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Today in “keeping social media a shiny happy place” news, YouTube is reportedly considering disabling the “dislike” button to address what the company is calling “dislike mobs”. A Verge article says that “dislike mobs” are groups of people who become upset with a certain creator or a certain video and decide to execute an organized effort to downvote or negatively review it. It’s an issue that YouTube has seen before and one that content creators have spoken out about.
Videos with a high number of dislikes are less likely to be recommended for people to watch and could eventually hurt the creator’s channel. Lest we forget, the whole point of having a dislike button to begin with is to be able to voice your displeasure with content that creators are putting out.
But in the day and age of participation trophies and millennial safe zones, even the little thumbs down button on YouTube is apparently becoming too offensive. While the company says these ideas are still just “lightly being discussed” they are offering creators the preference to indicate that they don’t want ratings on their videos, similar to the way comments can be disabled.
