On: Making the dislike count private across YouTube

[alex_c]

This change is very upsetting. Ever since becoming a parent, I've been baffled by a mystery.

I noticed that - unlike most other popular content - children's videos on YouTube almost always have roughly a 2:1 like to dislike ratio no matter what channel or type of content. Why? Where do all the dislikes come from?

Is it from kids mashing touch screens at random? Parents taking what small revenge they can at being subjected to the same songs on repeat thousands of times? Some shady underground power struggle between kids' content creators sabotaging each other?

I always assumed I would eventually find an answer, but now if dislike counts are going away I am unlikely to ever find out. I will probably have to carry this unanswered mystery with me for the rest of my life.

Thanks, YouTube.

[CamelCaseName → alex_c]

My uneducated guess is that children's videos are a highly competitive category, and that buy disliking competitors, you can raise your own status.

[phh → alex_c]

Maybe the reality is all those votes are purely random, but somehow the dislike button has half the chance of random click than like button. Which would be pretty interesting.

[rrll22 → alex_c]

Many kids knowingly hit dislike and many kids randomly hit either, to best of my knowledge.

[mahart → rrll22]

I have found videos that were marked disliked by me that I never intended to dislike. Pretty sure it was all from trying to scroll on mobile and a click accidentally getting registered.

[vhold → alex_c]

My hunch is that it's because children tend to consume YouTube voraciously without much thought put into what video they select. I could scroll for a minute before I decide a video that feels worth spending my time on, I've seen kids select videos in less than half a second.