YouTube might be testing hiding the dislike button
I keep coming back to the fact that YouTube already hid the numbers back in 2021. The button itself still gave you a quick binary read on how a video was landing. Moving it into a submenu doesn't delete that data, it just makes the act of reaching it take an extra click. That friction matters more than people admit.
The stated reasoning for hiding counts was to reduce harassment campaigns against creators. Clicking the button now becomes a slightly more deliberate act, which I suspect is the real goal. But I'd want to know whether the platform is planning to keep the dislike signal visible to creators in Studio, or whether it's quietly being deprioritized there too. That's where the actual trust story lives, and YouTube has been less clear about that in the past.
The pattern here is consistent: YouTube keeps nudging feedback loops toward softer, less confrontational signals. I'm not convinced that's good or bad on its own, but it's worth watching how creators adapt when their most immediate public pulse on a video keeps getting harder to read.