It looks like YouTube might be getting rid of the ‘dislike’ button in order to dispel ‘dislike mobs’. Generally, these people go on the video streaming platform with the sole intention of ‘disliking’ a video without even watching it.
A recent example is the Gillette advert, The Best Men Can Be, which is currently on 1.4million ‘dislikes’ and 759k ‘likes’.
Director of project management at YouTube, Tom Leung, has revealed that the platform is considering its options.
Describing the ‘dislike mobs’, he said: “This is where a group of people will go to a video, not even watch it, and purposefully click the thumbs down.”
He explained that one way of combating this is to make likes and dislikes invisible on videos by default.
Mr Leung said: “This is an interesting one, because on the one hand you could say, if I show the ratings and there’s a lot of people who like the video, that’s a signal to viewers that this is a really cool video,
“So in some ways, not showing it may not be what the creator wants.”
Another option they are considering is asking users to provide more information on why they disliked a video. He explained: “That would give the creator some more information, like they don’t agree with you, they don’t like your channel in general, they feel like the information was insufficient, who knows.”
The final, and most drastic option, is to get rid of the option to ‘dislike’ completely.
Mr Leung said: “That’s a very extreme option. It doesn’t seem very democratic in my opinion, because not all dislikes are ‘dislike mobs’, they’re just people expressing their opinion.”
They’re quite early on in the process of figuring out what to do, so we’ve still got the ‘dislike’ button for a while longer.
Featured Image Credit: YouTube