The YouTube dislike viewer looks up a video’s dislikes in Return YouTube Dislike, an open-source project that estimates them from counts archived before December 2021 and the votes of people who use its browser extension. Paste a YouTube link or a video ID, and the page shows the estimated dislikes beside the likes, views, and like-to-dislike ratio.
How to see dislikes on YouTube
- Under the video on YouTube, select Share, then Copy. In the YouTube app, tap Share, then Copy link.
- Paste the link into the box above and select Show dislikes.
- Read the estimated dislikes and the ratio. The line under them shows how many extension users voted on the video.
The page reads watch links, youtu.be share links, Shorts, live streams, embed links, and the 11-character video ID on its own. To see estimates under every video on a computer, install the Return YouTube Dislike extension for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, or Brave. For your own videos, YouTube Studio shows the exact count.
How the dislikes are estimated
Return YouTube Dislike combines two sources: dislike counts it archived before YouTube’s API stopped sharing them on 13 December 2021, and the votes of its extension users. For a video uploaded after that date, it divides its users’ dislikes by their likes and multiplies by the video’s public like count, as its FAQ on GitHub explains.
Where it holds an archived count, it blends that in, with less weight as the archive ages. The raw votes under each result are those extension users’ own likes and dislikes, so fewer raw votes mean a rougher estimate.
The counts are cached. Depending on how popular a video is, Return YouTube Dislike takes between a few hours and a few days to update them, so its likes and views can trail YouTube’s.
What the like-to-dislike ratio shows
The like-to-dislike ratio compares a video’s likes with its estimated dislikes. The viewer shows it two ways: the share of votes that are likes, and the likes per dislike. A video with 9,056 likes and 207 estimated dislikes is 97.8% likes, or 44 likes per dislike. Both rest on the same estimate, so treat them as a guide.
Why YouTube hid dislike counts
YouTube made dislike counts private on 10 November 2021. In an experiment earlier that year, viewers who couldn’t see the count were less likely to pile on dislikes, and YouTube heard from smaller creators that they were targeted by dislike attacks. YouTube kept the button. A dislike still tunes your recommendations, and creators see the exact count in YouTube Studio.
Why Shorts have no dislike button
On 25 June 2026, TeamYouTube announced that it was retiring the dislike button on Shorts and replacing the thumbs up with a heart. Not interested, Don’t recommend this channel, and Report remain, and creators’ Shorts dislike counts in YouTube Studio stopped updating at the end of June. Long-form videos and live streams keep the dislike button.
A Shorts link still works here. Since version 4.0.5 in September 2026, the Return YouTube Dislike extension adds its own dislike button and count to Shorts on a computer.
When the viewer shows no numbers
- The video is private. YouTube reports it private, so the page shows no counts, even when Return YouTube Dislike still holds old ones.
- YouTube has no video at the link. Check the link for a typo. The video may also have been removed.
- There’s no data yet. Return YouTube Dislike has no votes or views for the video. A new upload can take a few hours to appear.
- Too many lookups. Return YouTube Dislike allows each visitor 100 lookups a minute and 10,000 a day. Wait a minute, then try again.
Watching the video
To watch the video without the recommendations sidebar or the comments, open it in the cookie-free YouTube watcher. To find more videos with a date range or without Shorts, build the search with the YouTube advanced search builder. For the channels you follow, Retube, our free Chrome extension, groups your subscriptions into topic feeds inside YouTube, such as Cooking, Science, or Learning. Read how to organize YouTube subscriptions to set that up.