with making dislike counts private to only the creator of the video.

Now, if you're like me, you were surprised by that.

I mean, I've always thought

seeing the number of dislikes on a video 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.

But unfortunately, research teams at YouTube have found

there's this whole other use for disliking a video

that I had never experienced as a creator and you may not have either.

Apparently, groups of viewers 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.

So, earlier in 2021, YouTube experimented with making the public dislike count private

to see if it would help reduce these coordinated "dislike" attacks

across the platform.

And after analysis, they did see a reduction.

So, the update from YouTube is that the Dislike button is staying

but the dislike counts will now be private.

You can still dislike videos

and that action will be used to tune your own recommendations

but you won't be able to see the dislike count.

only the creator can find it on the backend, if they want.

Now, a few common questions we saw from the initial experiment.

First, without a public dislike count

how can viewers tell if a video is worth watching.

Again, I kind of had this question too

but it turns out that while viewers might use the dislike count

to give them a sense of a video's worth

when the teams looked at the data

across millions of viewers and videos in the experiment

they didn't see a noticeable difference in viewership

regardless of whether they could see the dislike count or not.

In other words, it didn't really matter

if a video had a lot of dislikes or not

they still watched.

Next common question

if creators can still see the dislike count on the backend

how's that any different?

They can see it if they look for it inside Studio Analytics, under the Engagement tab

but overall, it's much less likely to cause stress and embarrassment

if the count isn't visible to the public.

And one more common question: is this because YouTube Rewind got lots of dislikes?

No, although there are some teams internally

who have learned the hard way what it feels like to get lots of dislikes.

Now, this again is about protecting all creators

and making sure they have a chance to succeed and feel safe in doing so.

Alright, so that's the update.

I hope it doesn't cause too much frustration.

Honestly, I think you're gonna get used to it pretty quickly

and keep in mind other platforms don't even have a Dislike button.

So, consider that, thank you and I hope you're well.