It seems somewhat fitting that I should start the contents of this Medium with a statement on one of the most noncontroversial decisions made by an Alphabet subsidiary on the past year. After all, for something to be controversial, the good people of Cambridge tell me, it has to [cause] disagreement or discussion. And there is absolutely no disagreement or discussion on the matter of removing dislikes. Alphabet is solid on its position that this is a great idea, and every YouTube user agrees that it isn’t.
In fact, in your author’s opinion, what is most surprising about this is the backlash. By this point, the nebulous cloud of tutorial watchers, gamers, mommyvloggers, edgelords, storytime animators, restaurant owners who need background music, dopamine addicts, and just normal and ordinary people who occasionally want to watch a video should expect it. At any point the slightly-less nebulous stewards of the platform will descend from their low-rise tower at 1000 Cherry Ave. (probably using the slide so as to make it look fun) And inform us that they are doing some alterations to the platform. Pray that they alter it further so as to make it better.
Of course, it would be facetious to attempt to paint them as mostly ineffective stewards of what used to be a perfect ship. There are us old enough to remember the days just after Google had acquired YouTube, realizing themselves how hard it is to compete against it even if you have all the money in the world. It was lawless and it was beautiful to see. It was also hilarious to see it flailing in an attempt to flag and remove the hordes of people uploading movies still and theaters or filming the latest episode of whatever from their TV on their potatocam and sharing for all to see. Like a Chimera, when that head got (mostly) dealt with, it got replaced by Gore videos and scantily clad thumbnails.
And so it has gone on against clickbait, abusive accounts, misinformation…all of the things that are to be expected when making a platform that will be used by the public. Their success also means that they have gotten flak from the other, better paying, side. With media conglomerates who would absolutely adore to have their promotional video recommended on every feed on every device possible. Buzz created for their product rewards small clips about it cropped and pasted by individual (and unpaid) creators, which is great news for them. YouTube also has to do their part to attract the money. That horribly-disliked Rewind that was the final nail in the coffin for the entire concept? It makes a lot more sense if you see it as an upfront for commercial advertisers.
But it was ultimately massively disliked, and tinfoil heads argue that it was this that made the powers that be start thinking about removing it. That and several high-profile marketing campaigns that got overwhelmingly negative responses (such as the one that will have the dubious honor of being disliked to death, Ubisoft’s NFT cosmetics announcement). They argue that the features removal is not to benefit you viewer (the product) or you content creator (the product) but to the Advertisers (the client) and Corporate-backed content creators (the client…and product?). After all, if they want to announce a soul powered vehicle (35–45 miles to the soul), all they need to do now is heavily moderate the comments and it will look as though everyone wishes to offer their own soul to the project. Image is substance, pretty soon the vehicle is running around, its owner only occasionally having moral qualms about running over the next pedestrian to feed it. And perhaps there is something to that. But there’s a much simpler reason for this. The one that makes me surprised about the reaction. It’s just Alphabet killing another feature, much like they have historically done.
Annotations, Community Subtitles, Reply videos (though the likely main reason for that one is stated above) The 5-star system that existed before like/dislike. And outside of Youtube, Google Wave, Inbox by Google (whose features were promised to be rolled into the main Gmail client and that some users await even until today). Google Now, Google Fiber, Cloud Print, Allo, the list goes on and on. There are websites dedicated to their trigger-happy practices. Dozens of articles suggesting that the reason Google is like this is because employees have to demonstrate that they can do “Something”. And that something has to be a lot more interesting than “maintaining a codebase/product”. That Alphabet and its divisions will kill something you like should not only not be surprising, it should be expected.
It’s just that every site that has been branded a YouTube alternative has to contend with every single one of the problems that YouTube has for a decade, with less budget, and an uphill battle against the sheer inertia of the increasingly-flawed incumbent. It’s not a problem exclusive to this particular platform, how many times have we #deletedFacebook? Or Whatsapp? Or Twitter?
So. Hope the internet archive has archived the dislikes on the videos you wanted to laugh about, don’t expect the add-ons that promise to bring the dislike ban after the APIs go down forever (or that they will not be dismissed for “inciting hate without any solid foundation” even if they are), support your YouTube creators through other platforms (encourage them to seek alternatives if they do not), and be prepared for yet another barrier in finding objectivity, making it easy for people and companies to make reality into a shouting match.
