The stated reason for getting rid of dislike visibility was very suspicious to me. While I don't deny that targeted harassment and bandwagoning with dislikes on certain channels/videos happens, there's no way it was happening frequently enough to warrant removing the feature from all videos. I saw no reason why individual creators couldn't stick with hiding the controls on a per-video or per-channel basis.

Removing the dislike count takes away a valuable indicator of low quality and/or time wasting videos. Yes, it has false positives on charged topics, but I use it to help determine if an intriguing recommendation or search result is actually worthwhile or just clickbait. I suspect YouTube was pleased to remove the like/dislike visibility because it would boost engagement metrics. I assume any concerns about quality or the viewing experience are secondary or considered inconsequential.

Edit: They removed the dislike visibility, not the dislike button.

The dislike button was never removed, that is not accurate. The dislike count is no longer being displayed to viewers. Dislikes still exist. In my opinion, it is important to be accurate with language.

Isn't this a distinction without a difference? The point of having likes/dislikes is it's supposed to be a social signal for quality of the content?

Author/owner of the video would still be able to see it, so they can judge if their audience liked the video or not. But still, the biggest value proposition of having the likes vs dislikes is for viewers, not content producers, so it really sucked it went away.

I believe disliking it also influences whether or not you are recommended similar content.

I regularly dislike decent content based on my idea of what youtube thinks of my recommendation preferences. It’s baffling how much I need to manually participate in their “engagement” metrics to be able to go to youtube.com without closing it shortly thereafter. And I wonder how much more echo chamber-y it is for less tech-savvy users who rarely touch these controls.

80% of regulars are not subscribed and don’t “like” videos according to content creators, that’s why they nag for “like, subscribe” five times per minute. Developers tend to think that bigcorps’ data analysis is at a rocket science level, when in reality it’s probably less efficient than SQL LIKE query could be on some `video.tags` field.

I've never really found the like/dislike buttons useful, and tbh they could get rid of ratings altogether and not much would change for me.

As someone who looks up tutorials on various pieces of software, the dislike ratio was a pretty good indicator as to whether or not a particular video would help me do what the title of it says without me having to sit or scrub through the whole thing

Just a counter opinion, I find them fairly useful. Not 100% useful, but more often then not very useful.

Thanks to the idea of disliking as a meme, the ratings are essentially meaningless. An overwhelmingly disliked video is probably worth watching, if for the humor alone.

I've been using this chrome extension [1] and actually forgot they removed the dislike button.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis...

It's just made-up or out of date data, the feature has been removed, not just hidden.

It's not just made up, it tracks downvotes from extension users and combines them with a historical database. And I think some creators share new info with the database to help the accuracy.

Creators can only share own counts and would be heavily incentivized to lower their dislike count, no? How is this supposed to work?

Many videos had the dislike count collected by the extension and stored before YouTube completely removed the counter from the videos. That number is now combined with dislikes sent by the users.

New videos will only show dislikes sent by people using the extension. There's no way to know the real number anymore.

I don't think many people are going to go through the trouble of offering to help and then feed in fake info, especially if they make awful videos and it's easy to guess what they're doing.

ah, good point. I thought when this originally came out the data was still available via api call but it appears thats not the case anymore, or possibly never was.

From the FAQ

> Where does the extension get its data?

> A combination of archived data from before the offical YouTube dislike API shut down, and extrapolated extension user behavior.

Do these extensions track the dislikes externally, or do they somehow bring it back on YouTube's side?

they track externally and extrapolate, so it's skewed based on audience (they also made a 'backup' from when yt still showed them)

still, I found it more useful than not

My hope is that coming AI can be used to help better discern and classify content. Essentially, "prewatch" videos and help filter spam. I would love to see incentives for creators reset towards making quality content rather than sensationalized content. So, so fatigued on the stupid thumbnails with surprised faces and shocking claims and they are everywhere from home repair guides to physics tutorials.

Wow only now I noticed that the dislike button disappeared. That's a terrible decision. All social media should have dislike buttons. To many people with large following think they are clever because they only ever see likes and retweets, but if we could downvote/dislike some of their idiot comments on Twitter the world would be a better place.

I am curious - Why shouldn't a CEO impact a feature like this?

Are you missing the dislike button? I still see it on Youtube and I'm not running any plugins.

The button is still there, you just don't see the number of dislikes without a plugin.

Is it? I see in the network requests where the "likes" button data is returned, but not the dislikes. It's possible I just can't find it though - there's a lot of data in a lot of shapes.

