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YouTube Struggles To Fight Mobs Weaponizing Their 'Dislike' Button (theverge.com)
"YouTube is no stranger to viewers weaponizing the dislike button, as seen by the company's recent Rewind video, but the product development team is working on a way to tackle the issue," writes the Verge.
Suren Enfiajyan shares their report on a new video by Tom Leung, YouTube's director of project management. "Dislike mobs" are the YouTube equivalent to review bombings on Steam -- a group of people who are upset with a certain creator or game decide to execute an organized attack and downvote or negatively review a game or video into oblivion. It's an issue on YouTube as well, and one that creators have spoken out against many times in the past.... Now, the company is planning to experiment with new ways to make it more difficult for organized attacks to be executed. Leung states that these are just "lightly being discussed" right now, and if none of the options are the correct approach, they may hold off until a better idea comes along.
Ironically, Leung's video itself drew 2,654 "dislike" votes -- nearly double its 1,377 upvotes.
Suren Enfiajyan shares their report on a new video by Tom Leung, YouTube's director of project management. "Dislike mobs" are the YouTube equivalent to review bombings on Steam -- a group of people who are upset with a certain creator or game decide to execute an organized attack and downvote or negatively review a game or video into oblivion. It's an issue on YouTube as well, and one that creators have spoken out against many times in the past.... Now, the company is planning to experiment with new ways to make it more difficult for organized attacks to be executed. Leung states that these are just "lightly being discussed" right now, and if none of the options are the correct approach, they may hold off until a better idea comes along.
Ironically, Leung's video itself drew 2,654 "dislike" votes -- nearly double its 1,377 upvotes.
One of the factors leading to the Digg's decline in popularity was a scandal involving a group known as the "Digg Patriots." Political campaigners* who used a combination of organised disliking and an understanding of the Digg site operation to manipulate it. By monitoring the feed of submissions, they were able to identify any upcoming story which reflected badly on their political stances, or which might be used to support opposing stances - and then message an alert to the group to collectively vote against that submission long before it could reach the front page feed.
If you watch enough youtube videos relating to politics or religion, you will eventually come across stories of the semi-organised mobs on there - when a moderately prominent youtuber with a few thousand subscribers asks them to go and dislike a video by someone else, either because of a disagreement over an issue or over a personal dispute. Some of the mob will take it further and look for excuses to submit inappropriate content alerts too - which, given that youtube is almost entirely automated in that regard, can be very difficult to challenge.
*Their political alignment is not important for this example, only their methods.
Trivial to find these things, there are many many more of each all the way from summaries to many cited academic papers.
1:
https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/Psychological-Effects-On-Men-Growing-Up-Without-A-Father
2:
http://www.cybercrimejournal.com/marcumetal2012janijcc.pdf
http://sciencenordic.com/girls-gravitate-toward-online-bullying