YouTube: An Update on Dislike Button

One of the most beautiful and admirable things about YouTube is that creators of all sizes and backgrounds can find and share their voice and everyday YouTube is striving to be better in making that happen. In order to promote and ensure respectful interactions between viewers and creators, YouTube has introduced several features and policies to improve the creators’ experience and earlier this year it even experimented with the dislike button.

This was done to observe whether the changes could help better protect the creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks (where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos), or not.

“We’re making the dislike counts private across YouTube, but the dislike button is not going away. This change will start gradually rolling out” says 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.” YouTube added further.

Based on what YouTube has learnt, it is now making the dislike counts private across YouTube but the dislike button will still remain accessible to everyone.

What’s Changing for Creators and Viewers

“Creators will still be able to find their exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio, along with other metrics, if they would like to understand how their content is performing. We want to create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves.” says YouTube. As for the viewers, they can still dislike the video and share private feedback with creators.

YouTube believes that hiding the number of dislikes is the right thing to do in order to create an inclusive and a respectful environment. In the future it aims to take many steps to protect its creators and further a healthy environment.