YouTube Is Making A Messy Change On A Feature
World’s biggest video sharing platform, YouTube has come up with a little-seemed change that will actually affect the platform in a way much more than it seems. So, the platform seems to be working for a feature that won’t allow displaying the number of dislikes of a video received publicly.
Today, YouTube has announced that it has decided to try something new with its front-end design and took action for it. As it has first tweeted about it to announce, later a longer statement arrived through to outline the decision of this experiment changes on how the public can interact with videos, as well. Here’s what the giant platform said:
“We’ll be experimenting, with a small group of users, a few potential designs for the like and dislike buttons that appear below YouTube videos.
Viewer feedback has always been, and will continue to be, an important part of YouTube. But we’ve heard from creators that the public dislike counts can impact their wellbeing, and may motivate a targeted campaign of dislikes on a creator’s video. So, we’re testing designs that don’t include the visible like or dislike count in an effort to balance improving the creator experience, while still making sure viewer feedback is accounted for and shared with the creator.”
So, it sounds like a bad thing for those who enjoy trolling or making hate campaigns on streamers although there are also right and deserved dislikes, too. So, YouTube clearly wanted to do something to prevent those haters from doing so for the right reasons. But still, there is a large amount of user that has already disagreed with this change as well.
In the meantime, this change of YouTube on trying process is mostly a response to creators’ feedback that they are tired of being targetted and be voted unjustly. They had also said the platform that all of those targeting campaigns and those fake dislikes have been affecting their motivations negatively, while users on the other hand claim this change is a bad idea. But on the other side, this change will only dam up users seeing the dislikes, while the content creators are still going to be able to see the numbers secretly.
“Creators, you’ll still be able to see the exact number of likes and dislikes in YouTube Studio. For viewers, if you’re in the experiment, you can still like or dislike a video to share feedback with creators and help tune the recommendations you see on YouTube,” explains the company more of their change. And even if it’s all messed up already with conflicts, the platform has also stressed that this is only a test phase now which might lead nowhere. So, it is going to be really interesting to watch what is going to happen during this process.
Ultimately, it’s understandable why YouTube has made that decision to hide the dislike counting, but still, it is also a feature that helps us to find our ways through those tons of videos as well. So making it disappear also seems like a not that good idea for us to reach out more fitting videos for ourselves. It’s actually a tough decision to make. What do you think? Please let us know down below!
And here is the tweet of YouTube along with the possible look of the new button.
👍👎 In response to creator feedback around well-being and targeted dislike campaigns, we're testing a few new designs that don't show the public dislike count. If you're part of this small experiment, you might spot one of these designs in the coming weeks (example below!). pic.twitter.com/aemrIcnrbx
— YouTube (@YouTube) March 30, 2021
