A few days after Twitter unveiled its first subscription service, another popular website has announced a big change: YouTube is hiding the dislike count on its videos.
“Earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike button to see whether or not changes could help better protect our creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks — where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos,” a statement from the video platform reads. The thumbs down option was still available during the experiment (god forbid SnyderCut69 not be able to show his displeasure with the Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer), but after making it so that the dislike counts weren’t visible to the public, YouTube found that users “were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior.” The change is permanent beginning November 10 (that’s today!).
YouTube hiding the dislike counts made me curious to learn the most-disliked YouTube videos of all-time, a list that I found is dominated by kid’s songs. Of the 10 most-hated videos ever, five are labeled either “music video for children” or “educational video for children.” But there’s a video that people hate even more than “Baby Shark”: “YouTube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind.” The eight-minute video has over 19 million dislikes compared to only three million likes.
No wonder YouTube canceled the YouTube Rewind series:
2018’s video was viciously panned by the YouTube community… Creators argued that the company was shifting focus from the “real community” — including controversial creators like Logan Paul and PewDiePie — in favor of more advertiser-friendly choices.
There have only been four most-disliked videos in YouTube’s history: “~YouTube Worst Video of All Time~ vote 1 star, leave comment,” Justin Bieber’s “Baby” music video (twice!), Rebecca Black’s “Friday” music video, and finally and forever, “YouTube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind.” Baby Shark will never gets its chance to reign supreme.