I don't understand the rationale? I spend a lot of time (probably more than I should) on YouTube, since it's full of interesting videos that teach me new skill

I don't understand the rationale? I spend a lot of time (probably more than I should) on YouTube, since it's full of interesting videos that teach me new skills. My experience has been that mass dislikes only happens on videos that are 1. bad quality in multiple dimensions 2. false / misinformation 3. politically contentious. For most videos, they have a positive like/dislike ratio, and you can use this as a strong signal about quality on the topic in the description/title. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that a dislike is "harassment" or an "attack". This really reads to me like Google is upset by the politically contentious videos that do get ratioed, and this is politically motivated on their part. Generally speaking, YouTube content creators trend left on US political issues, but YouTube's audience reflects the mainstream and trends slightly to the right on US political issues, which means that left-leaning politically contentious videos tend to get ratioed, and that includes left-adjacent issues that aren't strictly political but have been politicized. Either YouTube is a place for creators to put themselves out there and engage with their audiences... or it's another place that is corporately whitewashed to be as inoffensive (and thus uninteresting and shallow) as possible. Historically it's been the former, and I see this as another in a long string of moves by Google to turn it into the latter... despite that being exactly what people fled from when they started spending more hours watching YouTube than they did television. It seems Google doesn't know or doesn't care what their audiences actually want.