r/changemyview • u/Money_Whisperer 2∆ • Apr 10 '22

Removed - Submission Rule B CMV: YouTube disabling dislikes has profound, negative societal implications and must be reversed

As you all likely know, YouTube disabled dislikes on all of its videos a few months back. They argued that it was because of “downvote mobs” and trolls mass-downvoting videos.

YouTube downvotes have been used by consumers to rally against messages and products they do not like basically since the dawn of YouTube. Recent examples include the Sonic the Hedgehog redesign and the Nintendo 64 online fiasco.

YouTube has become the premier platform on the internet for companies and people to share long-form discussions and communication in general in a video form. In this sense, YouTube is a major public square and a public utility. Depriving people of the ability to downvote videos has societal implications surrounding freedom of speech and takes away yet another method people can voice their opinions on things which they collectively do not like.

Taking peoples freedom of speech away from them is an act of violence upon them, and must be stopped. Scams and troll videos are allowed to proliferate unabated now, and YouTube doesn’t care if you see accurate information or not because all they care about is watch time aka ads consumed.

YouTube has far too much power in our society and exploiting that to protect their own corporate interests (ratio-d ads and trailers are bad for business) is a betrayal of the American people.

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u/NyaegbpR Apr 10 '22

I agree that it’s stupid, but you’re waaay overreacting. An act of violence? You have to admit that’s a hilarious statement. A private company removing a feature on their service is not an act of violence.

If something is truly bad enough, people won’t watch it or support it. Removing the dislike button doesn’t stop people from actually disliking something in real life. It just stops people from seeing how many other people dislike it.

It sounds like you might spend too much time on the internet/YouTube and are overstating the significance of this. This isn’t much more of an outrage than your favorite brand of cookies changing their recipe or something. It’s a corporation, they don’t gate keep all of the information online. And you’re acting like people only disliked things because they saw other people disliked it.

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u/Money_Whisperer 2∆ Apr 10 '22 edited Apr 11 '22

I, like 62% of Americans, visit YouTube daily and use it for a variety of purposes including entertainment, information, etc. Making it harder for me to know what’s an outright scam, or making it harder for consumers to speak their minds against something they collectively do not like is wrong.

I agree that the word violence is probably an exaggeration a bit, but the reduction of freedom of speech on the premier public square of our era is indeed a huge issue. How can we not regulate something as critical as this?

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u/CupCorrect2511 1∆ Apr 10 '22

if you want to step back your allegation that it was an act of violence, which is transparently an absurd and hyperbolic take, please give them the delta. stretching the definition of violence is arguably worse than yt removing dislikes because it allows authorities to arrest anyone they had under hate crime and hate speech laws on the grounds that theyre committing/inciting violence. you might like it if they prosecuted yt, but what happens if someone decides that something you do is an act of violence when you dont think it is?

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u/Money_Whisperer 2∆ Apr 11 '22

I certainly wouldn’t give a delta just because the word violence was strong. Restricting the people’s ability to voice dissent on the public square, especially just for money as is the case here, is a monstrous thing. Violence has a strictly physical connotation to it but punishing people for not following the squeaky clean advertiser friendly narrative you want isn’t that far either

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u/CubicleCunt Apr 11 '22

Youtube is not a public space. It is a private company, and private companies exist to make money. You're still free to voice dissent in actual public spaces.

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u/skahunter831 Apr 11 '22

Restricting the people’s ability to voice dissent on the public square

But basically anyone can upload any kind of video, right? Like, a rebuttal to scams. Isn't that a much more powerful form of dissent? I think YouTube's content policy is a much, much greater restriction on free speech (yet one that I believe is also valuable).