YouTube today announced that it will be making dislike count private in both videos and live streams. As you can see in the image above, the dislike button will remain, next to the like button, and people can still dislike the video, but the dislike count is not shown to the viewers. However, the creators can still view the dislike count in the Studio.
YouTube said that this move is after an experiment it conducted in July this year to see whether the changes to dislike count 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.
After the experiment, it found that hiding the dislike count made people less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count, and the data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior. It also got feedback from YouTube channels of small creators that they were unfairly targeted by dislike attacks, and their experiment confirmed the same.
- Creators will still be able to find their exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio if they would like to understand how their content is performing.
- Viewers can still dislike videos to further personalize and tune your recommendations, the only change is you won’t be able to view the number of dislikes on the video
- Developers using the YouTube API for dislikes will no longer have access to public dislike data beginning on December 13th. End users will still be able to view dislike data related to their own content on authenticated API requests.
The new change to the dislike count will roll out starting today across YouTube. You can get more details by checking out the official YouTube video from the creator Liaison Matt Koval.