Likes and dislikes have been an important part of YouTube for many, many years. This isn't unusual for a socially-facing platform, either, as across social media there exists the concept of getting ratioed, a term that refers to the ratio of likes to dislikes (or positive to negative engagements) on a particular piece of content. Recently, YouTube has removed its dislike count from the platform, no longer allowing dislike counts to appear on videos.
Luckily, you can turn dislikes back on easily on a browser on a computer, and in this article, we'll explain how.
Why Did YouTube Remove Dislike Counts?
In November of 2021, YouTube posted a blog detailing an upcoming change to dislikes on the platform. The argument was simple, according to YouTube: Dislikes are being abused, like user reviews on other platforms, so a dislike count won't be shown on videos and will instead only be accessible by creators on the backend.
On its face, most in the YouTube community disagreed with this idea. The counterargument is equally simple: With an infinite supply of content and a similarly endless roster of bad actors and even worse videos on the platform, seeing a dislike count saves the viewer time and can even help keep them safe.
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What if you watch a DIY tutorial, think it looks cool, and decide to give it a go yourself but because you can't see the dislikes on the video you don't realize what the man in the video is explaining is actually extremely dangerous and might kill you? What if you're watching a tutorial on how to do some technical maneuver for work but because you can't see dislikes you don't realize the tutorial is actually a huge troll trying to get you to delete important system files?
The hypotheticals go on and on, but the point remains the same. So the question becomes: With seemingly so obvious a conclusion, why did YouTube decide to hide dislikes? Well, it definitely does discourage trolls to an extent, because people won't be able to see dislikes anymore so spitefully disliking a video won't do much.
But more importantly, it makes the YouTube community seems less contentious by removing a key way of giving feedback. By cutting down on the 'negativity' on YouTube (like a government might clamp down on human rights protests in the name of keeping the peace), YouTube becomes a safer, more advertiser-friendly place.
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Decide to accept a sponsorship from a shady company? Don't worry! Users can't see how much other users hate your video. Instead, they'll be forced into the comment section where you never know if someone's trolling or not. Have fun sifting through hundreds of useless 'First!1111!11" comments to try and find an upvoted one that actually talks about the video.
What YouTube's ultimate intention was behind-the-scenes we won't ever know, but the effects of this change are very real and are very upsetting to many different users and content creators alike.
How to Get the Dislike Count Back on YouTube?
The fact of the matter when it comes to YouTube's dislike count removal is that it's a purely cosmetic change. This means that it's simply a matter of not displaying the count on a video by default, but on YouTube's backend the dislike count is still very much real.
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This means that it's accessible through YouTube's API. Ever seen Tom Scott's YouTube video with the video's current view count as the title? This kind of virtual trickery is made possible by YouTube's API and coders' ability to access that API.
In the same way, dislike counts are still accessible through the API. So, since YouTube removed the dislike count, browser extensions have come out that simply reenable the dislike count by accessing YouTube's API to get the video's actual dislike count.
Depending on your browser of choice, you may have different options available, but for a browser like Google Chrome for example it's as simple as a couple of clicks. Once installed, there's nothing you need to do, no settings to tweak: Whenever you open up a YouTube video, you'll see the dislike count like normal, even if other people without the extension can't.
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It's an inconvenience for sure, but with a couple clicks, it's business as usual. Unfortunately, most YouTube users won't know about the extension, and obviously, this kind of fix won't work for all platforms, like mobile. For most intents and purposes, the dislike button is gone, but if you use YouTube on a browser on a computer, it doesn't have to stay gone.
Getting Around YouTube's Dislike Count Removal
While living without a dislike count can and will be frustrating at times, there are some simple ways you can navigate YouTube and get more or less the same information.
For example, if comments are disable on a video, that's a great sign the content is controversial or otherwise suspicious. If a view gets a ton of views, you'll know immediately what's being said is probably more trustworthy than a video with only a cuple views.
Checking the comments can be useful, too. Individual comments aren't trustworthy, but most of the time, if a video has serious, obvious problems, you'll find people in the comments section making fun of it spread across all the most upvoted comments. If everybody seems to saying the same thing in the comments, it's probably true.
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Lastly, there are rules of thumb when it comes to likes, too. Generally, you're looking at a couple percent of people (~1-5%) that watch a video will click the like button, so if you stumble onto a video with a million views, you should expect to see between 10,000 and 50,000 likes. So, if you notice that video has only a thousand likes, you'll know it's less popular.
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