YouTube is changing the way that viewers are going to interact with videos by removing visible dislikes. The video sharing website has, for years, shown a ratio of likes to dislikes directly under the video viewers are watching. Though originally intended to help viewers decide if a video was good or bad, as you may expect, in recent years it's also been used to show mass disapproval of content, creators, and sparked arguments between communities.
As The Verge reports, YouTube is hiding video dislikes from the public. The ability to dislike a video will still be there, but it will only be the creator of the video who will be able to see the numbers of positive to negative reactions. The company says that this move is an attempt to encourage "respectful interactions between viewers and creators”.
The blog post from YouTube officially announcing the update notes that they experimented with this change, earlier this year. When they removed the ability to see likes and dislikes, viewers were less likely to perform actions like disliking the video themselves, as well as other creator-harassing behaviour like commenting about disliking. YouTube says this isn't only an effort to protect their large creators, but their small creators too who were targeted with this practice.
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The changes are already rolling out across the platform so if there are any videos you, I don't know, actively want to dislike and see that number tick up, then you might want to do it now.
As The Verge notes, the most disliked video on YouTube is actually the company's YouTube Rewind 2018. The Rewind videos were YouTube's way of celebrating the creators and trends of the last year in one massive collaboration video but 2018 marked the year where the company was solidly out of touch and made something younger audience members would call 'cringe'. YouTube has since stopped making Rewinds.
Featured Image Credit: YouTubeTopics: Youtube