So YouTube has decided to remove the dislike counter on all videos.
It's not an optional thing. It's not going to just be default.
It's going to be universal.
You won't be able to re-enable it as a creator ever again.
And basically,
the dislike button will still be there, but the dislike count will not be visible.
You'll still be able
to see the amount on the back end as a creator, but it's going to be
substantially hidden away.
You'll have to actually go to look for it.
And obviously, viewers won't be able to see it at all
now, based on the reasoning that YouTube gave for this.
I do not think they thought this through well at all.
A lot of the reasons they gave are kind of contradictory.
If you think a little bit further into additional consequences.
So let's go over why I think this is not a great idea.
Now, first of all, I want to say that even though I do
think this is kind of a dumb decision,
I'm not going to like , flip out or lose sleep over this.
OK, I got bigger things to worry about just from being a human being, on planet
Earth, right?
At the end of the day, it's not really going to affect me,
but I do think it's going to affect
a lot more people than YouTube thinks in a negative way
and not exactly the people that they are intending to affect.
In a blog post YouTube released about this.
They start off right from the beginning saying that at YouTube,
we strive to be a place where creators of all sizes and backgrounds
can find and share their voice.
And I think this is completely contradictory to what
this change will cause. Think about it this way.
How many times have you been on YouTube looking for a tutorial or a solution
to a problem or something?
And you're trying to find which of all the videos is one
that's going to actually help you solve the problem?
It might be an obscure problem, there's not many videos on it.
So you go and click on one.
And I've been in this situation where the video quality is kind of crap.
You know you're like, this, what is this?
But you see that there are very few dislikes,
so you're like alright, I'll give it a shot, right?
And then it turns out that this person with a $5 microphone
and 360p video actually solved your problem.
You're like, all right, wow I actually like that.
So you know, you give it your own like towards it,
and you would have just completely blown it off.
I know I would have if I didn't have that ability to see it.
And there's even literally a popular meme out there
that you may have seen about the concept of "the Indian guy on YouTube,"
where you've probably seen videos like this where again,
there is a video by some dude with a thick accent
who makes an incredibly informative and helpful video
about the topic that your teacher, whoever was not able to explain it this well.
And yet this random Indian guy on YouTube with low production
quality is able to explain it way better than them.
And I think removing the dislike counter is going to make it infinitely more harder
to find hidden gems like that.
What this change is going to do is shift people from making a judgment
based on the like counter and dislike counter,
which honestly, I think is kind of like a great equalizer, basically.
You can have a lowest production quality ever.
You could be just starting out.
But if people like the video and you gave them what they came for,
they're not going to dislike it and they're going to like it.
But if that's not there, people are still going to make snap judgments,
and this time it's not going to be based on a crowdsourced vote basically.
It's going to be based on that person's individual biases.
They're going to immediately make a snap judgment, no matter what
this time about the creator's appearance, their manner of speaking,
what kind of accent they have,
the amount of money that the person invested
or was able to invest into the visual esthetic and production
quality in the video that not everybody has.
And despite YouTube saying that all this gives everyone a fair voice.
No, I think it does the exact opposite.
And one thing YouTube has said is, Oh, well, look at all these other platforms.
Remember, they don't have dislike buttons,
and yeah, most other platforms are absolute crap.
Have you ever tried scrolling through Facebook or Instagram?
Most of the time, it's just rehashed garbage from stolen content,
and it's almost impossible to find any original good content
on Instagram and on other websites, whereas on YouTube, you actually had a way
to additionally judge what this video is going to be like.
Now, really, the main core reason that YouTube has given for this decision
is to reduce and eliminate harassment for creators.
Because yes, everyone knows that
there is a thing where you know someone might upload a controversial video
and then a bunch of people come and, you know, swarm it
and they'll hear about it and go and give their own dislike,
you know, their own two cents towards it.
But is that really harassment?
I don't think so.
Here's the thing.
A lot of people are smart enough to realize if they go
and watch a video, just from the title you can kind of tell.
