SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
YouTube is trying to prevent angry mobs from abusing "dislike" button
YouTube's dislike button can be a source of anxiety for many creators, and now YouTube is considering a number of options to prevent viewers from abusing that tool. Tom Leung, director of project management at YouTube, posted an update to the Creator Insider channel recently in which he detailed some "lightly discussed" options for combatting "dislike mobs," or large groups of users who slam the dislike button on a video before watching the whole thing, or even watching the video at all.
[...] One of the new options YouTube has talked about is making those ratings invisible by default, so you wouldn't be able to see the number of likes or dislikes a video has. Other options include asking users to provide more information about why they disliked a video (possibly in the form of a checklist), removing the dislike count across the board, and removing the dislike button entirely.
Leung acknowledges that all of these options have pros and cons, and YouTube may not implement any of them after testing. Particularly, he notes that removing the dislike button from YouTube isn't the most democratic option, and it's quite extreme. Leung invites users to leave their own suggestions as to what YouTube should do in the comments of the update video.
While plenty of creators have fallen victim to dislike mobs, YouTube itself experienced a massive mob recently when its 2018 Rewind video became the most disliked video on the platform last year (as of today, it has 15 million dislikes). Millions of those dislikes may have been genuine, but it's possible that millions of other dislikes came from users hopping on the negativity bandwagon.
Is review/dislike mobbing a real problem? Is there a positivity bandwagon?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Barenflimski on Monday February 04 2019, @10:41PM (5 children)
The real problem is people having too much time on their hands. I've personally paid zero attention to likes and dislikes on videos. If it has a billion dislikes, it may actually be worth watching.
Maybe they should expand their rating system to show "interest" in a video, as in, they have a billion dislikes and a million likes, which makes it one of the most popular videos on the site!
Sounds like its time to write a 3rd party app for these kiddos to spend their days voting 18 different ways on how they like a video to completely take this control out of google/youtube's hands. We can simply add a little CSS to add our plugin. While we're at it, lets port it to Facebook and the rest of the 10 sites that get 90% of the web traffic and begin to remove any control they have over the "content" they publish.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Monday February 04 2019, @10:59PM
There is a little something called "views".
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Monday February 04 2019, @11:16PM
I think you are thinking of critics on rotten tomatoes (Recent reference: The Orville)
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 04 2019, @11:30PM (1 child)
Maybe they should stop unsubscribing people and randomly deciding which subscribed channels actually notify users. If they're having too many dislikes, perhaps they should show better videos.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @10:03AM
Redtube respects me votes
I is moving there's
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday February 05 2019, @01:23PM
Their system knows dislikes show "interest" - I followed a link someone sent me to a video which turned out to just be a stupid and rude joke. I clicked the dislike button. For a full year I had similar jokes appearing in my queue as "recommended" videos; for the first week or so they were 50% of my queue, probably partly because I don't utilize the like/dislike system much so it was one of their few data points. I have since learned not voting unless I genuinely care about the subject matter keeps this from happening as much.