Yup, same here for home improvement or car repair. And I’ve watched…well, I won’t say thousands, but I’ll say hundreds and hundreds and hundreds…of such videos.
The real test for me has been that sometimes I can only find one or two videos on something I’m trying to do, and have ended up watching downvoted videos that sucked. [I could give you a whole laundry list of what causes a repair video to be downvoted, but big ones are skipping steps , poor camera angles, and poor audio]
I see that a lot. I’ve seen a couple dislikes pop up within minutes of posting. It’s like the same people just feel it’s necessary to dislike all of the channels content.
YouTube is a great way to observe human behavior. A good example is a missing shot in the video edit. A lawn mower repair fails to show a head bolt being tightened and torqued. People lose their minds in the comments. 
They forget they’re seeing a 20 min edit from 3 hours of filming.
Then the same people will pop up for weeks complaining in the comments that this bolt wasn’t tightened or this part wasn’t cleaned before assembly. I assume they also press the dislike button.
I always enjoyed the comments that said something like, say on a Star Trek video, “37 Klingons disliked this video”.
Eh, it’s easy to make fun of an untightened bolt, but there are worse examples. I remember trying to repair an older Kohler lawnmower engine that had a twisty z-shaped linkage that had to be negotiated. After saying “I’ve never seen that, I’ll have to revisit the manual” and wandering away, and eventually back [I didn’t ding him for that, it certainly created narrative tension], he didn’t show himself putting all the pieces back together, saying “it’s basically the reverse of taking it apart”, and guess where I got stuck? [it did work by bending one of the pieces a bit, which may have been the less elegant solution]
I get the joke, but they know because multiple high rep content producers have used their contacts to tell them why this doesn’t make sense.
I don’t find the Rewind issue to make a lot of sense, because why would YouTube care if people dislike them? They still get views, and that’s what matters. Surely they wouldn’t make a massive change just to avoid their feelings being hurt. Surely the reason would be monetary, like advertisers not liking being associated with publicly disliked videos, or content producers threatening them.
Youtube made a public blog post announcing the change and their reasoning for it:
Basically: the dislike button was used by (organized?) groups attempting to focus a storm of negative attention on a particular video or creator, and making the “score” private discouraged this behavior.
According to Youtube, it’s the opposite.
I’m in favor of it bc most of the time it’s just people being jerks.
That said, I’m gonna miss judging cooking videos the same way @pulykamell does.
I guess I’m just looking at the wrong videos, but I overwhelmingly do not see a huge dislike campaign against content providers. Yes, like I said, you are going to get – no matter what video or how wholesome or uplifting it is – a handful of token dislikes. We see this with Yelp, as well. Disregard that bullshit. Once it reaches a critical level – for me it’s somewhere around 10-25% as I mentioned before, and more towards the 10% level – it’s meaningful in all the videos I watch except those dealing with controversial and usually political subjects. Then it’s a free-for-all. For me, with Yelp, that level is around 4.0 stars, but I’ll generally read up on the comments down to 3.5 stars before dismissing a place.
Oh, I am fully aware of their claimed rationale. I just don’t give it any weight. I’ve not seen a single creator support this, let alone any users. If there was this massive outcry of small creators, you’d think you’d have seen it, or at least see a lot of people saying “thank you” after the change was made.
Plus, if this was this massive problem that needed to be fixed, it would be well known. Instead, while you may hear of people getting a lot of shitty comments, you never hear about them being downvote bombed. The videos who get that treatment tend to be the COVID-19 related videos, along with the poor videos YouTube themselves create (including on a new smalelr channel for Shorts). Not small creators.
Plus YouTube has not shown any care about small creators for over a decade now. They don’t make them money. In fact, YouTube made sure they can’t make money, because advertisers are more important to them. Without some sort of massive outcry that got public attention, I don’t buy for a second that they would make such a change.
One possibility is that someone high up made a YouTube account and had this happen to them, or had a friend who had the same thing. Then they set out to “fix” the problem. Of course the data will say that smaller creators get more downvotes proportionally. The larger creators will have learned what people like. Plus a lot of the disinformation videos are hosted on smaller channels—the ones that are downvoted legitimately.
That last part—looking for statistics to back up what they wanted to do—is something I believe happened. But making a change based on the feelings of employees or their friends? I’d hope that wouldn’t happen. It’s make much more sense if they were being influenced by those making them money—especially since they seem to be completely ignoring the outcry that shows their initial logic to be false. Downvotes are not primarily used in downvote bomb campaigns, and their display has a legitimate use.
