I don't agree. Many quality videos have low-no view counts because they are not promoted in any way or the persons making the video don't know how to do self-promotion. Downvotes are a signal about the percentage of people who watched something and disliked it, albeit an unreliable signal that can be gamed.
If it were just about view counts, th rational thing would be to get rid of upvotes as well and just let people rely on view and subscription #s and/or read the comments. As it is this will just lead to people putting thumb-down emoji in comments or flagging posts on other platforms that contain YouTube links.
>Downvotes are a signal about the percentage of people who watched something and disliked it, albeit an unreliable signal that can be gamed.
I guess I just don't believe this. There's no gaming required. Youtube can and does adjust that number at will. It's not indicative of anything to me, anymore than a positive product review on Amazon is indicative of anything to me. Follower counts mean nothing. Likes mean nothing. I think most of us who write code here know the game is rigged in every way imaginable. Even if view counts went up, I wouldn't assume Biden is suddenly popular. I would simply assume Youtube decided to monetize the view count by selling them to creators for perceived clout or someone else did with bots, and I would probably be right. The angry voices on Twitter are there because that's Jack Dorsey's personal opinions and he amplifies them. If Jack was a Republican, it would be a non-stop Bible thump instead.
None of it is real to me. It's all imaginary numbers and GPT generated text blocks with thispersondoesnotexist.com profile pictures. I mean, it wasn't even a week ago where the media is running video with Biden's hand passing through reporter's microphones as he answered questions. Almost everything online and in the media is faked now.
>I mean, it wasn't even a week ago where the media is running video with Biden's hand passing through reporter's microphones as he answered questions. Almost everything online and in the media is faked now.
It was a large and fuzzy microphone down and to his right.
And I'm not pointing this out in an "Ackshually..." way. You're right about manipulation of truth in media. The problem is, even the people who think they understand that and see through it are being manipulated.
I've found the best way to spot propaganda around an incident is by asking, "What's the most boring explanation?" That's usually the truth.
>The problem is, even the people who think they understand that and see through it are being manipulated.
Whether he's CGI Joe or not is just splitting hairs over the level of fake. The boring explanation is that the entire interaction was fake. The press had prepared questions that Biden knew. Biden had prepared answers the press knew. They're all just reading lines from a script. They might have even done more than one take to get it right. It is such a boring explanation that if I had incontrovertible proof of that being the case, the responses to it here would be something like, "Well of course it's fake! You really believed it was authentic? This is well documented in many presidencies. Look at FDR for example. Nothing burger."
An even simpler explanation is that Biden is reasonably knowledgeable and competent, based on his extensive experience. He seems to me like an intelligent person who is comfortable with technicalities but awkward at banter and small talk.
I can't tell whether you're motivated by skepticism of Biden or politics in general, but you seem irrationally fixated on this, and we're now far away from talking about Youtube.
I don't agree. Many quality videos have low-no view counts because they are not promoted in any way or the persons making the video don't know how to do self-promotion. Downvotes are a signal about the percentage of people who watched something and disliked it, albeit an unreliable signal that can be gamed.
If it were just about view counts, th rational thing would be to get rid of upvotes as well and just let people rely on view and subscription #s and/or read the comments. As it is this will just lead to people putting thumb-down emoji in comments or flagging posts on other platforms that contain YouTube links.