YouTube is getting rid of public dislikes starting today

[Steve]

They claim it's because of "dislike brigading" where a bunch of people go to a video just to click dislike cos they don't like the creator and/or the content, and to protect the well-being of creators. While you have been able to manually hide likes/dislikes on your videos for years, YouTube's argument is that's not good enough because when you see that, you know that the creator has disabled them for a reason. Now they will be off for everyone.

From now on, you will only be able to see the number of likes a video has. The creator will be able to see the number of dislikes in YouTube Studio.

I think this is a horrible change.

Firstly, you can make the exact same argument about comments. Maybe they will get rid of those next.

Secondly, you won't be able to get an "at a glance" measure of whether, say, a tutorial video is any good or not. Sometimes I've searched for tutorials on how to fix things on YouTube and when I've clicked on one of the results, it has a lot more dislikes than likes so I just click away, or I glance down at the comments, cos given that anyone can upload a tutorial about anything, lots of tutorial videos suck, give bad advice etc. If I see that a tutorial video has 1,000 likes and 15 dislikes, I know it's probably decent, but if I can only see the 1,000 likes, I don't know if it has 15 dislikes or 15,000.

Thirdly, there is now no indication of bad behaviour, so if someone does a fake giveaway, tries to scam people, posts deliberate misinformation etc. etc., again, you will not see at a glance that the video is heavily disliked. You can report scams and what not, but sometimes it takes a long time before YouTube take action, and sometimes they don't take action at all.

Fourthly, the well-being argument is bogus IMO. Imagine if eBay said they were removing negative feedback because it was making sellers feel bad. I don't see it as much different to that. If you can't handle getting dislikes, manually disable them - and the comments if you want to - or just don't upload at all because maybe being a content creator is not for you. Also, creators will still be able to see the dislikes on their own videos anyway.

Finally, I think this is just a poor way to handle it from a technological standpoint. I don't know how often videos get brigaded by people who just go there to click dislike, but one way to handle that would be to make people watch a certain amount of the video before they can rate it, cos that alone would kill off the bulk of fake dislikes as people won't bother to leave a video playing just so they can dislike it unless they're very committed to doing that.

I'm hoping they change it back.

 

[arkei]

It sure is fishy. They cater towards their "content"-creator and not the actual viewers it seems. Me personally I don't pay attention at all to likes/dislikes, subs and especially comments of YouTube-videos (too time-consuming IMO).

Wasn't YouTube starting as a dating-portal first? Anyways I hope they change it back as your explanation makes totally sense.

[Steve]

This browser add-on works for now: -

https://returnyoutubedislike.com/install

[JHouse]

Yeah, I use the Likes/Dislikes ratio as a gauge, too. YouTube needs to remain itself instead of trying to be like the others.

[scottie(the)goonie]

Youtube getting rid of dislikes already?  @SteveGood opportunity to start uploading your mixes! 

[Steve]

Now that shit is funny, LOL. Shame you couldn't make a full verse out of it.......

[mfsop]

Users already circumvent it: "use this comment as a dislike button" (826 likes)

[Steve]