YouTube, an online video sharing and social media platform owned by Google has removed the dislike counter and made it private, a welcome move for content creators.
According to Google, creators will be able to view numbers from the YouTube Studio, and “viewers can still dislike videos to tune their recommendations and privately share feedback with creators.”
However, the dislike button itself will remain. The platform says this is after testing the idea in the year.
At YouTube, we strive to be a place where creators of all sizes and backgrounds can find and share their voices. To ensure that YouTube promotes respectful interactions between viewers and creators, we introduced several features and policies to improve their experience. And earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike button to see whether or not changes could help better protect our creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks — where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos.
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 behavior1. 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.
The same move was made by Instagram and Facebook who removed the dislike counts from public view on its platform.
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