"All right, this is going to be a video that is going to rustle some Jimmie's,"
you might say.
There's going to be some people out there that are not going to like
what this person is about to say.
And in those situations, you can kind of already expect
that there's going to be a lot of dislikes and just kind of ignore it.
And in that situation, I think a lot of people
also might be like, "Oh, well,
these people who are disliking the video, they're stupid".
You know, people just be like that, right?
And they might even be incentivized to actually give a
like that they might have just otherwise not even thought to do.
And here's the thing sometimes people actually make a controversial opinion
that is not actually that good, and there's actually justification
in giving the dislikes.
Now, I don't agree with people like leaving comments and saying, "Oh,
you're stupid, blah blah" and getting all worked up over it.
I think people who leave
angry YouTube comments should probably examine their life
and find a little bit better things to be worried about.
And really
the most strong form of harassment, I think, do come in the comments anyway.
And this is going to do nothing to curb that, except maybe incentivize people.
What, they can't dislike it? Well, they're going to have to leave a comment, right?
And no matter whether you have
the dislike counter or not, whether that causes you to, "well
alright I'll just enable hold-for-review", they'd have to do that anyway.
People who were angry enough to leave a comment are going to do it anyway.
It's not going to stop you from having to deal with that.
Part of just uploading and putting yourself out there on YouTube
is opening yourself up to the potential of getting negative feedback.
And really, let's be honest, the dislike counter is the most mild
possible form of negative feedback that you could possibly receive.
Now, as for the justification of why even include the Dislike button still anyway?
I guess the idea is, well, they say in the blog post.
You know, viewers can still dislike the videos to tune the recommendations,
fair enough, and privately share feedback with creators.
And the other thing they said is that the public counter
specifically being they're visible to everyone, is causing stress.
Or that's kind of what gives people the feeling of being harassed is because,
you know, everyone else can see that people dislike your opinion.
And in response to that, I go back to my two other points
I made about,
first of all, you're going to have to deal with negative harassment in life.
And especially if you're deciding to put your content out there on YouTube,
that's just going to be part of it. You kind of have to expect it.
You can either learn to deal with it and become better
and be strong enough to deal with it and just kind of ignore it going forward.
Or if you didn't want to deal with that,
I mean, fair enough, people can do what they want.
Then you still have the option to disable likes
and dislikes altogether on the video.
And one reason they said they didn't enable this thing
as an option to disable the like counter is because they feel
that people would get harassment for disabling the feature
and making the choice to not allow people to see the dislikes.
And to that, I respond, OK, well, what are they going to do?
Leave a comment about it. They can still do that!
I don't think this solve any problem.
It creates more problems than it's going to solve.
It really just removes an extremely, very mild version of negative feedback
and only gives people who really are out for blood the option to leave a comment.
And if they're going to go to that extent,
they're going to say something really mean.
And on the flip side, really, the dislike counter is
the only thing that is not really censor-able by the creator.
And sometimes those creators are literal scam accounts, right?
Everyone knows that there's plenty of spam and scam on YouTube,
and YouTube is not always that good at handling it.
I mean, I made a video talking about how YouTube is unable to curb this
infestation of scam bots in almost every comment section you see on YouTube.
They can't handle that, so they're going to now just remove
the only form of feedback people have, which is the dislike counter.
And if someone goes to a scam video, they're not going to have any way
of knowing, at least before you could see, are this person disabled comments?
They disabled the dislike and like button.
You're going to be like a little bit suspicious of that.
And again,
even if it was like just because it was a controversial video,
you can kind of tell, well, this person obviously
is making a controversial opinion.
That's probably why they did it.
But if you saw any other kind of video, it would make you a little bit suspicious.
And YouTube said that, oh, well, there still is the comments section
for giving feedback and seeing whether or not a video is good
or not for tutorials and informational videos.
And no, not really, because the creator can selectively
remove comments or hold them all for review.
So if it's specifically like an informational video
that someone puts out and it's just completely wrong, (and
I do see the irony of me making that statement by the way),
in a situation where they are getting a bunch
of negative feedback because the video just sucks.
Really, the only method that creator had for hiding the fact that it's not a good
video was to completely disable the dislike count.
But now some fraud or scammer out there can just not have to do anything.
It's the default experience.
They don't even have to worry about the dislikes and likes,
and they can just
start censoring the comments, hold them for review,
and people will not be able to know at all.
But really, the main point I want to go back
to which I would consider my main point is that this is going
to have unintended consequences and do the exact opposite of,
in terms of helping, small creators and people just starting out.
Because again, it just removes the ability for people
to find actual good small creator content.
It's going to create a bias
if there's enough crap out there because there is a lot of just
junk on YouTube, there's a lot of low quality stuff.
So really, the only way you had to determine
it was to look at the dislike counter.
If you can't do that anymore, then I think it's going to make people biased
against watching smaller creators, or stuff withnot a lot of views.
And I think it's really ironic that YouTube says, like, "Oh,
we want to create an inclusive and respectful environment
where creators have the opportunity to succeed."
And a really bad way of doing that is removing a form of public feedback
that you can use to help judge again, whether you want to watch the video
or not, and force people into a mindset of making snap judgments
based on completely superficial stuff that really doesn't matter again
based on people like production quality or their accent or whatever.
There's plenty people out there who are very knowledgeable on subjects,
but they're not very knowledgeable on making good quality videos.
But you know, they make a video.
It might look like crap, but the content is there and it's good.
And if people like it and not a lot of people dislike it,
that's way more likely I think, to actually have people
more willing to sit through it and say "Alright I'll give it a chance"
as opposed to, "alright, this starting off right away, doesn't look very good.
I'm just going to go away." I don't think this is inclusive at all.
And the final thing I want to say is, is there really no other solutions
they could come up with except throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
Because look, yeah, there are situations everyone knows where people do go out
and you know, they have a vendetta and they just go and try to brigade
a video and give a bunch of dislikes to make them feel better.
Well, that seems almost right up the alley of an A.I.
application that Google is supposed to be really good at to maybe filter out
those types of situations.
If the algorithm sees that, "hey there's a bunch of people
coming from one source at the same time and going and just disliking this
video without watching it."
Hmm. That might be
a good idea to just remove those dislikes or not show those dislikes publicly.
I don't even think you would need A.I. in that situation.
It's like a common sense thing, and you could just add in other variables
to address different situations and then you can keep the legitimate uses
of the Dislike button.
So overall.
Again, I'm not going to lose sleep over this personally, but I do think it's dumb.
I think it's going to hurt small creators and people just starting out,
and I think we're going to find it's really
not going to have any kind of effect on dampening real harassment.
And by that, I mean, like the actual harassment
in terms of like people leaving comments, mean comments, you know, threatens
stuff like that. A dislike?
You can't give a threat through a dislike.
OK, you can't give a particularly mean thought through a dislike.
It's just a dislike.
And if people are going to be embarrassed
and feel harassed because a bunch of idiots
dislike their video, that should be a badge of honor
not feeling like, "Oh we gotta suppress this!" There are dumb people out there.
You just gotta kind of live with it.
If you try to hide it away, it's not going to go anywhere.
So I just want to give my thoughts.
And I don't think YouTube is going to back down on this decision.
Probably.
Or maybe they will see this video and maybe
give it a little bit extra thought or maybe come up with a different solution.
Who knows?
But I do personally
want to hear what you guys opinion or if you think that maybe I am wrong
and maybe there is some good justification for just, "you know what?
Let's remove it altogether." Then I'll hear it out in the comments.
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If you want to keep watching.
Speaking about gamers and fraud and stuff, I made a video last week
talking about a program I made to filter out all those spam
comment bots, and your favorite creator might be able to use that, so
definitely check that out. I think it's worth watching.
So thanks so much for watching guys, and I'll see you in the next video.