Thanks, Wesley for your input. We’ve also wrote about dislikes here, since many creators use YouTube Studio app, but this change also affects online web version, as well.

YouTube experimented with a lot from July to November 2021, and finally made a decision on November 10, 2021. YouTube moved forward to completely hide public dislikes on all YouTube videos. YouTube wrote in their thread and their YouTube Creators video that when the creators elected to hide public ratings, the creator can still be bullied or harassed for their decision.

Previously, dislike counts helped some viewers know what videos were worth watching. But YouTube revealed that showing public like counts and their comments (for videos not made for kids) are still a good way to get a sense of video’s quality, especially for both tutorials and educational videos. Viewers can still find out what other viewers’ opinions of videos may be without making any creators susceptible to coordinated dislike campaigns and other forms of harassment using the dislike counts.

Therefore, YouTube had made a healthy practice to help all YouTubers, since it is their responsibility to protect its community and to create a healthy environment for creators to express their views and opinions. Had YouTube removed both the option of hiding ratings (in the form of likes) and also disabling public dislikes on all their videos at the same time, it would be a “double-win” for the community.

As both a creator and a viewer, I have summarized its issues regarding the dislike button and its issues associated with its public likes.

As a YouTube viewer, I will normally stick to just upvoting videos I watch when I really like them. If I don’t, or I’m indifferent, I’ll just not vote at all– simple. Very rarely will I ever use the downvoting feature, and I’ll only do so when there’s obvious and intent purpose to offend people. In other words, the video has to be *really* awful and have evil intent for me to dislike it. But other than those extremely rare cases, the dislike button doesn’t have much use for me.

Unfortunately, you can’t selectively disable up or down votes :)

And if video is popular, votes don’t really affect it.

For example, people often downvote something if they disapprove the content (e.g. news or event), which doesn’t mean it was uploader’s fault.

I watched many videos with high number of downvotes, yet they have over million views.