Why YouTube Hid the Dislike Count in 2021
Published: 2026-05-19 - 5 min read
For more than fifteen years, the dislike button was a fundamental part of how viewers gave feedback on YouTube. A number under every video signalled whether the community trusted the content. Then, on November 10, 2021, that number disappeared from public view - and has not come back since. This article explains what happened, why it happened, and how viewers in the United States and the rest of the world recovered access to the data.
The Announcement
On November 10, 2021, YouTube’s Creator team posted a short announcement on the official YouTube blog under the title “An update to dislikes on YouTube.” The post said the platform would start hiding public dislike counts on every video worldwide. Creators would still see their own dislike numbers in YouTube Studio, but viewers would no longer see a count beneath the dislike button.
YouTube began rolling the change out the same day. By the end of the week, the public dislike count had vanished from desktop, mobile web, the iOS app, the Android app, and embedded players.
YouTube’s Stated Reasons
YouTube gave two reasons for the change. The official wording focused on creator wellbeing and on so-called “dislike attacks” - coordinated campaigns where users would dislike-bomb a video to harm its standing on the platform.
- Creator wellbeing. YouTube said small and emerging creators were disproportionately affected by visible dislikes, and that the count itself contributed to harassment.
- Dislike attacks. The platform shared an internal experiment that, it claimed, showed dislike attacks fell when the count was hidden.
The post did not include detailed methodology, sample sizes, or peer-reviewed data, which became one of the central criticisms of the decision.
The Community Reaction
The decision was met with one of the largest waves of backlash in YouTube’s history. The blog post itself received hundreds of thousands of dislikes (the irony was not lost on viewers). Petitions to reverse the decision collected millions of signatures. American tech press - including The Verge, Ars Technica, The New York Times, and TechCrunch - covered the change critically, framing it as a transparency rollback rather than a wellbeing fix.
High-profile creators including MKBHD, Linus Tech Tips, and PewDiePie publicly opposed the change. Their argument was simple: the dislike count was one of the most reliable signals viewers had to filter low-quality, misleading, or scam content. Removing it shifted the cost of bad content from the creator to the viewer.
The Data Problem
Independent research by the Mozilla Foundation, published in 2022, found that hiding the dislike count had limited impact on creator-reported harassment but a large impact on viewers’ ability to detect misleading or low-quality content. The study surveyed thousands of YouTube viewers and analyzed video metadata before and after the change.
Specifically, viewers reported that they:
- Found it harder to identify clickbait and misleading thumbnails.
- Wasted more time on low-quality tutorials before clicking away.
- Felt less confident judging whether to trust a new creator.
- Were more likely to fall for scam and fake giveaway videos.
Mozilla’s recommendation was clear: restore the public dislike count, or provide a meaningful alternative quality signal. YouTube has done neither.
The Return YouTube Dislike Project
Within days of YouTube’s announcement, a Polish developer named Dmitrii Selivanov launched the Return YouTube Dislike project. The project consists of two parts: a browser extension that crowdsources real-time dislike data from users who install it, and a public API that any developer can query.
Before YouTube’s decision, Return YouTube Dislike scraped and archived the official public count. After the change, the project switched to a combined approach:
- Archived counts captured before November 10, 2021.
- Real-time anonymous votes from extension users.
- Statistical extrapolation to estimate the wider audience response.
The result is an estimate - not an official number - but for the majority of videos with sufficient extension coverage, the estimate is close enough to be useful.
How to Check Dislike Counts Today
American viewers have three main options for seeing the dislike count on a YouTube video in 2026:
- Install the Return YouTube Dislike extension. Available for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. Shows the count directly in the YouTube interface.
- Use an online dislike viewer. Tools like the one you are reading on right now query the public API and display the count without requiring an install. Useful on mobile, on shared computers, or when you only need to check a single video.
- Check YouTube Studio. If you are the creator, your private dislike count is still available in the analytics dashboard.
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YouTube Dislikes ViewerWill YouTube Bring the Dislike Count Back?
As of 2026, YouTube has not announced any plans to reverse the decision. The platform has added some new viewer feedback features - including comment ratings and topic-level relevance signals - but none of them replace the at-a-glance reliability of a visible dislike count.
Until something changes, third-party tools remain the most practical way for viewers to recover the signal that YouTube took away in November 2021.