Youtube has chosen to gradually abandon displaying the number of dislikes under the videos. It is official and confirmed information published on the YouTube creator’s channel. The decision is to prevent waves of hatred under films. According to the owners of the portal this move will protect creators from persecution and coordinated attacks.
It was met with plenty of hatred. Users fear that it will be harder to find helpful and reliable content.
The dislike button will still be visible and you can use it. However, the number of dislikes will be hidden. Only creators will be able to see statistics.
YouTube testing the introduction of the change, confirmed that by hiding the dislike counter, users give less of them.
One of the programmers tries to revive this function within the browser extension. Nevertheless, on December 13, it will be turned off.
The alpha version is not perfect, it only works for videos that have API returning the correct number of dislikes.
Although, despite the shortcomings, it is good that something like this is created. Somehow is a protest against a technology giant.
Sources:
https://thenextweb.com/news/give-youtube-the-finger-by-restoring-dislike-counts-with-this-plugin
https://streamscharts.com/news/streaming-news-8-14-november
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
I disagree with Youtube’s argumentation. Sure, people won’t give that many dislikes, but the audience will lose a reliable source of how good the video is. Before the change got implemented I would start watching a video and after having looked at likes to dislikes ratio I would often watch something else instead. I hope youtube reverts this change.