YouTube's decision to remove the dislike count was met with mixed reviews as some users appreciated the gesture while other users wanted the streaming platform to bring back the dislike count display. Luckily, there's a YouTube extension that allows users to do exactly this on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Return YouTube Dislike Open-Source Extension
According to the story by ScreenRant, a new browser extension is bringing back the YouTube dislike count to the delight of users that reacted with dismay to the original announcement. The extension is called "Return YouTube Dislike" and is an open-source software that was developed by Dmitry Selivanov and its source code is currently available on GitHub under the license GPL-3.0.
Return YouTube Dislike is a FOSS or free and open-source software available as an extension for Chrome and Firefox browsers. The extension is also available for jailbroken iOS devices and has over 70,000 Chrome users with a perfect 5 out of 5 rating on the Chrome Web Store.
On Firefox, the extension has more than 10,000 users with a perfect 5-star rating and is currently in an early alpha version but is already working as previously advertised. In order to add the extension, users can head over to Return YouTube Dislike on the Chrome Web Store or the Mozilla add-ons repository.
Once on the page listing, buyers can simply click on the "Add to Chrome" or "Add to Firefox" button and users will finally be able to see the dislike count when they check out a YouTube video page opened in their browser. Unlike other extensions and add-ons, the Return YouTube Dislike won't require users to restart their units meaning once it's installed, users will automatically be able to open up a YouTube video and immediately see the dislike count.
As per the GitHub listing on the app, the extension now uses the official YouTube API in order to re-enable the visibility of the YouTube dislike count. However, YouTube will be officially removing the dislike stats from the API starting December 13, 2021.
Future of Dislikes on YouTube
Once the new update happens, the app will only be using a combination of scraped dislike states and estimates extrapolated from extension user data as well as estimates based on viewlike ratios. To add, this is to show the dislike count on every single video as per the developer.
Although the accuracy, especially for new videos, could drop over time, it will still be offering some insights into the like-dislike ratio of YouTube videos, which has started to become otherwise impossible after Google's recent decision. As of the moment, however, users can still enjoy the extension to look at YouTube views and their dislike count like how the good ol' days.
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Written by Urian B.
