YouTube to remove its dislike button from all videos

YouTube will remove its “dislike” button on all videos.

The video sharing platform has taken away the ability to leave a dislike on a video in order to try and protect creators from “dislike bombing” – in which innocent videos are disliked en masse by trolls – and to reduce “stress and embarrassment” caused by a video getting more dislikes than likes.

The change has not been fully rolled out yet, and some creators are worried the move could be harmful to the site, as people won’t be able to dislike videos that are clickbait or are genuinely problematic.

Chris Burton told BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat: “You want to immediately know how good the video is, before you watch it. A lot of the time, you can’t trust the title or thumbnail. If you see a tutorial video and it’s got almost all dislikes, you know it’s not going to help you.”

The 27-year-old content creator agreed it would “get rid of the bullying aspect” of dislike bombing, but added: “I don’t think that’s the way 99 percent of people use the dislike button.

“It already auto-blocks a lot of hateful comments which is fantastic. It holds them for review, and they don’t go live unless I manually click them.”

Fellow YouTube star Kenzo Jae also spoke about the change, and said he was keen to see dislikes gone from videos.

He also told Newsbeat: “You might put your heart and soul into something and then it doesn’t come out the way you want it to with likes or dislikes – that can be disheartening.

“On my Instagram account I’ve taken all likes off and it’s really helped with not caring about the amount of people liking it.”