"Return YouTube Dislike" Chrome Extension Injecting Ads
33 comments
·October 24, 2025snug
busymom0
> the extension requires quite a large database (~15TB)
Maybe I am missing something but how does a database which just needs to store video ID and a number become 15TB in size?
dzaima
Also a user ID, which seems to be 36 base64 characters (can't have one user count for multiple votes).
Round up to 500 raw bytes per row (perhaps including time/ip and other random garbage, plus indexes), 3x replication/redundancy or something, for 6 million users each having voted on 500 videos, and you're at 6TB; still some ways off from 15TB, but not insurmountably far.
(votes/user is rather tricky to get; but, as a bit of random garbage statistics math: YT gets ~5B views/day and has ~3B users; 6M downloads of the extension means ~0.2% of users use it, so 10M extension-user views/day = 15B over 4 years, or 2.5K/user; assuming 20% vote rate (rather high but lets say extension users care more for voting and/or watch YT more than an average person), that's 500 votes/user)
galagawinkle489
500 bytes? A user ID couldn't be more than 8, a date is another 8, a video ID is another 8, and an IP is 16. Even if you assume there is some overhead, a database cannot possibly need more than 100 bytes per row.
snug
The way the plugin works (in my simplified understanding) is that it guesses how many dislikes there are based on the like/dislike ratio of the people that have the plugin installed. So if 100 people that have the plugin installed and there is a 90/10 like/dislike ratio, and the actual video has 1000 likes, it will say that there are 100 dislikes. Youtube not only took away the dislike UI, but stopped publicly giving the number of dislikes even behind the API.
But even then, the database could not get that big, you'd only need a few simple tables, one that tracks every plugin users like/dislike on the video they stored it on, and then a table that does the aggregations. 15TB sounds crazy.
I'm not a youtuber so idk what content creators could see, but it would have been smarter for them to go after the content creators that have the plugin installed instead of youtube users, not sure why we would care about those kinds of analytics
jajuuka
I wasn't really upset about the removal of the button but this add-on seems superfluous. What benefit does it give users to see how many other users of this extension disliked a video? I would understand if it helped shape your recommendations or home page feed but I'm at a loss here.
lyu07282
It's not a representative sample so the dislikes it shows aren't accurate it's a bad estimate. I also heard some content creators that said they compared with real dislike numbers and it was way off.
ekjhgkejhgk
I don't feel for the developer. If donations is smaller than hosting costs, just stop putting time into it. It's a stupid gimmick anyway.
andromedaM31
I consider it to be more valuable than a "stupid gimmick", even if more in message than in direct utility - it fights to retain peer-voting and crowdsourced evaluation on the quality of online information, which is something that seems to be dwindling away with each passing year.
gdulli
I tried to make Twitter and Reddit more usable as they started to enshittify, but after a certain point I realized it was a fundamentally losing battle and gave them up altogether. Those sites were not one or two features away from becoming usable again, the rot was more comprehensive. Today in hindsight, I can see that moving on was the only way to go.
netsharc
15TB smells of incompetence. Putting ads, even more. Fucking up the ad displaying logic as he says: even more...
snug
They've added a full page ad that opens a new browser randomly and injecting ads directly into youtube.
I added some photos on this reddit post
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1of2k7s/return_you...
sieep
Thanks for sharing. I haven't noticed anything on the Firefox extension under the same name. ublock may be stopping it. I can investigate and post what I find here in a few hours.
null
ekjhgkejhgk
You gotta be a bit short sighted to imagine that the kind of people that would download an extension would accept ads.
On the other hand, you also have to be a bit short sighted to be installed gargabage like "an extension so you can downvote" lol.
AlienRobot
They won't "accept ads" but they also won't pay for the extension, so I think in practice this is a good way to tell users "you're costing me money, go away."
snug
You can downvote youtube videos without the extension, the extension just shows how many people downvoted a video since youtube took that visibility away a few years ago. It does help when there are shitty video recommendations and can ignore videos that have a bad ratio
QuadmasterXLII
I highly recommend following the official tutorial to create a browser extension for your preferred browser, and just making any changes to websites there instead of installing extensions made by someone else. For example, removing youtube shorts is like five lines of code in my personal extension. The rate at which published browser extensions turn into malware has escalated from “oh that’s concerning” to “How many times do I have to teach you this lesson old man”
gruez
You don't even need to make your own extension, which requires a bunch of boilerplate and docs. Userscripts (eg. greasemoney) or userstyles (eg. stylus) is often all you need, and much more straightforward to make.
Update from the dev:
> Unfortunately the extension requires quite a large database (~15TB) - and it costs money.
> The ad\changelog was supposed to show only on browser restart - i.e. be much less intrusive
> The idea behind paid features was also to cover the costs (since donations became smaller than the hosting costs).
> I messed up with implementation though.
> Sorry.
I do feel for the developer, and I am not anti asking for donations, and the full page pop up on browser restart I don't think is terrible, but it would have been better to maybe have a changelog and have a donation button. The ads injected directly into youtube make me lose a lot of trust