, 13 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter
Totally not weird and suspicious coming from a bunch of people who don't follow me.
Okay. People who think YouTube dislikes count as meaningful criticism have brain worms.
Problem the first: YouTube weighs both a like and a dislike the same, both count as interaction. By disliking a video you're just making it slightly more likely that the video will get served as a recommended video to people who will hate watch it.
Problem the second: this is a fundamentally unhealthy framing for the creator side of things and creates a really screwed up incentive set where you're equally incentivized to create good content that people would like AND fish for hate clicks.
I've heard every argument in favour of Dislikes and they're all thin and shoddy. Basically any "feedback" that Dislikes provide is duplicated by any of a myriad other superior systems.
As a viewer-facing element they're functionally pointless since you can't even see them until after you click the video, making it little more than a placebo button (which, again, only serves to increase the video's profile by raising engagement)
So people who place weight in Dislikes as "criticism" and claim that people who think they're bad and/or turn them off are "censoring criticism" have brain worms, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
The best part is you just know every one of these people thinks they're clever.
It's the fanciful stories of hypothetical situations completely divorced from how people actually make content that are the cutest.
Here's a cheat sheet: creators who care about how their content is received, its factual accuracy, its appeal to their core audience, they already know long before the dislikes start piling up.

Creators who don't care don't care.
To take a high profile example, which do you think had a bigger impact on the Fine Bros. to alter and ultimately scrap React World:

• the number of dislikes on the video
• the hundreds of response videos on the subject culminating in physical newspapers reporting the story
One of my most-disliked videos of all time is my video on Glass where, pretty predictably, people who liked Glass don't like that I think the movie was hot garbage. I am not in the dark about the fact that people who disagree with me do, actually, disagree with me.
Hitting dislike on a video because you don't like that I don't like a movie you like isn't going to change anything.

I'm not going to re-do my Glass video to, what, fix the fact I think the movie is bad?
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