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.
