If I can tell just by the dislike count if a video is a fake tutorial or w/e, I'm likely to leave immediately. If I'm on my phone (don't have adblock), I'll have closed the video before the preroll ad even lets me skip it.
Now, I'll have to sit through it and make youtube some money before I can determine if a video is any good or not.
Edit: Think about all those scam channels on YT. Disabling likes/dislikes looks fishy, but now they don't have to worry about that since only the likes are visible. This is a massive win for the "GTA online free money"-type channels.
> I don't see how removing the dislike count will in any way increase the click rate.
The rationale is, Google noticed that people use the dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video.
If you can't use dislikes to decide whether or not the video you're considering is actually worth watching, you're more likely to click simply to find out.
In order to find out, you first need to watch the ads.
That's all. Someone at Google simply just put two and two together and realised that the visible dislike count was costing them in ad clicks.
Was it politically motivated? Probably not.
Will it have profound political effects? Absolutely!
That's one argument, but on the other hand if you can't vet the videos by yourself before watching, the average quality of the videos you watch will drop, decreasing the incentive for you to spend time on the site.
Isn't autoplay the normal, default setting? Do a significant percentage of users have autoplay disabled?
Disabling autoplay on an ongoing basis isn't an option for me because I won't log into Google services, except to check who is still mailing my gmail address on the long tail of de-googling.
Not in my world it's not. I'm pretty sure FF has disabled autoplay as well as default. The only time autoplay is allowed is when listening a "full album" play list. But that's only after I've scrolled the list to make sure some asshat hasn't pushed in a rando video below the first page.
I think you could see it on the page, even before the video started playing (i.e. while you're still watching the ads). But maybe I remember wrongly.
Still. Far more likely to quit in the first 10 seconds than you would be to stick around for a couple of minutes and find out. Let alone click a related link.
There actually are browser extensions and userscripts that show a like/dislike bar on the thumbnails. Let's say goodbye to them. Likes per view will be the only metric they'll be able to calculate.
Nothing is stopping anyone from storing likes and dislikes offsite. Now that YT is opting-out of being a source of record for dislikes, it's pretty straightforward for those sorts of tools to step in.
No, that's just not believable.
YouTube (and Google more generally) are full of people who believe they need to control the public conversation for the public's own good. They've gone to the best schools, lived cosseted lives in safe, sparkly clean neighborhoods, and never had to shower after work instead of before work. They're totally out of touch with what regular people think, yet believe they know better than regular people and have not only a right, but a duty to guide the public conversation in what they see as the right direction.
YouTube people have spent years censoring inconvenient thoughts (e.g. the lab leak hypothesis), juicing rankings in favor of mainstream media, and outright banning their ideological opponents.
If they believe that they're just making the internet less "toxic", it's because they don't differentiate between people with different value systems and monsters to be silenced.
There is zero chance this lately instance of censorship is profit driven. It's yet another favor Google is doing for an establishment that's rapidly losing credibility with the public and control of the narrative.
You have to load the page to see the dislike count. They already got ad revenue by the time you see it.
I am sure they have better data than anybody as to how often a video is loaded for the first time and disliked within a few seconds of starting.
While once in a while this could be caused by a bad video start it probably mostly isn't caused by the content of the video.
By looking at behavior of users and pattern matching it probably wasn't hard to see that certain users were "making the number big".
Additionally as the article details they likely targeted those users with a new "don't show the number" feature and saw an improvement in the unwanted behavior (unnecessary dislikes).
The reality is that while dislike is fantastic from a quality filter standpoint human behavior likes making numbers big and sometimes they do weird things you have to correct for.
Quoting from the article: "We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video."
Remove negative counts, make people more likely to click on videos, serve more accompanying ads, profit.
Simples.