👎 yt-restore-dislikes

A browser extension for restoring the dislike count on YouTube videos.

⚠️ Please note that YouTube has issued a statement explaining they are removing access to public dislike data on their API on December 13th. This extension is just a temporary solution to a permanent problem (and well, a fairly fun learning experience for me), so expect this project to get archived by then.

Motivation

In November 2021, YouTube published a video informing they would be making the dislike count invisible for all videos on the plaform. This was a response to "groups of viewers dislike-bombing videos usually because they don't like the creator or what they stand for".

However, the dislike button still remains the most effective crowdsourced tool to combat misinformation, scams and clickbait on YouTube. This measure received overwhelming backlash by the community and content creators alike but is still being pushed forward.

Implementation

At the time of writing, the dislike count for any video can still be fetched by Google themselves via the YouTube Data API v3.

What this extension does is simply request the current video's metadata and inject a little HTML to the YouTube webpage, replacing the "Dislike" label with the response - the actual count.

Requirements

Unfortunately, the YouTube Data API v3 isn't free and the default quota is of 10,000 requests per day. This is equivalent to clicking on 10,000 videos. While this should be more than enough for personal use, if I distribute my own key and a few dozen people install this, we'll reach the limit pretty quickly.

So, you must provide your own API key. Luckily, generating a key is a pretty straightforward process, just follow YouTube's docs. There is no need to add OAuth 2.0.

Installation

Currently I don't feel like publishing this to the Chrome Web Store or Add-ons for Firefox because it'll undergo a review process, it may very well just get denied and the extension likely won't work in a month from now. So you'll need to load the extension yourself.

Chrome

1. Check the latest release page. Download and unzip chromium.zip.
2. Once you've generated your API key, open chromium/script.js and replace the YT_API_KEY variable with your own key (paste between the double quotes).
3. Navigate to your browser's extensions page. It's chrome://extensions for Chrome and edge://extensions for Edge and enable developer mode.
4. Click Load Unpacked and, in your unzipped folder, select the /chromium directory.

More reference on how to manually install Chrome extensions here.

Firefox

Unlike Chrome, before they can be installed, Firefox add-ons must be digitally signed by Mozilla, so this means extra work.

1. Check the latest release page. Download and unzip firefox.zip.

2. Once you've generated your API key, open firefox/script.js and replace the YT_API_KEY variable with your own key (paste between the double quotes).

3. Now you need to sign the extension. I suggest using web-ext for this step.

   3.1. After installing it via npm, navigate to your unzipped /firefox folder and run web-ext build. It will generate a zipped file inside a new /web-ext-artifacts directory.

   3.2. Generate your addons.mozilla.org credentials (you'll need a Firefox Account here).

   3.3. Then sign the extension by running web-ext sign --api-key=$AMO_JWT_ISSUER --api-secret=$AMO_JWT_SECRET, the API key and secret parameters with your own credentials.

   3.4. After a while, a .xpi file (this is your signed extension) should be created inside the /web-ext-artifacts folder.

4. Navigate to about:addons, select Install Add-on From File... and choose the extension you've created in the previous step.