Poster Of Me At The Zoo Alters Video Description To Essay Against YouTube Dislike Button Removal

YouTuber Jawed, one of the founders of YouTube who uploaded the first YouTube video of all time, titled "me at the zoo," has altered the description of his iconic video to feature an essay on why he does not care for YouTube's removal of the dislike button.

The new description reads:

Watching Matt Koval's announcement about the removal of dislikes, I thought something was off. The spoken words did not match the eyes. The video reminded me of an interview Admiral Jeremiah Denton gave in 1966. I have never seen a less enthusiastic, more reluctant announcement of something that is supposed to be great.

Calling the removal of dislikes a good thing for creators cannot be done without conflict by someone holding the title of "YouTube's Creator Liaison". We know this because there exists not a single YouTube Creator who thinks removing dislikes is a good idea -- for YouTube or for Creators.

Why would YouTube make this universally disliked change? There is a reason, but it's not a good one, and not one that will be publicly disclosed. Instead, there will be references to various studies. Studies that apparently contradict the common sense of every YouTuber.

The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform. Why? Because not all user-generated content is good. It can't be. In fact, most of it is not good. And that's OK. The idea was never that all content is good. The idea WAS, however, that among the flood of content, there are great creations waiting to be exposed. And for that to happen, the stuff that's not great has to fall by the side as quickly as possible.

The process works, and there's a name for it: the wisdom of the crowds. The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then, the platform invariably declines. Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre? Because nothing can be great if nothing is bad.

In business, there's only one thing more important than "Make it better". And that's "Don't fuck it up".

YouTube's decision to remove dislikes from the platform has proven incredibly controversial, with the decision's detractors pointing out that removing the dislike button makes sorting through the ocean of YouTube content for quality much more difficult. A commonly used argument is that those searching for a tutorial on a certain topic will now not have a simple visual indicator to tell if the information they're receiving is good or bad.

Jawed's new description echoes that concern, as well as hints towards an undisclosed reason YouTube made the decision, suggesting there may have been monetary interests at play in the decision to remove dislikes.

As anyone who has interacted with any of YouTube's recent tweets can tell you, YouTube users are begging for the dislike button to come back. One wonders if the call of one of YouTube's most historically significant users will get their attention.