YouTube Removes Dislike Button from Shorts: Creator News Update

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Twitch is quietly introducing up to 90-second pre-roll ads, effectively eliminating your top-of-funnel discovery on the platform. Additionally, YouTube has removed the dislike button from Shorts, and we’re dispelling the false panic surrounding EU refunds for digital goods. Let’s dive straight into the creator news. Thanks to leaked support chats, we now have confirmation that Twitch is significantly extending ad lengths. Standard pre-roll ads, which were previously limited to 30 seconds, can now often reach up to 90 seconds.

Even more concerning, if you set your mid-roll ad break to 3 minutes, Twitch may arbitrarily extend it to 4 minutes. Twitch is once again panicking about their cash flow and maximizing ad revenue at the expense of creator growth. Who will sit through 90 seconds of unskippable ads to potentially discover a new streamer? In my opinion, no one.

Organic discovery on Twitch was already struggling, and this change won’t improve the situation. You need to build your funnel on YouTube or TikTok and treat Twitch as a monetization platform only, even then, the terms are unfavorable. Meanwhile, YouTube is making significant changes to community sentiment. They’ve announced an update to the Shorts player, replacing the thumbs up button with a heart icon and removing the dislike button from the main interface.

If you want to express dislike, you must navigate to the three-dot menu and select “Not Interested in Channel.” However, this isn’t just about viewers. YouTube is also introducing an updated content list UI for your YouTube dashboard. To accommodate the new estimated revenue column, they’ve removed the like-to-dislike ratio from the quick view. For years, the first metric you saw in Studio was audience sentiment. Now, it’s how much money it generated.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below, and I hope they reconsider this change.

Moving on to this week’s drama: streamers and creators are in an uproar over a new EU law regarding the 14-day right of withdrawal. This isn’t about physical merchandise but digital goods like Twitch subscriptions, gifted subs, YouTube memberships, and Super Chats. Creators fear that viewers will purchase a Tier 3 sub, join their stream for a shout-out and spam emotes, then refund 13 days later.

However, the 14-day right of withdrawal for online purchases has been in place in the EU since 2011. The only change now is that platforms must prominently display a “cancel contract” button in the user interface instead of hiding it within terms of service. Some trolls will likely abuse this, but credit card chargebacks and PayPal refunds have always existed. Treat this as standard business shrinkage. If your channel’s economy crumbles because 1% of viewers click the refund button, you have a retention problem, not a legal one.

Regarding last week’s membership pricing news, many of you asked if YouTube would automatically adjust existing tiers. The short answer is no, but their communication on this has been extremely poor. Since the change in the Creator Insider team, their official communications have been disorganized. Now that the UI is live, we can see what this means:

You won’t be manually editing 50 different currencies. Instead, it’s a comprehensive transparency dashboard showing how YouTube automatically adjusts your home market base price to align with local purchasing power worldwide. This also addresses the Argentina exploit we documented previously, where we purchased 800 Tier 1 memberships for our channel for €5 due to broken regional pricing. YouTube is making the pricing transparent, which I appreciate.

The actual feature update allows you to manually change your tier prices every 12 months. Existing members will retain their old rate for now, while new members pay the updated price. Furthermore, you can now specify which membership tier is used when viewers gift memberships during your streams. This setting is hidden in the special features section of the memberships tab.

That’s all for this week. Let me know what you think about these creator news updates, subscribe for more, and I’ll see you next week.