alt Hacker NewsHere'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 • yesterday at 9:05 PM
> 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.
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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.