Dislikes, as a visible measure, were widely bombed by Internet trolls and ignorant cretins. The (vast) majority of people don't engage with those tools, so a small, coordinated minority can easily have a massively outsized influence. It was grossly misrepresentative to the wider YouTube userbase. The far right, for instance, was hugely overrepresented because everyone else has a life and isn't spending their day dogpiling on White House or other videos to click a down arrow (neither an up arrow -- the rest of us aren't pathologically broken, and we have better things to do with our life and to define our identity with). COVID was actually a great benchmark because factual, scientific COVID videos were downvote bombed with regularity. Conspiracies and nonsense videos were left alone, because the rest of us aren't ignorant nuts.

They were used to bully people and diminish voices. It was a completely toxic element of the system. No, it isn't dumb corporate videos (who were prone to just hiding it at the outset, making the trolls hulk smash and angrily declare that unfair) that they're defending, and that notion is pretty comically dumb.

This whole post and the noise around this issue is so absurd. YouTube isn't worse because a bunch of ignorant assholes can't bully gay and minority people, or ply their misogynistic or backwards ways. There are loads of easy ways to automate videos and basically spam YouTube, and the system hasn't overcome that yet. Visible downvotes would do nothing when these players are uploading literally millions of videos.