-Brittany Hennis-
Cousins!
Pull out your popcorn cousins! There’s about to be a whole LOT of wasted watch hours. Sifting through bad or misleading videos, in order to find the gems you love on YouTube’s platform!
They’ve given a “thumbs down” to their own dislike button. This social media platform will be removing public counts located by their dislike button essentially making everyone’s videos a wonderful choice.
That’s right, no longer will you be able to gauge what you want to watch based on the like vs dislike ratio we have grown accustomed to relying on, because creators are artists, and artists are sensitive about theirs.
NBC News shared that Matt Koval, YouTube creator’s liaison, actually admitted in a video the dislike button really works. It “helps us know, as viewers, if it’s a good video or not, if it’s a helpful tutorial or not, or if what a creator is saying in their video is generally agreed with or not.”
So why remove the number count you ask? Welp! Koval also added “unfortunately, research teams at YouTube have found there’s this whole other use for disliking a video, that I’ve never experienced as a creator and you may not have either. Apparently, groups of users are targeting a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. Turning it into something like a game with a visible scoreboard. And it’s usually just because they don’t like the creator or what they stand for. That’s a big problem when half of YouTube’s mission is to give everyone a voice.”
On the bright side, the video platform’s dislike button made the cut so it will live to see many more days and remain visible to the viewers. The number of times it’s been smacked however, won’t have to go home, but it will have to get the heck up out of the forefront and move quietly into YouTube studio, where only the video’s creator can privately view the count there.
It was noted that YouTube claims their decision was all research based, and a press release stated viewers were “less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count,” in a ‘dislike attack’ from apparent mobs of people who lay waiting to execute dislike drive-bys. They highlighted this mainly affects small creators.
Some users of the platform voiced their displeasure and could not help but note even bad creators will now have an opportunity to receive countless views, potentially even make ad revenue from them.
There will be a rise in clickbait video viewing and/or fake videos claiming to be helpful when in fact they are harmful or just advertising. It will challenge users to have to discern what is actual content, versus spammy content and the advertisers on these videos under all circumstances will be the real winners in all of this.