For The Sake Of Mental Health Of Creators, YouTube Hides The Number Of Likes And Dislikes

Youtube makes restrictions on Likes and Dislkikes. (photo: youtube)

JAKARTA - It looks like the experiment that YouTube ran earlier this year was quite successful. The Google-owned platform finally hides the number of likes and dislikes (likes and dislikes) publicly.

This decision is likely to be controversial given the extent to which it impacts the public's visibility of video acceptance.

However, YouTube believes the change will better protect creators from harassment and reduce the threat of what it calls dislike attacks, when a group works together to increase the number of dislikes a video receives.

Even though the number of likes and dislikes is not visible to the public, it doesn't mean that YouTube has removed the button, the number of likes and dislikes is hidden and only visible to the channel owner. However, the user can still click the button without seeing the full number. Channel owners, can see the number of likes and dislikes in YouTube Studio along with other analysis of their video performance.

According to a TechCrunch report on Thursday, November 11, the changes follow an experiment YouTube ran earlier this year. The goal was to determine whether such a change would reduce content creator dislike and harassment attacks.

At the time, YouTube explained that the number of public dislikes could affect the well-being of content creators and could motivate targeted campaigns to add dislikes to videos.

While that's true, dislikes can also be a signal to others when a video is clickbait, spam or misleading. YouTube said they had heard from content creators with smaller subscribers and others just starting out that they felt they were being unfairly targeted by dislike attacks.

The experiment confirmed the truth, where creator content with smaller subscribers was subjected to more dislike attacks than content from larger creators.

For similar mental health related reasons, Instagram a few years ago also started a trial to hide Like counts globally. The social media believes that focusing on achieving Likes can damage its community and can make content creators less comfortable expressing themselves on the platform.

However, in the end, neither Facebook nor Instagram were able to fully commit to the decision and instead gave users the ability to hide Likes back under their control. This means that users can choose whether their uploads will show the number of Likes or not.