Why did YouTube remove the dislike counts?

Summary

YouTube has removed public dislike counts to promote a more positive community and protect creators from coordinated "dislike attacks."

Abstract

YouTube's decision to remove the public display of dislike counts on videos has sparked initial surprise but is seen as a positive move towards fostering a more respectful and supportive environment. This change is part of YouTube's broader initiative to enhance the platform's community spirit and ensure that interactions between viewers and creators remain constructive. Although users can still dislike videos, the count is now private, visible only to the content creators. This shift is a response to feedback from smaller channels seeking protection from targeted dislike campaigns, which YouTube's experimentation found could be mitigated by hiding dislike numbers, thus preventing coordinated attacks.

Opinions

The author believes that the removal of dislike counts is beneficial as it encourages fair play and a more positive community atmosphere.
YouTube's official stance is that hiding dislike counts is a measure to protect creators, especially smaller channels, from "dislike attacks" and to promote respectful interactions.
The author suggests that the inability to see dislike counts publicly may discourage coordinated efforts to negatively impact a video's reception.
The change is seen as a way to ensure that the platform can promote a healthier environment for both viewers and creators.

Why did YouTube remove the dislike counts?

Yes, you can still dislike a video, but you’ll not see how many other people also disliked it. At first it was kind of shocking, but thinking over it my conclusion is that the change is for good, as it promotes fair play and fosters a better, more positive sense of community. YouTube’s own release about this and other changes ratifies my guess: they just introduced new features and policies to ensure that they can promote “respectful interactions between viewers and creators”.

In particular, removing the dislike counts (which you can still privately see for your videos) aims at reducing “dislike attacks”. As YouTube explains, they performed an experiment to address the need for protection that many small channels requested -and the experiment proved that hiding the number of dislikes reduced the attacks, likely because they cannot be coordinated.

For more, see YouTube’s official blog.