Recently, YouTube has stopped showing dislike count on the web and mobile app. You can always dislike the video but can’t see the number of dislikes. You made an official video statement regarding this where they mentioned the reason to remove this feature. Youtube justified this claim that the step has been taken to prevent harassment of small creators who usually face targeted dislike attacks.
Several big YouTubers have criticized this move but nevertheless, youtube has gone ahead with this feature, and now you can’t see the dislike button anymore on youtube videos.
Why Removing the Youtube Dislike count is not good?
I personally feel that hiding dislike count is wrong. Like and Dislike ratio helps a lot in deciding whether to watch a video or not. Youtube is not only the source of entertainment but also the 2nd largest search engine after a google search.
People visit youtube not to get only entertainment but a very large percentage of users look for their solutions, learning, motivation, and so on. And there are millions of videos that are made on the same search terms so the like and dislike ratio helps us decide which video to watch.
As per my opinion, youtube should remove the dislike button from the short videos as those videos are just for entertainment. You can comment your opinions on this youtube move.
Also read: Windows 10 keyboard shortcut you Must Use in 2020
How to bring back YouTube dislike counter
A software developer named Dmitry Selivanov has developed an open-source browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that can bring back the dislike count to any video on YouTube. If you want to bring back this youtube dislike counter then download and install the browser extension.
Within a short span of time, this chrome extension has got 100000+ downloads on the Chrome Webstore. This extension is an early alpha version, but it seems to work properly. Just stream any youtube video and this extension will add a dislike counter again like it was before. It is available on Github, Chrome Store, or the Mozilla Firefox addon library. You can also use this extension with any chromium-based browser by using the extension’s ZIP file available on Github.
This extension uses Youtube Data v3 API to fetch the dislikes of a video. This means you will be able to see the accurate dislike count and not just an estimate. Unfortunately, YouTube has planned to shut down this API after 30th December. But the extension owner has confirmed that they are archiving dislike data to keep showing you the dislike count.
So you can get almost accurate data of dislikes for already uploaded videos but the videos which are being uploaded after 13th Dec won’t have a correct estimate. Moreover, you won’t be able to see the dislike count on the extension in real-time, instead, the latest version of the software will update them once every two or three days.
How to use this extension?
This extension is an open-source project which can also be accessed on Github in case google removes it from Playstore.
Step 1: Open any browser and search “return youtube dislike GitHub” and tap on the first link with an updated date of 10 November 2021.
Step 2: Alternatively you can directly go to the returnyoutubedislike.com and this will lead you to the page where you will find all Github, chrome extension & Mozilla addons links.
Step 3: Now you can install extensions or add-ons to your supported browsers.
Step 4: Lastly, open a Youtube video and click on refresh once. The extension will show the dislike count at the bottom as it did before the new update.
Final words
There are also several other extensions that promise to do the same. I just tried YT Dislikes viewer and it worked as promised. So, I am just talking about this browser extension in this article. If you know any other good and working tool that can bring YouTube to dislike counts back, let me know using the comments section below.
