Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Slashdot Moderation is just as weaponized.
Gee, the "creators" don't like the "dislike" button? But they are A-OK with the "like" button? That's stunning, who would have guessed?
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.
If you participate in two or there such rallies then your account becomes flagged as an activist and as such discounted as new accounts under six months old are. It's like throwing your credibility away.
A very bad example of 'weaponizing' the dislike button. YouTube rewind truly sucked the big one. Some of those that participated said as much, although they were careful in their choice of words so they wouldn't bite the hand that feeds them.
And .. I don't care. I have never let the number of dislikes dissuade me from watching something. And since I rarely watch anything in 'trending', I would say the number of likes or views a video gets is also not relevant.
The only ego being bruised is that of the creator.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
You jest, but but abuses of said button are what lead to things like permits and licenses...
When idiots and people with bad intent are given as loud a voice as people with expertise and good intention, the result is anarchy, schemes like Bitcoin, and unqualified people getting elected to public office. The only ways to combat it are to teach critical thinking skills and start requiring some basic qualifications other than having access to a computer, to gain access to platforms that amplify a person's influence.
YouTube channels grown men doing feminine queenie poses to get people to click on their YouTube channel. Middle-aged men trying to act like teenagers. Howdy partners! I have got a baseball cap on the wrong way round and my trousers are so tight I busted one of my ball bags and my trousers are so far up my arsehole they have got a brown skidmark showing through.
Do not forget to click on like and subscribe!
Google rose to prominence by showing the web as it was without fear or favour. This gave them considerable advantage over then-competitors who hand-indexed the web based upon user inputs and corporate priorities. Google is normalizing deviance from this critical system. For them, this was a category one priority and much of their internal product research was based around this. Weaponizing the dislike button is as common as brigading the like button. People beg for likes as they share videos about this or that important message depending on this week's crisis du jour. In fact, many YouTube videos begin and end by begging for likes. I bet if people had brigaded the like button for YouTube's Rewind video management would not be complaining. It will take a while but Google prioritizing opinion shaping will devalue their search product offering. And given how broadly distributed their search function is throughout their product portfolio this may have interesting second and third order effects.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Even if they could magically guarantee one vote per real person, they'd still complain that it's not fair when people band together to dislike a video.
Just because their Rewind video sucked balls and garned universal condemnation does not mean "organized groups are weaponizing the downvote button". They are just expressing their discontent.
YouTube's problem is that they *still* don't get it. They have no idea why their platform works, treat content creators like numbers, and think PC mumbo-jumbo is actually going to be respected outside left-wing echo chambers and pressure groups.
It's not weaponized if the videos actually do suck.
...laura
It's self-validating to try to manage a tempest in a teapot.
Also, you can fool investors into paying you to do it.
First you want the opinion of your peers on your content, and when they don't like it, now you don't want their opinion?
Look, it's an all or nothing situation, IMHO. Take both buttons away and never report likes/dislikes on anything ever again, or leave it be.
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.
The assault dislike button ban. There is no reason the general public should have mob style weapons. Exclusions apply for police and military of course as they need to dislike videos that could be harmful to the public.
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.
Nexus Mods has had the correct solution to this problem for years already: Remove the dislike button.
Just build up a database of which videos I've viewed, which ones I've liked, and which ones I've disliked and generate a preference profile on me. Do this for everyone and generate preference profiles for every account. Find people with a similar preference profile as me and recommend to me videos they've watched and tend to like. Don't recommend to me videos they've watched and tend to dislike. People with a substantially different preference profile should have no effect on what's recommended to me.
Do this for every account, and the only thing a dislike-bombing campaign does is change which videos are recommended to people likely to participate in that particular dislike-bombing campaign. Which presumably is what they want since their profile says they're likely to participate in that campaign. That is, if your video preference profile is similar to those of people in the dislike-bombing campaign, then the video will not be recommended to you (though you probably never would have watched it anyway if it hadn't been for the dislike-bombing campaign). If your preference profile is different from those people in the dislike-bombing campaign, then the campaign will have zero effect on whether or not the video is recommended to you.
