Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ An update to dislikes on YouTube

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This is one of those design decisions that is really hard. YouTube announced this week that it will no longer display the number of downvotes on videos. You can still vote 'thumbs down' but viewers will not see the total. The problem with this, of course, is that it removes the information people use to decide whether a video is worth watching, since a ration is more valuable than a raw 'likes' score. But as Google wrote, the change helped "reduce dislike attacks - where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator's videos." Fair enough - but I can't help but think that Google's now-exclusive access to the data may also have informed the decision.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 29, 2024 11:08 p.m.

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