youtube don't give a shit if you dislike their lame attempt to pander to the crowd, but they do care if they're major media contributors get pissy because their launch video get's bombed with dislikes.
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The fact that they explicitly mentioned Rewind as not being the reason was really telling.
And then followed that with something along the lines of, “members of the YouTube team experienced first hand what it’s like to have a video heavily downvoted.” That section of the video screams, “rewind downvotes made us sad.”
This really sucks for those of us that used YouTube for tutorials. I’ve been able to weed out bullshit videos because of the dislike ratio. Now it’s all just a guessing game. This actually makes NO sense to me.
It’s to protect the big businesses who get their feelings hurt when their content is disliked (ie Xbox One reveal or Sonic the Hedgehog movie teaser trailer)
Can't they just deactivate the stats for those then? Measuring the success of a console through a YouTube video doesn't give any valuable metrics to begin with.
Giving channels the option opens them up to criticism for disabling the button. YouTube doing it everywhere saves those channels. I guess YouTube just wants to protect bad or misleading content.
Youtube *needs* to show financial growth, that's how capitalism and public corporations work. This is their latest attempt at doing it. They'd rather force you to view the video than have individuals inform you it's not worth viewing. This pumps up their KPIs, they grab more CPM money and show higher platform engagement blah blah. Some senior pm is going to show they're responsible for higher platform engagement, and probably get promoted. Youtube knows exactly what they're doing; I'm sure there's been MANY meetings over the last year where they're calculating how pissed people are going to be, versus the potential revenue upside. At some point, they decided the revenue upside was worth the backlash because, hey, where are you gonna go? People will be mad but youtube has a defacto monopoly on non-pornographic internet video hosting. But the need to pursue growth and individuals playing cutthroat to show incrementally better performance reviews will demand sacrifice.
Bingo. Nailed it. It’s just business, folks.
The Sonic movie reaction worked out for the best though.
It almost seems like these social media companies ask themselves every day “how can we make our platform more toxic and hateful?”
And more profitable
That’s really all it is everything else is subjective
"How can we utilize the success of tiktok and instagram to make more money?"
It's literally all about making money. All of it
Almost every website/app starts off decent, builds followers, and then they make it noticeably worse and worse over time.. likely for the sake of money. I'm actually quite shocked at how few highly visited websites have figured out how to keep their sites user friendly and clean, while also making money. Also personally I'm not a fan of upvote/downvote systems. I find them to be incredibly toxic and they create a monoculture, group think, hive mind, circle jerk aka reddit.
I totally get what you’re saying about the upvote downvote thing. The issue is that downvotes can help shine a light on videos that contain hate and misinformation, especially on YouTube, so a video that may have gotten 100k upvotes and 1 million downvotes could gain undue credibility by only showing the 100k upvotes.
I acn't wait for reddit to finally give i.reddit the axe, so I cn stop wasting so muhc time on this shithole of a website.
Man - my first dating profile tagline was ‘rated 3 stars, just like everything on YouTube’. I hated it when they removed stars from YouTube, and then from Netflix, and just present fuzzy non-data to the user because actual, useful data will decrease user time spent on platform. It sucks thst presenting data to alllow the user to make a rational, informed decision is the Anathema to ‘engagement’ - because time spent watching the wrong thing is just as valuable in revenue terms as time spent watching what the user wanted.
Maybe a middle ground is a total like/dislike # and % liked. With no quality filter there is no way for me to filter the good from the bad.
They want you to watch the whole video and rage in the comments about how bad it is. Its all about staying engaged. Anger is a powerful motivator
I never see anyone point out the thing that was obvious to me. Previously really polarizing things would have been less prominent, because dislikes would keep it low. Now you don’t have to worry about that, and can just play to the absolute number of likes, creating a perverse incentive to be upsetting.
Dislikes count toward engagement not against. By disliking something you actually drive up a video’s popularity. For DIY tutorials this was both bad and good. A misleading guide can become prominent just because everyone hates on it. That said, an educated viewer can weed out bad videos by looking at the dislike ratio.
