Guru Askew

Arbitrarily splitting the dislikes in half is a completely worthless gesture. It could be 99% of haters placing those votes. It could be 1%. You could have hit the nail on the head with your 50%. We'll never know so you should have just said "I don't buy it" and left it at that.

Having lurked on Ghostbusters forums and threads I absolutely buy that dislike-spamming has become a game. It's not even a secret.

Solid Snake

For sure. That spamming exists. It's a dumb fuck attitude and I don't think much beyond it cuz I don't care really but it's there...

Sean O'Hara

Some additional clips have been released that make the movie look a helluva lot better:

fumanstan

Even given the numbers that were quoted before for comparison from Draven, you still don't believe that there's a campaign for YouTube dislikes? I'm not sure why you still don't believe that's the case.

Mabuse

How does a "dislike campaign" work? Each user can only click dislike once.

Mike86

I don't see it that often for official videos like trailers or music videos or whatever so I find it kind of funny that there are apparently just certain videos that have these "dislike campaigns" go after them while a good chunk of YouTube videos don't have that issue.

fumanstan

Dummy accounts and large message board communities.

It's obviously a recent development given this movie (the dislikes didn't really blow up until more recently) and now Call of Duty, both are which are pretty high profile targets and properties. I think you have to be pretty naive to look at the numbers and still think it's happening naturally.

Guru Askew

You can look at the views:like/dislike ratio and see most people don't use it. That's a mathematical fact. Even this trailer with its supposedly-newsworthy amount of dislikes has (last time I checked) over 30 million views with around 1 million votes, and that's included both the likes and the dislikes.

What you get is pretty much a perfect storm. You have a large user base, many of which have undoubtedly already had a YouTube account for years that allows them to bypass the age gate, subscribe and favorite vids etc. and you have the act of liking/disliking itself taking a single click. Spread talk of manipulating dislikes somewhere like Reddit that already operates on a like/dislike system and it isn't hard to imagine a bunch of trolls disliking the video en masse.

I think it would be interesting to see how many of the dislikes are the one and only dislike in the history of the account (full disclosure: I looked at my account and the Ghostbusters 2016 trailer is my only like.) It would also be interesting to see which users consistently dislike only the popular targets to game the dislike system. But you can't.

And then there's also obviously the fact that there's nothing stopping people from creating alt accounts, voting on the devices of friends/family etc.

bluetoast

Or from creating bots to automatically dislike it on a large scale.

B5Erik

Or people really do think the trailer is shit.

I certainly do.

Mike86

Not saying it's impossible but to get a group of hundreds of thousands to sign up for multiple YouTube accounts go to the video and hit dislike seems like a stretch. Maybe some who really dislike it will but I doubt it's that many people willing to waste time just to do that.

If it starts happening more I may give it some more thought but at this point it seems like two properties that people genuinely don't like and or are tired of. There may be multiple accounts from certain users but I don't think it would be that high. Unless it's something like bluetoast mentioned and is a bot thing.

Guru Askew

I don't think anyone is making the case that the people behind the dislikes are secretly loving the trailer but clicking the dislike it for other reasons. Clearly a great deal of people sincerely dislike this project. Whether there's any validity to their dislike is questionable, to say the least.

fumanstan

I think a lot of it is the pile on mentality too, the same way you see Yelp or Amazon review bombs. I don't think it's entirely from a particular campaign or source, its just clearly not a natural behavior.

TheHive08

Because it definitely is. If the exact same jokes were in a trailer for a Sandler flick, the general reaction would be, "Welp, here comes another turd from Sandler." But because it's Ghostbusters, people expected more and are voicing their dissatisfaction louder than if it was Pixels 2. I think that was to be expected. People can blame it on sexists, or Internet assholes, or man-children, or whatever - I'm sure a portion of the bad reaction is from that crowd. But not all of it. The movie may end up an instant classic, but the trailer did it no favors at all. Just ridiculously lazy and unfunny. And Feig's thin-skinned approach to criticism makes the feelings around the project worse. Like when Trank got so defensive about Fantastic Four. THE NERDS JUST DON'T GET MY GENIUS!

Guru Askew

It's funny that people keep comparing it to Pixels when Pixels wasn't the target of a mass YouTube dislike campaign, nor did internet nerds collectively lose their shit steadily and consistently for over a year leading up to that movie.

I'm the first to admit that the first version of the trailer was weak, but I can't see how it was even half as bad as the Pixels trailer. That movie just died a quiet death.

This is an unprecedented case of immature nerd rage and at this stage it's impossible to deny that casting two physically-unattractive women is a large part of that.

TheHive08

You missed the point again. It didn't result in the same backlash because it wasn't part of a beloved property. If Pixels was called Ghostbusters 3, it would've suffered just as badly. Probably worse because Pixels was genuinely awful.

Guru Askew

Pixels was based around several beloved nerd properties. Are we talking about the same movie?

TheHive08

It was an original title that had previous video game characters in it. It wasn't a classic property. Again, the backlash isn't difficult to understand. Put out a better trailer than "THE POWER OF PATTY COMPELS YOU!" and "IT WENT IN ALL MUH CRACKS!" and people will respond better.

Guru Askew

"It went in all muh cracks" isn't even close to the way that joke is delivered in the trailer and I'll say that joke out-classes the ghost blowjob in the original movie any day of the week.

Not that the sainted Harold Ramis was above base humor. A mass evacuation of a swimming pool over what is believed to be a turd. Eating a dog urine-soaked sandwich. The entirety of Animal House. Making the case that the people behind the original movies were somehow above the performers and/or style of humor of the new movie is an uphill battle, to say the least. Let's not forget the fact that late in his life Ramis actually appeared in the same films as Paul Feig and Kristen Wiig, not to mention the fact that Feig and Ramis were both frequent Office directors. There's not a shred of evidence that Ramis disapproved of the current crop of largely Apatow-affiliated actors, writers and directors.

Sean O'Hara

It's a good thing we aren't talking about nerds who can write scripts that would automate the whole process.

DaveyJoe

Doesn't Youtube limit that based on IP address? Youtube actually takes this sort of thing very seriously.


How would that be done?

bluetoast

Not sure, but it looks like there are services where people can pay for mass likes, subscribes, dislikes.

fumanstan

Not hard to use a proxy.

Michael Corvin

People can cry "conspiracy theory" and discount feedback all they like but that still ignores the following: I too have talked with multiple "real world/non-troll" people and they all think it looks terrible...because the trailer makes it look that way. It's been proven as such too by the fan cut trailer, which makes it look pretty good.

Guru Askew

In this case the theory that people AREN'T doing all sorts of shit to manipulate the reception is the crazy, hard-to-believe conspiracy theory.

Again, there's absolutely no denying that a lot of people are pissed off over this movie, they're just undeniably doing everything they can to exaggerate/boost the impact of their little crusade.