Let’s be brutally honest for a moment, social media, on the whole, can be something of a cesspool. If you’re on social media of any kind and haven’t yet experienced some form of harassment or attack, you’re in the minority. Unfortunately, this often extends to platforms like YouTube which for some content creators, is their job.

Overnight, YouTube has announced, with intent to discourage trolles, that while the dislike button remains, dislike counts will no longer be publicly visible.

Earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike button to see whether or not changes could help better protect our creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks — where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos.

Clearly, the experiment has worked:

Based on what we learned, we’re making the dislike counts private across YouTube, but the dislike button is not going away. This change will start gradually rolling out today.

This is great news for content creators because now, the trolls will get nothing from disliking videos. For users who enjoy YouTube regularly a dislike button is still a useful tool. You will be able to use the dislike button to train the algorithm to show you videos you want to see.

8 Comments
newest
oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
steve

Ironic that a news site like yours is in support for a decision that gives feedback on the content creators are putting out.

Duncan Jaffrey

The change doesn’t stop the content creator from getting the feedback, it just stops it from publically showing. Content creators will still see it in the dashboard

steve

I refer to the feedback given to users on creators contents. Fundamentally, a news site like yours shouldn’t be in favor of a policy that suppresses information to its users.

JeniSkunk

I think that YouTube chat moderators can also see the dislikes tally, while a video is live or in Premiere. I don’t know about after, though.

Paul Warner

Where’s the like and dislike icons gone from this site??

Last edited 2 years ago by Paul Warner
Phil

It’s major loss of functionality. There is now way for consumers rate videos and easily tell judge. There are so many fake trailers, and bad quality videos. Now there is no way to determine quality. This will bad decision.

Lukearse

BAD IDEA for example I go to a Youtube “How to” video, on how to move my apps to an SD card on an Android device. The first video has lots of hits but the uploader inserts his own advertisements, and the video is not very clear, also they tell annoying jokes and take way too long to explain something simple, so even though they have 10,000 views they have 1,000 likes and 500 dislikes. Another video is made by a kid who’s only made 10 videos, but makes the same video in half the time, no ads no chit-chat… Read more »