Sorry 'Little Mermaid' haters, YouTube's dislike button doesn't really do anything

YouTube's removal of dislike counts in November 2021 led to a massive uproar from the community. But a new report from the Mozilla Foundation says that the dislike button doesn't do much to change the YouTube experience anyway.

The report, released today, found two main problems with the tools that YouTube gives users to indicate that they no longer wish to see a certain type of content. First, it's unclear what each tool does and second, using those tools doesn't affect recommendations as strongly as users expect they will.

The foundation tracked the YouTube experience of 22,722 people and surveyed 2,758 of them about their experience with the content they saw on their feeds. More than 39 percent of those surveyed expressed feeling that YouTube’s user controls did not impact their recommendations at all, and 23 percent felt the controls had a mixed response.

The results of the research supported those sentiments, finding that clicking "don't recommend channel" led to the prevention of 43 percent of bad recommendations, removing a video from your watch history led to 29 percent, clicking the dislike button led to 12 percent, and clicking "not interested" led to 11 percent.

Basically, users felt that YouTube didn't listen to them because it doesn't. That's bad news for everyone except for the people who disliked the Little Mermaid trailer. In their cases, I hope they continue to get Halle Bailey content recommended to them until the end of time.

You can read Mozilla's summary of the report at this link and access the full report here.