The Google-owned company announced to remove the ‘dislike’ count on videos across the platform.
With this move, viewers can choose to dislike videos without seeing the number of dislikes the particular video(s) has received. YouTube also said making the dislike counts private will avoid harassment or dislike attacks.
The change won’t affect creators, as the dislike rates will be made visible for them to help them know and gauge how their content is performing on the platform. This announcement is coming after YouTube experimented to hide dislikes with limited users.
While it may come as being controversial, dislikes can and will serve as signals to users when videos are clickbait, misleading or spam-which can be useful. YouTube also said they are acting based on suggestions, experiments and hints from smaller creators who are just getting started on the platform.
Speaking of experiments, YouTube has experimented with various designs and elements for removing the dislike counts- including one where the word Dislike appeared underneath the thumbs down button instead of the number of dislikes. For now, this is the design the company has agreed and settled on.
