YouTube videos no longer show the dislike count. The company reasons this change will protect small creators whose content at times falls victim to targeted dislike attacks, abuse, or harassment. And with this new initiative, YouTube wants to encourage “respectful interactions between viewers and creators.” This appears to be good-spirited on paper, but some creators believe this would be bad for the overall community. They argue the absence of dislike count doesn’t tell the viewer if the content is worth their time or not. Even the company’s claim doesn’t hold much water as bad actors can still bully or disparage a creator on the comment section.
This isn’t just our personal opinion as many big creators like MKBHD and PewDiePie have criticized the removal of dislike count. Here’s what YouTube co-founder Jawed Kharim had to say about this change:
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So, until YouTube reverts its action (which seems unlikely at the moment), there are some workarounds or hacks to restore the dislike count on your end. If you want, you can follow any of the following methods.
How to bring back YouTube Dislike Count:
- Restore YouTube Dislike Count using the ‘return-youtube-dislike’ extension
- Return the YouTube Dislike Count using the ‘YT Dislikes Viewer’ extension
- Enable the YouTube Dislike Count using the ‘vidIQ Vision’ extension
1. Return YouTube Dislike Extension
- Download and install the extension from Chrome (also for Chromium based browsers like Edge, Brave, etc) or Firefox store or returnyoutubedislike.com.
- You should see the dislike count on YouTube videos. If you aren’t refresh the page once. That’s all.
This is the simplest option. However, you can also try the following methods.
2. YT Dislikes Viewer extension
- First of all, download the YT Dislikes viewer extension from Github, Chrome Store, or the Mozilla Firefox addon library.
- Now if you are on a third-party chromium browser, download this zip file, extract it, and you’ll have a folder named
yt-dislikes-viewer-master. Next, go to the Chromium browser’s extensions page. Then, enable developer mode. Click on Load Unpacked option and select the yt-dislikes-viewer-master file. - After the above two steps, press the extension icon and enter your YouTube v3 Data API key. The extension will show you the procedure to access this key.
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3. vidIQ Vision extension
- Download the vidIQ Vision extension for Chromium browsers and Firefox.
- Once it’s installed, you’ll be shown a video detailing how to set up the extension.
- So, what you have to do is login to the extension using new credentials or your Google account.
- Now, you will see vidIQ Vision banner next to the YouTube video you are watching.
Besides, like and dislike counts, it also shows various other video performance metrics, tags, SEO stats, and optimization suggestions. However, it takes up a lot of space right next to the video, thus pushing down the suggested videos section.
