First time post, but been a frequent lurker during/after the joke of an election. Wanted to share what I found out after seeing people reporting suspicious changes in dislikes on China Joes recent WH videos on YouTube. So I setup a JSON capture of the stats on one of the latest WH videos tonight every 60 seconds and it ran for a little over 4 and a half hours.

What I discovered is the Dislikes increased pretty consistently and periodically there would be small/normal negative changes in dislikes.

But several times during this period the dislikes would massively reset several times. My best guess is YT is using some algorithm to adjust dislikes to keep video from dropping too far. So the end result after this time the UI only shows a change of 1058 new dislikes but in actuality the dislikes were 5x that amount if YT had not artificially "adjusted" them.

New Views: 43706

New Likes: 221

New Dislikes: 1058

(This is the increase of new dislikes that is shown to end-users by the Youtube UI/App)

Actual New Dislikes: 5885 (This is the actual new dislikes when ignoring the ones purged by Youtube)

Total Capture Time 4:35:00

Source video link "President Biden Delivers Remarks and Signs Executive Orders" Jan 21, 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8kudE06p08

Spreadsheet of the findings https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1prYGIZHH6j4SSTtrxonyCVJPzcHtw_yMtUQJG-Z8i_4/edit?usp=sharing

RAW data (at 60 second intervals) https://pastebin.com/CPxmqVuT