After being teased since march, YouTube has officially removed the dislike counter from all it’s videos across the platform. This means you’ll no longer be able to know how many dislikes a video has. However the dislike button itself hasn’t been removed. You can still dislike any video which in terms helps YouTube to mange your recommendations.

According to YouTube:

“we strive to be a place where creators of all sizes and backgrounds can find and share their voice. To ensure that YouTube promotes respectful interactions between viewers and creators, we introduced several features and policies to improve their experience. And earlier this year, we experimented with the dislike button to see whether or not changes could help better protect our creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks — where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos.

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, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior. We also heard directly from smaller creators and those just getting started that they are unfairly targeted by this behavior — and our experiment confirmed that this does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.”

However many users have shown their own dislike to the idea. Removing the dislike count will indeed help small creators from large number of dislikes which could potentially harm their viewer rates. But at the same time, It could also help out massive companies whose videos can be disliked because they’ve done something fans feel is unworthy. The dislike count is still available to the creators themselves which they can access from behind the scene.

YouTube’s own cofounder Jawed Karim has expressed his displeasure towards the removing of the dislike count. Karim updated the description of the first video uploaded to YouTube titled “Me at the Zoo” to criticize the platform’s decision to stop displaying dislikes publicly.

In the description he wrote:

“When all youtubers agree that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube”.

Karim co-founded YouTube in 2005 with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. They then sold the site to Google for $ 1.65 billion in 2006. This isn’t the first time that Karim used his video to voice his concerns. In 2013 he was against the idea of only allowing the Google+ users to be able to comment on videos. Despite many backlash on various social media, YouTube is adamant on its decision, claiming it is beneficial for all its users.