YouTube will no longer display the number of dislikes for a video, the company announced Wednesday.
The company had been experimenting with the feature for a few months before making it official. YouTube said this will help protect creators from harassment and targeted attacks.
“To ensure that YouTube promotes respectful interactions between viewers and creators… we experimented with the dislike button to see whether or not changes could help better protect our creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks,” YouTube said in a statement.
“Our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior.”
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Viewers will still be able to click on the ‘dislikes button, only that in this case, the tally will nit be displayed publicly.
According to YouTube, the public display of dislikes can impact the content creator negatively and “may motivate a targeted campaign of dislikes on a creator’s video”.
The move is meant to discourage what the company terms as “dislike mobs” who deliberately dislike videos from specific creators and channel.
YouTube creators use the like and dislike buttons to gauge the reception of their content. However, the feature has been abused as it has become a tool to target specific content creators. The high number of dislikes depict the targeted videos negatively demotivating content creators.
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