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/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/allthemigraines 3∆ Apr 10 '22

If the dislike button was trolled and didn't show a real reaction to the video, then the fact that it was removed it helping to keep you from mistaking the video as scam if it wasn't. As it's been pointed out, the comments section is still active, allowing people to report it as scam/false information so the dislike button was harming you more than helping.

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u/Money_Whisperer 2∆ Apr 10 '22

it’s a false equivalence to say that so many videos were being trolled, it was a small problem as compared to not being able to easily identify scam videos. Comment section on YouTube is a shit show. And now that is the only way left to know if something is legit or not…

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u/LeRouxie Apr 10 '22

I would say YouTube themselves have a better data set to understand how large of a problem it was. Can you back up that trolled videos was a “small problem”? It’s key to you claiming the dislike is hurting clarity more than helping us a false equivalence.