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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 Hyperturtle on Tuesday February 05 2019, @04:21PM
The problem is that advertisements are not displaying as much as they *should*, based on their sales metrics, thus denying profit from the actual customers purchasing ad impression space. They threatened to take their business elsewhere, because the problem is so severe it even has affected Google themselves, and it's clear they are having a hard time overcoming user behaviors.
Blaming SJW stuff is just fantasy! There is some of that, yeah -- about half the people out there are on the left, but the real bleeding hearts aren't the problem. And you failed to mention conservative ire that rankled to the degree that alternate social media sites were created purely for the freedom of unrestricted speech--such as what may have been suppressed by disliking videos and downmodding posts. But that's not what I am whining about--it's the myopic focus on blaming The Other instead of the real problems.
I agree, most people that cry about dislikes are flakes that aren't special. You can be left, center, right, or be like Bartleby and always prefer not to do anything different or uncomfortable. Takyon has a point in his comment that a hit counter could suffice-but it can't not for Google. It's all about personalized tracking, and people are poisoning the well so effectively while being trolls that it's reducing profits quite measurably. It has to be fixed, such as making it so the videos are fixed. You won't skip something that sucks if you don't know it sucks.
In order to show the advertisements, the goal is to prevent people from deciding not to watch videos that had prominent placement. Usually good shows on TV had high priced ads, because people watched. Online its different. Implusive behavior drives most of the non-"subscription" channel views. The dislikes are ruining the profit model. Remember when Facebook came out with a "Like" button and not "Dislike" button at the same time? The idea was to TRACK INTERESTS AND MARKET TO THEM! Disliking anything--like videos, and then doing it in bulk really drives down ad impressions and they have the data to prove it. So, to improve things, they are trying to make it easier for their paying customers to get what they paid for--ad views.
Yeah, people get upset and boo hoo someone made fun of my video or post or weight loss photos or whatever. But that has *nothing* to do with this. Alphabet or Google or whatever power that is in place may use it as cover, but it's not why, that's just social engineering--and it's working on a lot of people who are tossing about SJWs. Divide the people if it helps them cope; they'll still watch the ads.
Google does not care a tiny bit about our feelings as long as we act as the products we agreed to when consenting to the EULA. Remember how they are set to modify Chrome to break adblockers? Now we're talking about them removing the ability to discern what videos to watch--if they roll out the safety and privacy function that breaks adblockers, and remove some of the barriers to people clicking play, they'll increase shareholder value. SJWs and everyone else can pound sand or just click play because they can keep watching videos that interest them whether they like it or not.
This is the problem: People not watching the programming after Google went through the trouble to work out a way prevent the ads from getting blocked (even if that isn't implemented just yet--but the timing is quite coincidental that they are considering doing both at the same time...) After promising to eliminate ad blockers, people avoiding videos with prominent ad placements because of dislikes just isn't going to make the paying customers happy--they'll go to some place they can trust that will deliver the views, like Facebook or Microsoft. So, the option to remove choice (and call it a benefit) is likely to be exercised.
(And count our blessing--the 'disable auto-play' button hasn't been removed yet!)