Do what I do, stop liking the videos. If they won’t count the downvotes, don’t contribute to the upvotes.

For a long time after they removed the 5 star system, if you subscribed to a channel via RSS, it would show you the like/dislike data for videos as a 5 star rating. You can't see it easily any more but I suspect, due to tech debt, youtube's internals are still using the 5 star rating.

The biggest loss here was the neutral Futurama video being unable to be balanced

Unupvote is doubleplus ungood.

The way short format works is that it doesn‘t need a downvote button to rope you in and keep you scrolling. Avoid it like the plague.

Toxic positivity. I'm not a fan of "your opinion doesn't count unless you agree with me" and this is just a social media platform saying the same thing. But I'm grateful for the Return YouTube Dislike browser plug-in/add-on so that you can have some point of reference among perspectives outside one's own. If a video has 300 likes, you might think it's a fine video and you'll watch it thinking "wow 300 people endorsed this". If a video has 300 likes and 500 dislikes, though, you at least KNOW "oh that's at least one red flag. I shall invest more effort than usual into being skeptical and mindful, and more effort into thinking critically as well, as I watch this."

If i see a ton of dislikes on a video whose topic is one of the new reich's designated scapegoats, the dislike count may in fact be a factor that INCREASES my favorability toward it, because chuds brigading something means it upsets them.

The humans can't downvote the AI slop videos? 🤔

Why are you crosspost karma farming, it's lemmy karma doesn't matter

They only want downvotes in specific situations.

To help them tune things.

They don't generally want downvotes, because that breaks the way they want suggestability to work.

Its much harder for the algo to do its job when it tries to reverse engineer 'why did this person downvote this?'

But when it specifically wants to ask you that, it will.

Its job is to serve you an endless feed of 'close enough'. Not an endless feed of 'hey i actually like this'.

YouTube could only envy Pornhub.

I remember Reddit used to have the ability to show both upvote and downvotes. I miss that feature.

The decision to kill the dislike button is very much strictly anti consumer and marks the beginning of the enshitification of youtube, especially the enshitification of the comment section. It use to be that if someone had the most dogshit opinion, they would be disliked into oblivion and nobody would see it. Now even the worst opinions imaginable will be pushed to the top if it can find 100 like minded mouth breathers, effectively normalizing it in the eyes of the average viewer. Same goes for whole videos too. I desperately wish we would come up with a real federated alternative to it, because right now its actively contributing to the decline of humanity.

Any service only cares about engagement so the dislike was never really useful because the core of engagement is rage bait. The only way to truly downvote content is to not engage with it whatsoever. Ex. The only way to dislike Instagram is to not use the platform

When you remove the value of dislikes, it also removes the value of likes to users.

https://returnyoutubedislike.com/

Money... It looks better not to show dislikes and it puts users into echo chamber.

Does anyone know is there a reason why they got rid of dislike? I'd have thought they'd want it to help improve recommendations?

Luckily I have “Return YouTube Dislike” on my modded YouTube client

Aside from complaining, make sure to do something about it. Otherwise there's no point.

1. Absolutely use uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock on all devices you watch youtube on.
2. There's a Return Youtube Dislike extension you can use. Bonus: you can use data from it to shame various' companies videos, which is what youtube primarily wanted to avoid by removing dislikes.
3. For creators mostly - there are other video-sharing websites you can post your content on (or even easily mirror your youtube uploads). Make sure to upload somewhere else too, so that more people can leave youtube forever.

Do whatever you can to harm youtube (or Google more broadly), as well as support alternatives. Memes and complaining by themselves are pointless, and solve zero issues.

I witnessed it appear and then disappear, a strange feeling indeed.

Use Return of ytDislike

Name something more useless than the dislike button in comments