The Dislike counter will soon disappear from your Most Hated YouTube Videos, but the Dislike button won’t go away. YouTube revealed the change in a Blog post on Wednesdaywhich provided additional context on why the company will be removing the Dislike counter on all of its videos.
While the Dislike Counter – which, as the name suggests, counts the number of times a YouTube video was disliked – has its use, YouTube researchers have found that many users tend to put a single video in some sort of review bomb -Bombing similar tactics. This annoys the video not because of its content, but because people don’t like the creator himself or for some other idiosyncratic reason. Call of Duty fans used this very tactic to defeat the Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Trailer for the “most unpopular video” in 2016 – although it was quickly dethroned.
In an effort to prevent mass aversions and help all YouTubers to be successful – be they giant corporate machines like Activision or individual channels – the aversion counter will now be private.
YouTube actually experimented with removing the dislike counter Earlier this year and the evidence found in the process led to his decision to remove the counter for each video. While users cannot easily check the quality of a video at a glance, YouTube seems to be more concerned about the psychological distress and discouragement that can cause mass dislikes.
Users can still opt-out of a video to curate their YouTube recommendations, and content creators can check how many dislikes their videos have received for research purposes.
YouTube has already started rolling out this change and will gradually take over the entire website.
