There's a war on negative feedback.
It's not good for business.
Now be happy.
There's a war on negative feedback.
It's not good for business.
Now be happy.
The thing is, people themselves outside of business motives hate negativity.
People regularly get angry at others for bringing up criticisms of everything from foods to their favourite media products.
Even decades ago they'd give them names like negative Nancy, and within social settings the worst people often can win by weaponizing civility to quell legitimate backlash against immoral actions.
I mean, fuck, think about how many stories you've heard of people who have been the victims of sexual assault, who get told by normal people to shut up and whose experiences were diminished because it harshed other peoples mellow?
People suck, and one of the biggest reasons people suck, is they would prefer a harmful peaceful positivity than a tumultuous improvement causing negativity.
I think these companies are hooking into these human flaws in ways that hurt us, and benefit them with information asymmetry.
I don't think we can properly fix these flaws without somehow getting normal people to acknowledge that negativity is not just good, but vitally important.
people themselves outside of business motives hate negativity.
I think these companies are hooking into these human flaws in ways that hurt us, and benefit them with information asymmetry.
Oh, companies know. Social media have definitive data that show most users engage on anger. That's why it's in their core interest to promote rage baits and disinformation. More engagements means more traffic. More traffic means more advertisers. More advertisers means more revenues.
Hell, even before social media, news tends to report more on negative news than positive ones. Because bad news is tantamount to hearing gossips, and we all love gossips. I know many of us will say bad news makes us sad, and yet we still tune in to any news.
People regularly get angry at others for bringing up criticisms of everything from foods to their favourite media products.
Kind of on a tangent, I notice this as well that some people seem more predisposed to negative thinking. I think it's just hardwired into them. Although, I have to say, in my field of work, negative thinkers tend to have good attention to detail. Being suspicious and mindful all the time, they will check every nooks and crannies, and examining and scanning for almost everything. It is a good trait to a limited degree, but it could impair relationships both at work and outside, if one is too suspicious and distrustful of everyone.
It's so dumb. Just let people rate it with the five stars. They're so gun-ho with the algorithm let it do its job.
They don't want you knowing what other people think of the video. It's just about what you think of the video. Much easier to have an algorithmically perfect echo chamber if everyone is privately rating things and has no idea what others think about them.
Wouldn't the simplest solution be to only expose the other ratings after you rate?
Well it isn't beneficial for the company because people might realize they hold unpopular opinions and the company wants to be able to control the people's opinions regardless of popularity, that way they can keep users on the site engaging with that content for longer.
The thumbs up/thumbs down thing was fine too.
It's all bots anyway
I'm pretty sure that 99% of the time 1 and 5 stars options were used, so like/dislike is enough. There isn't much point in including a "I have no strong feelings one way or another" button.
The final stage is not caring at all what you think user. Only consume.

Great movie btw. But this just gave me the perfect idea for an ad blocker, that would replace all the ads with these type of signs.
Someone smarter than, get on it!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Adblock/comments/70xaqa/a_they_live_adblocker_details_in_comments/
This uses Catblock with a custom image set, but Catblock hasn't been updated in 6 years, so I don't know how well it still works. Anyway, if Catblock won't work, we have to find a blocker that allows for some customization and then fit those "They Live" images in.
(I'm trying to get Catblock to work, but somehow I can't find any pages that even load ads? I think the pihole is blocking the scripts that would load the ads.)
what movie?
They Live (1988)
My favorite is Amazon streaming that has a "rating for your taste out of 5 stars", but they don't want it to point out that most of their catalog is shit, so everything from Shawshank Redemption to Movie 43 are "4.5 stars for you"
The stars used to tell the company if you thought the video quality was good.
The stars now tell the company how to tailor a version of reality specifically to what you want to see and feel.
“Amy Schumer isn’t hated by Netflix users. It’s the star system that’s wrong. “
Oh man, I remember those days when the stars actually meant something! Now they're just trying to push their own agenda on us.
Next step: you must have a camera enabed to use YouTube so we can directly monitor your facial expressions with AI✨ and save you precious rating time to recommend you better videos!
Then you start watching mostly your subscription list and they get angry their fancy algorithm isn't working.
