It was teased in March, but today YouTube made it official: The platform is going to remove the dislike counter which means you won’t be able to watch any video and think, gee this is not a very popular video, I’m sure it’s just a bad video and by no means the result of an armed fan base and / or faction.
The Decline button remains so you can express your feelings when you really need to. It’s just the public counter that shows the number of times the “Decline” button has been clicked.
After YouTube tested the idea earlier this year, YouTube liked what they found:
At YouTube, we want to be a place where YouTubers of all sizes and backgrounds can find and share their voices. To ensure that YouTube encourages respectful interaction between viewers and YouTubers, we’ve introduced several characteristics and Guidelines to improve their experience. And earlier this year we did experimented with the “Dislike” button to see if changes could help better protect our YouTubers from harassment and reduce attacks against “likes” attacks.
As part of this experiment, viewers were able to see and use the “Dislike” button. However, since the count wasn’t visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target the reject a video button to increase the count. In short, our experimental data showed a reduction in aversion to offensive behavior1
. We’ve also heard directly from smaller YouTubers and newbies that they are wrongly attacked by this behavior – and our experiment has confirmed that this is more common on smaller channels.
This should in fact help smaller YouTubers who are actually attacked this way, and protect their channel from the negative results that newcomers watching massively unpopular videos may produce. At the same time, there’s also the unmentioned fact that this will also help big companies whose videos may not be liked because they did something that fans think sucks and / or a situation where there is a mass dislike campaign one of the only ways people can feel like they are protesting in a world where they feel increasingly powerless.
The number of Dislikes will still be available to the creators themselves, who can see the numbers behind the scenes, and “Viewers will still be able to dislike videos to vote on their recommendations and privately share feedback with the creators”. According to YouTube, the changes will take effect from today. So if you can still see the counter at the time of publication, it will go away very soon.
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