You may have noticed an issue with Youtube dislike count getting hidden, and it’s not just you… Youtube recently removed the dislike count, and hides it.
Why would they want to hide the dislike count? Apparently it has been the subject of attacks in recent days, and what does it mean? In some cases it is unclear, if you dislike a news video of a news item are you disliking that event or are you disliking the reporting?
Although this might seem like a good idea to remove an arbitrary and potentially bullying statistic from videos, there are some that you generally might want to see that on – what about particularly bad howto videos – “drill a hole in iPhone headphone” for one, or half of The Onion videos?
If you must have the dislikes, there appear to be some options – https://www.returnyoutubedislike.com for one, and other addons you can find also show dislikes, off of a separate system counting dislikes. These may have varying degrees of success…
Perhaps it could be helpful in that any negativity should have a reason – a constructive comment is better than no comment at all? Perhaps instead of hitting dislike, we can give a good reasoning that helps video authors. That may be a good new year resolution… 🙂