Photo Credit: 9to5Google
YouTube Music is making several changes to the app’s appearance, including a new playlist and now playing design.
YouTube rolled out the new playlist view last month, bringing a complete redesign of the feature. For playlists, the album art is now centered with a prominent play button at the top of the list, bringing it much closer in line with Spotify’s playlist view. A three-dot menu to the right of the ‘Play’ button houses other options like building a queue.
Now YouTube has gotten around to changing how the Now Playing screen looks–while removing the dislike button.
9to5Google notes that the redesign now shows users where the song is currently playing from, whether that includes the queue, likes, playlist, radio, or an artist page. The cast button has also moved to a more familiar position at the top-right of the app. But the dislike button which appeared before the song’s title is now missing.
Lots of people on social media are upset about the change as it begins rolling out. “It’s pathetic how afraid they are of anything that gives people the chance to express their dislike. Pretty soon, people won’t be able to downvote reviews in the Play Store, and reviews will start at three stars and only go up, not down,” one comment reads.
Not having to initiate two different taps to begin casting music to a Chromecast device is a good change. But YouTube got lots of backlash from people when it removed the dislike button from videos too. The backlash resulted in a YouTube extension for browsers that still displays like dislike count among users of that extension.
Removing the dislike button is pretty vestigial, anyway. Mozilla researchers found after studying inputs from 22,722 users that YouTube recommendations weren’t that influenced by the dislike button. According to that study, pressing ‘don’t recommend channel’ would only stop 43% of unwanted video recommendations, while pressing dislike only stopped 12% of them.