YouTube has recently removed the dislike count across the platform to avoid mass harassment. But this new extension can actually return the famous dislike button.
The disappearance of the dislikes counter leads to controversery. Some creators are even strongly opposed to it. Right now, you can still put a red thumb under a video, but you can't see how many "thumbs down" the video has garnered. Besides, YouTubers still have access to the counter from their YouTube Studio dashboard. Nevertheless, there is a method to make the total number of dislikes appear again under YouTube videos.
Open source "Return YouTube Dislikes"
According to the extension's website , the extension gets data from a combination of archived data from before the official YouTube dislike API shut down, and extrapolated extension user behavior.
The extension collects the video ID of the video you are watching, fetches the dislike (and other fields like views, likes, etc) using our API. The extension then displays the dislike count and ratio on the page. If you like or dislike a video, that is recorded and sent to the database so an accurate dislike count can be extrapolated.
In January 2022, this free extension has hit over 2,000,000 downloads in total.
Redactor's review after one week
3/5 ★★★☆☆
I tried for my personal for one week use and to be honest that's a really good solution if you are looking for having an opinion about the video that you are watching and to don't waste time on usefulness tutorial. It feels like the old days and I can't part with it. Some people on the internet complain about the dislike numbers not being updated for a long time ago, but it's still enough to make you a good idea if it's shit or not. Unfortunately, it may not work on every new videos uploaded after December 13th 2021, but the team plans to share a API system with the creators.
Download for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and iOS : returnyoutubedislike.com
Top comments (1)
Finally, I was wondering if someone would make something like this anytime soon.
I hope that enough people install this extension that YouTube just brings back dislikes because taking them away doesn't reduce harassment when the creator can still see the dislikes and feel bad about it, just as some did before.