- On November 10th, YouTube announced that,
whether this impacts you negatively or not,
the dislike counter was going away.
The stated purpose of this change
was to reduce dislike attacks,
a kind of targeted harassment
that YouTube confirmed disproportionately
affects smaller channels.
It's a valid problem and a noble goal to be sure.
You'll just have to forgive me for doubting
that that was Google's entire motivation.
Like the, "Are u ok?" book that they left
on my bed at a summit, their public concern
for creator mental health brings a little hollow
to someone who has lived inside the machine
for as long as I have.
Not because I cynically believe
that they are too heartless to care,
but rather because they cannot care.
The platform vents off competitors like Twitch and TikTok
by frantically serving it's viewers,
that's you, as many hours of satisfying content as possible,
regardless of the creator's feelings about it.
And the cold hard truth is that
no machine learning algorithm
is capable of caring about your sadness or mine.
I don't blame them for any of this.
I mean, all they did was build the wheel,
like we choose to run on it.
But the road that I travel is littered
with dead and dying internet superstars,
and as sure as the sun sets each day,
I will join them at some point, maybe soon.
And YouTube's wheel is gonna keep on turning without me.
I promise.
So, if removing disliked counters is unlikely to change
this ruthless meritocracy,
that uncaring only churns through its stars
like professional sports and (beeps)
what was the actual point of any of this
and what can we do about it?
Well, step one, is to get our dislike counter back,
and I'm gonna show you guys how,
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Restoring the YouTube dislike counter
takes less than 30 seconds.
Head to ReturnYoutubeDislike.com/install,
click your browser icon and add it.
You can also manually look it up in the Chrome web store.
If it doesn't work,
just uninstalled the extension and try again.
According to Dmitrii, the project lead,
there are some bugs in the Chrome developers Manifest V3
that make it randomly fail about 5% of the time.
Once that's done, voila, you're dislike counter
might take a second to load in, but it's back.
The incredible speed with which the open source community
identifies and rectifies problems like this
never ceases to amaze me.
I mean, huge props to the dozens of contributors and donors
who are keeping the dream alive.
But, as cool as it is on the surface,
this project raises a lot of questions for me,
which is why I made this video.
Starting with, is it even accurate?
Well, immediately following Google's announcement,
it was extremely accurate,
because the work around was a relatively simple one.
You see, the YouTube app and the website
had been updated to hide the dislike counter,
but the YouTube API which allows developers
to access key stats on the backend
was still reporting true dislike counts.
So creating an extension that would just pull that data
and then automatically inject it once your page loaded
was simple enough.
But then on December 13th,
API access to dislikes went dark.
So how does it work now?
The bad news is it involves a fair bit of guesswork.
Dmitrii who goes by Anarios on GitHub
pulled as much data as possible in the time
between YouTube's announcement and the API cutoff.
True stats for about 250 million videos.
But while that's gonna allow you to smugly affirm
how right you were that YouTube rewind sucked,
it is far from a complete picture,
and it only allows the extension to show
historical data for videos that were uploaded
prior to the cutoff.
The good news is that YouTube already uses
a lot of guesswork in its analytics anyway,
so no loss there,
and the project is poised to become
a lot more accurate and useful
in the short to mid-term.
First up, thanks to the efforts
of a digital heritage preservation group
called Archive team,
Dmitrii is working on integrating
the metadata from a whopping 4.56 billion videos.
It's gonna take some time
since that's 69 terabytes of data to ingest, nice.
But once that's complete,
extension users will have accurate
historical counters restored
for nearly every video on the site.
That is pretty incredible,
like this new hoodie on lttstore.com.
But what about new videos?
That's where you come in.
By using the extension,
you're gonna be contributing your own likes and dislikes,
which can then be compared
against publicly available views
and like counts to extrapolate
a probable dislike value.
In theory, then, the more people
install the extension and interact with videos,
the more accurate it will become.
Unfortunately, this raises some serious privacy concerns.
Your YouTube viewing behavior is extremely valuable,
particularly to advertisers.
And while there's an argument to be made
that once you've given your data to Google,
Pandora's box is kinda open anyway.
I don't wish to promote that attitude.
Thankfully, as Dmitrii lays out in this document
addressing privacy concerns,
the project code is mostly publicly available
and open-source, and it appears as though
he is collecting nothing more than what's required
to log dislikes and prevent
the same kind of spam behavior
that contributed to Google's removal
of the counter in the first place,
or at least that's what he's collecting from viewers.
One of the ways the project
could really get to the next level
is a commitment from YouTubers,
both large and small, to share their own true stats,
to help the extension validate its own guesswork.
But this gets pretty hairy pretty quickly.
While I could use a Loft to grant access to my own stats,
even with the limited scope of YouTube Analytics
read-only which can be configured
to exclude revenue numbers,
there's some really sensitive data in there,
and it's not the kind of thing
that we give away willy nilly
even if someone that I've never met before offers
a pinky promise not to misuse it.
But I'm torn, right?
Because how can I complain about the lack
of accurate counters if I'm not willing to do my own part
to ensure the restoration?
