November 25, 2021
There have been some rumblings over at YouTube these past few weeks, with rumours circling that they will finally be giving the axe to the dislike button… With rumours turning out to indeed be true, this update will be rolled out site-wide within days!
DUN DUN DUN
Like any other announcement on a social media platform, the news was met with backlash. Major content creators such as Marques Brownlee (15M subscribers) and Philip Defranco (6.3M subscribers) both spoke out about how it will be damaging to the creators on its platform and generally kill the tutorial landscape. Both touch on the fact that this is hiding relevant information from its users and may have damaging effects on which videos can be trusted and enjoyed.
This is quite an interesting move on YouTube’s part, as I don’t believe the dislike counter had any major impact on the service, if anything it made the experience better for its users to show their dislike of something or to rally behind a cause. Also, as someone who consumes a lot of tutorials on YouTube, I have to agree that this will make it difficult to know if a video is worth my time or if it is what I am looking for.
This is very reminiscent of the time when Instagram hid all of its user’s likes on their posts, to only bring back the option to its users a year or so later.
Going forward, it will be interesting to see if YouTube stick with their decision or if they will have some sort of backtrack and bring back the counter in a different way.