An update to dislikes on YouTube

As one of the victims of those "dislike campaigns", I can say with certainty that was the dumbest decision Google ever made. There are millions of ways to go about it before the idea of outright removing dislikes should come to mind.
They only did it to appease the journos and silicon valley because they always get the short end of the stick and usually get more dislikes than likes whenever they post on youtube, the dislike button was too based for them to handle.
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
Comments used to have negrates visible, but those were removed well before visible dislikes on vids were removed.

If Big Tech didn't go all censor-y and woke, YT could've kept that star rating system on videos.
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I never saw a major backlash to the removal of comment dislikes, or even to the removal of mass disliked comments being marked for spam on older youtube before that. It was also quietly removed and turned into the nerfed system, where comments could be disliked but it didn't really do anything beyond change the number. People were so distracted by the absolute clusterfuck integration of Google + that they completely missed the fact it destroyed the comments rating system entirely. Dislikes essentially act the exact same as they do for videos, have since 2014.
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
Comments used to have negrates visible, but those were removed well before visible dislikes on vids were removed.

If Big Tech didn't go all censor-y and woke, YT could've kept that star rating system on videos.
Click to expand...
The star rating system was a reasonable removal. They did it because the vast majority of people rated things they liked as 5 and things they didn't like as 1, and the other 3 options were useless. You have to ask yourself, what separates a 2 star video from a 1 star video, and are you really going to apply that standard to every video you evaluate? Even if you do, other people aren't, because they don't know your standard and you don't know theirs. It also had the effect of making a 3 star rating look like a mediocre video, when really it meant it was a very polarizing video.

There's also a subtle contrivance that's inherent to any averaged star rating system that makes it tricky to interpret and makes me glad any time someone says they're getting rid of stars as a rating. If we see something has a 5/5 star rating, then we might interpret that as 100% of people liked it, and that a 2.5/5 star rating means that 50% of people liked it. Except, that's not what it really corresponds to, because a 1/5 star rating means 0% of people liked it and not 20%, since we can't actually rate something as 0 stars. In effect, these ratings have a fencepost error built into them. Likes vs dislikes eliminates this confusion entirely.
 
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