YouTube CEO Defends Decision to Hide Dislikes on Videos

variety.com:

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorNot everyone is happy that YouTube has hidden dislike counts for videos. But YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki says the harms of displaying the metric publicly outweighed the benefits.Wojcicki, in her quarterly letter to creators Tuesday, acknowledged that the removal of public dislike counts was “controversial” and that some YouTube users had told the platform that number of dislikes helped them decide what videos to watch.On the downside, YouTube saw that dislike counts were “harming parts of our ecosystem through dislike attacks as people actively worked to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos,” the CEO wrote, and such attacks often targeted smaller creators and those just getting started. “We want every creator to feel they can express themselves without harassment,” Wojcicki wrote.Over several months, YouTube ran tests in which it removed the public dislike count across millions of videos.

According to Wojcicki, “Every way we looked at it, we did not see a meaningful difference in viewership, regardless of whether or not there was a public dislike count.

And importantly, it reduced dislike attacks.”Because people dislike YouTube videos for reasons “that have nothing to do with the video,” that means “it’s not always an accurate way to select videos to watch,” Wojcicki wrote.

She pointed out that YouTube had never shown dislike counts on its home page, in search results, or in the Up Next recommended video screens.The Google-owned video giant started hiding public dislike counts on Nov.