YouTube is Now Completely Lost

In case some of you haven’t noticed or heard, YouTube has now removed the dislike counter on all videos.

In my view this was almost certainly done as a result of political pressure from the current American executive branch administration, who’s videos are/were almost universally disliked more than liked, as well as pressure from the corporate press who are/were in much the same position.

It’s my opinion that the removal of the dislike counter was done as a way to stifle visible public dissent and rejection of the gated institutional narrative. For the record, I don’t at all believe their claims as to the purpose of this change in the structure of the website, I think it’s a willful lie and a disgraceful one at that.

YouTube’s willingness to do this a real shame, since any semblance of neutrality or fairness is now gone, and YouTube is fundamentally no better than the corporate press or the propaganda wing of the feds. Yet another once-great American entity has been ruined by political corruption.

Edited for grammar.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/12/2021 12:01PM by Ryan Nafe.

Ryan,
Yeah, I saw that. The Establishment is getting even more desperate.

I think you are reading into to much. The video posters(cReatOrs), all them have always been sensitive and entitled. Once Youtube became something they could consider a career they have been begging for the dislike button to go away. Since they hate negative feedback of any kind.

This Chrome extension might help.
[chrome.google.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/13/2021 01:50PM by jasonstone20.

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Older Spice
I think you are reading into to much.

That’s entirely possible, I merely have a hypothesis at this point. Arguments, a little circumstantial evidence, and guesses based on that.

But the timing of it seems very suggestive of the motive. YouTube has been prioritizing the corporate press, celebrities, and other MSM sources over small independent people or groups for years, and doing it pretty explicitly. I find it pretty hard to believe they suddenly decided to care about the sensitive ones among the little people when they’ve been intentionally burying their content and analysis under the corporate press and MSM, among several other examples of preferential treatment.

And I’m really not sure I’d buy the idea that independent sources have major issues with the dislike counter, most of them have favorable ratios because of the natural tendency for people to watch what they actually like. The only time I really seem to see poor like/dislike ratios is on propaganda, obviously biased news pretending to be objective, or just outright poor content like a video review with garbage audio/visual or no real information. And in that last category, the outright bad content, this is almost always on a channel that really has little to no content and very few subscribers anyway, probably precisely because it’s garbage, so I can’t see how a channel like that would be able to leverage YouTube in any way.



The simplest explanation, and the one that’s in direct alignment with their other behaviors of recent years, is that they’re doing it for purposes of stifling dissent and removing the ability of people to understand that they’re not alone in their rejection of the gated institutional narrative.

To illustrate my point about how YouTube is overtly favoring the corporate press over independent sources and analysis:

There’s been a livestream of the Rittenhouse trial going on for the last week, commentary and analysis provided by several lawyers in real-time. This livestream has been getting more viewership than most or all of the corporate press coverage. This morning, mysteriously, they were issued two copyright strikes in the middle of the stream that totally derailed it during closing arguments. By the same source for the coverage they’d been using all week. Then later on they’re issued statements that both of those strikes were somehow just a mistake. Two mistakes. Not likely, it’s a deliberate attempt to undermine independent competition and contrary analysis of the trial.

Ryan,
Yeah, the establishment is favorable by Big Tech in general. Good thing there are alternatives now to use. I would stop using Google products altogether, but their suite of programs is hard to replace. This is coming from someone who is a huge FOSS(Free and Open Source Software) advocate. Linux is my daily driver OS. I wish I could get away from Andriod for my phone, but their isn't anything I can really afford. With the Smartphones, it is either Google or Apple, and I hate both.

This isn't directed at you, Ryan, as I am guilty of this a lot myself, but I would like to try and avoid things getting political on this forum. We are bombarded with politics as it has permeated almost everything, it would be nice not to have to deal with it here. I was thinking it might be a good idea to have a news/current events section, but after thinking about it, I believe it wouldn't work well.

Yeah fair enough, I would count this as tech in the sense that it’s about one of the largest websites in the world making a significant change to its operation or layout, but I’ll leave it alone. No worries.

Ryan,
Yeah. I actually wish we could discuss such things, as I think we would have a good discussion about it, but for some reason politics is just too touchy of a subject as it is very personal to a lot of people and they can take things to heart, and stuff can get nasty very quickly. I happen to agree with you about YouTube and the Rittenhouse case, but I guess that is why they have PM's. I think most of this is better left to PM's.

I'm going to come in with what I imagine will be a trend of dissenting takes here, and say that Youtube doesn't really care at all about shutting down dissenting voices, Youtube loves controversy and dissent because it gets people engaging with the platform as they hate-watch someone they hate or listen to their favourite echo, and a lot of people seemingly don't understand that the dislike button didn't serve to let Youtube know it should suppress the video in recommendations, but rather it made all those videos more attractive to their algorythm because dislikes represent engagement which means more ad views. Similarly, I highly doubt the current US Admin really cares at all about their like to dislike ratios, the older members probably don't understand Youtube that well, and the younger members know about what I mentioned earlier re: engagement.

What I do agree with is that Youtube has been, for almost a decade now I feel, trying to push mainstream media content on their platform, because that's the sort of content that is practically guaranteed to be of no issue for their ad-buyers and copyright-content tracking bots, overall it's the kind of videos that are cheap and easy for them to sell to you, especially as Youtube angles more and more to just trying to outright replace TV for younger folks. And I believe that's the real root cause of why they're removing public dislike counters, to safeguard their investment in these corporate TV channel videos.

Luis,
That is a valid take on the YouTube situation. Like everything these days, there seems to be two main ways to look at what is going on.

Nevermind, we've discovered why it happened...

Luis,
Hahahaha!