Dislike count for all existing YouTube videos becomes private

Earlier this year, Google ran an experiment that involved testing whether the removal of the dislike count from the publicly available pages of all YouTube videos would help to keep creators safe from harassment and reduce the so-called "dislike attacks." Although the figures generated by this experiment have not been unveiled, Google is now rolling out this change globally.

According to the official blog of the team, "We're making the dislike counts private across YouTube, but the dislike button is not going away. This change will start gradually rolling out today." If this seems to be censorship, rest assured that it's not, because the dislike button is not going anywhere. However, while YouTube users can still dislike any video, only the creators can see the dislike count.

In addition to the above, disliking videos will still help viewers to tune their recommendations. Although no percentages were revealed, as mentioned above, YouTube shared that, during the aforementioned experiment, "some of you have used the public dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video" and concluded that hiding this element is the right thing to do.

What do you think about this decision? Feel free to hit the comments section as usual, but please keep it polite and spam-free.

Buy YouTube Channels For Dummies (2nd Edition) on Amazon