To ensure that YouTube promotes respectful interactions between viewers and creators, Youtube introduced several features and policies to improve their experience.
Creators will still be able to find their exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio, along with other existing metrics, if they would like to understand how their content is performing. Viewers can still dislike videos to tune their recommendations and privately share feedback with creators.
Earlier this year, Youtube experimented with the dislike button to see whether or not changes could help better protect creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks — where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos.
As part of this experiment, viewers could still see and use the dislike button. But because the count was not visible to them, Youtube found out that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, the experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior.
They also heard directly from smaller creators and those just getting started that they are unfairly targeted by this behavior — and the experiment confirmed that this does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.
Based on what they learnedthey are making the dislike counts private across YouTube, but the dislike button is not going away.
Watch the video to found out more: