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YouTube will begin hiding dislikes on videos. The dislike button will still be there and creators will still be able to see how many people hit it, but the number will not be viewable to the public.
YouTube said the platform wanted to curb "creator harassment" by hiding the dislike count. For example, almost all videos published on the White House channel recently, received far more dislikes than likes.
One of the potential new designs can be seen below, in this particular design the dislike button doesn’t include a public count, but is still in its usual position next to the like button.
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In this design the dislike button doesn’t include a public count.
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The company says that while dislike counts won’t be visible to the public, it’s not removing the dislike button itself.
Users can still click the thumbs down button on videos to signal their dislike to creators privately. Meanwhile, creators will be able to track their dislikes in YouTube Studio alongside other analytics about their video’s performance, if they choose.
The change follows an experiment YouTube ran earlier this year whose goal was to determine if these sorts of changes would reduce dislike attacks and creator harassment.
At the time, YouTube explained that public dislike counts can affect creators’ well-being and may motivate targeted campaigns to add dislikes to videos.
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The White House channel has more than 300 videos that have garnered nearly 3.7 million dislikes of which nearly 2.5 million were removed.
YouTube said it had also heard from smaller creators and others who were just getting started on the platform that they felt they were being unfairly targeted by dislike attacks.
The experiment confirmed this was true — creators with smaller channels were targeted with dislike attacks more than larger creators were