YouTube is the world’s largest video streaming service where everyone can find content to their liking. However, it will soon become much more difficult to do this – all the blame is on a new controversial function that allows authors to hide the counter of dislikes under their videos (obviously not the most successful ones).
There was a similar opportunity before, but at the same time, the likes counter was hidden, completely depersonalizing the rating of the video for viewers. But now that the function will be expanded to the entire YouTube, it will become much more difficult to determine the quality of the launched video before watching it. Previously, it was enough to look at the ratio of likes/dislikes, which will undoubtedly be one-sidedly hidden by authors of bad content.
In response to creator feedback around well-being and targeted dislike campaigns, we’re testing a few new designs that don’t show the public dislike count. If you’re part of this small experiment, you might spot one of these designs in the coming weeks.Creators, you’ll still be able to see the exact number of likes and dislikes in YouTube Studio. For viewers, if you’re in the experiment, you can still like or dislike a video to share feedback with creators and help tune the recommendations you see on YouTube.