YouTube has made the number of disliked videos private across the platform with a new update rolling out gradually on Wednesday.
Update of YouTube's dislike count
According to YouTube, this is part of an effort to create a respectful environment and prevent harassment. Content creators can still find the number of dislikes in YouTube Studio analytics and other metrics to understand how their video is doing.
In March of this year, YouTube announced that it would experiment with the dislike button to see if removing it would better protect creators from harassment. The platform claims that its research teams discovered that groups of people were abusing the dislike button to target content creators as part of a coordinated attack.
During the experiment, YouTube found that making dislikes private significantly reduced the number of coordinated attacks. The dislike button will still be there for people to use, and the platform's algorithm will use this feedback to refine a person's recommended videos; it's just the view count that will disappear.
