YouTube Irony as Video Explaining Removal of the Dislike Counter Gets 31K Dislikes!

For more than a year now, YouTube has clearly been fighting something of a moral battle in terms of the future of its ‘dislike’ button. As many of you are probably aware, YouTube currently gives you the option to like or dislike a video, And, based upon this, the idea is that a new potential viewer can judge beforehand whether it is worth watching or not. Or perhaps on something of a moderate sidenote, whether people who have watched it so far agree or disagree with the content posted.

The problem this clearly raises, however, is when the dislike feature is, basically, abused. Rightly or wrongly, various YouTubers have fallen afoul of the internet over recent years and this has often resulted in something of a moderate campaign to bombard their channel with ‘dislikes’. You may disagree with my choice of wording, but you know what I’m driving at.

Following a new blog post by YouTube, however, it looks that they’ve finally come to a decision over this point. Although you can read it in full here, the gist of it is that while the ‘Dislike’ button is remaining, the ability for anyone other than the creator to view the actual number it has received will be going bye-bye!

YouTube To Remove Dislike Counter

As noted above, I think it would be fair to say that while the ‘dislike’ button works in principle, it is way too easily misused by more angered members of the social media community. – In an attempt to give some sort of example of this, let’s just presume that we posted a video citing our loathing hatred of a particular brand or product. Now, while some of you might agree and like the video, there would undoubtedly be many who disagreed. Of these, there would be a percentage who were so outraged by this content that they would spend the next 10-15 minutes disliking every single video we had ever created. Regardless of whether it was relevant to the original subject or not.

Put simply, it is undoubtedly a system that is open to abuse. Not, incidentally, that this is a sole issue to YouTube as Steam constantly attempts (without much success) to prevent ‘review bombing’ on its own platform.

While YouTube has published the video above explaining why they have made this decision, there is a rather ironic (and, I’ll just say it, funny) twist to the story. You see, rather bizarrely, despite the content and subject of the video, some idiot at YouTube chose to allow the likes and dislikes to be displayed on it! – And, as you might expect, given that this is the internet, the video has already received over 31,000 dislikes. (And that’s just at the time of writing!).

I can only presume that they’ve done this as some kind of self-signalling means of proving that their decision to remove the dislike counter (clearly moving forward) was correct!

Rolling Out!

YouTube has confirmed that following a (what they call) successful trial of this system earlier this year, it will now be fully implemented as a standard part of their platform. With it getting a ‘roll out’ implementation, however, it may be several weeks before you start to notice the dislike count number disappearing.

So just to confirm from above, the ‘dislike’ button isn’t going, but the exact number it has received will only be viewable by the creator themselves. – I just love the irony though that YouTube’s video explaining this is quite possibly one of the most disliked videos in recent history!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!