Return YouTube Dislike for Chrome

Google's decision to stop showing the dislike counter on YouTube came out of left field: for a platform aiming to give a voice to everyone, such a move felt jarring, to say the least. Besides being a method to voice one's discontent with a video, the counter also acted as a barometer for the surrounding consensus.

Now that it's gone, you'll notice that the 2018 edition of YouTube Rewind sits at a respectable 3 million likes, without any dislikes to offset that number. While using Return YouTube Dislike for Chrome, you'll notice the 19 million dislikes: and that's the scope of this extension. Bring back the dislikes on YouTube through this to-the-point Chrome add-on, so you can gauge the actual reception to a video.

This is a functional extension, geared towards bringing back the dislike counter on YouTube. There's not much else to it, but in times like these, it's nice to know there are ways to circumvent anti-user-friendly changes made by the big corporations. You can dislike a video, but its creator would be the only one to see it.

This plugin will essentially make the dislike data visible, and to do that, it fetches the information off of YouTube's API. A common worry related to such a method is that YouTube might stop supplying dislike counts altogether in their API, but there are ways to skirt it.

In the eventuality that YouTube also scraps the dislike information from their API, the extension will use archived stats, estimating their change over time based on an algorithm.

You should note that the dislike counter is not entirely up-to-date: it takes about 2-3 days for the extension to fetch the new data.

Return YouTube Dislike is an extension that stays true to its name. No one expected it would come to this, yet here we are.