What if, instead of trying to hide the dislike button, YouTube put a less pejorative spin on its thumbs-down icon? That’s the question the platform is exploring via an ongoing experiment on YouTube Shorts.
According to the YouTube Support thread that catalogs ongoing tests, some Shorts users are seeing a new layout that reimagines the role of the humble dislike. Instead of keeping the dislike button on the Shorts sidebar, the experimental design moves it to a pop-up menu, where it has been merged with the “Not Interested” option.
Some users in the experimental group will see the “Dislike” title, while others will see “Not Interested.” YouTube’s goal, as stated in the Support thread, is to determine whether users use those terms “interchangeably.”
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
Though dislikes have long been incorporated into social media feeds, trolls and other bad actors have weaponized the thumbs down. Female creators have been particularly affected by those campaigns, as their videos are more likely to be dislike-bombed when compared to videos uploaded by men.
In 2021, YouTube responded to that concerning trend by hiding dislikes on its videos. Viewers could still give a thumbs-down to clips they didn’t care for, but dislike sums were taken out of the public eye and moved to creator dashboards.
That move was met with immediate backlash. Some critics raised moral questions related to the ethics of hiding dissent. Developers hastily built browser extensions that make dislike counts reappear.
Shorts was still a brand-new format when the dislike change went into effect, so YouTube’s understanding of how Shorts users perceive the button is incomplete. Though the dislike option initially appeared on the Shorts sidebar, YouTube announced months ago that it would start testing layouts that depreciated the thumbs-down.
The current experiment suggests that YouTube might have found a simple solution to its dislike problem. Rather than hiding its most negative form of public feedback, YouTube can simply rename it. The dislike button could become “Not Interested” in the near future — unless of course, users are not interested in that particular adjustment.
