How do you mean? There's a lot of things that I think ruined the internet, but upvotes/downvotes aren't on that list for me.

Watch time is more important than view count, and user retention (the percent of users that stay on the site after watching your video) is even more important than that. I believe that user interaction (liking/disliking/commenting) also factors in to the recommendation system somehow.

YouTube is incredibly slow at taking manual moderatorial action. While it's true that dislikes sometimes just signify that people disagree with the video, on tutorial or educational videos a high dislike count can indicate that the tutorial doesn't work or that the information is blatantly wrong to anyone who isn't new to the concept. Especially for small videos or videos about niche topics, it's unreasonable to expect YouTube to be able to immediately flag videos as containing misinformation, so dislikes help do that instead.

They create echo chambers and promote extremism/hivemind-ism. Since upvoting or downvoting is a binary decision, it really polarizes the people on a site. It's really hard to go a long amount of time on a Big Tech site like reddit without seeing some inane political "discussion" where either both parties are extremists or one party is torn to shreds despite having not having any obvious extremist beliefs. Feel free to disagree with me but next time you go on a popular Reddit board I suggest seeing how long it takes before the most idiotic of conversations start being had with the most simplistic of responses.

I suppose I see where you're coming from here, but lots of tutorial video sites exist, many of them with higher quality than most YouTube videos.

So how are you supposed to separate the good from the bad? Obviously, an actual moderation team would be preferred (though not always objectively better, see most Reddit mods), but YouTube basically cannot have that for things that aren't just straight up illegal.

Yeah, this definitely happens on Reddit, but I don't think that up- and downvotes are the Reddit features that are specifically causing this. I think that like 90% of the echo-chamber-iness of Reddit comes from the subreddit system. You could still have idiotic conversations and extremism without the voting system (just using the comments), but it's hard to see how it would have that level of echo chamber without subreddits.

I mean, sure, but just because there are other alternatives to YouTube doesn't mean that YouTube should quit improving. Because of the sheer number of videos on YouTube, there are a lot of tutorials there for things that no other sites have tutorials for, so everyone who uses tutorial videos is going to need to watch one from YouTube at some point, and it would be better if you could tell whether it's a good tutorial or not before actually following it.

I see where you're coming from, but think about where we are having this conversation! Internet forums are segmented just like subreddits are and probably inspired the whole system (only difference is that subreddits are centralized), but I'd like to think forums don't have some of the same issues as Reddit does (I haven't seen any, anyways).
I don't think I articulated *why* I think upvotes/downvotes promotes hivemind behavior. When combined with a karma system (whether it's visible or not), a social credit score gets assigned and that's where problems start showing up because people are willing to say just about anything to increase that social credit score.

...shouldn't this be up to the user? Or are you mostly talking about illegal content here? There's also the problem that the dislike system can be heavily abused in subjective ways (I maintain that Justin Bieber's "Baby" is a good song despite it having the most (2nd most?) dislikes).
At the risk of this being offtopic because I'm hyperfocusing in on Reddit rather than YouTube, I won't mention it anymore.

I've definitely seen internet forums with similar echo chamber / hivemind behavior to Reddit. I think the main reason that we don't see a lot of that here is that we're a technology forum, not restricted to one particular topic. While we do focus on calculators, there's not really a whole lot of political stuff to hivemind over with them, outside of like "TI Bad."

That's definitely true, but I don't think it's limited to just upvotes and downvotes. On YouTube, you also have views, watch time, and subscriber counts to chase. On reddit, you could get the same thing from comment counts or the content of replies. Even here on Cemetech, you have statistics like post count, average words per post, karma, etc. Seeking any of those things for their own sake is unhealthy, but being able to see these provides some utility to other users, especially for YouTube likes and dislikes.

While it is up to the user to decide what's worth watching and how much to trust the content of a video, that's not an excuse to remove tools that people use while making that decision. It's true that dislike count should not be the only thing that you use when evaluating a video, but so long as you can understand under what circumstances the dislike count does not correlate well with video quality (e.g. political videos, where they usually signal disagreement instead, or on content where hating it has become a meme, like Bieber videos), it's better to have more information than less.

Omnimaga used to have a karma system in the late 2000s-early 2010s and it helped reducing the workload for moderators and admins considerably, as members more inclined to break the rules did not want their account to be associated with a publicly-viewable, negative karma score. However there were also 300+ posts per day at the time so such system was more justified than if for example it was implemented now on Cemetech because the activity is much lower and easier to manage nowadays.

On big centralized websites karma systems have much bigger chances to be abused or used entirely for whenever someone disagrees with a post/comment than on a smaller, less central community where admins can disable karma voting at will for users that abuse the system in such way.

