The number of dislikes on a video will no longer be visible to users on YouTube, according to the company.
After researchers briefly decreased the number of dislikes on films in an experiment in early 2021, the website will gradually push out the change starting today.
While the dislike button will remain available, only video producers will be able to read this input, according to the company’s creator liaison, Matt Koval.
The change, he claimed, is intended to decrease “dislike attacks,” in which users try to intentionally inflate the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos.
“It’s usually just because they don’t like the creator or what they stand for,” he told users today.
“That’s a big problem when half of YouTube’s mission is to give everyone a voice.”
The announcement was met with a mixed response from YouTube users, with almost 6000 likes and 27,000 dislikes on the video.