The ratio of likes and dislikes on YouTube is a very useful “tool” for deciding whether it pays to watch a particular video or not. YouTube has abolished the display of dislikes and thus made life difficult for many viewers, but there is still the possibility of restoring the display of dislikes with a workaround, third-party solution
Mr. Spock from Star Trek once said: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.”. Maybe it’s just a character from the SF series, but it’s a deep philosophical thought, which YouTube ignored when it discontinued the display of dislikes.
You will realize or understand how important the display of dislikes is or when you were left without it. Maybe it’s not important to you at all, and maybe it’s so important to you that your gaze automatically shifts to the ratio of likes and dislikes under the video, only to realize right after that that it is no more, that instead of the number of dislikes it now says just “DISLIKE”.
How to return the display of dislikes on YouTube
If you are among these others, you can get back to the display of dislikes, although this is not or may not be the exact number, but an approximate one. The salvation lies in the Chrome and Firefox add-on simply called Return YouTube Dislike.
You can go to that add-on page, and after clicking Install, you’ll get links to that add-on in the Chrome and Firefox add-on stores, a JavaScript file for Tampermonkey, and there’s an iOS jailbreak implementation.
Once you’ve installed it, go watch a video on YouTube, and – the number of dislikes is back!
How to see dislikes on YouTube
Of course, this is far from the perfect solution. As long as Google’s or YouTube’s API returns the number of dislikes, the Return YouTube Dislike plugin will display that number and store it in its database to provide that basis for the future when YouTube disables that part of the API. And when that happens, it will combine that archived data and extrapolate the data depending on the activity of the add-on user, that is, it will estimate the number of dislikes based on user activity for those videos for which there is no archived data. There are two consequences of this – lower accuracy of the number of dislikes (this is far better than not writing anything) and slower updating of the number of dislikes.
The more users use this plugin, the better the dislike data will be (if not for the general population, then for the population using Return YouTube Dislike). Let’s just hope it won’t be kicked out of Chrome’s plug-in store. It’s only been a week, and there are already over 100,000 to 200,000 downloads.
We would also like to hope that YouTube when they see the popularity of this plugin, will decide to return the display of dislikes, but there is no reason to hope because YouTube has stopped displaying dislikes despite the opposition of its users, so it will probably not return the display of dislikes – because they do not listen to their users. However, corporate and political interests are more important than the voice of some video viewers on YouTube, even if there may be billions of them …
