YouTube just pushed out one of its biggest down-dates (IMO), which removed the viewer's capability to view a video's dislike rating. This goes beyond basic layout changes where mobile users just have to go against their muscle memory to access the comment section. This is a fundamental change in the platform's structure.

I wonder if the executives will ever rescind their collective decision to do away with such an integral part of the YouTube user experience. Especially when they realize that the videos where people ask for a balanced amount of likes and dislikes will now make no sense and can't be properly interacted with. It's akin to when YouTube got rid of all annotations, rendering tons of interactive video content unplayable. Granted, that's only a drop in the bucket of YouTube content, but still, it makes the situation a drop sadder. (...And it's the only other point against removing the dislike counter that I haven't seen spreading around the internet.)

Ninety-five percent sure that they did it as payback for YouTube Rewind dislikes.
Remember to rate their decision one star.

I agree wholeheartedly.

As commandz pointed out in irc (11/30/21-21:34), videos that provide misinformation will not be able to be easily shown apart from ones that don’t. Commandz showed a programming series where all of the code was giberish.

“this is why we need the dislike button :p”

However, there is a browser extension that can (temporarily) restore the dislike count!
View on GitHub

Google is removing the dislike field on December 13th, so say your last goodbyes to that glorious button.
► ► ◄ ◄

I would say that this is actually a POSITIVE change on YouTube. No more disapproval or poor feelings on YouTube! And especially no more TIny_Hacker hides

I highly disapprove of the change. I do not believe it will make a tangible impact on creator's mental health, especially when comments are still poorly moderated, and I think it may have a negative impact on my channel as a whole.

I know unjust dislike bombing is a real thing however, removing the dislike counter feels like when TI removed Assembly from the CE. There's more elegant ways of killing a centipede without a sledgehammer. From my point of view, all YouTube managed to hit was a single foot of the centipede yet decided to call the bug dead. Despite what it appears, YouTube has a lot of talented engineers who could definitely implement a way to detect dislike bombing and handle it.

Following YouTube's claims about this being about mental health; I truly believe comments are significantly more mentally impacting than dislikes. I've been on the receiving end of negative comments and I understand how creators mental health can be easily damaged by them. If I were getting dozens of negative comments every week I doubt I would be making videos today. I've been very fortunate to have the Cemetech community behind me as I run my channel. When there's half a dozen people at the ready to defend me against a troll who tries to throw doubt at my integrity, it really helps me brush off those comments. Instead of removing a dislike counter, YouTube should be focusing on making comment moderating tools that aren't trash. I could go into a whole new rant about the current 'tools' but I want to stay on topic.

As for how this will negatively affect my channel; the calculator tricks I make videos on challenge what people think is possible on a calculator. Such as installing Gameboy games, dark mode, wireless charging, or a bluetooth speaker. I'm proud these videos have a high like to dislike ratio and I definitely believe that many viewers check this ratio before watching to see if I clickbaited them. Now I just have to hope that they'll trust I'm not trolling them and watch my videos. Unfortunately I can't make determine whether this is having a measurable impact since every year around November and December my channel naturally dips in view count. Only time will tell if this particular concern is actually an issue.

So, what am I doing about this? YouTube recently sent me a survey through YouTube Studio which gave me the opportunity to share my disapproval. I've also added information to pinned comments instructing people to install the extensions which shows the counter again. I believe I heard of some future feature of an extension which will allow me to opt in to sharing my video's likes/dislikes. Depending how that's implemented (and if my shoddy memory is actually correct that this will be a thing) I will likely opt in.

My hope is that huge channels who vocally disapprove of YouTube's decision such as Linus Tech Tips, Marques Brownlee, etc. will have enough weight to convince YouTube to implement a better solution.

Thanks for the topic, I needed a place to rant.

Finding scam, misleading and clickbait videos since this change has become dramatically more difficult.

There is no clickbait in Ba Sing Se.
But yeah, this is a terrible change. I usually check the dislike count before watching any video longer than a few minutes - usually, a bad dislike count indicates that the thumbnail was misleading, the video never actually gets to the point, the video contains incorrect or outdated information, or that the video is about a political topic. A low dislike count can also indicate that a video that initially seems likely to be clickbait actually follows through on its claim.

Without it, it would be incredibly hard to tell when a video is completely bogus - as KnightsWhoSayNi mentioned, I did share a tweet discussing a series of "coding" "tutorials" with completely made up nonsense:

The channel has since been deleted, but only because someone mentioned it on Twitter - otherwise, if you were a beginner programmer, the dislike count would have been the only thing you could use to realize that the code makes zero sense without watching half the video and giving the channel your watch time.
I would not be particularly surprised if there's more of these types of video in the future - with the current state of text-to-speech, you could probably generate entire tutorial videos automatically from StackOverflow answers or from stuff that GitHub Copilot spits out. A bot could automatically delete any comments that speak negatively of the video, and without any other mechanism for demonstrating to other users that the video is meaningless, you're relying entirely on YouTube's already-overloaded report system to do so.