If YouTube is going to screw the many for the few, it makes more sense for those to be the few with money.
I assume that that’s just because any time something changes, people always complain loudly about it, but generally it ends up being minor at best. Status quo bias is very strong.
For what it’s worth, I’m a user who thinks that Youtube’s stated reasoning makes sense, and that this is probably a positive change overall. Now you’ve seen one 
.
I’m struggling to think why any creator would be opposed to this? Can you point me to a public statement from a video creator who thinks this is bad? I can see why users who want to use the dislike count to calibrate their understanding of the value of a video would be inconvenienced.
I expect that it was not currently a massive problem, but that it was an increasing problem. Someone is looking carefully at youtube analytics and sees that “dislike swarming” is negatively impacting new small channels (which in the long run will prevent them from going into big strong revenue streams for Youtube) and that the “dislike” signal is becoming less useful for recommendations because it’s being gamed rather than indicating an organic “I didn’t like this particular video”.
I don’t think any of that would be obvious or well-known to people who don’t have access to internal Youtube data.
ETA: There is a long history of various internet sites making a “dislike” either hidden, harder to do, or just removing it entirely, because they found it was used punitively and was a bad signal of anything. Youtube’s claimed experimental results are consistent with these, and with a general model of human behavior that we are petty little creatures who, given any mechanism to punish those we don’t care for, will use it to excess.
I don’t know all that much about YouTube, but isn’t that kind of the point? If a video gets targeted for unfair dislikes, you are less likely to see it because it was targeted for dislikes.
I suppose that is the case, but when I search for specific videos while researching, say, a recipe, it seems I get the good, the bad, the ugly. When there’s a lot of dislikes, it’s because it’s a shitty recipe and The Algorithm doesn’t seem hell bent on keeping it from me. One of the things I hate about the results I get from a Youtube search is even before now, it would not show you likes or dislikes – you had to click through to the video to see those numbers, which was often a waste of my time.
For example, I just now searched “posole recipe” and on my first page of results is a recipe that has 600 likes to 100 dislikes, which is a warning sign to me. Sure enough, there are shortcuts and the such I would not take in the recipe, and the comments with people who have tried it and who know what posole is say that the shortcut doesn’t work and tastes “off.” So Youtube doesn’t seem to be hiding this content from me.
I do this when people claim to have full wrestling matches, only it turns out to be something from WWE 2K.
I get that you think this is personal, but it’s not. It’s just years and years of seeing content of all types disliked for various flavors of nonsense, without comment by the scads of people that have suddenly emerged to announce how important the data was. It’s like that person sleeping in front of the tv set who wakes when you change the channel, saying “Hey, I was watching that!”
Even if you accept YouTube’s argument and believe it’ll have the intended effect, it is at best benefitting creators at the expense of everyone else.
Frankly, I simply don’t care if some creators get brigaded with downvotes. Sucks to be them, but the problem I face is that the vast majority of YouTube is absolute garbage and the tools for avoiding the garbage were already pretty minimal. It’s getting to the point where I don’t consider any material except from known good creators.
The dislikes were a means of avoiding some of the very worst trash–useless clickbait, autogenerated videos, robotic narration, etc. Imperfect, but better than nothing. It would bother me less if YouTube offered some other, better means of filtering good from bad.
Eliminating bad videos is much more important to me than ensuring every good video is represented. And yes, this is just my view as someone who largely consumes YouTube content. My point here is that this is a deliberate move to make the platform less useful for consumers in order to help some (subset of) creators.
You quoted @Baal_Houtham question without answering it. I thought it was a good question and would like to see your answer to it, if you have one.
I’ve heard it discussed during a gaming stream by multiple content providers. One of them noted that what happens now if you click “dislike” is that you won’t be shown that video anymore. She said it messes up things like playlists. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but that’s a creator with a gaming channel who thought it was bad.
I address that in the first sentence you quoted. BH’s question is based on an assumption. I’ve got no dog in the Dislike button fight, no tale of tragic woe or outsized injustice that must be avenged using Grabthar’s hammer.
Is there any way to compare number of views with likes? Seems like that might be a helpful stat.
I can see why that’s a change in behavior that would bother some people (because status quo bias). But that seems like what I’d want a dislike button to do? If I didn’t like it, why would I want to watch it again?
Seems like it’s also an orthogonal change to the hiding of dislikes.