Friday, February 11, 2011

Youtube

As one of the most popular websites, Youtube has always been serving as the main Internet platform in video uploading and broadcasting in most countries. In other context, it is the website where most of the Internet users are searching for audio-visual information. The user community has been growing steadily after several implementations of introducing a dynamic, user friendly, interactive interface. At the same time, the users can easily stay connected with video producers via subscriptions. Although Youtube is not a social network like Facebook, it is still obliged to take care of this large community and control the privacy, harmony and benefits of the community.

I don't know if I'm an active user of Youtube. I watched a lot of videos. I have an account but I rarely subscribe to any channels or providing feedbacks via leaving comment. At the same time, I don't bother to like or dislike a video at all. However I do observe how the community has been abusing their right regarding their freedom of speech. It is fascinating yet surprising to notice how easily human beings can be so juvenile, ignorant and abusive when they are granted the anonymity. And here comes the main point of this post. I would like to leave my opinions here concerning the way Youtube has been changing its feedback-providing system from what I slightly observed.

Once upon a time, Youtube was practicing a rating system which people normally called "five-star rating system". For example, if there were two groups of similar number of users rated 3 stars and 4 stars each, an average rating of 3.5 stars would be shown below the video. After that, this rating system was changed to what I called "bar rating system". Users were allowed to like or dislike a video without being given a scale to rate a video. The numbers of likes and dislikes were accumulated and displayed by two bars of green and red to show the video viewers a comparison. Now, Youtube has altered the "bar rating system". Only numbers of likes and dislikes are shown instead.

Before continue elaborating on my point of views, I would really like to determine the actual purpose of implementing a rating system. Groups of users can be differentiated in term of their interest, video making experience and so on. Some users would like to know how good their videos are made from the ratings given, while some of them are not interested to know the rating because they just share videos to close friends or relatives without editing. I don't know if we can completely disable all the rating and feedback in a video. At the moment, I would like to link the rating system to another website, The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). The website is proving a wide information of filmed movies with great and active response from the audience community. Instead of "five stars rating system", they maintain a "ten stars rating system" to improve on the rating sensibility of how worthy a movie should be watched. A rating system like this would be very useful, beneficial and appreciated with some reviews available at the same time. Back to Youtube, not many videos are filmed or made to entertain people in the same way as those commercial movies. Sometimes I just do not feel the necessity to have a rating system on Youtube, when I have no idea which parameter I should follow to rate a video featuring some bad news. It is the team of Youtube to decide which interactive elements to be maintained or to get rid of.

The above picture illustrates a "troll face"

Have you heard of "troll"? You might have met with trolls but not knowing they are referred as trolls. In Internet slang, troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous or off-topic messages in an online community. These people are almost everywhere. The bigger the population of an online community, the bigger the population of such trolls in the community as well. Why do I mention a new term here? Well, let's conduct some trials. Try to surf on Youtube to find as many videos with a moderate number of view counts as you can. You would be able track the trace of such a trolling activity when a video has been uploaded for a period of time until a troll can actually reach the site. And here comes their favourite agenda - giving some ridiculously juvenile and irrelevant remarks and a dislike, or more than a dislike if the troll has multiple accounts. You can hardly find a video with no dislikes, even if it is featuring sheer artistic performance. Under the same analogy, they would rate for the lowest star if possible, when they do not feel comfortable with the growing view counts and relatively high rating stars of a video. Perhaps you don't even know "Baby" by Justin Bieber has set a new record by collecting the greatest number of dislikes - about twice the number of likes. Do people really hate him so much?

Let alone the trolls. We cannot eliminate them as they are abusing their rights legally. Any democratic platforms are bound to these trolls. But certain actions can be taken to curb their activity. I recommend Youtube to remove the dislike buttons. By the way, what is the point to have this function? If we dislike someone, we don't express ourselves by telling him "hey dude, I dislike you." Instead, a preferred action would be telling him which aspect we would hope him to reflect on or change. Dislike is way too negative. This function could potentially harbour a community accompanied with hatred, jealousy and discouraging environment. I would agree to preserve the dislike button if it can bring a constructive means even without the presence of trolls. If you are thinking that you want to preserve the dislike button because you can take a look at its number while deciding if you want to spend your time watching the video, why don't you take a look at the numbers of view counts and likes, since trolling might give you a false feedback, assuming trolling does not target its positive feedback? In my humble opinion, the percentage of people who liked a video is enough for us to decide if a video should be watched. Thus, my another recommendation for Youtube would be showing the percentage, for instance, 25 out of 1000 people who watched the video have liked the video, thus giving a percentage of 2.5%.

It would not be wise to disable all comments in all videos due to trolling as we still need some constructive responses. At least inappropriate comments can still be flagged, reported and hid from public. By the way, if a video is really featuring something we don't like, personally I don't think it is a must to express ourselves. We have to accept the fact that having the urge to express such a dislike or negative sentimental thoughts to something is actually lack of self-cultivation, and being angry is an emotional penalty to no one other than ourselves. We just need to be moderate to build a harmony community.


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