most of the votes (up and down) don't come from real people and do not represent real users' opinions and are casted for the most stupid reasons, like in DIY video example I am friend with the author or am friend of a competitor.
there is nothing more hostile to users than the fake information YouTube is providing
I would go as far as to remove the votes completely and sort the videos randomly
It's the same old story of HN downvotes
They happen randomly, sometimes users are targeted by bots that downvote everything they write and, most of all, if there is no way to know who downvoted you, the only way to survive it is to make a new account, because "moderators" don't care, their job is not to protect users, but to protect their employer.
Same goes for YouTube they are an ads company disguised as a UGC platform.
Advertisers and Premium subscribers are the real users.
as a proof of what I've written on the parent comment, I made the usual mistake yesterday: I commented on a thread about bitcoins writing that no, btc won't save the World and no, very few people got rich, btc are not making the general population rich.
Of course I received a couple downvotes, that rippled over my previous comments on completely unrelated topics, like this one, just because my other comments where more than 24 hours old and they couldn't be downvoted as per HN rules (the parent comment was already 15 hours old when received the only downvote - meaning nobody cared for it - at the same time of the btc thread that was fresh).
> You cannot downvote comments which are direct replies to your own comment, and you cannot downvote 24 hours after the original comment was made.
If downvotes where ided, it would be obvious that the downvotes on the comments on this thread were just retaliation from the frustrated owners of bitcoins whose propaganda was being questioned.
The id doesn't have to be the real useranme, it could be a random id that identifies a user for a brief period of time (48 hours) so that other users could report the issue, knowing that it's not their paranoia, but a real thing.
there is nothing more hostile to users than the fake information YouTube is providing
I would go as far as to remove the votes completely and sort the videos randomly
It's the same old story of HN downvotes
They happen randomly, sometimes users are targeted by bots that downvote everything they write and, most of all, if there is no way to know who downvoted you, the only way to survive it is to make a new account, because "moderators" don't care, their job is not to protect users, but to protect their employer.
Same goes for YouTube they are an ads company disguised as a UGC platform.
Advertisers and Premium subscribers are the real users.
Wanna really be user-friendly?
Show voters' ids!
We all know it will never happen.