YouTube has given some simple options for its users, including liking and sharing the videos, and if they do not like one, they can just hit the dislike button. But from quite some time now, some of the users are misusing the dislike button, and YouTube is well informed of it.
YouTube has been noticing that people are weaponizing the dislike button, and now have decided to act on the issue with the help of its development team. Currently, it is seeking ideas through its creator’s feedbacks and advice from its development team, on how to stop people from misusing the dislike button. Tom Leung, the director of project management at YouTube, in the recent issue of Creator Insider, talked on how the ‘dislike mob’ is harming the content on YouTube.
The ‘dislike mob’ is a group of people, who dislike the videos of a certain YouTube channel or creator, in order to attack their reputation, or just because they are upset with the creator, even without watching the videos.
YouTube has provided its users with the facility to make their videos private on their channel, or they can make the other matrices, including total likes and dislikes on the videos, invisible. Leung has suggested YouTube must make the hiding the likes and dislikes options as default, and the users who want to display the ratings can make the changes from the settings.
Leung has also advised adding a comment box, where the person who wants to dislike a video, has to give a reason behind disliking the video. The user also can opt for the ‘don’t want ratings’ option.
Since the ratings of the videos help in the channel growth, we cannot expect that all YouTubers will support the same. But many of the creators, after they got to know about hiding the ratings, have adviced that the dislike button should appear only after the video has played for at least half of its time.
Currently, YouTube is looking for more and better options to avoid the activities from the ‘dislike mob’, and has not decided on what it will be doing in the same matter, but soon we can see YouTube getting rid of this issue.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.