Last November, YouTube announced on its blog that it would remove the “Dislikes” count for each video. The reason put forward by the platform is the intention to take care of content creators, protecting them from the massive bombardment of negatives and hate campaigns that are becoming more and more common on YouTube.
This does not mean that the YouTube algorithm will stop taking into account negative reactions when ranking videos. In fact, although users can no longer see the number of thumbs down each video accumulates, creators can still view that data privately. And yes, internally YouTube will continue to consider negative votes to decide whether to recommend a video to other users of the platform.
How to see the “dislikes” count on YouTube videos again
As of today, the dislike count has completely disappeared from YouTube. The “dislike” button is still there, but you can no longer know how many people have expressed their dislike of a certain video. Luckily, it is still possible to know how many negatives a video accumulates “approximately”.
For this, a registry or database is used that collects all the “likes” and “dislikes” shown by the videos before YouTube hid this information.
This is precisely what “Return YouTube Dislike” does, an extension available for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers like Google Chrome, Edge, Opera, or Brave. This extension takes into consideration the record of likes and dislikes of more than 200 million YouTube videos and then combines them with the dislikes that users of the extension itself distribute.
In this way, they get an approximate count of the number of “dislikes” that a YouTube video accumulates.
- Go to the official page of ” Return YouTube Dislike ” and install the corresponding extension for your web browser.
- First of all, enable the extension (you will see that the icon appears in red instead of gray, as shown in the image below).
- Close any YouTube tabs you have open and reload the video.
- You will see how the number of “dislikes” of each YouTube video is automatically displayed again.
The application certainly works best with videos published before YouTube removed the dislikes count since there is a database that can be consulted to obtain the data. With the new videos published from November and December 2021, the application makes an approximation, so the counter is not so accurate. Although at least it helps us to get an approximate idea.
