The actual reason why YouTube disabled showing the dislikes amount

This isn't a huge revelation or anything, as it's rather obvious and most people know it (well, suspect it, as it's rather obviously not an officially stated reason), but let's document it here anyway.

One of the most visible and used features of YouTube, which allows interaction between content creators and their viewers, perhaps second only to the comment section, are the "like" and "dislike" buttons. These numbers are quite useful and telling because their magnitude and relative proportion tells something about how well the video has been received among the wider audience: If both numbers are very small, then it tells that either the video hasn't had many views overall, or that people aren't really all that interested in rating it. If one of the numbers is huge and the other only a small fraction of it, it tells that the video is either enormously liked or disliked. If both numbers are large and about equal, it speaks of a probably controversial video where viewer opinions are split. All this is quite useful information depicted by two simple numbers.

A couple of years ago, however, YouTube hid the "dislike" number from view. They didn't disable the button itself, but it doesn't show the number anymore. Thus, the majority of the information and usefulness of these numbers has been completely lost. This change was met with extremely widespread disapproval and criticism, and pretty much everybody, both viewers and content creators, opposed the change. (I don't remember seeing a single video of someone approving of the change.)

Given how massively unpopular this change was, one would think that YouTube would have restored it. But nope. The number is still hidden, to this day (at least as of writing this blog post).

But why did they suddenly decide to hide that number? Rather obviously YouTube made an announcement about it explaining their reason, but equally obviously that explanation was pure bullshit.

In order to make a very good guess of the actual reason, we only have to look at the timing: When was this change made, and what was happening on YouTube at the time?

It's extremely unlikely that it's pure coincidence that the number was hidden soon after Joe Biden became the president of the United States. And it's extremely unlikely that this was unrelated to the fact that all of the few speeches by Biden after he became the president, uploaded to YouTube, got massively "ratioed", ie. they got an absolutely huge amount of dislikes, and a tiny amount of likes.

If I remember correctly, the dislike number was hidden after just two or three videos of Biden as president were uploaded and massively ratioed in this manner.

I seriously do not think it's mere coincidence. I think it's the reason.