After YouTube announces that it will be making a major change to the way dislikes work on its platform, content creators speak out against this decision by YouTube.
Yesterday, via Twitter, YouTube announced that it would be rolling out a small but significant change to the dislikes on videos. While it’s not quite removing dislikes altogether, the number of dislikes a video has will no longer appear next to the dislike button on YouTube. However, viewers are still able to freely like and dislike videos on Youtube to their liking, and content creators can still view the number of dislikes on their own to help provide feedback to the YouTubers. Though YouTube cites the well-being of content creators and “targeted dislike campaigns,” it’s unclear what prompted this strange decision.
Both YouTubers and their viewers are sharing their thoughts in regards to the decision to remove the number of views. Overall, content creators such as MYSTIC7 are explaining how the dislike ratio helps the community hold itself accountable and make informed decisions on what’s good content and what’s not.
Let’s Play YouTuber Jacksepticeye points out an interesting note. No longer showing the number of dislikes on a video won’t expose content that is objectively bad and harmful, such as scams. This could also impact clickbait, as the community will downvote videos that don’t deliver the content the title of the video might imply. In the gaming corner of YouTube, this will make it harder for users looking for walkthroughs for specific quests, and more difficult to field out if the explanation is well-done or not.
This isn’t the first time that YouTube has attempted to change the dislike button on its platform either. A couple of years ago, YouTube attempted to remove it completely to curb misuse of it, a similar reason to YouTube’s current decision to remove the number of views shown publicly. Back then, it was due to users spamming the dislike button, and now, it might be YouTube’s way of combating “cancel culture.”
On his daily show, Philip DeFranco joked that this is so the YouTube Rewind won’t display the sheer number of dislikes due to its yearly backlash, but also says that showing dislikes, similar to how Reddit operates, while not perfect, is how the community polices itself. Some other smaller content creators are hoping that this function will be optional because it’s unapparent who requested this change.
YouTube has since responded to these tweets, thanking users for their feedback while it implements this experimental phase of the dislike button. It also says that users should be relying on the report button and not the dislike button for scams, but this doesn’t combat clickbait or unuseful videos.
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