Tom Leung, a YouTube Product Manager, posted a video in which he discussed how to cope with the Dislike button. He introduced a variety of solutions to combat inappropriate use of the Dislike button at the time, ranging from requiring consumers to have a justification before their dislike is accepted to completely deleting the button. The company revealed the experiments on Twitter, but clarifies in a group forum article that the aim isn’t to eliminate the opportunity for viewers to dislike a video. Developers would still have access to the video’s like and dislike count from YouTube Studio, and dislikes will continue to fuel YouTube’s recommendation algorithms.
— YouTube (@YouTube) March 30, 2021 It’s close to Instagram’s experiment of removing public like counts, which it’s also fine-tuning about a year later based on user reviews. Instagram has recently started testing a new feature that allows users to select whether or not to view public like counts in their posts, with their posts otherwise displaying a non-numeric predictor of post likes. When using the Like and Dislike buttons on YouTube, there can be a sense of mob mentality. However, having the dislike count will aid in alerting others to videos that are clickbait, spam, or deceptive, which can be useful.
