To become a positive social network, YouTube will hide the number of dislikes.

On November 10th, YouTube posted an announcement on its blog about the latest changes to the platform. According to the announcement, YouTube will still allow users to use the Dislike button on all videos, but the number of dislikes will no longer be publicly displayed as before.

Although the Dislike counter was created for a specific purpose—to count the number of times users have disliked a video—in recent years, YouTube researchers have realized that many users tend to "criticize" a video based on emotion or as part of a boycott campaign.

Specifically, many people use the Dislike button not because of the quality of the content, but because they dislike the creator, or for other subjective reasons. This has led to the emergence of rankings such as "Videos with the most Dislikes on YouTube" and hinders the creativity of content creators.

In an effort to prevent this situation and help all creators have a healthy environment to thrive, regardless of whether they are large organizations or individual channels, YouTube will officially move the Dislike counter on videos to private mode.

YouTube experimented with hiding dislike counts earlier this year to determine if the change would reduce attacks and harassment against content creators. Their findings during this process led to the official decision to remove the dislike counter from all uploaded videos.

Although many users oppose this change because they will no longer be able to easily check video quality as before, what YouTube is more concerned about is the negativity and psychological impact that "dislike" users have on content creators, and even on the community in general.

Specifically, video creators can still see the number of likes and dislikes on their videos through YouTube Studio. YouTube has already started implementing this change and will apply it to all videos in the near future.

Khanh Ha (compiled)