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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: 5, Informative) by takyon on Monday February 04 2019, @10:58PM (3 children)
The system is far worse than you describe. For example, companies can auto-claim videos and if the claim is appealed, they get the power to review the claim, typically rejecting it (maybe this is automated as well). If this repeats a couple of times, you get a copyright strike unless you take the claimant to court and win. Each active strike disables features, and three strikes kills the account. I don't think the "community" strikes you describe and the "copyright" strikes mix, which is a small consolation.
You've got videos being demonetized very quickly after being uploaded, which is when a large amount of the revenue is made typically. The video gets remonetized, but you don't earn what you could have gotten during the demonetization period. I believe claimed videos siphon off money to third parties without it being returned if the claim is dropped, although I might be wrong about that.
It's not just isolated incidents that blow up, these are things that many uploaders, big and small, face nearly constantly, even if they are using little or no copyrighted material. YouTube is like a war zone, or hell. But everyone is stuck there because it is the dominant platform. If you want to earn a living from making videos, you have to stick with YouTube. Maybe you can use Patreon to supplement your income if you are popular enough. Even if you don't care about earning a cent, if you intend for your videos to have a large reach, you need to be on YouTube.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 04 2019, @11:47PM (2 children)
So was MySpace. Then it wasn't.
I'm old. I remember when people put stuff up on the internet and didn't expect to get paid for it. Hell, I remember when people put stuff up on YouTube and didn't expect to get paid for it.
There are several other video sites. If you want to get people to go there, put interesting content up there and not on YouTube, and don't expect to get paid for it, at least not at first.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday February 05 2019, @12:39AM
I've been so lucky in terms of that whole world. I don't need the money. And it's not a lot of money. Even though I'm one of the biggest Vloggers. Not only on YouTube. I'm very big on Insta and Twitter. Very "successful." And I cash every check. But I wouldn't count on it to pay the bills. It is a dangerous world out there, folks!!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 05 2019, @12:42AM
Attempts have been made, and there are YouTube alternatives that do just fine, except with a small fraction of the traffic. But the YouTube exodus hasn't happened yet despite years of complaints. There was a lot of hope for Vidme during the height of the adpocalypse but that fizzled.
Maybe YouTube will ease the transition by kicking off more big channels, forcing them to pick Dailymotion, Vimeo, or wherever while monetizing through the likes of Patreon, PayPal, cryptocurrency, etc.
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