YouTube is experimenting with hiding dislike counts in an effort to improve the well-being of content creators. In YouTube Studio, stats will remain available.
YouTube has revealed that it is experimenting with covering dislikes in order to prevent “dislike mobs” from downvoting videos from creators and channels on purpose. The experiment is a different implementation from the company’s previous solutions, but it’s close to other attempts by sites like Instagram to counter targeted attacks.
YouTube is experimenting with eliminating audience hate counts from posts, but the dislike button will remain in place. Users will begin to see a few possible new prototypes for the like and dislike buttons that appear under videos as part of the trial.
YouTube tweeted
“In response to creator feedback around well-being and targeted dislike campaigns, we’re testing a few new designs that don’t show the public dislike count. If you’re part of this small experiment, you might spot one of these designs in the coming weeks (example below!).”
“Creators, you’ll still be able to see the exact number of likes and dislikes in YouTube Studio. For viewers, if you’re in the experiment, you can still like or dislike a video to share feedback with creators and help tune the recommendations you see on YouTube,” the tweet says.
In the current configuration, all likes and dislikes statistics are viewable in a creator’s individual YouTube Studio tab, but only likes are publicly displayed on a video. Dislikes, according to a YouTube support article explaining the test, can have a negative effect on a creator’s well-being and “can inspire a targeted campaign of dislikes on a creator’s video.”
According to YouTube, the latest design is being tested in response to feedback that hate counts can have an effect on content creators’ well-being. The dislike button is often used as part of a targeted campaign to attack the content of a creator. Such campaigns may lead to an artificially inflated hate count, which may even outnumber likes.
Creators rely on likes and dislikes as a means of input to direct their creative development, but it’s simple to transform what could be a useful function into another surface for violence, just like intentionally giving a game a bad review on Steam. When YouTube first revealed that it was looking at how to deal with dislikes, it said it was exploring three options: hiding the numbers for both likes and dislikes, increasing the friction associated with disliking something by needing more contact, or eliminating likes and dislikes altogether.
YouTube would use this experiment to see if eliminating public hate counts leads to less targeted dislike campaigns.
What does this mean for both designers and people in the audience?
Participants in the test group will continue to like and dislike videos. That can lead you to question why YouTube isn’t exploring the removal of the dislike button entirely if creators can continue to see how many dislikes they get.
YouTube’s goal with this experiment is to enhance the creator experience while also ensuring that viewer input is recorded and shared with the creator. The dislike button serves a useful function for YouTube users when it isn’t being used maliciously. The dislike button can be used to fine-tune YouTube’s recommendation algorithm to fit one’s personal preferences.
When a user dislikes a video, they are less likely to see video suggestions on their homepage for similar types of videos. When used correctly, the dislike button can be a valuable source of viewer input for developers. As far as we can tell here in Prism Marketing, as a result, the dislike button will remain under videos, with the same effect on video recommendations.
It is not possible to opt out of this trial, according to YouTube, but the company will closely track input to decide whether or not to continue with a wider rollout. YouTube isn’t the first website to try to hide engagement figures.
Instagram tried eliminating like counts from its platform in 2019. Instagram’s experiment, like YouTube’s, was motivated by the need to improve its users’ mental health.
Several months after Instagram began its experiment, Facebook began obscuring like counts on its site. Both experiments were short-lived, and Instagram and Facebook like counts eventually returned to normal. Time can say how long YouTube’s experiment continues and what effect, if any, it has on the well-being of its creators.
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