Title is misleading. YouTube is testing removing the ability for viewers to see the dislikes. Video owners can still see the dislikes.
I am skeptical about this design change fixing the stated concern, which is creator "well-being". If good faith creators can still see the dislike count, they will still feel miserable. Anyway, if you are putting yourself out there, other people taking a dump on you is part of the deal, because other people... you know, exist. If creator well-being is a concern, Google should focus on preventing or minimising actual harassment campaigns instead of these minimal design changes.
The design change also assumes that all creators are good faith actors whose well-being ought to be managed, which is impossibly idealistic. If there is a way for bad faith actors to benefit at the cost of good faith actors, they will exploit that, and the good faith actors will lose ground over the long term.
It also ignores that dislikes can be given for many reasons, hiding valuable screening information from the viewer. It should not be up to Google to hide this info and finesse their recommendation engine behind the scenes to serve relevant videos. Google would optimize for views, not the content in the video.
I think the wellbeing play is more about preventing dislike-bombing than about protecting creator egos. Dislike-bombing is coordinated mass action against a video or creator, not by the usual audience of that creator, but by herds of non-watchers seeking to shame the creator publicly via a bad dislike count. That sort of stampede-like behavior doesn't seem like a healthy community dynamic.
It sounds reasonable to imagine that dislike-bomb participants will lose the public shaming motivation if the dislike count is no longer visible; they also will lose the ability to practically organize eg by setting up goals ("10k dislikes and I'll give away xyz").
Creators still retain dislikes as a signal of quality from their audience. Viewers lose dislike count but it's also already taken into account into the recommendation algorithms that drive most consumption on YouTube so maybe not a whole lot is lost; besides in the only place where dislike count is shown, comments are already visible (and those may be negative too).
I am skeptical about this design change fixing the stated concern, which is creator "well-being". If good faith creators can still see the dislike count, they will still feel miserable. Anyway, if you are putting yourself out there, other people taking a dump on you is part of the deal, because other people... you know, exist. If creator well-being is a concern, Google should focus on preventing or minimising actual harassment campaigns instead of these minimal design changes.
The design change also assumes that all creators are good faith actors whose well-being ought to be managed, which is impossibly idealistic. If there is a way for bad faith actors to benefit at the cost of good faith actors, they will exploit that, and the good faith actors will lose ground over the long term.
It also ignores that dislikes can be given for many reasons, hiding valuable screening information from the viewer. It should not be up to Google to hide this info and finesse their recommendation engine behind the scenes to serve relevant videos. Google would optimize for views, not the content in the video.