YouTube has announced plans to start hiding the number of dislikes a video gets across its site. The company maintains the controversial change is to protect smaller creators from being targeted by dislike attacks or harassment, and to promote “respectful interactions between viewers and creators.” You might be able to view the dislike count currently, as YouTube is rolling out the update gradually, and it might take some time before everyone receives it.
The dislike button will still be available, however, only the content creator will have access to the numbers. Google had already been treading towards this move, as earlier this year, the company announced its experiment on hiding the public dislike numbers. This follows what creators already have in being able to hide ratings for their videos. The like and dislike button would still be there, but the dislike numbers will only be visible to the creators.
Using the like to dislike ratio to judge whether a video is useful rather than low effort content has widely been used by viewers in considering whether to watch a video or to find another one. Moving forward, this will now be impossible, however Google’s stance on shielding creators from harassment holds some water.
There have been cases where creators from large YouTube channels have encouraged their fans to attack smaller channels by disliking their videos without even watching the content to determine whether their fanboyism is clouding their judgement. A high dislike ratio on a video leads to the YouTube algorithm hiding that video, essentially preventing small creators from growing their channels.
Now, these cases are on the extreme, and the bigger question is whether the behaviour of the minority warrants the removal of a feature that is much more useful to the remaining 99% of YouTube viewers.
If you are doing research on a topic, or watching a tutorial for your maths exam, then you come across a video with a high number of dislikes. Chances are the video contains false or outdated information. The removal of the dislike count will ensure that you have no way to judge the usefulness of the video, leaving you at the mercy of the comments section, which the creator has full control of and can delete comments that he/she does not agree with.
Funny thing is that one of the most disliked videos on the site is from YouTube’s official channel. The video in question, Rewind from 2018 got so many dislikes that the company decided they will not be making those types of videos anymore.
Hiding the number of likes and dislikes has already been adopted by a few other social media platforms, namely, Facebook and Instagram, both now under the parent company Meta. Likes have recently been used as a measure of success online, and hiding the count was intended to relieve some of this pressure by not revealing the numbers to the public. Creators still have control over them and can leave them on if they wish to.
This however does not directly translate to YouTube, as Instagram and Facebook are mainly geared towards individual people sharing their experiences while YouTube content is intended for everyone to consume and not having a way to judge the quality or accuracy of content could open a can of worms with misinformation or worse.
