The only thing I've seen Dislike count used for on videos I watch is to drive a snowclone about what hypothetical type of viewers would dislike this particular video, like say there's a video showing how to correctly position Protoss buildings to prevent a Reaper jumping into your base in the video game Starcraft 2 [an early game harassment which is annoying and could win if you defend it poorly], and the video has 12 dislikes, the snowclone comment might be "12 Reapers saw this video".
I have never seen a video which I thought "This is a bad video, nobody should watch this video" and had lots of dislikes. I don't think clicking that would even achieve its goal, clicking the dislike button is engagement and shows you cared about this content enough to do something.
So this change seems fine to me. Dislike will still exist, but now it won't cause a snowclone we didn't really need and it doesn't make numbers go up visibly.
I watch a lot of videos on home repair or construction topics ie “quick fix for broken PVC pipe” or “how to replace your RV water heater” and the like/dislike ratio is invaluable. The videos with high dislikes are either incomplete, incorrect, or have terrible audio rendering them useless. The videos with a high like ratio usually help me figure out how to do what I needed to do.
I have never seen a video which I thought "This is a bad video, nobody should watch this video" and had lots of dislikes. I don't think clicking that would even achieve its goal, clicking the dislike button is engagement and shows you cared about this content enough to do something.
So this change seems fine to me. Dislike will still exist, but now it won't cause a snowclone we didn't really need and it doesn't make numbers go up visibly.