YouTube Dislike Button and How to Bring It Back
And my not-so-happy thoughts on it
Tl;dr
If you’re only interested in getting the dislike button back, just follow this link:
https://returnyoutubedislike.com/install
And install the extension for your browser. The project is open source, so if you want to go more in depth on how it works, check out their repo as well.
But if you want to know the whole story, let’s go to the next paragraph.
First, Some Context
Imagine you have a mid sem test tomorrow, and you only just remembered it because you wasted all your time playing games and binging Netflix. You’re in damage control mode, listing out specific topics you’re gonna prepare and pray that they are on the test. Now all you need is a short to-the-point video which is obviously accurate as well.
But wait, when you look it up you get hundreds of search results all claiming “best explained” in their title and thumbnail and good luck going through all of them. What do you do now?
Well, before November 10th, 2021 you would look at the like to dislike ratio and go with the one with a favorable value.
This is you putting your trust in a video when you don’t have the time to do a thorough research on whether it’s accurate or not. You trust that if most of the people approve of this video, its content should be correct.
You can think of many such scenarios, like fixing your laptop’s noisy fan or when you are learning the fundamentals of a new topic; where you need quick, to the point, and correct information. This is where you could some help from other people who’ve been down this road, who express their experience with two simple buttons. That is, until…
An update to dislikes on YouTube
But because the (dislike) count was not visible to them, we found that they were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior1. We also heard directly from smaller creators and those just getting started that they are unfairly targeted by this behavior — and our experiment confirmed that this does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.
Based on what we learned, we’re making the dislike counts private across YouTube, but the dislike button is not going away.
This is the reason cited by YouTube for removing the dislike count. You can read the full announcement here.
Basically it boils down to avoiding what I call the Positive Feedback Loop Dislike Cycle. As per YouTube’s experiments, if a user can’t see the number of dislikes, they are less likely to press the dislike button.
As you might have expected, the decision wasn’t very well received. It was criticized by many big YouTubers and YouTube’s co-founder Jawed Karim, who warned the organization, saying,
The process works, and there’s a name for it: the wisdom of the crowds. The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then, the platform invariably declines.
But before we take a look at the bigger picture, let’s bring the Dislike button back.
Return YouTube Dislike browser extension
Return YouTube Dislike is an open-source extension that returns the YouTube dislike count. The extension is available for Firefox and all Chromium browsers. Just install it and the YouTube pages will be updated showing the dislike count.
The extension currently uses Google API to fetch the dislike count and stores it in its database. Google most likely will disable the dislike count endpoint, and currently the project’s fallback strategy is to use the archived data along with the data gathered from the extension users (even if Google stops returning the dislike count the extension could still record it when a user presses the dislike button and update the database) to extrapolate estimates. So the bigger the extension user base, the more accurate would be the count.
It has over a million users on Chrome web store with a rating of 5 stars. So that’s something. But if you have some concerns, you can check their Security FAQ page.
The extension implements a simple (but very important) feature, so it does not need to access any user specific data. At the bottom of it all, all you need is a mapping of a video to its dislike count.
Now that we got the dislike button back, I have a few things to say, to end this article with.
My two cents…
I started this article giving some examples where the dislike button comes in handy, and like most of the people, I’m not a huge fan of this change. But it’s not just about removing a field.
Let’s consider the experiment that YouTube conducted that led them to implement this change. According to their blog,
we experimented with the dislike button to see whether or not changes could help better protect our creators from harassment, and reduce dislike attacks — where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos
So the goal here is to protect the creators from harassment and reduce dislike attacks, where people press the dislike button on purpose not because the video is bad but just to attack the creator or because they’ve been influenced by the dislike count.
Also, one important point to keep in mind,
Creators will still be able to find their exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio
Question is, is YouTube counting on the dislike count to have less impact on the creators when it’s private compared to when it’s public? If the real issue was only that the dislike count was public, YouTube already had the option to hide it. If not, how does this change help the creators?
Keeping this in mind, let’s think about how different kind of content creators will be impacted by this decision.
- Big Channels with good content: these channels won’t be impacted much, their dislike ratio will probably remain the same as their current ratio already accounts for dislike attacks and those who attack them aren’t going to stop, especially when the creators they are attacking can always see the dislike count.
- Big channels with bad content: they are going to love this update. When a video has a lot of views, it gains more traffic. So far, a user could see the dislike count and decide not to waste their time even if the video has millions of views. Now, though, you have to watch the video (which could have anything from promoting a Ponzi scheme to spreading misinformation) and judge for yourself, or you could go through those huge comment threads.
- Smaller channels with bad content: not sure about these because it would be hard to determine if the dislike count is high because of the poor content quality or because they’re being attacked. Either way, not a strong/good enough reason to make this big of a change.
- Smaller channels with good content: these are the creators that I think YouTube is trying to help. According to them, it plays out like this:
A smaller channel makes a good video. This video upsets a group of people, or they just don’t like the creator for whatever reason. They dislike the video and since this is a smaller channel, even if the group is not too large, that number could seriously impact the like to dislike ratio.
Now a user comes across this video (recommendation/search result, whatever). According to YouTube, the user would press dislike without watching the video because of the ratio. Now I don’t have any data on user behavior analysis, but when I come across such a video, I either watch it and then hit like or dislike, or just skip it without any interaction.
If I missed any cases please let me know down in the comments, but taking all the above ones into consideration, YouTube is:
- Counting on its user to dislike a video with fewer views and bad like-to-dislike ratio without watching it
- Counting on its user to not check the comments before hitting dislike
- Counting on the user to either skip such videos (which most likely will happen) or actually watch the video and hit like (which, according to their experiment, is not the usual behavior) after the dislike count is removed
- Counting on this update to bring down the dislike count for good smaller channels by so much that it makes up for all the drawbacks.
You can see why YouTube knew that this change will not be well received. From their blog,
We know that you might not agree with this decision, but we believe that this is the right thing to do for the platform.
This does raise a question. How do they define the “right thing” here.
The thing that worries me about all this is the precedence it sets. YouTube only cares about what “they” believe is right, regardless of what their users, or the creators, have to say. And as our dependency on YouTube increases, we lose out more and more on having any control over what happens on this platform.
At some point we might need something more than these extensions, something big enough to end the monopoly.
