Instigator / Pro
11
1502
rating
40
debates
36.25%
won
Topic
#3278

Bring Back Youtube Dislike Counts

Status
Finished

The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.

Winner & statistics
Better arguments
3
3
Better sources
4
4
Better legibility
2
2
Better conduct
2
0

After 2 votes and with 2 points ahead, the winner is...

gugigor
Parameters
Publication date
Last updated date
Type
Standard
Number of rounds
4
Time for argument
One week
Max argument characters
20,000
Voting period
One month
Point system
Multiple criterions
Voting system
Open
Contender / Con
9
1697
rating
556
debates
68.17%
won
Description

Resolved: On balance, Youtube should bring back its Dislike Count display feature (showing how many people disliked a video).

What does this mean?

Please read the November 10, 2021 blog update to youtube dislike count [https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-to-youtube/].

If for some reason during the debate, Youtube has indeed brought back dislike counts, the resolution shall be interpreted as Maintaining the dislike count display feature. Either way, PRO is advocating for showing the number of people the clicked dislike on a video, while CON is advocating for Dislike count to be hidden.

BoP is shared.

Round 1
Pro
#1
Hello everyone. Today I will discuss that Youtube Dislike count is crucial for the platform due to being beneficial for viewers and creators, while being unjustifiable in Youtube's point of view.

1. Audience review -- Video quality

It's well known that many sites with products and entertainment such as shows or movies allow you to see customer/audience reviews. As E satisfaction lays out [1], these reviews are important in general due to credibility, understanding the audience, allowing them to have a voice, and improve rankings. There is also the encouragement of more reviews and feedback. Similarly, the youtube dislike algorithm means you are essentially showing how many one or two star reviews a video may be worth, while the like algorithm is displaying how many four or five star reviews the video has received. Imagine that you were trying to see if Matrix 4 was a good movie or not, but you only saw how many people gave four to five star reviews. Can we make a good decision about this movie? We don't know how many people disliked it. Hence with a similar comparison, it's much harder to judge a video's quality.

As Premium Beat blog furthers, this is especially important in information based videos and tutorials. [2] While perhaps wasting time on a bad movie might be one thing, wasting time on outdated information to fix a furnace could be very harmful.  There is no quick way to judge the video and you might follow the wrong instructions, especially if the creator has disabled comments. Therefore you remove the audience's ability to show each other if a video is poorly made or if the instructions are too ambiguous to work.

This leads me into my second point.

2. Encouragement of Bad Content

While Youtube can still have reported content, it's still harder to judge videos that border the line between dangerous and safe. Just this last year, Youtube Moderator has sued youtube to failing to catch and remove violent videos posted on to the site. If Con can prove that youtube alone can manage bad content, perhaps he can negate the problem of no dislikes. Yet CNBC has reported that the plaintiff "was required to watch murders, abortions, child rape, animal mutilation and suicides". [2] Their moderators were treated poorly and greatly understaffed. The expectation was set to 2% to 5% error, yet they have detriment on the mental health. Even in the stage of 2020, people already desired for Youtube to "provide more resources for the people who need to remove videos that violate the rules". Well, with a video having significant dislikes, I say this is a crucial resource that can be used to help the staff. With the inability for Youtube to keep track of dangerous and inappropriate content, there must be a way for people to easily judge this problem.

3. Youtube is a hypocrite

The release of the removal of dislike is also problematic because Youtube itself has the most dislike on any video (Youtube Rewind). To this, it seems the one who benefits the most would be Youtube. Youtube claims that small content creators would benefit the most, yet also makes it much harder to express disproval of bigger youtube creators. For example, it would be harder to backlash if a celebrity did something questionable or inappropriate online. The muddle information to millions of viewers seems like a much bigger impact than someone with only 10,000 subscribers and everyone disliking his videos. Youtube also claims that the similar information can be reproduced with dislike attacks, but has not gave any examples which this was abused. Many complained the 2018 Rewind was low effort and cringe, not a pure attack due to Youtube channel itself. The other years' rewinds had much more favorable reviews, showing that this "dislike attack" is vague and a myth. Unless Con can show me enough examples and impact of the so called "dislike attacks", it seems to me that the intended benefit is contradictory. Youtube is preventing the sector of people's feedback being shown on big channels and thus allowing misinformation and bad quality to spread on a massive basis.

A recent news on technology in November shows this decision was met with outrage globally; and perhaps even quietly rolled back. [3] As I repeat, the advocacy claimed that the dislike was something like a physical scoreboard. Yet they had been reinstated. Instagram also tried removing the "like" to apparently minimize stress of posting online, yet there are nearly no studies of people worrying over how many others "like" the count. As other suggested, trolls would turn to nasty comments instead of hitting dislike, and corporate channels would get stiffer reception usually, but now would get the most benefit. This resonates with my previously stated logic. 

Conclusion

How can I know how bad something is, if we don't know how many people are complaining about it? Are we going to remove negative Restaurant reviews and movie reviews? Why or why not? Indeed, the video Neutral Response with its equal amount of dislikes and likes implies that humanity working together can achieve something incredible. So let us keep this physical "Scoreboard". Because now many pieces of art are lost, among the sea of negativity and muddied videos, that on the surface cannot be distinguished by a thumbs down button alone.

Con
#2
YT is entitled to remove the dislikes and here is why:

  1. If you dislike a video (as in you actually don't like what is inside the video) it's your freedom to have that opinion without any influence or subtle pressure to conform to others disliking it or not disliking it.
  2. If you dislike a video and it's force-displayed unless all ratings are hidden, there is shaming likely to happen to the channel owner, which both financially and in terms of creativity limits the variety on YT. If enough dislike a new uploader's early video, it doesn't get recommended to others but what's likely to happen is if 2 or more disliked it, others will join the bandwagon if they even slightly find a reason to dislike it without watching the rest of it, assuming the first 1 or 2 were 'right to dislike it'. This is why smaller content creators are affected badly, since very few need to dislike it before it's barely recommended to anybody. This then demotivates them to try and to get advertised on YT, let alone be a creative contributor to it as opposed to a conformist.
  3. There is no uploader who wants to flex the amount of dislikes they have, generally speaking. It's true though that higher like vs dislike ratios fulfil some but see point 2 about the issue of it (point 2 isn't the same as point 3, I'm talking about displaying it here, not just it pressuring others to dislike).
  4. The counter isn't deleted entirely, content creators get to analyse and properly assess whether or not they care about the dislikes and what type of content people dislike more, this adds genuine credibility to the dislikes as it couldn't have been motivated to shame them or sheepishly mimic others that disliked.
I believe that these 4 points are going to be the pillars of my entire debate and are irrefutable. I will attack my opponent's full case in the next Round.
Round 2
Pro
#3
Problems with Con's arguments:

  1. If you dislike a video (as in you actually don't like what is inside the video) it's your freedom to have that opinion without any influence or subtle pressure to conform to others disliking it or not disliking it
  1. Con asserts that your "freedom" not to conform to others is important, yet this already exists there. There is no reason why allowing you to see how many people formed a negative opinion stops you from expressing your opinion. By contrast, Without the dislike counter visible, you *prevent* that opinion. Remember how I stated what if Amazon hid all one star reviews. Are you *expressing* your opinion if it is hidden? Of course not. There does not seem to be a peer pressure for more people to deliver one star reviews -- they are merely showing the product low quality. Unless Con can show a powerful negative effect from showing the dislike button, this is a poor assertion with no sources for support.
  1. If you dislike a video and it's force-displayed unless all ratings are hidden, there is shaming likely to happen to the channel owner, which both financially and in terms of creativity limits the variety on YT. If enough dislike a new uploader's early video, it doesn't get recommended to others but what's likely to happen is if 2 or more disliked it, others will join the bandwagon if they even slightly find a reason to dislike it without watching the rest of it, assuming the first 1 or 2 were 'right to dislike it'. This is why smaller content creators are affected badly, since very few need to dislike it before it's barely recommended to anybody. This then demotivates them to try and to get advertised on YT, let alone be a creative contributor to it as opposed to a conformist.
  1. Con tells us that people would cause low viewed channels to result in disliked easily and affected with less recommendation. Yet he shows us zero examples of this. On the other hand, there are countless bad tutorial videos that now can easily slip by with no ability to give feed back. For example, The youtube video telling us how to switch from Static to dynamic IP Address has 600 likes with 250,000 views. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAW9ErlarU&ab_channel=GoodFightConnection] All the comments are quite positive, and on the surface this looks pretty decent. However, these comments were all 5 years ago, far before the dislikes were hidden. If we take a more careful look, Reddit tells us that all these comments are sarcastic and that this is a horrible tutorial [https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/56au88/i_may_have_just_found_the_worst_video_on_youtube/]. The man only showed his own IP address and did almost nothing. He spent a lot of time accessing his home router without explaining the title at all. As you can see I showed a clear example of a bad tutorial example where you could potentially waste 6 minutes. Archon with 355 upvotes lists:
  • Long intro, displaying the work "hacking". Good start.
  • Does things in a roundabout way, possibly because of lack of planning ahead of time.
  • Constant panning and zooming makes it increasingly difficult to read what is typed or clicked. Keeps you guessing what is happening.
  • Misinformation.
  • Task in the video title is not completed. To be honest the video is almost completely irrelevant to the task.
  • Funky song.
 Mean while Con has zero examples of people being impacted. I do not know why people would just downvote people due to the cause of seeing the dislike number. Not only must he show us the small video channels being downvoted to hell, he must also show that this is because they saw others dislike the video.

  1. There is no uploader who wants to flex the amount of dislikes they have, generally speaking. It's true though that higher like vs dislike ratios fulfil some but see point 2 about the issue of it (point 2 isn't the same as point 3, I'm talking about displaying it here, not just it pressuring others to dislike).
  2. The counter isn't deleted entirely, content creators get to analyse and properly assess whether or not they care about the dislikes and what type of content people dislike more, this adds genuine credibility to the dislikes as it couldn't have been motivated to shame them or sheepishly mimic others that disliked.
Con argues that Content creators can still get feedback, however, the times when Dislike actually matters -- to entertain or inform the viewers -- the creator has very little motivation to perform better. People searching up the bad tutorial videos would still be led to those videos unless the algorithm vastly improved. And it would still be difficult to judge from views and likes whether the video is worth watching. My points still stand well and I don't see an example where the creators have had a malicious or poor quality content video, and fixed it. I have seen some channels try to improve their biased information and inaccurate knowledge. [For example, Kurgzesagt]. However, they already hold a higher standard for themselves, and their videos are relatively well liked. Therefore I think the creation of better content is very hard for Con to prove and the current situation does not encourage greater quality. If I wanted my videos to be better I would make them better. If anything, showing an embarrassing large dislike count due to poor quality could be far more powerful than private feedback. 
Con
#4
Pro's case is partly based on the idea that currently you cannot dislike a video, which I have established is false.

Pro's case is further based on the concept of hierarchy amongs 'better vs worse' content being ruined thanks to the dislike counter not being there anymore.

However, I would like to point out certain things that first and foremost negate and secondly defeat these pillar's of Pro's case:

  1. The dislike-counter never displays/displayed on the screen before you had opened the video and given it a view anyway meaning that in terms of what you see (views and like-count) nothing has actually decreased in one's ability to judge a video pre-opening it.
  2. The fact that when you open a video, the dislike counter showed, could bias you against or for the video if more vs less dislikes were there but art that irritates more people isn't inherently inferior, this is art we are talking about after all and the height of creativity offends and irritates as much as it pleases, in fact this is an inherent problem with 'dislike and like' counters in general in matters of art.
  3. By removing the dislike-counter displaying but maintaining it being shown to content creators as well as being used in the recommendation algorithm, the most superficial part of it has been removed, increasing the percentage of meaningful elements of disliking that matter. The urge to join a dislike-bandwagon to hurt the feelings of the creator are reduced and indeed as Pro says, people are more motivated to comment what it is about the content that they dislike.
You see, the motivation to comment mean with constructive criticism as one doesn't get the same satisfaction from a thumbs down is actually a good thing

Round 3
Pro
#5
Con's argument is growing weaker by each round and it is very illogical. I shall clarify further by restating my position since it had not been refuted.

Con argues there is no significant difference between showing and hiding dislike counts, however, he misses the fact that audience would like to know if a video is good or bad.

Con says the creator knows and that's good enough since they can improve upon it without "dislike attacks".

However Con has not shown a single example of dislike attacks, therefore this claim is dubious at best.

Even if Con was correct he has not shown similar impact as my example tutorial video where potentially thousands of people could be mislead into wasting their time, or worse, applying terrible software practice by following the video.

Furthermore Con has stayed silent about my telling of bad content.

Youtube itself has trouble regulating out-of-control content as clearly displayed.

They are understaffed, underpaid and experience horrible situations as told in my news.

Therefore the Dislike system is a reasonable system to alert someone that something is wrong with the video.

Perhaps it is inappropriate and Youtube hasn't removed it yet. Perhaps it spreads hate speech, or the misinformation I had told you.

Comments are clearly not enough since they may be disabled or rely on the context of dislike count (as seen in the tutorial video). 

Therefore Con's argument falls apart once you take a closer look at the reality of things.

Cross examination question: Should Amazon remove showing how many people rated the product 1 star? Why or why not?
Con
#6
I will both reiterate my points here and show you a crucial misunderstanding on Pro's part (of both my case and his own case, as well as the debate) that make me the objective winner/victor at this point in time.

Pro's case is based on the following pillars:

  1. People want to be able to dislike videos 
  2. People want to know 'bad' vs 'good' content as rapidly as possible into bad content, so seeing a discount liker that tells them people dislike the video to a certain proportion, securely tells them that they/he/she as an individual, will dislike the content and saves them time viewing it.
  3. It's dishonest because it's letting content that's 'bad' get away with being bad.
I countered pillar 1 already with a very simple idea; people can still dislike videos.

I countered pillar 2 with the idea that not only has the recommendation algorithm remained in place (and it takes dislikes into account) but that it's often 'smarter' about an individual's taste than they expect. In other words, to put my previous 2 Rounds together, I am asserting that there is such a thing as content that people will like that many disliked, which they cannot know they'd dislike for sure without viewing it. The only real thing influencing them seeing it faster and more expectant of high content should be either that it had many views and likes or that they got recommended it via the YouTube algorithm.

I countered pillar 3 with the fact that dislikes are still counted on the end of both YT algorithm and the content creator's feedback and in fact, since people are no longer motivated to tap dislike if they want to hurt the person's feelings (and instead directly comment what's wrong with the video) it's actually generated more (not less) honesty in what negative feedback tells the content creator.

Let's establish more on pillars 1, 2 and 3 with proof now.

I want to combine points 2 and 3 with the following:

As part of this experiment, viewers could still see and use the dislike button. But because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior1. We also heard directly from smaller creators and those just getting started that they are unfairly targeted by this behavior — and our experiment confirmed that this does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.

Based on what we learned, we're making the dislike counts private across YouTube, but the dislike button is not going away. This change will start gradually rolling out today.

What’s changing for creators and viewers starting today
Creators will still be able to find their exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio, along with other existing metrics, if they would like to understand how their content is performing.
We want to create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves.

Viewers can still dislike videos to tune their recommendations and privately share feedback with creators.

We heard during the experiment that some of you have used the public dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video. We know that you might not agree with this decision, but we believe that this is the right thing to do for the platform.

We want to create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves. This is just one of many steps we are taking to continue to protect creators from harassment. Our work is not done, and we’ll continue to invest here.

1 Analysis conducted July 2021

If you don't trust what YT itself says, in terms of the experiment and its algorithm, then you need to justify your conspiracy theory.

As for point 1, it's literally a fact that the button still exists and that the counter is still involved in the recommendation algorithm as well as the content creators' end of things.

Let's also establish what I mean by point 3.

Purpose of Constructive Feedback
The purpose of constructive feedback is to give feedback to an individual in a way that will lead to improvements or corrections. This is important, as it enhances personal and professional growth in individuals.
For example, constructive feedback can:
  • Improve employee morale
  • Reduce confusion regarding expectations and current performance
  • Provide a new perspective and give valuable insight to the person receiving feedback
  • Positively impact an individual’s behavior

If we combine Pro's case with my point 3, Pro and I both agree that likes themselves matter and that comments that give negative but constructive feedback will rise towards the top as they will be higher rated. The fact that now one who really wants to 'hit home' that they disliked the video can't get a rise/kick out of seeing the dislike counter and thus is perhaps driven to comment what they specifically disliked about the video is actually a net beneficial thing for YT. As a content creator, a thumbs down count just tells you people didn't like that video who hit that button (or wanted to make you feel bad, it's not clear which). It's less clear why they did so. Anything that can drive them to express their displeasure constructively is win-win for them and you. They get the satisfaction they used to get from seeing a dislike counter number go up by 1 (and the ratio not favouring the content creator) while you get the satisfaction of knowing why they disliked it, more often than you did before.
Round 4
Pro
#7
Let's wrap this up with some final counter arguments.

Con says people will still be able to dislike videos, and that the algorithm will take this into account, however, there is nothing that suggests this. For example if I take my video as example once again, when I browse the top rated videos of converting static to dynamic IP address or vice versa, this video deemed horrible by Reddit (and therefore should be near the bottom of lists with relevant filter on) -- is still 7th place video overall. So it would still be reasonably easy to click on this video and follow horrid instructions.

Con asserts that judging merely based on dislike/like isn't perfect as you may have specific taste to help you know if the video is good or bad. But he has not told me about the potential waste of time, especially if a video is up to hours long with misinformation or stacking inaccurate ideas together. If many people dislike the video you may do more research to figure out what's going on and why it's negatively received. In the old days you could quickly see the video had something negative about it and therefore you should be more cautious before watching the whole video. 

Con says the dislike ability generates more negative feedback, but has been silent on why some website like Amazon doesn't hide how many people rated the product 1 star. Con says the old system encourages meaningless negative feedback by people banding on the dislike "just because". But has still failed to provide useful study or news article/well trusted authority that gives us example of people bandwagging on dislikes.

CONCLUSION

Con's argument falls apart because he has not given one single example, study, expert, news, about people banding together to dislike just because they dislike.

By con's logic people would rate a product 1 star because majority of people rated it 1 star.

He has not shown us why products should hide 1 star ratings.

Therefore you shouldn't hide negative reviews/feedback.

With the misinformation or inappropriate material having trouble being removed, the only major obstacle in the way is my dislike system. As you can see early on if a video can be worth watching, you can decide better because your peers warn you they did not like the video.

Vote for me.
Con
#8
Forfeited