YouTube Removes Dislike Counter

So this was weird, YouTube suddenly just removed the dislike count on videos. I actually don’t see this covered to a crazy amount, which means either people think this isn’t a big deal or they don’t even realize it, but this is huge for YouTube. What YouTube said on the matter itself was that it was doing a “test” to see if people were disliking videos to drive up a count. Apparently, a lot of users stated that they were getting trolled by the platform and as such that they didn’t want the dislike count visible because the people trolling were less likely to dislike the video. As such, they said the experiment warranted the removal of the dislike count on all videos across the platform. While I understand why this happened, I don’t necessarily agree with it. Some videos I believe were disliked for a reason, not just because trolls are going after them. For example, recently Nintendo made a video about the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack, and video watchers were giving constructive feedback by disliking the video, not because they were targeting them, but because they didn’t like what the video was saying. The video before the dislike count was removed was about 172,000! It even got them to speak about the matter. And that’s not the only example out there, as there are countless other instances of this. Some people I understand do have people that go after them, but for that I say YouTube itself should let creators like that have an option whether or not to show the amount of dislikes on a video. A lot of what I did on the platform was determining if I wanted to watch a lengthy video by the like to dislike ratio. But now all we have is the amount of likes, which without a comparison of dislikes will be hard to compare a lot of videos to and I believe long-term will have some people watching less videos. A good thing (or bad thing for creators) that could come out of this, however, is that this could get people who were more shy to dislike more videos, as I know even myself sometimes I would feel more afraid to dislike videos when the count is at 0. Being the one outlier can be strange. But it can also mean the trolls live on still, and only the creator can see it. Plus the fact that those same trolls will just probably move on to something like the comments section for videos. So all-in-all, the fact that they removed the count because of not that many creators is kinda crazy in my opinion. It seems like the majority of us were fine seeing dislikes on our videos, as it tells us what we need to work on as creators. And trolls will always be there, no matter how small or big a creator you are. What matters is that you don’t get affected by what those trolls say or do. We will see how big of a deal this is, if we are still missing dislikes a year from now, or if we completely forget about it altogether.