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YouTube has confirmed they’re looking at potentially removing the “Dislike” button on their video platform.
The move to remove the ability to directly and proportionately criticize a video comes after the company has long struggled to combat “dislike mobs”, or what YouTube director of project management Tom Leung describes as large groups of users who hit the dislike button before watching the whole video, or the entire video for that matter.
Currently, creators on YouTube can disable comments and or the like/dislike features on each individual video. Leung noted the proposed options could never come to fruition, however the optional “invisible ratings” feature could be made invisible by default – prompting the user to turn public like/dislike ratings on for each video.
The most disliked video in YouTube history is their own 2018 Rewind video, which is currently sitting above 15 million dislikes.
In a similar move to remove any semblance of ratings or user critique, Twitter was also considering removing the “like” feature, so that users could only retweet or comment on tweets.
How often to you browse YouTube? Do you actively like/dislike videos – and do you lean one way or the other? Sound off in the comments below!