Netflix does this. The list of recommended movies you see is based on how closely that movie matches with other movies you've seen (based on the movie-watching history of other Netflix customers).
It fell flat not because of weaponized dislike but because it was horrible and tried to push what the people running youtube wanted to be pushed.
But hey they are the gods of the internet, the public will damn well like what they tell them to.
One idea I've had for a while... have software attempt to group users by 'tribe' based upon their own past like/dislike patterns, then show people review scores weighed against their own tribe's voting patterns. So, if militant feminists go out and downvote anything with an actor they dislike, only militant feminists will see the overwhelming hate. Ditto, if dudebros go around upvoting videos feminists tend to hate... the score THEY see will be high. Likewise, for ardent fundamenalists, Greens, libertarians, Bernie Bros, etc.
In the long run, participating in organized voting will just get you lumped into a tribe & screw up the review scores YOU see.
The problem is that people are believing things that see on screens, they haven't personally experience d. It a puppet Masters wet dream
Wonder if there is a site/forum that tries this. Does any one in slashdot know such a system?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The far left love to divide people into classes of victims, except for white men, who make up oppressing patriarchy.
That’s why the ad was so terrible. I didn’t see it aimed at individuals, but at all white men.
Unfortunately, these lefty nut jobs occupy the entire humanities departments, which spills into the education departments. The effect of this is having primary school children, who used to at least get some Sunday school, now being told they are gender fluid snowflakes that to feel out their sexuality.
I would call it child abuse. Gillette are just another corporate jumping on the latest man bashing lefty trend to try to appeal to millineals brain washed by Marxist’s teachers and professors.
46137
YouTube has gone from a relatively benign place where cat videos were posted, to Just Another Social Media site. Eschew all the 'social media' 'features' and just watch the damned cat videos instead.
me wishing slashdot had a like button for your comment. amen to all that.
but what then is the solution??? surely you don't mean to imply that all internet users should be personally identifiable. I wouldn't want to live in such a world.
Might makes right irrelevant.
Likes/Dislikes are dross; if you don't want to see how bad your content is, disable the ratings.
Comments are dross; if you don't want to see what people think about your content, disable the comments.
The truly weaponized button is the report button. False flagging campaigns to get content age restricted, put in limited state, or removed altogether have been around since before likes and comment were a glimmer in the trolls' eyes. Now it has been weaponized to get entire content creators removed from platforms. And coming to a platform near you, we are beginning to see content creators being unpersoned not just from a platform, but from life in general; now the mobs take away your ability to make a living outside the platform (or even more recently your access to the monetary system). While I hate to say this, it will take government intervention to undo the unpersoning we see these days.
If you can't handle likes, dislikes and comments grow a thicker skin or get off the platform. If you can't handle someone else's content to the point of trying to get them kicked off the platform, maybe it's you that really needs to go. If you can't handle someone else's content to the point of trying to get them unpersoned, it's prison time for you.
I remember an old George Carlin bit about someone complaining about content they didn't like on the radio and trying to get it banned. George pointed out that radios have two buttons, one button changes the station -- and the other TURNS IT OFF. Ah the wisdom we now ignore ;(.
Users "weaponize" the dislike button? Seems to me that characterization is a tad overdramatic.
Using "like" and "dislike" is not turning out as pretty as you imagined it would? You've got the data, Google... perhaps you should study it and learn a thing or two about human nature.
Or, you could just redesign your feedback mechanism and stick your head in the sand by coming up with a way to completely sanitize user feedback. I bet your corporate buddies can't wait for that one.
So people calling out Rewind is an evil doublebad mob with weapons, but the clusterfuck of claim reporting (not tolerating but embracing automated ones) is acceptable.