I'm on the fence with the thumbs vs stars. On one hand, a boolean is probably better than an integer for a number of reasons. Another thing to consider is that the five star system can be gamed by only giving 0 or 5 depending on if you believe the content deserves a higher or lower average, meaning people who figure that out have more voting power... which is... better?
Doesn't this apply only if you are looking at mean average exclusively? There are loads of other metrics you can look at based on scalar ratings.
All I want to say is:
I rarely like any video so much that I want to give it a solid 👍
Its also pretty rare for 👎
But I'll rate stuff on a scale of ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ every day of the week.
Also, hiding 👎 is completely brain-dead stupid.
Also, hiding 👎 is completely brain-dead stupid.
I think, it depends on the platform. The reason why many platform don't show them is the constant negativity simply caused by different opinions.
40 people agree with your post, 60 don't agree... I call that pluralism. But showing a -20 for example could motivate the person to delete their post, which leads to echo chambers.
My Lemmy instance does not show any downvotes by the way and I like it. If one disagrees with me, they can leave a comment.
Funny enough the dislike button is there but hidden. You can get extensions that show the thumbs down button and how many clicked it.
I've wondered about those. I always assumed they'd just show the down votes by others with the same extension.
Yes but extrapolated
In my experience, the extension is INCREDIBLY good. Whenever I get a shady video, it has dislikes, and normal videos almost never have any significant amount of dislikes. They're as accurate as they can be but it's more than enough to be useful.
The dislike button would be a godsend with all this ai slop.
It is. Tho thankfully AI never makes it's way into my feed.
I can confirm. Really useful, I almost forgot it's suppose to be hiden.
Apparently the extensions aren't reliable at all. I saw a video at one point where a guy went over why you cannot trust the extensions and how the numbers are pure fiction, but I forget the exact reasons. I think one example was that the same video would have vastly differnet numbers of down votes depending on the person with the extension. Something something confirmation bias.
For me, it doesn't really matter. I still down vote when I dislike a video. They may not count my vote at all, but I still do it out of stubbornness.
They actually do count it but it's only visible to the uploader
Also, from what I understand about specifically ReturnYoutubeDislikes it counts dislikes FROM people using the extension and uses that to extrapolate from the visible like count. I haven't seen the video though so it's definitely possible that's all bunk
Corporation does well: brags about all the statistics Corporation does poorly: hides all the statistics and asks customers to trust it that it's doing well
Classic corporate transparency. When a filthy corpo says they're dedicated to something, they're usually dedicated to the opposite.
TBH, people often dislike bombed videos some pundit "disproved" it for them.
They just hiding performance metrics because they know it affects viewing habits, right?
The like/dislike system is better than stars IMO.
I disagree. There are a lot of videos that I find just "meh". I might not regret watching them, but wouldn't recommend them nor watch again.
Then there is content which I find pretty good/bad but not extremely good or bad. For such cases a more nuanced scale is better.
For other users this might be less informative, since they will be seeing just the average anyway and can therefore only determine general perception; except if the distribution is also made available.
But for a personalized recommendation system I think a nuanced scale can work better.
From a content creators perspective one can also evaluate better whether there is room for improvement and by "how much", in case one is interested in such.
What about a trinary system? Like, dislike, and meh?
Quaternary Like, dislike, meh, "what in tarnation?"
I like the quinternary system like a strong dislike, a dislike, a meh, a like, a love.
Every video that I ever saw with a like:dislike ratio like the one in frame 2 was being brigaded for reasons unrelated to video quality.
When Blizzard said "Do You Guys Not Have Phones?" the problem was obviously not the quality of the video presented, it was the topic at hand and made perfect sense to have all the dislikes. It makes no sense to take that away from users.
5 star rating are actually 4 star ratings with a free 20% boost.
Hate it. Gave my employer a bad review, 1-2 stars in most categories, and the average was still a 3.7?? I have to adjust my intuition when reading star reviews. Apparently 3.5 is bottom of the barrel.
The good news is: that reviews wasn’t really accurate.
The bad news is: that review wasn’t really anonymous.
My last day is Friday. :)
I've tried my best during the last seven years to make a change, both by lobbying upper management and introducing change in my team. Nothing stuck, nobody besides my team mates cared. So I hope it's not really anonymous. I'm clinging to the illusion they'll somehow take it to heart now that it's public, for the betterment of the team mates I leave behind.
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment