YouTube is doing away with public dislike counts, making them private across the platform, it has announced.

The platform began experimenting with the dislike button in March where viewers could still see and use the dislike button, but not the dislike count.

It had begun testing the same to see whether or not changes could help better protect creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos, it said.

"Based on what we learned, we're making the dislike counts private across YouTube, but the dislike button is not going away," YouTube said in a blog post.

It has started rolling out this change gradually.

‘Unfair targeting’

The Google-owned video platform made the decision based on the feedback of its experiment.

"We found that they 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," it said.

"We also heard directly from smaller creators and those just getting started that they are unfairly targeted by this behavior — and our experiment confirmed that this does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels," it added.

Creators will still be able to view their exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio, along with other existing metrics, if they wish to see so to understand how their content is performing.

Viewers will be able to see the dislike button and dislike videos to tune their recommendations and privately share feedback with creators.

"We heard during the experiment that some of you have used the public dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video. We know that you might not agree with this decision, but we believe that this is the right thing to do for the platform," it said.

"This is just one of many steps we are taking to continue to protect creators from harassment," it added.

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