YouTube took its controversy-making decision to conceal the dislike score from all videos a few years ago. The change will hide the count that was disliked by the public however, channel owners or creators can observe the count. But a new browser extension restores the dislike rating on YouTube videos to everyone (for the time being).
“Return Youtube Dislike,” also known as “Return YouTube Dislike” is an open-source browser extension that runs across Chrome (and all other Chromium-based browsers), Firefox, and iOS. It also restores the number of dislikes on every video available to everyone.
The extension is gaining popularity due to its more than 200,000 users in Google’s Chrome Web Store in the first place. Users can see the exact count of likes and dislikes by hovering over buttons using the extension.
The extension pulls its data from YouTube’s API which will retrieve the count of dislikes to analyze. However, using the API isn’t without its drawbacks, and the extension’s software downloads all available data and saves it on the server. The data isn’t updated frequently, and the dislike number may not be updated for a couple of days.
As per the extensions GitHub webpage, YouTube will remove the “dislike field” from its API on the 13th of December. Following this date, the dislike count will not be available on the YouTube API. However, the creators claim that they “save all of the information” in their database, so that they can use it after YouTube decides to remove the option.
It is possible to visit this extension’s website or the GitHub repository or search it on the extension store of your browser in order to install it. After installation, it will show the number of dislikes on every YouTube video.
