I value the dislikes on YouTube pages. They tell me the opinions of the other viewers in aggregate, which is good to know, but that's not all. For tutorials, they can be life-saving. If I watch a video about CPR, for example, and it's got more dislikes than likes, then that tells me the info is wrong and potentially deadly. The comments sometimes warn the viewer of the same things, but not reliably. I've noticed this with advice about using dangerous power tools. All the comments were full of praise even though I knew the advice in the video was bad advice. The dislike/like ratio is a far more reliable indicator of a video's value.
So I was disappointed when YouTube made the dislikes invisible. It seems like every change the site has made since being bought out by Google has been a change for the worse, and this was just the latest frustration.
All is not lost, though. There are now addons and extensions and whatnot that bring back the dislikes. They never really went away; YouTube just stopped them from displaying. They're still there, hidden in the code, so all it takes is a bit of code to bring them back out into the light.
Here's the one I downloaded, and I can confirm that it works:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/return-youtube-dislikes/I'm sure there are other addons that work, too, and for more browsers than just Firefox. Do a little snooping around and I'm sure you'll find them.
Anyway, if you were as disappointed by this recent change as I was, then rest assured there are solutions available.
