YouTube announced in 2021 that they were going to disable the dislike counts on YouTube videos and keep it private to only the video content creators.
Many YouTube viewers were surprised and expressed their dissatisfaction on this new development because many are of the view that seeing the number of dislikes on a video helped viewers to know if a video was of good or bad content.
Helpful tutorials on YouTube always had more likes as compared to the dislikes and vice versa. However, many YouTube viewers thinks this new feature was going to prevent them from knowing this.
YouTube researchers in turn have explained the whole idea behind the new development.
YouTube Dislike Counts Disabled for Viewers
YouTube researchers team explained that many YouTube viewers were targeting a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. This in turn was turning the counts on the videos into something like a game with a visible scoreboard.
This was mainly due to who the creator was or what they stood for. This was a concern to the YouTube’s team.
The YouTube team reiterated that their focal mission of the platform was to give everyone a voice.
Hence, earlier in 2021, YouTube experimented with making the public dislike counts private to find out if the coordinated ‘dislike’ attacks will reduce on videos.
The Research team later found out after analyzing that there was a reduction. This prompted the go ahead of the Dislike count being disabled to the public.
In the experiment, YouTube explained that there was no noticeable difference in viewership on various videos regardless of whether they could see the dislike count or not.
The update from YouTube is that the Dislike button is staying and will be visible to viewers to press. However, it is the dislike counts that will be made private.
Viewers can continue to dislike videos and that action will be used to tune their own recommendations.
YouTube content creators can in turn privately find the dislike counts at their backend if they want to.
