The dislike button was never removed, that is not accurate. The dislike count is no longer being displayed to viewers. Dislikes still exist. In my opinion, it is important to be accurate with language.
Isn't this a distinction without a difference? The point of having likes/dislikes is it's supposed to be a social signal for quality of the content? I have found dislikes useful for knowing which videos to skip if I am crunched for time and do not want to watch all of them, like music.
I regularly dislike decent content based on my idea of what youtube thinks of my recommendation preferences. It’s baffling how much I need to manually participate in their “engagement” metrics to be able to go to youtube.com without closing it shortly thereafter. And I wonder how much more echo chamber-y it is for less tech-savvy users who rarely touch these controls.
80% of regulars are not subscribed and don’t “like” videos according to content creators, that’s why they nag for “like, subscribe” five times per minute. Developers tend to think that bigcorps’ data analysis is at a rocket science level, when in reality it’s probably less efficient than SQL LIKE query could be on some `video.tags` field.
Author/owner of the video would still be able to see it, so they can judge if their audience liked the video or not. But still, the biggest value proposition of having the likes vs dislikes is for viewers, not content producers, so it really sucked it went away.