I swear, the YouTube staff was just salty about the ratios on their cringe-fest Rewind videos.

It was probably turning corporations off the platform entirely since turning the likes off looked bad and leaving them on created risk.

But you could already disable likes/dislikes if you want

Turning them off, like turning comments off, makes you look like you’re afraid of what people will say about your video.

… Which is exactly the case, but they don't want it to look like that.

What?

Videos of Biden (speeches, etc) were regularly seeing abysmal like/dislike ratios, esp on official news channels like CNN. Then suddenly YouTube removed dislikes because of "dislike bombs". There was some speculation they were specifically pressured by someone (Biden or the media) to remove dislikes so their ratings would stop being negatively affected.

This is really silly because the theory assumes that A) Biden cares or even knows about people disliking YouTube videos of him and B) that CNN doesn't already receive preferential treatment from YouTube and couldn't just ask for an algorithmic boost regardless of how many likes/dislikes they have

Most likely it was because YouTube's own content (such as Rewind) was getting dislike bombed.

>Most likely it was because YouTube's own content (such as Rewind) was getting dislike bombed.

If Biden or CNN don't care about dislikes, why would YouTube? The most obvious explanation is that some data scientists noticed that removing dislikes tends to increase ad revenue or watch time.

YouTube got a massive amount of bad press about it, whereas I don't think the average person knew Biden was getting dislike bombed. But you're probably right.