Thumbnail Rating Bar for YouTube

The latest changes to YouTube's way of handling dislikes were quite unpopular. While it was unsurprising for users to be dissatisfied with the update, it wasn't long before ways to circumvent the removal of the dislike counter started appearing.

These ways come in the form of extensions, and new ones are popping up every day: Thumbnail Rating Bar for YouTube is a Chrome add-on that now affords users the possibility to see the like-to-dislike ratio of a video right from its thumbnail.

While installing from the Chrome Web Store is business-as-usual, there are a few extra steps you need to take to get this fully working. You have to input a YouTube Data API key, and this involves a bit of extra work to set up.

First, you'll have to go here, click the Create button, then wait until the loading finishes. Upon doing so, you'll have to visit this link and click the Enable button. After doing that, you can start creating an API Key: go here, click the Create Credentials button, choose API Key, then Restrict Key, pick YouTube Data API v3 from the dropdown, and save.

Thereafter, all you have to do is copy the key sequence to the YouTube Data API field in the extension, then save the changes. The likes-to-dislikes ratio of the videos will now appear in the lower part of their thumbnail.

Besides affording you the possibility of choosing your own colors to signify the likes and dislikes, the add-on can not only show the likes of a video relative to its dislikes, but also to its views and comments.

More than that, you can also reveal the rating info by hovering your mouse over the rating bar on the thumbnail, and the option to exponentially scale the rating bar is also available. The add-on also offers a color-coded rating percentage to each video listing, allowing you to quickly gauge the consensus around a clip before you even click on it.

Overall, Thumbnail Rating Bar for YouTube is a Chrome extension that is worth your while: due to the recent anti-user-friendly changes to the clip-sharing platform, add-ons like this one are most welcome.