EDIT: Also karma isn't very effective if it has to be used based on the quality of posts, because half of the internet considers memes as quality content.

I don't feel there's anything inherently bad with downvotes (and I'll contradict myself on this later), I think the issue arises when communities and forums float the higher rated comments to the top of the discussion. This allows individuals to control a narrative by upvoting comments and posts they agree with thereby sinking voices with more critical thinking. Reddit really shines when you stop letting it (or the community) dictate the comment sorting. As long as it's not by "Top" or "Best" you're better off. Sort by "New" or "Controversial" instead.

Regardless of voting, echo chambers will form when people with like minds get together. They'll shun and ostracize those who think differently. Or just remove those comments/posts altogether.



You may not be wrong, but ease of information is going to play a big part. I'm not going to spend 30 minutes looking for other video hosts online if I know I can go to YouTube and get a high production value tutorial in a matter of minutes.

Other video sites may suffer with an inadequate video player, lower quality videos because content creators aren't incentivized to post content on this site, the site audience may be lacking because of discovery/search issues. All these get into a feedback loop and doom any video content sites. Not to mention video file sizes are huge.

YouTube has a leg up because they literally transcode videos into a few familiar codecs so it plays faster, uses less bandwidth, and is a more fluid experience for the viewer. If I upload a 5GB 4K video file YouTube may play back a 720p 300MB file to most viewers and a 4K 1.5GB video to others. Spread that out over 10,000 viewers and they're saving boat loads of server bandwidth. A smaller video site that can't do the same will chew threw bandwidth and pay for it too. I bet YT doesn't even keep the 5GB file.



Critical thinking is one but members correcting each other and engaging in a discussion is the big indicator. If someone says that a certain ASM call does X, others would ideally chime in and say no.

(A) If someone doesn't know ASM and they were searching because of an issue, and they read a post that said this particular ASM call does X, and there's no comment that disagrees they'll likely fly with it.

Same scenario with no replies (B), but the comment/post is downvoted by the community. Okay, so maybe this isn't what they want.

Same scenario with no votes but with replies (C). They can see that others disagree and not only provide an alternative but explain why the alternative is correct.

Now imagine B & C combined. You'd really be able to tell which is correct and not. Voting also lowers the noise while increasing the confidence/legitimacy of a comment. Instead of a few people commenting a single word in agreement - or quoting and agreeing - they just upvote the reply. A few may still chime in and agree or provide further correction but that viewer will have more confidence they are selecting the correct solution.



I proposed adding reactions/voting to Cemetech in some capacity in a private admin forum. I was against adding a downvote but wanted to add a form of voting or reacting because I felt it would enhance information our users have and visitors seek. We ultimately decided not to pursue this.



If the Cemetech mod/admin team removes a topic that claims that an ASM call does X, but is in fact proven to do Y, are we determining what is misinformation and what isn't?


View counts are pointless in determining authenticity or accuracy. All we know is the popularity and just because something is popular doesn't mean it's real nor true.

Twitter comes to mind, where folks will mention a tweet has 400k retweets and 600k replies, but they have no real way of knowing how many of those retweets and replies are in support or disapproval. I've watched videos I disagree with, because I want to be informed not because I support the content.

Do you know how many people watched Rebecca Blacks Friday music video because it was "bad?" Probably a lot. If you looked at just the view count you'd easily misinterpret that a lot of people liked it.

I would agree that upvotes/downs create eco chambers... on reddit... but not on youtube. This is becouse on reddit, if a community has a certain opinion, a newcomer with a different opinion will be downvoted, and their posts will be hidden. This pretty much discourages and shuts down discussion of different opinions in ideology driven subreddits. Meanwhile on youtube, most people who watch a video already probably support the message of the video, so it's unlikely that a video will be mass disliked for the message of the video. The only times videos get mass downvotes is when the owner of the videos does something that upsets a lot of people, or when some other creator tells his audience to mass dislike the videos. This was especially prevalent around 5 years ago during the peak of the youtube drama community. However... videos from mainstream sources as well as from youtube themselves tent to always get mass downvoted, which is probably a big reason why youtube implemented the change - they want mainstream media to stay, and they don't want dissent on the platform to be easily visible (ei, remember all the hate for every single youtube rewind?).

So, in a roundabout way, i'd say dislikes on reddit contribute to echochambers, while not having dislikes on youtube contributes to - maybe not an echochamber - but defiantly a pro youtube pro mainstream media environment.

And don't forget, youtube is perfectly fine with shaddowbanning people they don't like anyways, so that kinda makes having/not having dislikes somewhat irrelevant to the whole echochamber argument anyways.