How to turn off likes and dislikes on YouTube?

YouTube is a world of metrics and a world of interaction. One of the ways users can interact with YouTube content are likes and dislikes. These metrics are visible by default.

Did you know that you, as a video creator, have the ability to hide likes and dislikes on YouTube? It’s pretty easy to do.

 

How to hide likes and dislikes on YouTube?

First, make sure you’re signed in to the account that owns the videos you want to edit. For obvious reasons, you cannot hide likes and dislikes for videos that you do not own. Next, you have two options.

Option 1. Navigate to the video you want to edit. If you are logged into the correct account, you will see two buttons underneath the video. One button is called Analytics and the other is Edit Video. Click “Edit Video” to get to the editing page.  

Option 2. Go to your personal YouTube account by clicking on your avatar. Click it and you will see a drop-down menu with various shortcuts and options that you might want to use. Click the icon that says YouTube Studio.

From here, look to the left of the page and click the Videos section in the sidebar. Then you need to find the video you want to edit and click on the video title.

Regardless of how you got to the video editing page, you need to click the Advanced tab at the top. This will show you advanced options.

Scroll down and find the ‘Users can view ratings for this video’ option. By default, this check box is selected. If you want to hide likes and dislikes for a video, just uncheck the box and save your changes.

Now, if you go back to your video, you will see that the words “like” and “dislike” are just next to the buttons “Like” and “Dislike”, and not the numbers of each of them that were there before. Users can like or dislike your videos as usual, they simply won’t be able to see their numbers. In addition, the data regarding likes and dislikes won’t be deleted;  you can re-check the box above and YouTube will display video likes and dislikes again.

Why do people want to hide likes and dislikes on YouTube?

The main reason people prefer to hide likes and dislikes is that there are a lot of dislikes in their videos.

In general, there is no good reason to hide likes and dislikes or hide your follower count on YouTube. Most users prefer to keep everything public and just deal with the effects of negative content better. What about you?

Frequently asked questions

What are YouTube likes for?

Likes and dislikes are needed to allow the author of the video and other YouTube users to understand whether YouTube viewers enjoy the video or not.  YouTube is able to analyze user

preferences and, based on the likes they placed, recommend videos on similar topics or content produced by the same creator.

How to find out who put a dislike on YouTube?

It’s impossible to tell what user dislikes your YouTube video, as this information is kept private by the platform. 

What do dislikes on YouTube do?

YouTube dislikes allow YouTube users and content creators to understand how different videos are performing, weather the channel’s audience enjoys this type of content, etc.