YouTube’s removal of dislike counts has been almost universally panned. However, despite public outcry, the company seems content to stay on course. Fortunately, there’s a way to bring back this info with the aptly-named Return YouTube Dislike extension by Dmitry Selivanov.
Is there an extension to return YouTube Dislikes?
The Return YouTube Dislike extension does exactly what it says. It replaces the now numberless default dislike button with the old dislike count. This essentially returns pages back to the way they were before YouTube removed the dislike number.
Though the dislike count has been removed from the frontend, the number is still available via the YouTube API. Right now, the extension is pulling from that information to display the amount of dislikes a video has received.
Unfortunately, YouTube is removing the ability to access dislike counts through its API starting December 13, at least in part. The blog that announced the change has a bit of an addendum for developers:
“Your end users will still be able to view dislike data related to their own content on authenticated API requests. You can apply for an exemption (to have dislike data on non-authenticated calls) as long as you don’t display or share dislike data with your end users.”
So the ability to see dislike counts is just being removed for the public. Developers can apply for exemptions to see it as long as they promise not to share it with users of their app.
Fortunately, Dmitry Selivanov and the team behind the Return YouTube Dislike extension are archiving dislike stats, so they’ll still show up on videos uploaded before December 13. They’re also planning a way to allow dislikes from users of the extension to be collected so that numbers can continue to be updated.
The open-source Return YouTube Dislike extension is currently available for Chrome, Firefox, and Userscript (Tampermonkey), and links to download it can be found on the website.
