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vinelliott t1_j1t92up wrote

It still calculates them, and I think it can affect them in the algorithm, but they don't show it because of how common it was for a group of fans or upset users for one reason or another would invade someone's channel and dislike en mass to make the ration of likes to unlikes look bad. It was more accurate to show how many liked a video than all of those that may dislike it as it could include a lot of people that hate that type of content and went into the channel to dislike bomb, or people that didn't even watch the video.

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DieDae t1_j1t9qff wrote

Basically, youtube got tired of their rewinds being utterly shit upon because they are just terrible. But they used other creators who got shit on by their fan base as excuses to remove it. Mostly content that was good for advertising because of being clickbait or similar.

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_OBAFGKM_ t1_j1ta1r7 wrote

This isn't an explanation, so I can't post it as a top-level comment, so I'm going to borrow yours

> It still calculates them

This is true, and there actually exist extensions for both Firefox and Chrome (and other chromium-based browsers) that return the dislike counters. If anyone reads this and happens to want the dislikes back, go looking for an extension called "return youtube dislikes"

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Flair_Helper t1_j1uwicl wrote

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oblivious_fireball t1_j1tdj4y wrote

Because it made misinformation or poorly received videos seem better than they are. without a dislike ratio you can't really tell how well it was received by the viewers, only how many positive responses it has, much like other social media platforms.

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Ill-Cryptographer867 t1_j1takuc wrote

Government propaganda videos were getting ratio'd into oblivion and this didn't look very nice so they asked their partner Youtube to do something about it and they obliged happily.

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