YouTube has long been thinking about what to do with its 'dislike' button. In 2019, YouTube proposed a solution of asking users why they're disliking a video. Earlier this year, the company finally started to hide like counts for a "small bunch of users." Now, YouTube has announced that it will start hiding dislike counts on videos across its site for all the users starting today.

YouTube justifies the move by saying that the change is to save small creators from being targeted, and to promote “respectful interactions between viewers and creators.” However, YouTube isn't removing the dislike button completely. The dislike button will stay where it is. It'll just not show how many viewers have actually disliked the video. This means that you'll be able to dislike a video on YouTube, but the count will remain hidden to the public while the company will still show the total number of dislikes to the uploader.

YouTube says that the like-to-dislike ratio has a big effect on how a user perceives a video and the users use that number to decide whether to continue watching. However, that will no longer be an option as the dislikes will remain hidden to the users. Though there's no guarantee on whether the move will affect the YouTube community at large, at least the company is doing something after researching about it for well over two years now. What are your thoughts on YouTube removing dislikes count from videos? Let us know in the comments section below!

Source: YouTube Blog