Put down your pitchforks — Google's not hiding YouTube's dislike button

Is there any relationship between a streaming service and its users that’s more contentious than YouTube’s? Even putting the interminable struggle between YouTube and ad blockers aside for the moment, it feels like nearly every single change the service makes to its interface is met with fierce pushback. Earlier this week, we told you about the newest controversy, as some viewers reported that the dislike button in videos was being hidden away, out of reach. As it turns out, this latest one might be no big deal, after all.

As we shared at the time, impacted users observed that rather than finding the dislike button out in the open, perched right next to its like-button brother, YouTube was moving the the option behind a three-dot overflow menu — putting you one more tap removed from being able to dislike a video. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it did admittedly feel like YouTube was going out of its way to discourage negative feedback.

Except, it turns out that’s not quite the full story on how this was implemented, after all. Google gave a statement to 9to5Google that explains what’s really going on with the repositioning:

We are not testing hiding the dislike button on YouTube for users. We’re introducing a new UI for creators on their own uploaded videos, where dislike is behind the three-dot menu, and as always, they can find their full dislike counts in Studio, alongside other analytics.

That… actually makes a lot of sense. Creators aren’t really going to be interested in disliking their own uploads, so they don’t need easy access to the button.

Granted, that disclosure does leave us with a whole lot of additional questions: Why bother going to the trouble of making such an inconsequential change in the first place? And why not hide the like button for your own uploads, as well?

Regardless, this is quickly revealing itself to be not much of a scandal at all. Knowing YouTube and its viewer base, however, we’re sure it won’t be long before that crew finds something else to start protesting.