YouTube has announced that they are making huge changes to the website. YouTube posted a blog where they explain that they are turning off their dislike visibility. This means, the user will still dislike the video, but the video creator won’t be able to see the dislikes and YouTube gives the specific reason for that. The major reason is that people who are making videos and entertaining you face some harassment and bullying.
YouTube believes that hiding the dislikes from the video, will encourage the video creators and prevent them from receiving harassment and dislike bombarding.
There are few groups on the YouTube platform, who seeking help because they receive a lot of harassment. They claim that they are new to the YouTube channel, so automatically in the beginning they will receive more dislikes than popular YouTuber’s.
The decision of removing dislikes from YouTube is not a surprise, however, it was already announced in March 2020. But the results are showing now and creators not receiving any harassment and dislike bombardment.
YouTube is not the only website, who hides the dislikes. There are a lot of websites, which don’t have a dislike button at all. For instance, Twitter, Instagram doesn’t have a dislike option.
When we talk about YouTube videos or particular helpful guides, then it can take a while. It depends upon the user needs, dislikes will help users to decide, whether this video is worth spending their time on or not.
Moreover, the YouTube research team has announced that, whether a video has a huge number of dislikes or not, it doesn’t matter. The user will watch the video if it has information regarding your query.
YouTube experiment to protect creators from hiding dislikes
YouTube has already announced its experiments with hiding the dislikes counts, for creators well being, dislikes becoming the reason for downvoting videos from channels.
This experiment implementation was discussed previously because it’s precise to the other experiments like Instagram.
In YouTube current status, both likes and dislikes will be displayed on individual YouTube Studio pages, But the likes will be displayed to anyone on videos.
YouTube statement is, dislikes impact the negative effects on YouTube creators well-being. Because, if people notice the dislikes count, then they automatically build the mindset that this video is not that enough for their queries.
And, without opening that video, they straight go to the next one. So basically, small video creators will motivate to make enough people subscribe and like the videos.
YouTube Video Creators Feedback depends upon likes and dislikes, But much like purposefully giving a game a bad review on steam, It’s easy to turn what could be a useful feature into another way for abuse.
When YouTube announced that dislikes addressing many problems, then they build three strategies.
- Hiding the count of Both likes & dislikes
- Adding more friction to disliking the video by requiring more interaction.
- Remove the options of like & dislikes
Conclusion
So, based on this experiment, YouTube is making dislikes private, but still, the audience can hit the dislike button in order to share their feedback with the creators. Only creators will see the dislike counts in their personal metrics. Kudos to YouTube who taking such a huge step in building an inclusive and respectful environment.