If you've ever seen the ‘Dislike’ count on a video on YouTube, you know that the Comments are likely also equally as negative. A perfect storm of factors ensures that YouTube is home to the most toxic comment section on the web. If you Google “Why are YouTube comments…”, the search engine will complete your sentence with the options “so bad”, “so racist”, and “so toxic”.
YouTube has recently started experimenting with hiding Dislike counts to protect creators’ well-being and we believe this is long overdue. This will not affect metrics on the backend dashboard of the creator but it will remove Dislike count from public view. The platform says that dislikes can negatively impact a creator’s well-being and ‘may motivate a targeted campaign of dislikes on a creator’s video.’ Basically, the idea is that seeing a dislike number and watching it go up could be enough motivation to join in and make the number larger.
Although this feature is just rolling out on select YouTube Creator accounts, we eagerly anticipate this becoming a bigger update across the platform by 2023. We will be sure to keep you updated on the progress of this.
Source: The Verge