YouTube is trying to stop dislike button misuse

YouTube is considering ways to combat the misuse of its “Dislike” button on videos in an attempt to counter the damage that spammers can do to a creator’s channel.

Director of project management at YouTube, Tom Leung, addressed the problem of harassment by dislikes in a recent video of “Creator Insider” in which he talks about a few probable ideas that could effective in dealing with the “dislike mob”. The most recent example of this would be YouTube Rewind, which came under fire from the community for ignoring some of the platform’s biggest moments of the year.

The YouTube team is currently leaning towards adding an option for creators to toggle the visibility of likes and dislikes. However, hiding the ratings also has an impact on videos with positive responses, and Leung says the team knows how important public stats are to creators.

Leung also discusses an option to ask viewers why they dislike the video in question. This could take on the form of a checkbox with reasons you dislike the video.

The product team at YouTube has also considered the extreme solution that involves the complete removal of the dislike button, but Leung argues that this would not be “democratic”. He also points out that these changes are still in a discussion phase and that none of them are perfect solutions yet.

YouTube isn’t making any changes as of now, but Leung said updates would be shared with the community once the product team decides what to do.