In the first significant change to its rating system in over ten years, YouTube is removing the public dislike count from videos. The option to dislike videos will remain, but the count will only be available to the video creator. In a video, YouTube Creator Liason Matt Koval stated that the change was made after researching whether removing the dislike count would decrease “dislike attacks” across the platform. The decision has been met with almost universally negative feedback, and YouTube users question how they’ll be able to quickly gauge a video’s quality when this vital info is no longer available.
Why is the dislike count gone on YouTube?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxOuG8jMIgI
YouTube claims that removing the dislike count is a step to prevent groups from coordinating “attacks” on creators just because “they don’t like them or what they stand for.”
However, YouTube didn’t address the opposite side of the coin. Its binary voting system can just as easily fall prey to mobs mass-liking a video that gives false information or features controversial opinions or material just because they agree with and like the creator. Since the company sees half the system as flawed, one would think they’d remove the whole rating system. However, the like count remains.
While removing the dislike counter might be YouTube’s way of trying to address an issue some creators face, it seems like there are more nuanced ways to handle the issue. Steam, for example, notifies users when a title has received an unusually large amount of reviews in a short period of time which lets visitors know that they should be aware that the game could be getting review bombed. Alternatively, YouTube could just make creators more aware of the fact that they can turn off ratings on their videos entirely and report that they’re facing harassment if there’s some sort of coordinated effort to mass dislike their videos.
Since this is such a broad and clumsy measure, and because YouTube hasn’t made its research public, it’s not a stretch to hypothesize that hiding the dislike counts is actually being done to cater to large corporations and political organizations (with large advertising budgets). For example, just recently, the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack overview trailer received 174,000 dislikes to 18,000 likes. I felt that Nintendo is charging an outrageous price for the subscription, and it’s evident that many others shared my opinion. However, without that dislike ratio, Nintendo could just pretend like the whole thing is a hit. Without the numerical proof, YouTube could have said that Rewind 2018 was a colossal hit instead of inspiring 19 million viewers to put their thumbs down and make it the most disliked video ever.
In the video announcing this change, Koval says, “half of YouTube’s mission is to give everyone a voice.” Unfortunately, the irony that taking away the dislike count is taking away millions of people’s voices is lost on YouTube. Regardless of the actual reasoning behind it, removing dislike counts was an easy fix, despite creators already having the ability to do this per video. Now, if only YouTube can solve the rampant DMCA issues creators have been plagued with for years or figure out a way to block the constant uploading of animal and child abuse material that goes unnoticed by the company.
