This Chrome extension adds the dislike count back into your Youtube viewing experience

Last month, Google removed the public dislike count from Youtube videos in an effort to safeguard against the feature’s abuse, and in doing so, angered millions of people. I wrote about how it could be viewed as a positive thing, and while I stand by my convictions, I also believe that many points were brought up by our readers, the internet as a whole, and even Marques Brownlee, who’s video on the matter now has over 3 million views. Ultimately, it’s a matter of perspective, but the downsides of removing the dislike count truly seem to outweigh the benefits.

While these analytics are still available to content creators via their Youtube Studio dashboard, they’re no longer glanceable on the front end – well, not officially, at least. However, a new Chrome extension called “Return YouTube Dislike“, adds them back into the interface for your viewing displeasure.

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In addition to showing the public dislike count in order to determine a video’s value for you, hovering over this area reveals a blue bar that divides itself according to the ratio of likes and dislikes. This full rating bar is unique to the extension, and you’ll certainly not get a tool like that out of the box with Youtube now that the company has pulled the feature on its end.

The developer abides by Chrome’s new privacy practices, and has its own seal of approval which ensures the developer has promised to never disclose or collect your data for use. Overall, it’s a simple extension with a simple function, but a welcome one for so many people. The developer is a genius opportunist for sure, and I applaud them.

One disappointing fact, however, is that as 9to5Google points out, the extension relies on scraping days old data from Youtube’s API to get dislike counts from the backend before revealing them on the frontend, and access to that API is going away on December 13, 2021. That means that this data may not be able to be updated after a certain point very soon and the entire thing could become immediately useless. I tried the extension out for myself, but I really don’t care whether or not I have a dislike count, honestly, so for all of the reasons I mentioned in my previous article, I’m not one of the ones who’s that broken up about it. That being said, I understand why so many people are, and respect it!