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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: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 04 2019, @10:43PM (2 children)
The problem that 'likes/dislikes' creates is modifying the chance to find the content, presumably a content with a high number of dislikes being burried in the search. A high number of dislikes still indicates attention grabbing - even in the negative sense.
Since eyeballs is what Google wants, it will make absolutely perfect sense to allow search results sorting in the results by the number of dislikes. Not only is a trivial amount of code to adjust, but it will cut down the mod bombing: the higher number of dislikes, the higher prominence in the negative sense. You want to bury something, abstain from mod-ing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday February 05 2019, @02:26AM
The thing is: something that is truly disliked by many WITHOUT an also large number of likes probably does deserve to be ranked lower.
Things that are horrible but still grab attention likely still grab a significant number of likes. Eliminating "dislike" probably won't lose a lot of those, because with only one option, someone who is drawn to a video -- even for a bad reason -- may hit the like button.
Anyhow most of the discussion here is completely irrelevant to what Google wants, and that isn't moderation or allowing certain content to rise in rankings. Google wants to sell ads on YouTube --always remember that is Google's prime focus.
A "like" button makes a connection and gives Google a datapoint to target better ads for you. I'm sure the SOLE motivation really behind this proposal is someone did a statistical analysis and realized removing dislikes could likely raise ad revenue and/or improve the ad algorithm.
Does anyone here really think Google gives a rat's ass about better moderation unless it led to a positive impact on their bottom line?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @04:37PM
See, the thing is that good has been very clear about both likes and dislikes counting as engagement for the algorithm (sorting, as you put it), so all we are really talking about here is people's feelings.