[existencebox]

I used to consider the dislike count. I am still inconvenienced by its absence.

To give one example: In the major categories of videos I watch (tutorials, niche historical topics, video games, music) it was very common for at least some type of "Trojan horse" content to show up (heavily amateur/improper/incorrect content, potentially troll content or in the music case bad rips/"remixes"/mislabeled songs etc.)

Previously, dislike count gave me a way of catching this trivially, even in cases when comments were disabled, before I wasted time loading the page or getting blasted with max volume noise (human screaming in one case IIRC) to the point of clipping my speakers (I hit this post-removal as well, thus this rant).

Low view counts are effectively meaningless as an oracle given that it's largely expected in many cases.

This change has for me as a user severely hampered Youtube's utility as a platform (I effectively no longer use it for discovery), and as a technologist, lowered my respect for the functionality/integrity of the software and its design choices. (I doubt they are unaware of this, but I also doubt I'm their target demographic, and find their stated justifications disingenuous at best.)