YouTube added “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons on videos starting in 2010. Over the next decade, these “like” and “dislike” buttons became staples of the platform, but YouTube started to mess with them in 2021, when they removed the ability to see how many dislikes a given video had gotten.
At the time, YouTube explained that it was doing this to protect creators from “dislike attacks,” where people would actively work to drive up the number of dislikes on a video for reasons that had little to do with its quality. Those kinds of attacks do happen, but many creators objected to the change anyway.
Now, YouTube has messed with dislikes again and given a completely different rationale.
How YouTube is changing how you interact with Shorts
There are now fewer ways to express how you feel about a video
You’re still able to dislike a longform YouTube video; you just can’t see how many dislikes the video has amassed without extensions or plugins. But YouTube hasn’t just made it harder to see how many dislikes a YouTube Short has; it’s removed the dislike button entirely.
In a June blog post, YouTube explained that removing the dislike button was part of an attempt to create “a more intuitive Shorts experience.”
To shape a better feed for you, we’re also retiring the dislike button. Instead, we’ll rely on our more precise controls, “Not Interested” and “Don’t recommend this channel,” to more accurately tune your feed and serve up content you’ll love. These options give you more control over what you see and allow us to better understand your genuine preferences, especially since you’ve shown us that “disliking” a video could mean anything from “poor audio quality” to simply “not my cup of tea.”
It’s interesting that YouTube doesn’t claim that it’s removing dislikes to protect creators, as it did when it limited the visibility of dislikes on longform videos in 2021. Also, YouTube encouraging people to go to the extra trouble of selecting options like, “Not Interested” or “Don’t recommend this channel” is sort of at odds with the claim that this change is driven by a desire to make the Shorts experience more “intuitive.” Surely clicking a thumbs down icon is more natural than clicking the third dots at the top of a YouTube and then selecting whatever wordy options are available below.
In fact, YouTube’s explanation is so inconsistent it makes you wonder if the platform isn’t covering for something.
Why is YouTube REALLY removing dislikes from Shorts?
Put on your tin foil hats
Removing dislikes isn’t the only thing YouTube has done to the Shorts experience. They’ve also given users the option to watch shorts at double the speed, “to absorb information more quickly or find your favorite part faster.” There is now a “Clear Screen mode” that temporarily hides all icons and text from your playback view. And while the “thumbs up” or “like” button stays, it’s been replaced by a heart icon, although not everyone may see it at all times. When we took a screenshot of a Short, above, the “thumbs up” icon was there rather than a heart.
It’s worth noting that TikTok, another video platform which YouTube has been competing with for a decade now, allows users to watch videos at faster speeds, has a Clear Screen mode, has a heart rather than a “thumbs up” icon, and does not have a dedicated dislike button. It’s possible that YouTube has made these new changes to keep pace with its biggest rival; it’s widely agreed that YouTube created Shorts in the first place to compete with TikTok, which specializes in short-form content. This may just be a continuation of that.
It’s also possible that YouTube is minimizing the power of dislikes in order to protect big channels set up by governments, movie studios, and other powerful organizations. It’s embarrassing when a studio like Universal, for instance, posts a trailer for a big movie like The Odyssey only to watch it get flooded with dislikes. YouTube is increasingly seen as part of the mainstream media, and it may be doing what it can to make the platform a hospitable place for mainstream outlets.
Could YouTube’s war on dislikes be residual bitterness?
YouTube is no stranger to being ratioed
There’s also the matter of YouTube’s own problems with the dislike button. In the 2010s, YouTube used to post a YouTube Rewind video every year. These videos would gather together prominent creators from the platform (and sometimes traditional celebrities) to recap the previous 12 months in internet culture. The 2018 video was famously hated for being cringey and outdated, and received far more likes than dislikes. YouTube retired the practice after 2019, and has since taken down every YouTube Rewind video.
This theory is probably a stretch, but it’s possible that the leadership at YouTube was so tired of people disliking videos they had a hand in that they decided to discontinue dislikes altogether.
I finally figured out how to hide YouTube Shorts (and get them back)
YouTube doesn’t make it easy to eliminate Shorts from your feed, but there are ways.
In praise of dislikes
It’s true that people can abuse the dislike button, but at bottom, it’s just another way for people to express their opinion about a piece of content, and isn’t good or bad in and of itself. Taking it away gives people one less way to interact with YouTube, and that makes the platform a little less interesting.
