I hate thumbs up/down. 2 values is too little. I understand that 5 was maybe too much, but thumbs up/down systems need an explicit third "eh, it's okay" value for things I don't hate, don't want to save to my library, but I would like the system to know I have an opinion on.

I know that consuming something and not thumbing it up/down sort-of does that, but it's a vague enough signal (that could also mean "not close enough to keyboard / remote to thumbs up/down) that recommendation systems can't count it as an explicit choice.

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steveklabnik 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Here's the discussion from back in the day when this changed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837698

In practice, people generally didn't even vote with two options, they voted with one!

IIRC youtube did even get rid of downvotes for a while, as they were mostly used for brigading.

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PunchyHamster 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> IIRC youtube did even get rid of downvotes for a while, as they were mostly used for brigading.

No, they got rid of them most likely because advertisers complained that when they dropped some flop they got negative press from media going "lmao 90% dislike rate on new trailer of <X>".

Stuff disliked to oblivion was either just straight out bad, wrong (in case of just bad tutorials/info) and brigading was very tiny percentage of it.

	▲	rednafi 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Oh, didn't they remove the dislike count after people absolutely annihilated one of their yearly rewind with dislikes?
	▲	UltraSane 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		YouTube never got rid of downvotes they just hid the count. Channel admins can still see it and it still affects the algorithm

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giobox 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Youtube always kept downvotes and the 'dislike' button, the change (which still applies today) was that they stopped displaying the downvote count to users - the button never went away though.

Visit a youtube video today, you can still upvote and downvote with the exact same thumbs up or down, the site however only displays to you the count of upvotes. The channel owners/admins can still see the downvote count and the downvotes presumably still inform YouTube's algorithms.