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YouTube Struggles To Fight Mobs Weaponizing Their 'Dislike' Button (theverge.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the dissing-by-disliking dept.

"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.

6 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. What about the other way by peragrin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What about mobs weaponizing the like button to generate fake data?

    Notice how Facebook and you tube never talk about fake impressions when it appears positive?

    --
    i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
    1. Re:What about the other way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There's a clear connection to 1984 here.

      You aren't allowed to be negative. That godawful corporate dross video isn't crap... it's ++ungood.

  2. This is all about Gillette by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    and the 10-to-1 ratio of dislikes that their incredibly offensive new advertisement generated.
    I would love to know how many downvotes and negative comments were deleted by Gillette.
    Would rather see YouTube end the sort of cheating that Gillette embraces.

    1. Re:This is all about Gillette by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It was a good commercial, if a bit late to the game.

      No it wasn't.

      1. "Masculinity" is not the problem. It is lack of masculinity. Boys raised in female headed households, without a strong male role model, are more likely to grow up to be violent and abusive toward women.

      2. "Online bullying" is attributed to "toxic masculinity", but is actually almost entirely a female-on-female phenomena.

      3. In the commercial, nearly all the "bad" males are white. Nearly all the "good" males are black. Why does race need to used so prominently?

      4. A "bad/white" man steps toward a woman, apparently to initiate a conversation. A "good/black" man stops him, because talking to women is toxic. Really?

      5. Here's a nice butt photo of some "pit babes" in another Gillette commercial, shamelessly exploiting women's bodies to sell razor blades. They aren't preaching from the moral high ground.

    2. Re: This is all about Gillette by squiggleslash · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The good news is that the average viewer has more smarts than the average Slashdotter when it comes to this video. Most actually interpreted it the way it was meant to be, rather than the bizarre "OMG THEY'RE CRITIFICATING THE MANS!" thing going on on Slashdot right now.

      Morning Consult
      Ace Metrix

      Most viewers do not appear to be taking it as a general attack on men. None of the comments in the Ace Metrix survey suggest that, and the fact most men saw it as positive, shares their values, and that it's likely to take business away from Harrys and Dollar Shave definitely suggests men weren't patronized or felt under attack by it.

      Only you and presumably some /r/the_donald, KIA, and 8chan regulars felt like that. So, take from that what you will.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  3. Doesn't work the other way by Solandri · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Although it's harder to see why today than it was in the past. Long, long ago, YouTube allowed you to see a like vs viewed ratio. That's the value that's really important - what percentage of people who viewed a video liked it? I dunno why YouTube removed it, but presumably it's still used in their internal "recommended for you" algorithm. Otherwise new videos would never be recommended because they always have fewer likes than older liked videos.

    If you generate fake likes to try to get more people to view the video, that drives the percentage likes up. If that succeeds in getting the video more organic views (by people not affliated with your fake campaign) but those people don't like it, it drives the percentage likes back down. And your video drops back down into obscurity (unless you've got one helluva fake like-generating network). And your campaign to artificially increase how often the video is viewed is unsuccessful (after an initial brief success, how brief depends on the size of your fake campaign).

    OTOH, if you generate fake dislikes and try to use the likes vs dislikes ratio to determine which videos are worth watching, then the fake dislikes crater the ratio, and bury the video into obscurity. The video gets fewer organic views (instead of more as with positive-like bombing), making it less able to recover from the fake reviews. And your campaign to bury the video into obscurity is successful.

    In other words, a fake like campaign makes it easier for organic viewers to counter the campaign. A fake dislike campaign makes it harder for organic viewers to counter the campaign.