The YouTube team has announced that YouTube dislike counts will now be hidden from the viewers.
In relation to this, the streaming giant clarified that the dislike button remains and it will still help creators to track their content performance. It should also still allow viewers to express their opinion.
YouTube Dislike Button Remains, Counts Hidden
According to the statement released by the YouTube team, YouTube aims to be a platform where creators can find and share their voices. Through this, they have created various tools and standards to guarantee that they encourages polite interactions between viewers and the artists.
"Earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike button to see whether or not changes could help better protect our creators from harassment and reduce dislike attacks - where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator's videos," the announcement furthered.
With regards to the stated experiment, the company clarified that viewers could still see and utilize the YouTube dislike button as part of the trial. However, since the count was hidden from the viewers, the video streaming platform discovered that individuals were less likely to press the dislike button on a video to increase the count.
In short, the results of the experiment have revealed a reduction in dislike-attacking behavior. In addition to this, smaller creators, as well as those who are just getting started to establish their channel, have told YouTube that they were unfairly targeted by this behavior. With this, the experiment has unveiled that the dislike attack happens more frequently on smaller channels.
Since the dislike button attack was proven, YouTube has decided that they will be keeping the YouTube dislike counts hidden across the platform, but the dislike button will not be removed. The said update has been gradually implemented Wednesday, November 10.
However, YouTube is not the first social media giant that experimented to hide the reaction button from the public eye, per Tech Crunch. A few years ago, the Meta-owned social media platform Instagram began testing to hide the total like counts globally for similar mental health reasons.
Instagram was worried that focusing solely on gaining likes might harm its community and make authors feel less comfortable expressing themselves on the site. In the end, though, neither Facebook nor Instagram could commit to a decision and instead, the company returned the authority to hide likes under the control of the users.
YouTube Dislikes Not Showing: What Are the changes?
Since the said change is gradually rolling out, some might be wondering what the changes for creators and viewers will be aside from the hidden dislike counts.
The streaming giant pointed out that creators will still be able to understand how their material is performing. They can still use YouTube Studio to obtain their specific dislike counts, as well as other existing data.
As for the viewers, they can still dislike video content to modify their video suggestions and offer criticism with artists anonymously.
