On November 10, YouTube will be making the public dislike count private. Users will still be able to dislike videos, and creators will still have access to the dislike counts for their own videos in YouTube Studio.

Again it doesn’t mean the dislike button is going away, it’s just that people won’t be able to see how many people hit the dislike button on a video.

YouTube ran an experiment to determine if this was a good idea or not.

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, the YouTube experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior.