Blame Me For YouTube’s ‘Dislike’ Option. But Now I’m Glad They’re Removing It.

In 2010, It Almost Disappeared But Then I Put My, Err, Thumb On The Scale

“This isn’t Disneyland,” I insisted while challenging our team’s recommendation that we remove the Thumbs Down (Dislike) button off the YouTube Watch Page during its 2010 redesign. “We’re. Not. Hulu.”

The Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down feedback options had already replaced YouTube’s Original Five Star rating system. After not surprisingly finding that the majority of Star votes were for One or Five Stars, the team decided to move to a UX which better reflected the binary choice. I honestly don’t recall what prompted the “should we remove Thumbs Down” discussion a year later, although it was likely because (a) it was already causing creator distress to see their videos ‘disliked’ and (b) the rest of the team was smarter than I was :)

Actually let me amend that: not just smarter, but more diverse in representation. Although perhaps our overall employee stats still didn’t reflect the breadth of backgrounds our industry strives for in current day, we did know that we wanted our team to look more like our user community than a typical tech company. So I’d like to imagine that the presence of more POVs resulted in one or more people’s lived experiences contributing to the idea, even back then, that platforms had a responsibility to think about trust and safety in a broader manner than just preventing illegal activity.