Did YouTube remove the dislike button on Shorts? June 25, 2026

Yes. In a post dated June 25, 2026, YouTube said it is retiring the dislike button on Shorts and introducing a heart icon to replace the thumbs-up. Nothing in a Short file changes, but any burned-in call to action that says "like" or "thumbs up" is now out of date.

What YouTube says

The YouTube Blog post (read 2026-10-05) says the heart is "a more meaningful way to express when a video truly connects with you", and that YouTube will rely on "Not Interested" and "Don't recommend this channel" to tune a viewer's feed. This post uses only those statements. It does not repeat claims from third-party guides about other buttons.

Limits that did not move

The YouTube Help page for Shorts (read 2026-10-05) still says a Short can be up to 3 minutes and that you can upload at a maximum resolution of 1080p. The page I read does not state an aspect ratio, so I make no claim about one. In Sume, you set the shape yourself with aspect_ratio on a video request, and 9:16 is the vertical value in the video generation docs.

What to check in your own files

Three things are worth a look in a library of finished Shorts:

• Burned-in text that says "hit like" or shows a thumbs-up icon. Replace the wording, not the whole video.
• A closing card that asks viewers to rate the video. The old rating idea no longer maps to a button.
• Caption styles that put text where the new heart control might sit. Move captions with design.placement.anchor_ratio if you need to.

Fixing an out-of-date call to action

For a clip that is already captioned, you do not need to run speech-to-text again. The video captions docs let you send source_caption_id instead of video_url, and Sume reuses the stored word timings. The price does not change, because a restyle is still a render. A standalone caption job is $0.20 for a clip of up to 60 seconds.

If the only fix is the wording of a call to action, send cues (phrase-level text with start and end in seconds) to burn new authored text. You can send only one of script_text, words, cues and segments in one request.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: heart-cta-001" \
  -d '{
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/example/clean.mp4",
    "style": "black-outline",
    "cues": [
      { "text": "Tap the heart if this helped", "start": 24, "end": 28 }
    ]
  }'

What the post does not say

A fair reading of the post is narrow: it announces two interface changes and one feedback model. It does not say that creators lose analytics, that reach changes, or that older Shorts are re-labelled. If you read a summary that says more, go back to the YouTube Blog page and check whether the sentence is there.

A replacement smoke test before you post

The ratio of likes to dislikes was a cheap smoke test for a Short that was not landing. Without it, the test moves to before upload. Two inexpensive checks fit a Sume workflow: look at the stills of the first seconds with video inspect, and listen for a spoken hook by asking for a transcript with transcribe: true, which is a public rate of $0.01 per audio minute. A clip with no audio fails with inspect_source_has_no_audio, so probe has_audio first.

A note for reporting

If you manage many channels, keep a spreadsheet column for the date a Short was posted. YouTube's change took effect after June 25, 2026, so any Short you compare across that date was judged under two different sets of buttons, and a raw engagement comparison is not like for like.

Where to verify

The change is also a reminder to keep claims about platforms tied to the platform's own page. Third-party roundups often mix dates and features. For this topic, the YouTube Blog post of June 25, 2026 and the YouTube Help page for Shorts were the only two pages used here, and both were fetched on 2026-10-05.

Keep a clean master

Start from the clean version of the video, not a version that already has burned text. The caption job burns onto the video you give it, so a clip with the old text baked in would carry both. If you only keep the final file, re-cut it from the source in a timeline render, which assembles an MP4 from slots and a spine at $0.10 per output minute.