The dislike count is from an external tracker, not YouTube's own data.

That makes way more sense, but seems like it's a useless feature. I would assume that in that case it would be dislikes from the add-on (or some sort of federated dislike space?), which is really just going to tell you the opinions of people who like disliking things so much they downloaded an add-ons just to see others down-vote it as well.

My experience in this space is you would be surprised how many thing slike this only exist because of as few as one person wants it to be that way. It's not even the leader necessary. A mid-level VP can have an outsized impact just based on their area of responsibility.

It can be purely emotional too, no data whatsoever. If there is data it's just selectively chosen to support the preconceived view. It literally happens all the time.

Just look at the changes to the Macbook following Johy Ive's departure or even the iOS UI changes following Forstall's departure. In the latter case, the removal of skeuomorphic design was so impactful Apple engineers called it "de-Forstall-ation".

In this case, I see it being big brands pushing for the removal of dislike button. They simply don't want to be dislike-bombed for doing something unpopular. That's it. So I wouldn't bet on Wijicki leaving impacts this.

There is a chrome plugin that brings the dislikes back.

Completely disagree. Getting rid of that button has significantly cleaned up the associated comments sections. I’ve also noticed a general improvement in my recommendations. Great move imo.

How can you tell when a video contains something misleading? For example, I struggle to find quality DIY videos without the dislikes warning me away. Dislikes are a great way for the community to clean house.

DIY videos are my primary concern on this as well. It is also why browser extensions don't help me too much because my use case is usually in the garage, half way through a project having issues, on my phone furiously trying to get a solution to the problem I'm having.

I had this exact scenario yesterday trying to remove rounded/stripped lug nuts off my wheels. It would've been very helpful to be able to see if the video I was watching had 1000 likes but 6000 dislikes to know if what I was about to do was advisable or not. Yes, I read the comments and it ended up being a simple fix with the right tools, but the like/dislike ratio is a great way to filter dangerous/dumb/unhelpful videos.

Isn't YouTube already pushing down the bad-ratio videos, though? I know it's not the same as you being able to filter the counts yourself... but the data is being used to try to hide crap.

But YouTube is already using the dislikes to push content down, it's just not showing you the count (nor does it show you the many-other engagement signals it uses for its rankings and recommendations).

Personally, I see the removal of visible dislikes as a net positive. They were used to rain down negativity and meanness on well-intentioned videos. I think YouTube is now a happier place when a kid's crappy singing video gets quietly ranked down, versus being shown to have 34 classmates (or 34,000 strangers) that hated it.

same experience trying to find videos that answer a technical question - there's no immediate gauge on whether or not the video's useful, and it's easy (and often automatic on YouTube's part) to hide any comments with a negative sentiment

Sure, we all got fucked by that but just think of the political porn addicts who now get to have their feelings protected. Ensuring the integrity of their ideological bubbles is much more important than preventing videos with dangerous instructions in them from being promoted.

Comments and general channel credibility. If channel deletes comments or is often misleading people will likely catch on and avoid.

...how can you tell if a channel deletes comments?

YouTube still uses dislikes to keep those out of your stream.

>Dislikes are a great way for the community to clean house.

That's precisely why it was removed. Can't let the rabble have a voice. They might think the wrong things.

I'm not expert on YouTube's algorithms, how did getting rid of visible dislikes help improve recommendations?

I could see it having an impact on the comment section because rather than just dislike and move on people feel compelled to say what is wrong with the video, but I could also see the opposite effect where instead of just disliking and moving on now people spam the comment section with unhelpful attacks on the video/creator.

Because people would brigade videos they politically disagreed with even if it was good content. I’m seeing those videos now. Taking away dislikes has a chilling effect on brigading.

The dislike crowd just came in and demonstrated exactly why dislikes were removed all while trying to defend their position.

Can anyone please explain me why the parent comment deserves being voted down?

It's a bizarre assertion without evidence.

There is evidence, it’s just anecdotal and every contrary comment is the same.

There's a lot more to YouTube than political videos. I'd estimate over 90% of "reviews" for exercise equipment are automated videos based on data scraped from Amazon. These used to get downvoted heavily, so you could quickly see which videos were worth watching and which ones were created by bots. Now you have to slog through a dozen bot videos to find even one created by a human, giving their actual review. But fuck those of us who use YouTube for something other than political porn because some politician got their feelings hurt by a high dislike count.