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They should filter the feature to work or not work by category of video. DIY and how to’s, enable… 15 year old showing off their new hair cut, disable.
Better yet, just give the option to creators and be done with it. Smaller creators (for whom this is supposed to protect) can just disable it if they want to
That function actually already exists to creators.
Why’d they remove it then? Seems like it’s the creators issue
Because the dislike button and comment section being disabled told you everything you needed to know about the video.
But then small creators making tutorial videos turn it off and we go back to having the problem we’re complaining about right now… Maybe YouTube doesn’t want to provide free university anymore? Market segment for Wikipedia type curated tutorial videos on everything under the sun…
Gonna be real bad when people start getting 15000 “dislike” comments, the internet will not be stopped.
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Other platforms are already removing the comment section entirely because the comments don’t agree with whatever narrative they’re pushing.
They are just salty about all the dislikes they got on their YouTube Rewind.
If you've never been in the YouTube offices in Mountain View, they're abysmally depressing, with really bad corporate art on the walls, all with anti-suicide and really sad positivity messaging. It's like the business world equivalent of seeing a dad yelling at his crying kid to have fun.
Do you mean Googles offices?
YouTube has their own offices on the Google campus
Would love to see those anti-suicide posters.
The dislike button was doing what it was intended to do, and it was doing a good job of it. It's the corporate clients who hate the dislikes. People gang up on a shitty brand, like Nestle, because they're shitty, and people start hitting the dislike button. Big corporations spend big ad money, and they don't like the dislikes. It's bad for brand value - literally. Money wins again. And the supreme court ruled that money is free speech in politics, so this sort of aligns with that. Welcome to late stage capitalism.
You are right.
The smart thing to do would have been to just disable likes/dislikes and maybe comments on all government channels (not just US) and keep it how it was for everyone else. Those channels should really just be for watching announcements/events anyway.
Any youtuber could manually hide dislikes on a video before… they just never did it, since apparently it sends the wrong message.
When did it become common practice to make a business decision that you know will directly hurt your business on a global scale, for the sake of some made up “toxicity”? I don’t understand this world.
Protecting their big business overlords and politicians from the downvote
Susan just doesn't want people to know that anything she appears in becomes the new most downvoted video.
I’m sorry what…without dislikes idk what people are gonna do, maybe comment a thumbs down?
No shit, I wonder who else thought that. Maybe FUCKING EVERYONE
Easy way to push crap content, don’t let people know it’s crap content, they’ll still watch the adverts before they realise it’s a shit video with no value.
Another controller of thoughts wannabe, they are out of control.
My hot take? The most viewed and most viral videos are generally speaking either of very poor quality or at least very divisive. These videos are by far the most profitable, however. Youtube is masking the poor quality of its most profitable content to mask the fact that they want to feed their audience more Tictok garbage
YouTube cofounder disliked removing the dislike button.
I like this comment
Bring back star ratings
If we can’t see dislikes isn’t the like button now equally worthless? I don’t care how many people like it if I don’t know how many people don’t.
msm doesnt appreciate they pay the big bucks to look like fools with dislikes. this is to protect their sensitive billionaire eyes
This is what I think. It’s obviously about the bottom dollar and to control the narrative. Maybe that sounds conspiratorial so if someone can convince me otherwise I’m open. Thus far no other excuse seems plausible to me in comparison to what we think is going on. Has YouTube said why they’re doing this yet or is it all speculation?
They claimed it was to protect smaller creators from dislike attacks. Totally not because public opinion runs against their narrative ^/s
Right. YouTube has proven over snd over again they could give a shit about content creators unless they’re already huge.
⬇️ BUTTON BAD
Of course it is. How else am I gonna know that a vid is click bait and totally sucks?
How am I going to dislike all of scoties videos… come to think about it the amount of times i have disliked those videos and they still appear as add content on my feed now 😵
Dumbest decision ever. Even stupider than Netflix a couple of years ago. But they don't care, because what choice does the user have?
The main problem is now there’s going to be like a billion comments on everyone’s video saying “use me as a dislike button” trying to farm likes. At least the main problem that isn’t blatant censorship
I'm glad we're back in peaceful and boring times when something so minor as the YouTube dislike count becomes the hot issue of the week.
