Earlier today (11th November 2021), YouTube announced a major upcoming change that will be arriving on its platform. The company will be making the “dislike” count on all of the videos private on its website and app.
This decision is big deal considering this simple feature has been in the platform since basically the start, and the vast number of users on the popular video sharing platform will no longer be able to determine the overall reception of the video. YouTube believes that this change is better from a creator’s standpoint, as content creators/YouTubers will now be better protected against harassment and reduce the threat of what it refers to as “dislike attacks.”
For those unaware, this is essentially when a number of users team up to raise the number of dislikes that a video receives. According to the company, the dislikes count will no longer be visible to the users, although, the dislike button itself will not be removed. So, users can still click the thumbs down button but the actual count of these dislikes will only be visible to the creator of the video alongside other statistics related to their video via YouTude Studio.
Notably, the move from the company arrives after an experiment that it ran earlier this year. The purpose of this experiment was to find whether these changes would reduce dislike attacks and creator harassment. The company also explained that the dislike count affects creators’ well being and could motivate targeted dislike campaigns. Although while the reasoning might be sound, the dislike button was also quite useful for other reasons as well. Before, one could determine if a video is misleading through clickbait, or even if its potentially scam by looking at the dislikes.