They're removing dislikes because of a multitude of reasons, from my own thought.<p>1. Movie companies don't like releasing trailers and seeing their dislike numbers reaching orbit.<p>2. The current US administration doesn't like the vast number of dislikes on their videos compared to likes.<p>3. Advertising agencies don't want their ads related to videos that have high numbers of dislikes, so google is finding "middle ground" and only making the counts visible to the creator so advertisers have less to complain about.<p>4. People get their feelings hurt when they put a lot of work into a video, only for it to immediately get disliked or "brigaded" by people.<p>I think the whole fear of "people might dislike-brigade videos" is really only a concern for any online "celebrities" who upset their fans, and for large companies who for some reason think like/dislike ratios are any indication of actual opinion.<p>Possible solutions other than removing dislikes:
- Youtube doesn't count a "view" unless some criteria are met - I assume watch-time is one of those. Just do the same with dislikes/likes. That will immediately get rid of the vast majority of spam up/downlikes. (Sidenote: if they don't have any current criteria for what constitutes a "real" like or dislike, that's on them lmao)<p>- Leave it up to the creator to show or hide likes/dislikes.<p>- Leave it up to the advertiser. If they don't want like/dislike counts to be shown on their videos, they get less ad revenue (which will never work, because Google likes money)<p>I'm not sure what the solution is, but I guess since Youtube "is a private company and can do what they want!" they'll just keep forcing up and coming competitors out of the industry through predatory practices and maintain their top status as a video upload platform.