Hey folks, you may have seen a while back that YouTube announced it was experimenting
with making dislike counts private to only the creator of the video.
Now, if you're like me, you were surprised by that.
I mean, I've always thought
seeing the number of dislikes on a video helps us know, as viewers
if it's a good video or not, if it's a helpful tutorial or not
or if what a creator is saying in their video is generally agreed with or not.
But unfortunately, research teams at YouTube have found
there's this whole other use for disliking a video
that I had never experienced as a creator and you may not have either.
Apparently, groups of viewers are targeting a video's Dislike button
to drive up the count.
Turning it into something like a game with a visible scoreboard.
And it's usually just because they don't like the creator
or what they stand for.
That's a big problem
when half of YouTube's mission is to give everyone a voice.
So, earlier in 2021, YouTube experimented with making the public dislike count private
to see if it would help reduce these coordinated "dislike" attacks
across the platform.
And after analysis, they did see a reduction.
So, the update from YouTube is that the Dislike button is staying
but the dislike counts will now be private.
You can still dislike videos
and that action will be used to tune your own recommendations
but you won't be able to see the dislike count.
only the creator can find it on the backend, if they want.
Now, a few common questions we saw from the initial experiment.
First, without a public dislike count
how can viewers tell if a video is worth watching.
Again, I kind of had this question too
but it turns out that while viewers might use the dislike count
to give them a sense of a video's worth
when the teams looked at the data
across millions of viewers and videos in the experiment
they didn't see a noticeable difference in viewership
regardless of whether they could see the dislike count or not.
In other words, it didn't really matter
if a video had a lot of dislikes or not
they still watched.
Next common question
if creators can still see the dislike count on the backend
how's that any different?
They can see it if they look for it inside Studio Analytics, under the Engagement tab
but overall, it's much less likely to cause stress and embarrassment
if the count isn't visible to the public.
And one more common question: is this because YouTube Rewind got lots of dislikes?
No, although there are some teams internally
who have learned the hard way what it feels like to get lots of dislikes.
Now, this again is about protecting all creators
and making sure they have a chance to succeed and feel safe in doing so.
Alright, so that's the update.
I hope it doesn't cause too much frustration.
Honestly, I think you're gonna get used to it pretty quickly
and keep in mind other platforms don't even have a Dislike button.
So, consider that, thank you and I hope you're well.