Earlier this week, November 10th, 2021, YouTube put out a video titled "Update to YouTube's Dislike Count". In short, the video says that they're removing the number of dislikes a video has from the public eye. The only person that can see it is the video creator. There are a few things wrong with this.

First off: The Like-to-Dislike ratio is a fundamental part of the YouTube experience. Is the video i'm about to watch:

1. good quality
2. coming with a little bit of discourse (example: Anthony Fantano's review of "Yeezus" by Kanye West)
3. Bad quality (example: Youtube Rewind 2018, "Cuties" official trailer, etc.)

I can just look at the ratio and know from the get-go. It's that easy.

Secondly: For the creators, the dislikes are good criticism devices. It's a good way to tell the creator that they're doing something wrong or they need to improve something. As a former creator myself (i used to when i was in 7th grade, those videos have since been deleted), i used that as it was intended.

But the one thing that grinds me to my very core is that YouTube INSISTED that this was intended to help smaller creators from "Dislike Mobs". That's total bullsh*t. YOU CANNOT tell me with a straight face that that was the spark behind this. It's just not true. If you're going to push that blatantly false narrative, why don't we break out the list of most disliked videos?

1. "Youtube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind
Uploader: Youtube (corporation)
19M dislikes

2. "Baby Shark Dance"
Uploader: Pinkfong Kids' Songs and Stories (child's entertainment corporation)
14M dislikes

3. "Sadak 2 Trailer"
Uploader: Fox Star Studios (movie studio)
13M dislikes

4. "Baby - Justin Bieber feat. Ludacris"
Uploader: Justin Bieber (celebrity)
13M Dislikes

5. "Johnny Johnny Yes Papa"
Uploader: LooLoo Kids (child's entertainment corporation)
12M Dislikes

That's just the top 5. The first actual homegrown content creator on this list was at #13 with PewDiePie's "can this video get 1 million dislikes?" video. And even then, he was asking for it.

This is generally a bad idea, and i'm not sure what drugs YouTube is on right now, but i want some.

youtube gone mad with this everyone knows full well

Youtube is a disaster, and related to the dislike issue, Youtube seems to be mass removing dislikes from political videos already. I won't endorse this claim either way, but some are raising the question if it is due to the mass dislikes on many White House and Covid/Fauci related videos, which I felt might be interesting to consider.

Completely agree.

But you know, YouTube doesn’t want to hurt people feelings! Because if I post a video and someone says they don’t like my video that hurts!

It’s a joke. Dislikes are a part of life. You’ll never get everyone to agree with you EVER

Are they planning to do this, because they haven't yet.