YouTube ELIMINATING Public Dislikes | The Kyle Kulinski Show

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Earlier this week, YouTube announced in a blog post that it would start making dislike counts on videos private. The Google-owned company said that this change was part of an ongoing goal within YouTube to make the platform more inclusive by eliminating harassment and hate.

YouTube has also been changing some of its video monetization policies, especially around low quality and overly commercial content targeted to kids. In late October, executives from YouTube, along with TikTok and SnapChat, were called in front of the Senate to defend their efforts to protect young users from harm on their platforms.

“Earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike button to see whether or not changes could help better protect our creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks — where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos,” the YouTube team wrote. “As part of this experiment, viewers could still see and use the dislike button. But because the count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count.”

The dislike button itself is staying put, so viewers can continue to dislike videos to tune their recommendation algorithm, and creators can view their exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio under the engagement tab. “Overall, it’s much less likely to cause stress and embarrassment if the count isn’t visible to the public,” Matt Koval, creator liaison at YouTube, explained in a video.

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