American online video sharing and social media platform YouTube announced that “dislike” counts for clips posted on their site will now be private to deter negative behavior and activities among some users. The said interface change will take effect immediately.
According to its official blog, this move aimed to ensure that “YouTube promotes respectful interactions between viewers and creators” while also preventing “dislike attacking behaviour.” It is not unheard of that smaller channels and creators are usually bombarded with dislikes from random users for no reason at all, which is already becoming a form of harassment.
The official YouTube Creators account’s tweet emphasized that “earlier this year we launched an experiment making the dislike count private. Based on what we learned, the dislike button is staying, but the *count* is now private to creators (in Studio) to help prevent targeted dislike attacks.”
Moreover, Youtube pointed out that although the dislike counts will be hidden, the dislike button can still be accessed by users and viewers. Remarkably, the move has been met with mixed reactions from netizens on social media.
Twitter user Dr. Gamer Ja stressed that “social media needs more positivity plus this was supported by data gained through an experiment. I agree with the change. Thank you, YouTube.” Buckey Laing, another Twitter user, related that he goes along with the “no dislike count” decision. “Targeted dislikes are a real thing, and it’s so unfortunate that people will go out of their way to be negative for no other reason than personal amusement,” Buckey pointed out.
However, some individuals believe that there is something off with the change in interface. For example, Twitter user iAdvancedU shared that the move is “not the right thing to do” because the feature will be “heavily abused.” The social media user even suggested giving the creator of the channel control over it by allowing them to turn it on or off.
Twitter user ReflectedMantis added that it won’t be long until the “queue the ‘like this comment if you dislike the video’ comments everywhere, cause that’s gonna be the best way to see the like/dislike ratio now…”
