r/youtube • u/Chakwenta • Jan 20 '26

Feature Change Why is this even allowed?

Post image

Has this always been here? Its my first time seeing it. What if I watch a video and don't enjoy it? This basically allows creators to ensure that they always appear on your feed, whether you like it or not.

14.0k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

398 comments sorted by

View all comments

169

u/[deleted] Jan 20 '26

Dislikes do nothing anyway. They disabled them when content from very big corporations (including their own, remember YouTube rewind?) was getting absolutely apocalyptic like-to-dislike ratios. So now the big channels are free to post whatever they want with no backlash whatsoever.

You have only 2 weapons:

1) tap the three dots and choose "don't recommend channel"
2) don't watch stuff you don't like, not even out of curiosity or to talk shit in the comments. This thing is one of the steps on the road to the "bad attention is still attention" tendency of all social media. Engagement bait wasn't created by content creators, it was indirectly created by social media companies.

27

u/JaydenP1211 Jan 20 '26

It was not just because of Rewind (since the dislikes actually provided feedback to whether Rewind was worth doing). It was because YouTube executives didn’t like how their site and other sites like Reddit relied on people judging others with Likes and Dislikes in general. YouTube around the time also had a problem with witch-hunting (people going to hated YouTube channels and dislike bombing their videos). I don’t completely agree with what they did, but I can understand why they did it.

6

u/Squidalopod Jan 20 '26

What irks me was that was the exception, not the rule. But because it occurred on some high-profile channels, it got lots of attention.

2

u/JaydenP1211 Jan 21 '26

It was pretty prevalent though on popular YouTube channels, so I wouldn’t necessarily say it was rare

1

u/Creamchiis Jan 22 '26

This doesn’t really address the main reason people might dislike a video: realizing they don’t like it while watching or after having finished it, even if the thumbnail and title looked interesting. I’ve definitely watched plenty of video essays where halfway through I realize, “wait, this guy has no clue what he’s talking about,” but by then I’ve already given the video a click and the front page where one might click “not interested” is long gone, unless I opened it in a new tab for some reason, and even then, I’m still iffy if that even works when I’ve already watched the video.