While a dislike count on a YouTube video doesn’t seem like much, it is actually a pretty good gauge of a video’s popularity and usefulness in some cases. For example, if someone is dispensing advice or a tutorial on YouTube and the number of dislikes outnumbers the number of likes, it can be used as a gauge of how good or useful the video really is.However, sometimes this feature can be abused by trolls and harassers to make a video disproportionately disliked, which is why earlier this year, YouTube started to test out a change where they would publicly hide the dislike counter on videos. It seems the company is pleased with how the testing went because they are now rolling it out across all videos.
According to YouTube, “Based on what we learned, 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 says that creators will still be able to see dislike counts in YouTube Studio, but publicly, these numbers will be hidden.
The company adds, “We heard during the experiment that some of you have used the public dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video. We know that you might not agree with this decision, but we believe that this is the right thing to do for the platform.”
Filed in . Read more about YouTube. Source: blog.youtube