Recently, YouTube stopped showing dislike count on the web and mobile app. The company claims that the step has been taken to prevent harassment of small creators who usually face targeted dislike attacks. Several big YouTubers and publications tried convincing YouTube to bring it back but the company doesn’t want to listen to any argument on this. I personally feel that hiding dislike count is wrong. Like and Dislike ratio helps a lot in deciding whether to watch a video or not.
Although the company is not ready to bring dislike count back, you can still enable it on your browser. Yes, there is a way to get dislike count back on YouTube but only on the web. There are a few extensions that promise to bring back the dislike count.
YT Dislikes viewer is a browser extension that promises to bring dislike count on Chrome and Firefox. It is available on Github, Chrome Store, or the Mozilla Firefox addon library. You can also use this extension with any chromium-based browser by using the extension’s ZIP file available on Github.
This extension uses Youtube Data v3 API to fetch the dislikes of a video. YouTube will stop offering this data after 30th December. But the extension will archive dislike data to keep showing you the dislike count.
The extension uses Youtube Data v3 API. So, you also need to obtain an access key to enable the extension. There’s a link to learn how to get an API key to use this extension.
Once you get and enter the API key, you can now start browsing YouTube normally. The extension will add a Dislike count on each video.
There are also several other extensions that promise to do the same. I just tried YT Dislikes viewer and it worked as promised. So, I am just talking about this browser extension in this article. If you know any other good and working tool that can bring YouTube dislike counts back, let me know using the comments section below.
