YouTube to Remove the Dislike Counter on all Videos

YouTube, the worldwide online video sharing and social media platform owned by Alphabet (Google) with video categories ranging from music videos, video clips, news, short stories, feature films, documentaries, audio recordings, movie trailers, teasers, live streams, vlogs, and more have recently announced its decision to remove the dislike counter on all videos across its platform.

The Dislike counter is the number that appears below the Dislike button. As the name implies, it counts how many times people have disliked a YouTube video. Youtube announced this on their official blog yesterday in their strive, to make the platform a place where content creators of all sizes both individuals and corporates of varying backgrounds can find and share their voice. This change was made after an experiment conducted earlier July this year on the removal of the dislike counter and the evidence is found in the process led to its decision to remove the counter on every video.

This decision has, of course, sparked reactions among users who claim that worst of it all, it requires users to click through and begin watching a particular Youtube video before they learn that other users have disliked the content. There’s also an argument that not being able to see public dislikes counter could mislead users to watch a video that’s malicious or below average or informative-looking thumbnail with ad content. This inadvertently rewards the content creator for putting up abusive content but Youtube has stressed that one of the major reasons for putting up such change is to protect smaller creators from smaller channels who are at a higher proportion of occurrence of dislike mobs or harassment.

The dislike button will still remain public but the count will only be visible to the content creators. This means viewers can still dislike videos to tune their thoughts and privately share feedback with creators. Youtube content creators will still be able to find their exact dislike counts in their YouTube Studio, along with other existing metric data, if they would like to understand how their content is performing.