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The second-largest search engine in the world, Google’s video streaming platform has long been a dumping ground for hate and vitriol. Just go and look at the comments section of any Youtube video and you’ll know what mean. Hell, you probably already do. While the platform has done much to resolve these issues, one tool has persisted as a means to tear down individuals and their creative work – dislikes, a.k.a. downvotes.
Youtube is now removing public downvotes count across the entire service, and going forward, all downvote numbers will show only to the creator on their Youtube Studio dashboard. In a new blog post, the Youtube Team says that the dislike button will remain so that users can make their opinion of a video known, but they will no longer be able to form an opinion of a piece of content by being influenced by the masses via dislikes. Check out 501Words for more information.
We’re making the dislike counts private across YouTube, but the dislike button is not going away. This change will start gradually rolling out today.
Youtube Blog
Oftentimes, many Youtube viewers have presuppositions about a creator or their work because of the interest or disinterest (or even the hatred) that others show. They “jump on the bandwagon”, so to speak. Team Youtube says that this is an “experiment”, and that they hope users will be less likely to “target a video’s dislike button to drive up the dislike count”. We’ve seen this occur so many times in the past, and it’s not just an issue with large, public videos and brands. Apparently, users who are just getting started as video creators are also being targeted by dislike attacking behavior.
I believe this change will be effective in creating a more inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves. There’s so much content across so many categories on Youtube, and while I support a user’s right to dislike a video as a means of tuning their recommendations, I have been so annoyed to see this ridiculous behavior over the past few years, so I’m glad to see something finally being done about it.
We know that you might not agree with this decision, but we believe that this is the right thing to do for the platform.
Team Youtube basically says deal with it
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