So, why would YouTube do this???

Joking aside, I do feel like this was probably put in place so that YouTube can promote unpopular content (either its own or as part of a deal with other companies) without it being possible for users to make it look bad. Disabling the like count was always an option before, but since it was optional, it was an even bigger red flag than a large number of dislikes.

I would say that this is likely to result in a similar trend to twitter "ratios," where someone comments "ratio" on a post and people like it, serving a similar role to a dislike button. However, the YouTube comment system already deletes comments containing any critical thought whatsoever, so I imagine that any comment containing "ratio" or "like this comment to dislike the video" is going to get thrown into the void too, regardless of whether the video's author wants it to or not.

So, yeah, go download that browser extension.

The net is becoming increasingly more 'regulated' by the private sector - which is a worry since their justifications are their own.

Reminds me of when news websites disable comments on topic's they want to push a narrative on.

As TLM said, it won't get rid of negative comments or the 'ratio' style posts (that you can still like) Twitter style as commandz stated either.

This is hilarious

To me it’s just confusing. It raises so many questions:
Why did he do this?
What is he even doing?
How did he get to this point?

just so confusing…

I dislike this change.

I agree whole-heartedly. This change is possibly one of the WORST decisions YouTube has made in a while. Not only did dislikes never affect a videos performance on the platform, but now all their doing is suffocating necessary and useful public criticism. I agree DJ, it's just harder to find truth on the platform than ever before.
The change is ridiculous. I highly doubt they'll ever go back to normal though. What's next? Removing comment's to avoid mean words?

This^^
This man speaks only the truth.

Since I just finished watching Devin Nash talk about this subject, I feel like I should slap a link down to his take on this. I'm not ENTIRELY sure I agree with him, but, it is a good idea to at least consider the premise that YouTube actually think they're protecting people with this change.



Tl;Dr of the video: He presents information on why YouTube (and other companies at large) don't care about the negative press, and instead believes YouTube honestly is trying to "protect" users and creators with this change. He still thinks its a dumb idea, but that YouTube themselves won't care what we say if we keep saying they're protecting other corporations.

Oh, buddy, there are other decisions from YouTube that are, as Ninja Kiwi likes to put, "less awesomer". This is just the current icing on the cake!

One of the main premises could be protecting the mental health of young content creators who would have been let down if too many people dislike their channel.

Imagine Rеddit only having upvotes. Say, could Cemetech have an upvote/downvote system?

For me, I have no issue scrubbing through a video and making a decision on how I feel about it without dislikes. I'm solely peeved by it because no one to speak of wanted this except corporations foisting content on us that we don't like. Youtube aside, theres always CNN, Fox, late night shows, just garbage mainstream content that's only visible because Youtube promotes it that a lot of people dislike. So Youtube is trying to manipulate what viewers think by changing the impression of what other viewers think.

This morning, the creator of the Return YouTube Dislike extension posted an announcement in the extension's discord.

Essentially they're discussing methods of allowing creators to publicly share their channel's dislikes. Apparently YouTube doesn't allow you to just share channel dislikes, you have to share most of your channel's analytics. They're discussing how to build trust in the extension so content creators would actually opt into sharing dislikes.

If you want to monitor the discussion you can follow the link to the discord above.

My issue with this is that many supposedly informative videos will wait until not the very end of the video before finally delivering the information that everyone was seeking for, but rather a certain random point in time during the last 30% portion of the video and the information will be told in 30 seconds. I don't feel like skimming through such videos as I could easily miss the info.

I'm sure many of us have already seen this, but yesterday LTT released a video discussing the Return YouTube Dislike extension; how it currently works and why LTT is hesitant on opting into sharing their accurate dislike count.

I don't like the idea of not seeing the dislike. Realistically, this is unfair. There are some terrible videos that deserve appreciation.

I realize that this might be a popular opinion, but I think the removal of the dislike button was a good thing (even if it wasn't YouTube's given reason for removing it). I'm not a fan of "upvote/downvote" systems in general. Hell, I believe they ruined the Internet. If they're going to remove the dislike, then they should remove the like. Honestly, view count is the only metric that has ever mattered on there, so it's not like the removal is going to change much.

YouTube decides what's misinformation, not the community and certainly not you.

Oh god please no.