This is incorrect; Reddit still shows downvotes, as well as upvote/downvote ratio, even if you're on the "new" Reddit.

If you're on the old Reddit, some subreddits used CSS to hide the downvote button, which I think is dumb, but you can easily get around that by going to the new Reddit long enough to downvote.

You don't even need to suffer through "new Reddit" long enough to hit the downvote - you can just disable custom CSS on old Reddit (to be clear this is an account-level setting on Reddit, not some browser hack you need to do yourself).

On posts, but not on comments.

You can't see the ratio, but if a comment has a negative score you'll see it, which I would count as downvotes being "visible" -- certainly better than YouTube's terrible choice here. Downvotes are also surfaced when the ratio is ~50% with a "controversial" marker.

I don't believe reddits obfuscation efforts did anything but significantly hamper spammers who relied on accurate counting to be able to determine when their spam accounts were shadowbanned and the reach they had.

Reddit has always had a significant problem with downvote meaning "disagree" or "dislike", which according to redditquette is incorrect usage. In practice, the downvote is about enforcing groupthink on reddit and enforcing subreddit culture, and it is just as powerful today as it has ever been. Sort by "controversial" and you'll see.

I'm confused, as I see downvotes on other user's comments on Reddit. Did they walk back that move?

The total upvotes and downvotes used to be explicit, so you'd see (+100, -15). They've only shown an aggregated score for a while now.

> If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be.

There are many ways of doing so, with their own pros, cons, and time requirements. At best you're losing a relatively low quality way of quickly filtering out some videos.

> It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others.

You seem to want it both ways. It is judging videos by this ratio that allows the harassment to have an effect.

There may also be an emotional component to it; a private downvote likely stings a lot less than a public one. It prevents people from piling on or joining in the harassment. And it can allow YouTube to shadowban harassing accounts.

For the people who could actually affect change, it hides nothing. YouTube and the creator both get to see the numbers, and in extreme cases, they'd be available for law enforcement.

> The beginning of the end of being able to trust YouTube stats (as if that wasn't already an issue).

These stats were never trustworthy for viewers.

>If you can't see downvotes on content, there is no way of determining how misleading the content may be.

Why are dislike counts more credible than like counts?

>It also disguises cases where a creator may be getting harassed or bullied by others.

How would you discern that from a creator producing genuinely disliked content? And, what difference would it make if you could? Genuinely asking.

> Why are dislike counts more credible than like counts?

Nobody said they are. I'd be about as upset if like counts went away but dislike counts remained. The point is having both counts gives you a very useful signal.

>I'd be about as upset if like counts went away but dislike counts remained.

Interesting thought: why do you never just see a dislike button anywhere?

>The point is having both counts gives you a very useful signal.

No. The point is that you really don't know how useful the signal is.

Dislike buttons actively encourage bad behavior, so can create skew in the signal. That's intuitive, and also backed up by YouTube's research; hence the change here.

misleading/bad content can get up-votes too though

The key is the ratio between the votes.

5:1 upvotes to downvotes is a lot better than 25:21

Even with the same ratio, 5:1 can still be considered better than 50:10 because the confidence is lower and the true value could still be better: http://simplemlhacks.blogspot.com/2013/04/reddits-best-comme...

That might tell you something, but it’s not always clear what. Could be brigading, sock-puppets, tribalism, or lots of other causes.

In the end, pretty much all such voting mechanisms are flawed in some way or another. More interesting are the comments left by known experts in the field.

>pretty much all such voting mechanisms are flawed in some way or another. More interesting are the comments left by known experts in the field.

Agree with this. I think downvoting is net-negative, as it encourages bad actors. Let relative upvotes determine quality. For disagreement, use comments. For content that violates terms or is misleading, etc, use flagging.