As you may have heard in the past few days, YouTube has decided to remove dislike counts even though most people over social media have shown their opposition towards that decision.

Well, the change's rolled out in my region two days ago, and this is what it looks like,

My takes about this change.

Poor UI/UX experience

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'm damn sure this change gets a score of 0. It's aesthetically unpleasing and looks like a broken/half-baked feature as it's asymmetrical.

Let's compare that to when both like/dislike counts are hidden.

Looks much better, huh?!

The death of an extremely useful functionality

The dislike count was a flag that implied a video is worth your time or not.

That's no longer the case. However, as people on the internet are smart, I'm certain soon they will find a way to work around that and signal a bad video. My first guess is through the comment section.

YouTube is the sole winner

Ultimately the winner of this change is YouTube itself. You may ask how?

That's simple, previously one necessary did not need to click on a video to ensure it is poor quality. Like/dislike ratio was a good indicator (with a low error margin) to viewers to not even waste a click.

Now that's gone. So one has to watch at least a few seconds of a video to make the decision. That means watching ads first, isn't it? If the video in question is monetized, YouTube gets a good cut out of it. If not, it's even better. YouTube takes all the money as based on a prior change, see here, YouTube can put ads on videos of channels that are either not monetized or not eligible to be monetized without paying a single dime.

YouTube does not care about content creators

It's proven once again that YouTube doesn't care about content creators, neither small ones nor otherwise.

The majority of top YouTube creators have shown their dissatisfaction about the change, yet YouTube decided to dismiss their concerns and roll out the change.

On the other hand, on the blog post that the change has announced, YouTube stated,

At YouTube, we strive to be a place where creators of all sizes and backgrounds can find and share their voice.

That's a typical corporate hypocritical statement that doesn't fool anybody anymore. It's the exact opposite. YouTube takes the most advantage of small channels by putting ads on their videos and taking the entire money for itself and driving away potential subscribers and viewers. Not to mention their AI algorithms that favor larger channels over smaller ones.

Dismiss conspiracy theories

The change has aroused some discussions on the conspiracy theorists community. Many stated that YouTube is doing such because videos of the United States President Joe Biden are highly ratioed.

source: https://twitter.com/ChristineNiles1/status/1352283514775998467/photo/2

Although big tech has a long history of social engineering, the latest example is the Facebook scandal, YouTube's latest change seems unrelated. Given president Biden has the support of the entire media that whitewash every single of his actions (such as the catastrophic pull from Afghanistan), the YouTube change doesn't bring much to the table. Additionally, people can easily sense whether the Mr. president is doing a great job or not based on their day-to-day life experience (e.g., inflation, shortage of Christmas trees, etc.). They don't need to rely on the like/dislike ratio on Biden's YouTube videos.

Odysee is playing smart

Odysee being Odysee is taking the advantage of the situation to bring unsatisfied people to its platform. One of the latest attempts is the Odysee website comical motto,

Welcome to odysee: we have dislikes

As I'm somewhat biased towards Odysee, no wonder I'm more optimistic on this front, and I hope everything works in its favor.

 Sign up on Odysee now! (referral link)

Featured image (with some modifications) by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash