towardsWisdom

The Dislike bar was very useful.

1. It indicated the quality of the video / content, allowing us to decide if it was worth watching.
2. It indicated if the video was controversial (think 50-50 bar). Thus it showed where other people stand on the content of the video.
3. It was a quick summary of the public perception without needing to read many comments.
4. It was YouTube’s qualitative advantage over videos & content from FB, Insta, Twitter. Those platforms without a dislike button allow crap content to be prevalent.

YouTube may give bullshit reasons like they removed the Dislike bar to “protect” creators from dislike-harassment but it is not hard to see that their motivation to remove it comes from point (1) – if we cannot see the dislike count, it would increase user engagement, watch time, ad-revenue, thus increasing profits.

Thus, I urge you to realize this, and consciously reduce YouTube engagement.

• Skip over videos that you are unsure of for which you previously would have consulted the Dislike bar. Don’t give them the watch-time, ad-time and Views.
• Unsubscribe from YouTube Premium. Use an adblocker in the browser. I guess if you are a power user who uses it on mobile & TV, this will be hard to resist.
• Try alternative like Odysee.com, Vimeo, DailyMotion, FB Videos, CuriosityStream etc.

By removing the Dislike count, the valuable information gained from points (1), (2) & (3) will be lost forever in the future. The way people use the Dislike button will change because they cannot see the Dislike bar. More of crappy content will become prevalent. Imagine clickbait videos, fake news, fake guru videos for which you would not be able to see how many others have Disliked; you would take that content more seriously than if you could see the Dislike count. Bad content creators won’t get accurate feedback.

I’m sure Google / Youtube understands all these negative consequences; because afterall they are the smartest people. But they can afford to do this because they have a monopoly. This is why we can’t have good things. When a company has a monopoly, the quality of the product goes down. They just think of maximizing profits.

It is sad that Google / Youtube has made this decision for chasing financial profits, by causing a reduction in user experience and reduction in quality of content in the future. Google used to be the charming company that made products for actual good of the world, not for profits. But seeing this deviation from their original mission is saddening, lowering their image in the eyes of the public.

Perhaps by boycotting their attempt at increasing user engagement they would bring back the Dislike bar.

In the meantime, there are a couple of browser extensions that can show the Dislike count. These extensions use the YouTube API to fetch the dislikes count for now; however, YouTube has announced that they will be removing this information from their API in mid December. Here’s an extension that you can use till then: www.returnyoutubedislike.com.

Finally, I leave you with the following three videos to watch to understand why censorship on Youtube, Facebook etc is bad. These videos show us an extreme situation, but it can be a slippery slope if we do not educate ourselves of the distant outcome. Hiding the Like/Dislike opinion of other users is a form of censorship on a public forum.