Whatever, let it burn, not my loss. When I'm cornered and absolutely need a youtube video I DDL and view locally. Like someone studying a plant strain and plucking specimens from a post-apocalyptic wasteland, so they can inspect it somewhere out of the cancerous radiation.
"Speech [and video] doesn't swing fists at your nose." - Incitement to violence is a crime determined by a judge/jury, this is a limitation of 1st Amendment rights. You're a moron if you think otherwise Davis, not a legal scholar.
Yes, you can have freedom of speech and hate speech laws, because all rights are limited against eachother. Where speech is proven to be a contributing factor in violence with that intent, it's illegal. Your false dichotomy doesn't apply.
Not in this country anyway, where there are no absolute rights that outweigh all other rights in every single case. You're spreading mis-educated non-facts.
Well you know the corporate rule. Always promote the exact opposite of what you are. Google with do no evil, NFL with supporting black rights/social justice while physically and mentally destroying their workers until they are bankrupt or in prison from being crippled or domestic abuse/drug charges. It's always a look the other way it's not us! message. It's hilarious to witness because you know they are exactly opposite of what they are preaching. Sometimes they are the root cause!
Various downvote crews turned a mediocre news aggregator into a worthless website.
The younger generation of YouTubers are like graffiti vandals ready to ruin everything around themselves while the rest of the users wonder why the site keeps getting worse.
I give YouTube about 5 years before it is a complete failure.
Yes, you can have freedom of speech and hate speech laws, because all rights are limited against each other. Where speech is proven to be a contributing factor in violence with that intent, it's illegal. Your false dichotomy doesn't apply.
The problem here isn't the banning of people trying to start violence. The problem is the banning of people who just have differing opinions than those of the social media corporations. For instance Prager University has had more than 30 videos pulled for so called "hate speech". They were nothing of the sort, but wrongly labeled as such. The true problem is that the definition of hate speech is so nebulous that it becomes impossible to actually define it. Best to let free speech be the default, and provide a better argument for that which you don't agree with.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
I was responding in context to a post about so-called hate speech videos on YouTube and his comparing that to "swinging a fist in my face". Those are obviously not comparable.
You are correct about inciting of violence against individuals, but that goes beyond "hate speech". Stating your opinions on something or supporting certain legislation is not inciting violence... yet the "left" would often label those as "hate speech".
So in that regard, I am correct. You can't have "hate speech" banned and still have free speech [as we know it in the USA]. The USA doesn't have "hate speech laws". So please take your apparently "educated" self to WikiPedia for a moment before blasting others with curse words (or it is hate speech?):
"The United States does not have hate speech laws, since American courts have repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[8] There are several categories of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment, such as speech that calls for imminent violence upon a person or group. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that hate speech is not one of these categories.[97][not in citation given]"
By the way, I love how you tout my name in your reply subject (and with the insult and curse word) as if you are going to punish or embarrass me from your high moral ground, while hiding behind anonymity. Great job.
Google chose to "weaponize" YouTube for quite some times now. I'd say their users "weaponizing" it back is only fair game.
If Google and other corps are going to just dismiss feedback they dont like might as well not have the farce of a rating system at all. Just disable it by default and then you can churn out as many SJW vids as you like and imagine they're all universally beloved.
Incitment to violence is a completely different thing from "hate speech". Here's a hint: the difference is that incitement to violence is always wrong, while hate speech is supposedly only wrong if it's targetting certain groups, and perfectly okay when targetting other groups (who are just told to check their privilege and suck it up).
Zero-seconds viewed and Dislike smashed - why do they even count that?
It's perfectly reasonable to weight the ratios based on some evidence that the viewer actually tried to watch and maybe understand the video.
It's like they're pretending they have no analytics, no referrer, no neural net expertise inhouse, no data whatsoever to make a more accurate system.
