The dislike button will remain, but the total number of people who clicked on it won’t be shown publicly to combat harassment.
The world’s biggest video streaming platform YouTube, plans to remove the dislike counter from the public eye. The platform recently broke the news via their YouTube Twitter handle and retweeted using the YouTube Creators page. According to YouTube, they are doing so based on community feedback and preventing targeted dislike campaigns and protecting creators’ well-being
With these update YouTube aims to disincentivize harassing behaviour in the first place. They found that public dislike count motivates trolls, harassment, and dislike attacks and their experiment results showed a reduction in dislike attacking behaviour.
YouTube co-founder, Jawed Karim, is Against Removing Dislikes. He changed the description of the first video ever uploaded to the platform in 2005 “Mee at the zoo” to protest the decision to get rid of the dislike button.The updated description claims that “not a single YouTube Creator…thinks removing dislikes is a good idea—for YouTube or for Creators. Karim goes on to say, the dislike count made it easy to identify bad content from good content. Over the long term, Karim believes the quality of videos will gradually as a result of removing dislikes.
Some think that removing negativity is always a good idea, just spread the positivity. They said that if one does not like the content just don’t give a like why one have to dislike and kill creator’s self motivation. Some think that removal of dislike button is not to protect creators. It’s to protect massive companies like Disney and politicians. Some asked how to decide if the video is worth watching if one can’t know the dislike ratio. Meanwhile people will start commenting Dislike in the comment section.
