YouTube made dislike counts private in 2021. On November 10, 2021, YouTube announced that the public dislike count would disappear from videos, while creators could still see the figure in YouTube Studio.
The change followed experiments in which YouTube tested hiding dislike counts from selected viewers. YouTube said the policy was intended to reduce harassment and coordinated “dislike attacks” aimed at creators. The dislike button itself remained available, so viewers could still register negative feedback; only the publicly visible total was removed.
The policy attracted criticism because viewers had used dislike totals as a quick warning about misleading, dangerous, fraudulent, or low-quality videos. YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim also criticized the decision. The actual dislike data was later removed from YouTube’s public API in December 2021, although browser extensions have attempted to estimate counts using their own data.
A common mix-up is confusing the announcement date with the later API change: both occurred in 2021, but the public-count change is generally associated with November 10.