Jesus, quit bitching and start solving problems. Google used to do that.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yep and pretty soon everyone is only hearing the opinions they like, automatically think every other opinion is the minority, in a giant happy bubble echo-chamber enabled by technology.
Then when reality hits them entire offices have mental breakdowns and have to shut down for a couple of days and think everyone else is a radical extremist because how else can one's isolated brain explain that other people have a different opinion?
It must be trolls! It must be 4chan's doing! It must be xenophobic-racist-misogynists-radical-alt-right-transphobic-homophobic-Nazi-Russian bots!
I doubt that many "famous" Youtubers actually have very many followers at all. Rather, Alphabet/Youtube pretends they have millions of followers as an excuse to give them front page billing.
The purpose is to force feed their audience a steaming crock of brain-rotting antisocial pro-evil schlock. Remember, YouTube is now run by a bunch of scoundrels who formerly worked in the TV industry.
When considering the actions of an overtly evil company like Alphabet, it's always safe to assume malice and deceit.
It is possible that people really dont like the content @Youtube.
1) Youtube's own BS with Will Smith that was one of the most disliked videos on, well, Youtube.
2) Then Gillete's insulting "don't rape beegud" wonder that was disliked
Sometimes, people are genuinely pissed off about one's content and sometimes it happens with content that is wonderfully progressive from SJW folks perspective.
I have a simple recipe for "digital victims" of this kind: if you don't want hordes of pissed of people to downvote your content, just don't piss off people, at least en mass. Hey, look how well it worked for Edgar Watches, who has shown some respect for men, instead of pissing on them.
Abuses of democracy are what lead to dictatorship. Yay dictatorship!!
Imagine that every video or product would get a rating from everyone on Earth. Each person gets one thumbs up or thumbs down option. How many games, books, videos or other products would get a majority positive reviews?
Then there is the vocal minority problem, where there is a minority which has very strong opinions and lots of time to voice them as loud as they can. We can see that in the USA politics today, anyone expressing any views near the center will get attacked by global minorities from the left and from the right. In the age of social outrage, the only survivable positions are extreme left or extreme right, at least you got one set of vocals on your side an only get attacked from one side.
One solution is to create multiple virtual review buckets, akin to Netflix rating system - "majority of people who tend to rate content like you liked this product". The vocal minorities will have their own buckets to voice their approvals or displeasures.
Between the marketer or interest groups it work both way : they sometimes want to push the dislike to make something go away.... And push the like to promote something. Ask yourself why only the "dislike" stuffing are spoken about, but not the "like" stuffing.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
People do. Then the banks and internet providers deplatform them.
'salt is good for you' as an example. Sure you need a certain amount of salt to survive and nature provides that naturally in the food we eat, what we don't need is copious amounts of salt to be added to food and there are plenty of idiot youtubers that don't understand that a small amount is healthy and too much is not healthy and they appear to be encouraging people to eat salt with reckless abandon and are railing against the campaigns to eat less salt and add less salt to foods. These idiots piss me off and I'd happily join a mailing list and go vote down all of their videos.
Often you don't need to watch more than a few seconds of a video to know that it is 100% trash and click-bait and or doesn't have anything useful or particularly entertaining to say. Often the vote-count is a good indicator of that and can act as a quick confirmation that the video isn't worth watching any further.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
So a bunch of people decide that they don't like something, go to YouTube and click on "Dislike". It seems to be working as intended.
But there isn't a dislike button yet.
Oh wait... they meant for the videos. Who the hell cares about that?! I just want one for disliking comments. Please let me know when that happens.
...which is exactly how the NPCs want it, as they can wield that cudgel against their enemies--or not wield it against their allies--as they see fit, because some animals are more equal than others.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
While downvotes can cost views, demonetization is an even bigger issue. Thenderf00t recently analyzed how his videos were often demonetized. Even videos about electrons. Probably by feminists or creationists who don't like his videos on those topics. It's possible to appeal, but by then views have peaked and you've missed most of the income.