Return YouTube Dislike is a browser extension that restores the display of YouTube video dislike counts after Google removed this metric from the platform.
YouTube removed public dislike counts in November 2021 and subsequently deleted the dislike field from its API in December 2021, eliminating a way for viewers to assess content quality before watching. Return YouTube Dislike solves this by combining scraped historical dislike data with estimates derived from extension user interactions to reconstruct and display dislike counts alongside like counts on video pages.
The extension works as a Chrome or Firefox web extension, with userscript versions available for other browsers. Anyone frustrated by the inability to see community feedback on video quality should consider it. The project exposes its dislike data through a public API that third parties can use, subject to attribution requirements and rate limits of 100 requests per minute and 10,000 per day. The API provides endpoints to retrieve vote counts for specific YouTube video IDs and returns appropriate HTTP status codes for missing or malformed requests.
The project maintains documentation across multiple languages and accepts community contributions through a formal contribution guide. Development activity shows ongoing engagement with user support and feature maintenance, with the team actively managing API access and rate limiting to prevent abuse while keeping the service available to legitimate users.
