My first thought is that the reason is to take the incentive away from "dislike" trolls. I reasoned that trolls got some pleasure out of seeing that ratio being skewed and it would encourage them to continue disliking videos.

why would youtube care what the dislike trolls do or what gives these "dislike trolls" pleasure? I would think that youtube's business model would not include any plan to determine what gives "dislike trolls" pleasure

They already said but people are allergic to knowing what they're talking about.

They didn't remove the dislike button, they removed the count.

They removed the count because they found it reduced spurious usage.

That way they can use the dislike count for their algorithm ( and you can still use it for curating your content) without having it influenced by brigading.

I mean they still show it to creators anyways, so I don't get what the weird conspiracies are. Like this is such a nothing of an issue it's insane.

Imo, people get endorphine hit from hitting dislike and feeling like they publically revenged. You are taking that away.

There are of course also arguments there and back. But the emotional reactions are either about interests or feelings. More likely to be feelings here.

> Imo, people get endorphine hit from hitting dislike and feeling like they publically revenged. You are taking that away.

This is a wonderful case for removing it. Better than I could have ever proposed.

Youtube didn't add it for revenge and their statement on removing the dislike count shows this.

Hmm, I wonder if a campaign to tell everyone to go and dislike every video they watch would gain traction. The same way Google destroyed this metric for viewers, it would destroy the usefulness for creators.

Act of petty revenge for sure, and they'll probably remove you from their fiefdom for being a troll.

Why would anyone join that campaign? That would only hurt the creators they follow and damage their recommendations.

If there's enough traction, the creators would start complaining to YouTube, and they'd have to rethink it.

Also it would confuse creators: is this video shit, or is it the campaign?

Creators are already complaining to YouTube. So far they aren’t listening.

Let's not do anything then, and let the emperor do as he wish... /s

No, what we should be doing is figuring out a way to solve the root cause: that YouTube has this much power in the first place.

Might have to do with everyone downvoting the scary carona news from the major news channels