Dislike bots and dislike trolls on Youtube

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Anyone who often uploads video’s on YouTube knows the phenomenon. You upload the video, and in the first seconds, or the first hour, it gets several, sometimes dozens, of dislikes, and only dislikes. Then, for the rest of the time, you get a more realistic pattern of likes and dislikes.

It seems like there are bored kids or trolls just waiting for random new vids to pounce them and shit all over them. Some people call themdislike trolls; other suspect there are dislike bots.

Seems like a fascinating phenomenons, in many ways resembling snark online. Does anyone know more about this?

2

I’m only bronze level, but I’ve not seen this at all - I think it must depend strongly on your content type (which drives your viewer/subscriber demographic - and different subsets of viewers probably have markedly different troll quotients)

I get a few* dislikes on my content (but also, not a mountain of likes), but I can typically figure out the reason for the dislikes - it happens on videos where:
[ul]
[li]I didn’t put in as much effort as I usually do[/li][li]I did something people regard as unsafe[/li][li]The content was weird and pointless[/li][/ul]

*across my last 30 videos:
25 dislikes
1,158 likes
32,768(!) views

3

The other thing to consider:

Anyone can view your videos at any time regardless of whether they are signed into YouTube or have no account at all.

In order to subscribe (and find your video soon after it’s published), people need to be signed in. When they’re signed in, they can like and dislike.

So it makes sense that dislikes/views ratio might be disproportionate at the start, but not so much dislikes/likes ratio.

4

<Content deleted>

5

I don’t have any personal experience with it, but a social media consultant (approaching this from the perspective of business advertising and including YouTube with other types of social media content) said that you’ll sometimes get initial responses from people who are seeing you only because you’re the newest thing, not because you’re something they actually care about. They think “I hate content about x” and click dislike. Later viewers are more likely to find you from searches and recommendations, and are therefore predisposed to like the content.

6

Interesting: does YT have an algorithm that organizes new content based on what they think the user will like, similar to what FB does and what YT seems to do for pre-existing video? If so then perhaps the downvoters were trying to “train” YT to show them more relevant videos?

7

I’m sure this was supposed to be a joke but it looks a hell of a lot like trolling. Cut it out.

I’m editing out the original post to keep people from being confused but I’ll leaving the original content in the quote box so others can see what I’m talking about.

The above text in blue is not a link it is just made to look that way.

8

Yeah, they talk a lot about ‘the algorithm’, but they’re pretty tight-lipped about how it works.

9

To play troll’s advocate for a moment, is it possible that your videos really do suck?

10

There are levels? :eek:

No one ever looks at my videos.

Ducking out now.

11

If they did, it’s still odd that 95 percent of the total dislikes are given in the first 24 hours, and then mostly in the first hour.

12

Yeah, it’s pretty cool actually - based on the number of subscribers and tied into the silver and diamond play awards you might have seen YouTubers talking about - details here: https://www.youtube.com/yt/creators/benefit-levels.html?noapp=1

When I got past 10k subscribers, a guy from YouTube started contacting me and offering free advice on how to build my channel, improve my content and subscriber retention, etc - it was all good stuff.

I get invites to producer events at YouTube spaces - I went to the one in London a couple of months back - and it turns out that I can just book studios, camera, sound and lighting kit, production editing suites, etc for free.