Well, maybe they can be good enough without my help.
Let's take a look at a couple of my own videos
that were published after the changeover.
Here's one that was well received.
The ratio of likes to dislikes is actually very close
when I compare the YouTube player page to my own stats.
Meanwhile, here's a sponsored showcase
that didn't perform well for us.
At the time of writing this,
my browser extension reported 12,000 likes
to 940 dislikes, a ratio of about 12.77:1.
While the true stats tell a slightly
less favorable story putting us at 11.63:1.
So that's a bit farther off,
but still accurate enough to reflect
the audience's general displeasure with that video.
It's possible though, that extension users
are overrepresented in our audience,
meaning that our videos might be more accurate than,
say, for example, a video on a makeup channel.
Our upside down building video, for example,
had a whopping 2000 votes from extension users
out of 14,000 total.
Though, curiously, I wasn't able to verify this one
because I believe YouTube
is doing some funky things with the counter
after live streams.
So I would love for other creators,
particularly if you're from a different vertical
to chime in in the comments
with a couple of your own comparisons,
if you'd be willing.
From my side, though,
it's looking pretty good so far,
which you might've realized
it doesn't help anyone that wants to use
a mobile app for YouTube,
unless this is the straw that finally breaks my back
and makes me install YouTube Vanced.
Yeah, I went there.
Dmitrii is currently in talks
with that team to include his data.
And for those who haven't heard of it,
Vanced is a sideload-only alternative YouTube app
that among other things,
enables background playback
and ad-free playback without a premium subscription.
Both things that hurt my livelihood
as well as those of my employees
and my fellow creators.
And Vanced isn't my only unlikely ally here.
One of the policies that served me very well in my life
is to never take a deal where I don't understand
what's in it for the other party.
Dmitrii claims that the project
started as a simple effort to restore
the dislike counter for his own use,
presumably, so he can quickly and easily
filter out junk content.
That's fair enough.
That's a pretty big deal for anyone
who's ever tried to find
any kind of obscure DIY tutorial,
especially anything to do with software.
But by his own account,
he hasn't even had time to actually watch
any YouTube videos since this project began.
Surely, that's not sustainable.
And that's even ignoring the fact
that running the infrastructure to support
this extension is a non-trivial endeavor
that may not be able to rely on donors
or a small Patreon forever.
I see a sponsorship link from a VPN
that I've never even heard of at the bottom of the page,
so it makes me wonder what's his end game here?
Truthfully, I don't know.
Is getting my dislike counter back
really worth violating my principles here?
Promoting online content piracy groups
and collaborating with parties
whose motivations I don't fully understand?
I'm not sure yet.
What I do know is I sure as hell
didn't choose this path.
YouTube chose it for me
when instead of coming up with better ways
for creators to moderate their communities,
they decided to just get away
one of the few publicly available
video quality markers that we still had left.
The only answer I've been able to get from YouTube
is that going forward, you're supposed to just use
comments to gauge video quality or validity,
but it takes about 30 seconds
in a YouTube comment section to figure out
why that is not a silver bullet.
They're full of spam and misinformation.
And they are much easier for a malicious actor to control.
I see the benefit of this control for marginalized creators.
I truly do.
Having a bunch of jerks come in
storming from some hateful subreddit
to dislike brigade you is something
that nobody should have to endure.
But I also do not believe,
I just do not believe that YouTube,
a multi-hundred billion dollar company,
or at least their parent company,
couldn't combat this through a combination of origin
and user behavior tracking
and all kinds of other AI black magic
that they have access to.
And if they really felt
that these negative interactions weren't valuable,
all they had to do was remove the button altogether.
So if YouTube still thinks it's useful
and it's still gonna affect
your video performance anyway,
and so far, anecdotally,
it doesn't seem to have actually changed
how many people are interacting with the button,
what purpose are we really serving here?
I mean, I've seen every conspiracy theory under the sun.
YouTube wants to protect itself
and its corporate partners
from embarrassment or the woke mob
is running the show over there now,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But honestly, the more likely one to me
is the simplest explanation.
Monkey see, monkey do.
So many platforms are removing
any way of negatively interacting with anything,
and YouTube seems like they just wanted to follow suit.
And probably the most frustrating thing
about all of this is the dismissive way
that Google has addressed
the collateral damage here.
I mean, I'm glad that creators
can protect themselves from unwarranted attacks.
I really am, but malicious actors can
and will use these same tools
to create fake positivity around their content
and to moderate negative comments.
Mark my words.
The number of kids that are gonna get fished
with Robux scams is going to increase
and making the internet safer for one vulnerable group,
while making it more dangerous for another
is not a clear cut win.
And some of the benefits of disliked counters,
like nuking misleading content
and punishing creators who,
honestly, really had it coming,
are going to be sorely missed,
at least by you maybe.
I'm gonna be running the return YouTube dislikes extension.
(laughs)
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- If you guys are looking for another video to watch,
maybe you could check out, I don't know,
the last time I was this mad
was probably when they renamed USB again.
It's over on the Techquickie channel though.
(upbeat music)