So YouTube announced this week that they're killing the public dislike count. Not the button itself (you can still click it, it still does whatever it does to the algorithm behind the curtain), but nobody except the video's creator will be able to see the number anymore. It rolled out starting November 10th and I've already noticed it creeping into videos in my subscriptions feed, that little thumbs-down icon just sitting there with no number next to it, like a light switch with the bulb removed.
I have Opinions about this, and they are not charitable.
For years the dislike count has been the single most useful piece of information on the entire platform. Not the view count, which is basically meaningless once you understand how easy it is to inflate. Not the comments, which are a coin flip between genuinely helpful and unhinged. The dislike ratio was the one number that told you, instantly, whether a video was going to waste your time. I can't count how many times I've clicked into some router firmware tutorial or a "how to fix your slow laptop in 5 minutes" video, glanced at 40 likes and 900 dislikes, and closed the tab before the intro music even finished. That's real signal. That's a community telling you "don't bother." YouTube just took away the smoke detector because some creators didn't like hearing the alarm.
Their official reasoning is about "dislike attacks," things like brigading and harassment campaigns. And sure, I believe that happens, especially to smaller channels or anyone who becomes a meme target for a week. But the fix for a narrow problem shouldn't be removing a tool that millions of people used correctly every single day. It's the platform equivalent of banning kitchen knives because some people misuse them. My actual, unhedged take: this is mostly about protecting brands and big studios from getting publicly dunked on, not about protecting some kid with 200 subscribers from a pile-on. Remember when the Cybertruck reveal video, or that one Ghostbusters trailer, sat at something like 10x more dislikes than likes? That kind of very public, very visible flop is exactly the thing this change makes disappear.
Anyway. I went and installed a browser extension within about twenty minutes of reading the announcement. There's already one that scrapes the historical dislike numbers from before the change and shows an estimate going forward using a public API some volunteer stood up. Felt very "early internet" to go patch a corporate decision with a random extension from a GitHub repo, and also very on-brand for this blog if I'm honest, since that's basically been the whole point of it since 2011: finding the workaround because the default thing stopped doing what you needed.
Small tangent, because I can't help myself: this is also the same week Rivian went public and the stock basically doubled its opening price in a day, which made a company that's sold something like a few hundred trucks worth more on paper than Ford. I don't have a hot take on that one other than "the stock market and reality are doing a long-distance relationship right now." Bitcoin's also been on an absolute tear the last couple days, flirting with new highs. None of that is really my beat here, I just find it funny that both things happened the same week YouTube decided the thing everyone actually needed, an honest thumbs-down count, was the thing that had to go.
If you're a creator reading this: I get it, dislike-bombing sucks, and I'm not pretending the old system was perfect. But there was a middle option here. Hide it from brigades and coordinated campaigns specifically, keep it visible for normal use, something. Instead we got the blunt version, and now I'm back to reading comment sections to figure out if a video is garbage, which is a strictly worse way to spend my evening.
I'll probably keep the extension installed for as long as it keeps working. Given how these things usually go, I give it eight months before YouTube patches the API it's scraping and we're all back to guessing.