YouTube recently announced that it is hiding the 'dislike' count on videos to tackle coordinated dislike campaigns. However, barely days after that announcement, a new browser extension is bringing back the dislike count, much to the delight of users who reacted to YouTube's original announcement with dismay. Named "Return YouTube Dislike," the open-source software is developed by Dmitry Selivanov, with its source code available on GitHub under the GPL-3.0 license.
Return YouTube Dislike is a free and open-source software (FOSS) that's available as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, as well as a TamperMonkey userscript for other browsers. It is also available for jailbroken iOS devices. It has more than 70,000 users on Chrome alone and has a perfect rating of 5 on 5 on the Chrome Web Store. On Firefox, it has over 10,000 users with a perfect 5-star rating once again. It is in an early alpha version but works exactly as advertised, returning the dislike count to YouTube videos.
To bring back the dislike count to YouTube videos, head over to the listing page of Return YouTube Dislike on the Chrome Web Store or the Mozilla add-ons repository, depending on the browser. Once on the listing page, click on the 'Add to Chrome' or 'Add to Firefox' button, and the dislike count will be visible the next time a YouTube video page is opened on that browser. Unlike most other extensions and add-ons, this one doesn't even require a restart, which means once it is installed, users can immediately open up a YouTube video, and the dislike count will be visible front and center.
The Extension Pulls 'Dislike' Data From The YouTube API
According to the app's GitHub listing, the extension currently uses the official YouTube API to re-enable the visibility of the dislike count. However, YouTube is removing the dislike stats from the API on Dec. 13, 2021. Once that happens, the app will use "a combination of scraped dislike stats, estimates extrapolated from extension user data and estimates based on view\like ratios" to show the dislike count on every video, says the developer. So while the accuracy might drop over time, especially for new videos, it will still offer some insight into the like-dislike ratio of YouTube videos, which has become otherwise impossible following Google's recent decision.
The dislike count has been a touchy subject for YouTube ever since its 2018 Rewind compilation became the most disliked video in the platform's history. The compilations in the next couple of years didn't fare much better either, forcing the company to cancel Rewind for good. While many online commentators and social media users believe that YouTube got rid of the dislike count because of the embarrassment of Rewind 2018, the Google-owned video-sharing site maintains that its decision has nothing to do with that. Instead, it says the decision is a positive step for creators' mental health and well-being on the platform.
Source: Chrome Web Store, Mozilla, GitHub