YouTube will hide dislike counts on videos to stop organized attempts at harassment.
The dislike button isn’t going away, but totals will only be viewable to the video’s creator. YouTube is making the change after experimenting with hiding the dislike count starting in March. The goal was to see if removing the count would reduce “dislike attacks,” where internet users deliberately gang up to downvote a video, which can discourage viewers from watching the clip.
“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,” YouTube wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior.”
In addition, YouTube found that dislike attacks tend to target video creators with smaller followings. However, the platform is fully aware not everyone may like the upcoming change.
“We understand that some of you won’t agree with this decision and have used the public dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video,” YouTube said in a separate support post. “But we believe that this is the right thing to do for our platform—to better protect creators from harassment [and] help ensure smaller creators and those just getting started can thrive.”
YouTube also created a video (above), where it addressed whether removing the dislike count will prevent users from knowing which videos to watch. “When the teams looked at the data across millions of viewers and videos in the experiment, they didn’t see a noticeable difference in viewership,” said YouTube’s creator liaison Matt Koval. “In other words, it didn’t really matter if a video had a lot of dislikes or not, they still watched.”
Despite hiding the dislike count, YouTube says the dislike button itself still serves an important purpose. For example, your dislikes will help inform the recommended videos that YouTube serves up. The button can also be used to offer quick feedback to the video's creator.
Still, video creators can also easily ignore it; they’ll need to dig into YouTube’s dashboard to find dislike data. “Overall, it’s much less likely to cause stress and embarrassment if the count isn’t visible to the public,” Koval added.
YouTube plans on phasing out public dislike counts slowly over the next several days.