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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, Insightful) by lentilla on Monday February 04 2019, @11:03PM (4 children)
No. Many people are better at doing one rather than the other. That's why we have both artists and accountants in this world - one dreams big and throws paint all over the place with wild abandon and the other is detail-oriented and ensures everything is in order. Both types of people have value. Same with mod-points - some people are more interested in praising (up-mods) and others find themselves drawn to keeping things in order (down-mods).
Further, enforcing a [permanent] up/down ratio will have a chilling effect on participation. It's a little like draconion speed limits - you spend more time watching your speedometer than the road.
= = =
SoylentNews avoids this mobbing problem in a simple and elegant fashion - moderation is capped in the range -1 to 5. It's complicated for YouTube because they are owned by an advertising company and likes/dislikes is one of the primary metrics for monetisation.
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Monday February 04 2019, @11:13PM (3 children)
I remember someone on SN commented that they used all their mod points for months to get their up/downmod ratio to a certain point.
I'm not sure why it matters, or if this was just a subtle troll to make gullible people like me look for it, or even where you would find what your ratio is (I sure don't' see it)
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 4, Informative) by Sulla on Tuesday February 05 2019, @12:15AM (2 children)
TMB posted a journal a while back where he calculated peoples ratios
https://soylentnews.org/~The+Mighty+Buzzard/journal/2568 [soylentnews.org]
I decided that I wanted to be on that list so I made a spreadsheet and tracked daily to see how far I could get. I got to around 98% based on my calculation but that asymptote was getting too smooth so I stopped bothering to track.
It is pretty easy to do. Cruise the site at -1 and give people points for moderately interesting comments that to me appear to have been moderated down for no reason. Feels like most down mods are used as "disagree" instead of what they actually are, and an interesting post I disagree with still deserves a +1 interesting.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @12:19PM (1 child)
so I made a spreadsheet and tracked daily to see how far I could get.
why not just ask buzzy to post your stats?
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Tuesday February 05 2019, @05:30PM
I begged on the IRC and someone calculated my score for me so I had a starting, but I didn't want to bug them a bunch over it, easy enough to just run a calculation in Excel. If you have 77 downmods and X upmods and you get 10 more upmods a day then its pretty straightforward.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam