I like to think Youtube removed the dislike count because their youtube year in review videos were getting slammed with dislikes
Five star rating system was dumb because almost every rating was 1 or 5 stars. It was right to replace with a thumbs up/thumbs down system.
They stopped showing the number of thumbs down. They did not take away the thumbs down button.
Yeah it’s still better than FB which doesn’t even have a thumbs down. Fortunately I’m only on FB for my job, not being able to downvote makes me crazy.
🤣
Can confirm this. I created a 5 Star system for my recipe app. Had the feature for a year, I didn’t use it once. I just couldn’t justify the difference between a 4 or 5 Star. Or 2 and 3 Star.
Switched to dislike, like, love buttons. Nice and discrete. Been using it for weeks now.
Five star rating system was dumb because almost every rating was 1 or 5 stars. It was right to replace with a thumbs up/thumbs down system.
That assumes that the only use for ratings is for averaging the aggregate votes across all users. Nope. Sometimes for a specific user they like to be able to see the granularity of their own ratings for their own use. And even if it is a public aggregated thing the rating service can still treat all 1-2 stars as downvotes and 4-5 stars as upvotes while it’s easier to use the simpler algorithms, but to still store the more precise data for analyzing correlations at greater detail.
Big tech covered the world in trillion-parameter AI models and couldn’t even figure out what to do with 5-star ratings differently from upvotes/downvotes? It’s ridiculous.
But they did this for one reason and one reason only to appease the companies they advertise for.
That is all. Marketers like safe mundane non-volatile markets. Having a lot of dislikes on a video creates a connotation to the advertisement being played on it.
This is nothing more than marketing.
And don’t forget marketing is one of the most evil institutions ever created by humanity.
There’s an extension that adds the dislike count back.
It’s unreliable from what I have read
It’s not exact, but it’s still a useful indicator.
Well, I wouldn’t say unreliable. It does not match the real dislike count, because it only knows about the people using the extension. It’s like the difference between the official rating of an app on the google play store and some third party user review site. It’s not that one is more reliable than other, just different people contribute.
Gotta love the reddit watermark
That’s the fifth step.
Every step:
“Let’s make it more difficult for people to realize the video they’re about to watch is hated (so people keep coming back for more and advertisers keep paying us more), but not in a way that is blatant so we lose a significant portion of our userbase.”
I use the super secret system of telling my favorite YouTubers how disappointed I am that they’re not gay when they announce that they’re having a baby
Youtube had a star rating system for videos?
I’m sorry 🗿
Here’s what a video page looked like back in 2003:
<starts playing Weird Al’s “Good Old Days”>
The old YT player was perfect and nobody will convince me otherwise.
- I was baby then 😁.
It’s kind of amazing how long people have been putting up with youtube, compared to other social media + SM adjacent sites.
I think that 2026 is doing okay.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/d7886499-5a38-4fc6-bf28-d350d836e6d5.png
where did you get a screenshot of my setup?
But will your setup open the pod bay doors?
Early on yeah, they replaced it with the thumbs up/down system since most star ratings were 1 or 5.
They used to, and they currently do too, but the current one isn’t meant to be an alternative to the like/dislike button like this portrays.
It’s most often in your feed, where occasionally it’ll show a video to you, then give you a tiny light blue box beneath it saying “how good of a recommendation is this” or something along those lines, then you rate it so they can both make the algorithm better overall, and fine-tune yours even if you don’t want to watch the video. (e.g. I might say “5 stars, this is a good recommendation,” but never watch it just because I don’t have the time. YouTube knows I like that topic now, just that I might not watch videos that are that long.)
I don’t mind everything except the last one.
People brigade content. It’s just better to use other metrics, like how long did someone engage with the content.
People do brigade content too. But that isn’t a reason to hide the data. It is the viewer’s responsibility to ponder the rating. People talk about critical thinking, but hiding the tools to practice it doesn’t actually help people to get better at it.
A highly engaging video that’s entirely BS is not a good video for anyone but advertisers.
Im confused. There’s still a dislike button on YouTube right now.
sure, and it does a whole lot of nothing
But you don’t get to see how many dislikes a video has
