YouTube is notorious for making major decisions that don't exactly fall in line with community sentiment, and many of these involve the removal of features that many viewers still miss years later.
We know that not everything can survive the evolution of a website as big as YouTube, but there are still some things that people viewed as foundational to the experience of using the platform, and their removal has made the site worse overall.
Users would change a lot if they suddenly found themselves in charge of YouTube, yet one of the social media platform's biggest creators has revealed the one feature he'd bring back if he were made CEO.
Speaking to Jon Youshaei, Marques Brownlee – known also as MKBHD – revealed that he'd bring back the dislike button if he were given the power of YouTube's CEO.
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While its more positive sibling still remains, the dislike button was canned by YouTube's leadership back in 2021 after being on the site since its inception. It’s safe to say that the change wasn't welcomed by the community.
Many still parrot their desire for its return, and there are even some extensions that you can enable to see the hidden dislike count of videos published before the change, showing quite how unpopular they are over time.
YouTube's reasoning for removing the feature was well-intentioned, as it was to discourage harassment campaigns and overall negativity on the platform. Still, many mourn the lack of any meaningful way to express discontent or opposition to a creator's video outside of commenting directly.
It's a sentiment that Brownlee has expressed before, and he's keen to reaffirm his desire for YouTube to bring it back despite being a creator and therefore subject to the pressure of the dislike button, but there's been no indication from up high that it's on the agenda right now.
Brownlee also expressed an intriguing perspective on the future of AI during the interview, noting that while the technology will eventually reach a point where it can match (or perhaps even exceed) what we can create as humans, he believes that people will still be drawn towards human-made content regardless.
"People will still want to watch human-made craft, and activity, and performance, and we're still going to watch humans play chess against each other instead of AIs play chess against each other.
"We're still going to watch movies made by people who tell their life story rather than AI coming up with a story," the tech creator expressed.
"Even if it's graphically as high fidelity as what we'd make as a human, I still believe that people want to watch human stuff."