YouTube announced that it will make the "dislike" count private across the platform.
The change is aimed at preventing young content creators from being targeted by "dislike attacks," the Google-owned streaming service said, adding that it also aims to promote "respectful interactions between viewers and creators."
The "dislike" button will still be there, but only for private comments, not public attacks. Meanwhile, creators will still be able to track the number of dislikes in YouTube Studio, along with other analytics on their video’s performance, if they wish.
The change follows an experiment that YouTube conducted earlier this year, which aimed to determine whether these types of changes would reduce dislike attacks and harassment of content creators.
YouTube explained that the number of public dislikes can affect the well-being of creators and may incentivize targeted campaigns to launch dislike attacks on videos. While this is true, dislikes can still alert users to spam or misleading content, which can be useful.
YouTube stated that it also heard from smaller creators and others who were starting out on the platform that they felt dislike attacks were unfairly targeting them. The company’s experiment echoed these creators’ sentiments. Creators with smaller channels experienced dislike attacks more than larger content creators did.
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