By Jonathan Easton

YouTube is hiding the public dislike counter on videos across the site.

In a blog post, the company said that it is making the change in order to protect smaller creators from public harassment campaigns. Instead, the dislike function will provide creators with private feedback.

The post explains: “As part of this experiment, viewers could still see and use the dislike button. But because the count was not visible to them, 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 behaviour.

“We also heard directly from smaller creators and those just getting started that they are unfairly targeted by this behaviour – and our experiment confirmed that this does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.”

Viewers will still be able to dislike videos, but it will be promoted more as a means of tuning content recommendations rather than as a way of voicing disagreements with creators.