How to See Dislikes on YouTube

The dislike button still works and the number still exists. YouTube just stopped showing it to anyone but the channel owner, and that left the like as the only public vote.

Updated September 2026

Can you see dislikes on YouTube?

Only on your own videos. Here is what each person can see as of September 2026:

• The channel owner: exact dislike counts in YouTube Studio, per video and for any date range.
• Anyone else signed in or not: the dislike button, but no number next to it.
• Developers using YouTube's public API: no dislike figure either. YouTube removed the public dislike field from the API on December 13, 2021.
• Users of third-party browser extensions: an estimate, labeled by the extension as its own figure.

What does the dislike button still do?

Two things. It records a vote the creator can see, and it tells YouTube something about you: according to YouTube's own announcement, disliking a video continues to tune your recommendations. It is a private signal from you to the recommendation system and a private message to the creator, but it no longer tells other viewers anything.

Can viewers tell whether a video is disliked?

Only indirectly. Without the count, a viewer has three clues: the like count against the view count, the tone of the top comments, and whether the creator has turned comments off or held them for review. A video with a large audience and a very small like count, and comments arguing with the premise, is probably being disliked heavily. None of those is proof, and a viewer on a phone rarely looks that closely. For most visitors, the absence of a visible dislike count means the like count is the only verdict they register. That is the design YouTube chose: a creator can no longer be judged by a number that a group of strangers can inflate in an afternoon.

How to check dislikes on YouTube for your own videos

YouTube Studio holds the real number. The steps on a computer:

• Go to studio.youtube.com and sign in with the account that owns the channel.
• Open Content in the left menu. The Likes column shows likes as a percentage of all votes, likes plus dislikes, for each video.
• For exact counts, open Analytics, choose Advanced mode, and add Dislikes as a metric. You can break it down by video and by date range.
• Compare dislikes with views rather than looking at the raw count, since a larger audience always brings more of both votes.

How to see dislikes on YouTube mobile

Use the YouTube Studio app, not the main YouTube app. Open a video's analytics in Studio and the engagement figures include the like ratio; the detailed breakdown is easier to read on a computer. The main YouTube app shows only the like count, even to the owner, because it is the same view every visitor gets.

How to show dislikes on YouTube with an extension

The best-known option is the Return YouTube Dislike browser extension. Until December 13, 2021, it could read real counts from YouTube's API. After YouTube removed that field, it switched to three sources: dislike counts archived before the cutoff, votes from people who have the extension installed, extrapolated to the whole audience, and estimates from view-to-like ratios where neither exists.

So the number it displays is a model. For videos published before December 2021, it is anchored on real archived data and is closer to the truth. For newer videos, it depends on how many of the viewers used the extension, and it is least reliable exactly where people most want it: small and recent videos, where a handful of extension users decide the estimate. Treat it as a rough guide to sentiment on a large video, never as a count.

If you install one, check its permissions, and prefer extensions whose code is published. An add-on that reads every YouTube page you open is worth a minute of care.

What is the most disliked video on YouTube?

Before counts went private, the answer was widely reported to be YouTube Rewind 2018, YouTube's own year-in-review video, which collected more dislikes than any other video while the counts were public. After November 2021 no one outside each channel can verify dislike totals, so any current ranking is either based on archived numbers from before the change or on extension estimates. A list that claims to know today's most disliked video from public data is guessing.

Does a dislike hurt a video?

YouTube doesn't publish how votes feed its ranking, so nobody outside it can give you a weight. What YouTube does say is that the recommendation system learns from viewer satisfaction signals, of which likes, dislikes, surveys and whether people keep watching are all part, and that a dislike tunes recommendations for the person who pressed it. A dislike is more likely to mean that person sees less of your content than that the video is hidden from everyone else.

Watch time and whether viewers stay remain the heavier signals, which is why how YouTube counts watch hours matters more to a channel than any vote. If a video gets unusual numbers of dislikes, read them as information: the title or thumbnail promised something the video didn't deliver, or the audience that found it wasn't the one it was made for. The comments usually say which.

Why the like count now carries the weight

With dislikes hidden, a visitor has one public vote to read, and they read it against the view count. Views without likes suggest people clicked and didn't care. Many likes against a modest view count suggest the people who found the video wanted more. That ratio is also the core of YouTube engagement rate, which is calculated from public counts precisely because the private ones aren't available to anyone comparing channels.

This is the practical reason creators pay attention to the like count in the first hours of a video. It's the first social signal a new viewer sees under the player, alongside the view count. Adding YouTube likes changes that visible number; it doesn't change what YouTube knows about how long people watched, and it doesn't remove a single dislike, which remain in Studio for the owner to read. Views work the same way on the other side of the ratio, and YouTube views are priced separately. Every YouTube service is listed on the YouTube page.

Questions people ask about YouTube dislikes