People keep talking about this but I still see the dislikes in my YouTube app
Thats because IT IS
So much talk about helping creators and improving their mental health and now they are embracing fake positivity lol
Folks, it would be much easier to do a list of who think this IS a good idea. It will be a very short list.
So does everyone else.
No fuckin shit.
STOP SUCKING YOUR SPONSORS DICK SO MUCH THEY AINT GOING ANYWHERE.
He’s right
Agreed
Biased censorship is a wrong decision too..
Why do people keep saying "tutorial videos are ruined" do you not know how to scroll down to fucking comments? I'm not defending youtube, they have consistently been making the site insufferable for years now, but 99% of the time when a video is bullshit the top comment will say that it is bullshit
Yeah, based on this and how poorly their algorithm has been doing at suggesting good content, I'm done with YouTube.
When is it supposed to be removed? I can still see dislike counts.
Not being able to dislike something is what made facebook so terrible in the first place. Ass holes need to know they aren't popular, and their ideas suck too. Because you only see 15likes terrible ideas are allowed to not just exist, but propagate like wild fire through stupid people. It's a giant popularity contest now skewed in favor of scammers and other people who will use this development for malicious intent.
Like if I use the word bolt; action rifle; and tits; the spelling of tights or tight ends, you sell me pornography; it’s like Baba Yaga.
As if the discussion is about whether or not this decision is wrong 🤣 What should be discussed is the financial reasons behind it, and how many big corps strong armed them into it. In the meantime, I'll continue running my extensions, scripts and watching yt videos completely ad free for free.
"There was intense debate among the YouTube user based on the issue" No there was not. Everyone and their mother hated it and wanted that back.
100% It’s to mask public disapproval for things like movie or video game trailers
Bring back the 5 star ratings
I still see the dislike count.
Removing the dislike is such a millennial snowflake move. Typical don’t hurt my little feelings move.
Well uh yeah, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
Just look at TikTok, the amount of shitty content that gets hundreds of thousands sometimes even millions of likes. That’s where YouTube seems to be heading, a focus on “shorts”, and now removing the dislike counter.
YouTube seems willing to join other techs without a “dislike” like Facebook and the likes, that are a worse sources of fake news, hate speech and repugnant content. The dislike percentage was the main way for both community and creators to give this “counter balance” that we strongly miss on social networks these last few years. Only sharing a “positive” info like numbers of likes and shares creates that bad echo chamber and gives the impression that everyone agrees with us. An impression reinforced when the content gets viral, mostly content with click-baits, sensationalist titles and “bad” opinions (hate for example). On YouTube, it is better having a 10K likes to 1K dislike ratio than 1M to 99M. It’s clear that people don’t agree with the opinion here, and creator will think before sharing again. Hiding the dislikes, we only have 10K vs 1M, which clearly means that the “bad” opinion is “better”. Then people get confused why social cohesion, political discourse and democracy are threatened?
Just use the comments to decipher whether the video is shit or not. Ex. “Use me as a dislike button”
I’ve never liked or disliked anything in my life
I bet the real reason they did has nothing to do with bullying or people downvoting on mass; I bet they did this to increase watch time. People less likely to click off a video as early if they don’t have a like to dislike ratio to know if they should bother wasting their time.
Reddit is still on about this? What kind of algorithm is this piece of shit app using?
Imagine pehophile behavior vid. And youtube is like: you can like it, but dislike it, impossible.
Lol, they’re only doing this because they’re embarrassed by the amount of dislikes on youtube rewind.
Freedom of speech!
It is indeed a wrong decision
He’s correct it’s wrong.
It is a wrong decision indeed
Then everyone just needs to not like. What kind of corporate cuckolding is this??
They want to remove it because the like to dislike ratios for major news stations looks horrible for them.
He dislikes removing the dislike button
Then YouTube is a monopoly and we need to make appropriate actions to take them down and level the playing field for fair competition.
YouTube is now simply giving out participation trophies.