TL;DR
  • YouTube users recently started reporting that they were finding their dislike button hidden away.
  • Google now confirms that this change only appears for your own uploaded videos.

Is there any relationship between a streaming service and its users that’s more contentious than YouTube’s? Even putting the interminable struggle between YouTube and ad blockers aside for the moment, it feels like nearly every single change the service makes to its interface is met with fierce pushback. Earlier this week, we told you about the newest controversy, as some viewers reported that the dislike button in videos was being hidden away, out of reach. As it turns out, this latest one might be no big deal, after all.

As we shared at the time, impacted users observed that rather than finding the dislike button out in the open, perched right next to its like-button brother, YouTube was moving the the option behind a three-dot overflow menu — putting you one more tap removed from being able to dislike a video. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it did admittedly feel like YouTube was going out of its way to discourage negative feedback.