Returning the YouTube Dislike widget brings back the removed count

By YouTube remove the number of dislikes was filmed almost universally. However, despite the public outcry, the company appears to be continuing to move in the right direction. Luckily, there is a way to recover this information with the aptly named Dmitry Selivanov’s Return YouTube Dislike extension.

Is there any extension to return dislikes on YouTube?

The Return YouTube Dislike extension does exactly what it says. It replaces the default dislike button that currently has no number with the old dislike button. Basically, this will return the pages to the way they were before YouTube removed the dislikes.

Although the dislike count has been removed from the UI, it is still available through the YouTube API. Currently, the extension is pulling from that information to show how much dislike a video has received.

Unfortunately, YouTube will be removing the ability to access dislikes through its API as of December 13, at least partially. NS The blog announced the change there’s a little extra for developers:

“Your end users can still see their own content-related dislikes on authenticated API requests. You can apply for an exemption (having dislike data on unauthenticated calls) as long as you do not display or share dislike data with your end users”.

So the ability to see the number of dislikes will be removed only for the general public. Developers can apply for an exemption to view it as long as they promise not to share it with users of their app.

Luckily, Dmitry Selivanov and the team behind the Return YouTube Dislike add-on are storing dislike statistics, so they’ll still show up on videos uploaded before December 13. They’re also up The plan allows to collect the number of dislikes from the users of this add-on so that the numbers can continue to be updated.

The open source Return YouTube Dislike extension is currently available for Chrome, Firefox and Userscript (Tampermonkey) and you can find links to download it on webpage.