The people behind YouTube have added another controversial decision to their long list: hiding the number of dislikes. In theory, this aims to reduce toxicity on the platform, but in practice it only hurts users, because it removes the main reference for anticipating a video's quality without watching it. That's where Return YouTube Dislike comes in, a browser extension compatible with Chrome and Firefox to restore the dislike button on YouTube and continue calculating it once Google blows up the API.
In early November, the official YouTube blog announced that the number of dislikes on all videos will become private, but the button will remain available to users. The experiment started in late March, and its goal is basically to protect creators from online harassment, as well as to neutralize the dislike bomb campaigns that many videos frequently suffer.
YouTube confirmed that users will still be able to use the dislike button to personalize their recommendations… but the decision complicates our lives. The dislike count always helped us identify (to some extent) the quality of a video, a fundamental detail when looking for tutorials, guides, and exercises. The good news is that we can already restore the dislike button on YouTube as before, and all we need is an extension: Return YouTube Dislike.
Return YouTube Dislike: Extension to Restore the Dislike Button on YouTube
All we have to do on our end is install the extension, either using one of the stores (Chrome and Firefox), or using the Tampermonkey version if we don't have access to them. A couple of refreshes, and the dislike count will appear immediately. However, the main aspect to understand about Return YouTube Dislike is that its accuracy has limits.
Why does that happen? The answer is that Google didn't just decide to hide the dislike count; it also anticipated the removal of the dislike field from the YouTube API. In other words, no developer will have access to public dislike data starting December 13, 2021. The Return YouTube Dislike extension will continue scraping dislike data, and then present a combination of cached dislikes, estimates calculated through the extension, and the ratio between views and likes on each video.
In short, Return YouTube Dislike is not a perfect solution to restore the dislike button on YouTube, but it's the best we have for now. As expected, users are accusing the platform of censorship, and of protecting brands and corporations that don't want negative experiences with their products… but Mountain View isn't going to change its mind.
Official site and downloads: click here
