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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
YouTube has a problem with the dislike button because their Rewind 2018 video got branded as the most disliked video ever on the platform. Creators don't care because the algorithm treats likes and dislikes as positive engagement that don't count against them or the video.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
'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.