YouTube's Removal Of The Dislike Button

Overview

YouTube's Removal Of The Dislike Button refers to a decision by YouTube to remove the visibility of the dislike button count underneath the platform's videos. Although YouTube had been developing the concept as early as March 2021, they didn't actually go through with the plans until November 2021. News of the removal was met with mostly criticism online, predominantly on Reddit, wherein the days following the decision, many Redditors posted memes about it, as well as elsewhere online.

Background

YouTube first announced its intention to remove or alter the dislike button on March 30th, 2021, via a Twitter ^[1] announcement. The reasoning they gave for wanting to remove the feature had to do with the feedback they received from creators in regards to targeted dislike campaigns. The company emphasized, however, that it wouldn't remove the dislike button entirely. Instead, it was experimenting with hiding the dislike count so that only the creator would be able to see how many users disliked their video. This initial tweet sent from YouTube (shown below) received roughly 29,400 likes over the course of eight months, but also over 16,500 quote tweets compared to just 2,700 retweets (known as being ratioed).

Initial reactions to the March 2021 announcement were mostly skeptical of the effectiveness of such an update. For instance, Twitter^[2] user @Rimmy_Downunder replied to the tweet, arguing that, "Likes/Dislikes are an important method to judge if a video is trustworthy." Their tweet (shown below, left) received roughly 1,700 likes over the course of eight months. Other Twitter^[3] users, like @Mlickles, referenced the TikTok trend of, "Use me as a dislike button," which someone can comment under a TikTok video to have people like as a form of a dislike button. Her tweet (shown below, right) received roughly 41,200 likes over the course of eight months.

Developments

On November 10th, 2021, YouTube announced both in a blog post^[4] and in a YouTube video^[5] that it would officially be hiding dislike counts going forward. According to the blog post, YouTube's data results from their experiments started in March "showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior." Based on these results that supported the company's hypothesis, YouTube decided to officially make the change on the platform. It was to be gradually rolled out over the days following. The video that was uploaded to the official YouTube^[5] account, YouTube Creators, on November 10th, 2021, (shown below) received roughly 570,500 views, 8,600 likes and 34,000 dislikes over the course of 24 hours.

YouTube also attached the video in an official announcement tweet^[6] that was posted on November 10th, 2021. The tweet (shown below) received roughly 8,000 likes and 15,000 quote tweets compared to just 1,800 retweets over the course of one day.

Online Reactions

Notable YouTuber Philip DeFranco shared the news via his own tweet^[7] that received more likes than YouTube's announcement tweet: roughly 17,400 likes in less than 24 hours. Tweets like DeFranco's spread awareness of the news further.

Twitter^[8] users who voiced criticism of the removal focused on the dislike ratio being vital in identifying "fishy" content. Others^[9] questioned YouTube's statement of "protecting small creators" with this move. Instead, they argued that the removal protected big corporations from criticism.

Image macro memes about the removal began to appear on Reddit en masse shortly after. The first meme posted to /r/memes about YouTube's removal of the dislike button was posted on November 11th, 2021, by Redditor^[10] IHateDeepStuff. The meme used a Batman template where he loses his parents in a flashback, object-labeling them with text reading "YouTube dislike button" and "YouTube comments." The meme (shown below) received roughly 21,200 upvotes in less than 24 hours.

More Redditors^[11][12] uploaded memes about the removal of the dislike button, harking on the same criticisms and jokes that were prevalent in March 2021, like the idea of liking a comment as a dislike button substitute and the future of not being able to know which videos are unreliable. Redditors^[13] also began to post memes about the infamous dislike ratio of the YouTube Rewind 2018 video, jokingly guessing that that might be a reason for YouTube's dismissal of the dislike feature.

"Me At The Zoo" Creator Response

In response to the decision, YouTuber Jawed, who uploaded the first video in YouTube's history "me at the zoo," changed the video's description to an essay against the decision to remove dislikes. It 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".

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References