Credit: Jimmy Westenberg / Android Authority
- YouTube is making dislike counts private across all videos on the platform.
- Users can still click the dislike button on YouTube videos, but the dislike counts will no longer be shown.
- The change will start rolling out today.
YouTube is making a major change to the way users interact with its service. Starting today, dislike counts will no longer be visible to viewers on YouTube. To be clear, the dislike button is not going away — users can still dislike any YouTube video they come into contact with — but the counts will remain private to the creator of the YouTube video.
YouTube cites “dislike attacks” and other forms of harassment as the driving reason behind this change. If a group of people dislikes a video for any particular reason, they can “target” the dislike button to drive numbers up as much as possible.