Hi, I'm Robin.

And I'm not going to lie, I'm a little bit pissed off.

YouTube has made the decision recently to effectively remove the dislike button from their platform. While it is still there and you can still see it and click on it, you can not see the dislike count on a video. The news came on November 10th, 2020 after months of testing this feature for some users. Normally, I wouldn't care about this decision.. They're private company, they can do what they like with their platform whether I like it or not. But this time, it really just feels so different. I've been thinking about why that is, and I've come to these reasons.

First of all, nobody in the YouTube community asked for this. In fact, many prominent figures have said this is a bad idea. People like SomeOrdinaryGamers, Coffeezilla, LinusTechTips and Marques Brownlee are just a few people who have said they do not like this decision. Even PewDiePie has come out to say he doesn't like the decision and while two corporations- T-Series and CocoMelon- have surpassed him in recent years, he is still the most subscribed to channel run by a single personality, not counting his editors and social media team running his Facebook page. All of these creators and more have stated that they do not like this decision and find YouTube's reasoning to be nonsensical- and I agree. It's not just creators either, it's the whole community as well. I personally haven't seen anyone say this is a good idea.

So, okay, let's backtrack a little. What are these reasons YouTube has presented? Well, in a video they posted to their YouTube Creators channel simple titled titled "Update to YouTube's Dislike Count," Matt Koval, a "Creator Liaison," gives the reasons as to why. The first reason they give is that bad faith actors are dislike bombing videos on channels they don't like, usually because they don't like the creator themselves or their viewpoints. I will not say that this does not happen because I know for a fact it absolutely does. In fact, I've seen it happen myself and I have to say- this is often a good thing. Why? Because a lot of creators who get these dislike bombs are because they were exposed for partaking in awful behavior. Take, for example, cartoon reviewer Cosmodore or gaming let's player MiniLad. Both of these YouTubers have been exposed for having relationships with their underage fans, both of whom planned to or actually did meet them in person at one point. Both creators have made multiple apology videos, disappeared from the internet for a while, only to come back and act like nothing happened at all. If you didn't know any of this, the only way you can tell something happened at a glance is the massive amount of dislikes visible on every new upload to their channel.

Okay, but those are bigger channels right? Koval stated this was to protect smaller channels. Well, when it comes to smaller channels, it's usually the same case- they got exposed for something, be it plagiarism of other's content like in the case of Filip Muicin, a game reviewer who used to work for gaming website IGN that was found plagiarizing other people's game reviews on both his own channel and in articles he made for IGN. In other cases that I've seen where small channels get dislike bombed it's because they were scamming with fake gift card giveaways or they used a recent death or tragedy as clickbait. I'm not going to say that creators don't dislike bombed for no reason, because I'm aware that does indeed happen. What I'm saying is it's not as a big of a problem as YouTube has made out to be, at least in my own experiences.

The other and seemingly bigger reason YouTube gives is the mental health of the creators on their platform. Many YouTubers have in recent years taken extended breaks from their channels due to massive burnout, have expressed immense stress doing it as a full time job due to the unpredictability of the platform and so on. Koval says change is done to ease up creators' worries and anxieties over videos that get a lot of dislikes. I'm gonna be honest, in my opinion, this is complete bullshit. Why? because you can still view dislikes on your creator dashboard. Hiding it from the public changes nothing when you yourself can still see a video you made is hated on immensely. Sure, not seeing the dislike count can disincentivize people from bothering to hit the dislike button, as Koval said their studies seemed to find. But dislikes are the least of YouTube's problems with creators' anxieties. If YouTube actually cares about their creators' well beings, why is it that if you don't upload a video a day your channel is actively hurt in recommendations? Why hasn't YouTube removed the ranking system from the dashboard? It's a system that shows your most recent ten videos and pits them against each other. Is your most recent video that you spent a lot of time on at the bottom of the list? Well that sucks, doesn't it? That's the biggest problem that I've been hearing people talk about for months. It's not something you can hide. It's not optional, it's right there, ever present and always there.

To me, this is just another sign that YouTube's original slogan, "Broadcast Yourself," is as in effect as their parent company Google's abandoned slogan "Don't Be Evil." To me and many others, this decision only serves to benefit corporations. Now Nintendo doesn't have to remove and reupload a video on the lackluster benefits of their mediocre online service because everyone showed they didn't like it. Now Activision and Electronic Arts don't have to disable ratings on their videos that show their awful, egregious monetization schemes. This doesn't help the common creator- and with how YouTube has been in recent years, I'm honestly not surprised at all.

That's all I really have to say. I'm not surprised, and yet I'm somehow still disappointed. Thanks for reading.

-Robin.

(If you enjoy my content, feel free to buy me a coffee on my Ko-fi page. I appreciate all your donations.)