YouTube Will No Longer Show the Amount of Dislikes That a Video Has Received

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YouTube has begun rolling out a site-wide update that will hide the amount of dislikes that a video has received. According to the platform, this change was necessary to protect users from harassment and to reduce “dislike attacks,” whereby users purportedly conspire to ruin the reception of a video. While the dislike button will remain, only creators will be able to see how many dislikes their videos have received.

From YouTube:

As part of this experiment, viewers could still see and use the dislike button. But because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior. We also heard directly from smaller creators and those just getting started that they are unfairly targeted by this behavior — and our experiment confirmed that this does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.

This change seems to a welcome one for corporations and businesses, as they no longer have to suffer embarrassment following a botched launch or some other sort of product controversy. Creators can continue to find their exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio to gauge how their content is performing.

Source: YouTube

Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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