YouTube’s Like and Dislike counters have been a fixture on the backside of movies since what feels just like the daybreak of time, however now to be able to fight harassment and so-called dislike assaults, YouTube will now start hiding dislike counts.

In an official YouTube blog post, the corporate mentioned that an experiment that hid dislike numbers on sure movies revealed that hiding dislikes diminished the frequency of dislike assaults (when customers goal a video with dislikes in a marketing campaign of harassment) and will stop particular movies from being focused—significantly on new or smaller channels the place dislike assaults happen at the next price.

But the hate button isn’t going away totally. After the change, which is able to start “rolling out gradually” beginning right this moment, exact dislike counts shall be personal and solely seen to the creator of the video in YouTube’s dashboard below the engagement tab.

In a brief video explaining YouTube’s choice, YouTube creator liaison Matt Koval mentioned that whereas likes and dislikes have been initially seen as a easy approach for viewers to mark if a video was good or not, some customers have lately turned the hate counter right into a form of sport, typically attempting to drive up the variety of dislikes, generally whilst a part of coordinated assault, just because a consumer may not just like the creator of the video.

Koval mentioned that analysis executed by YouTube discovered that the variety of dislikes on video on common didn’t have a noticeable affect on total viewership. So in essence, the variety of dislikes wasn’t actually serving as a instrument to evaluate the standard of a video.

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And while dislike totals are still visible to a video’s creator, Koval said that by hiding the specific figure deeper in YouTube’s dashboard, YouTube says dislike counts are less likely to cause a creator extra stress or anxiety.

Koval joked that some may marvel if this transformation was made partly to cover YouTube’s embarrassment in regards to the 2018 YouTube Rewind, which with 19 million dislikes stays probably the most disliked video in YouTube historical past, however added that the replace is admittedly simply geared toward defending content material creators of every kind throughout YouTube.