[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

[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.

[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.

[bcraven]

Imagine a video is recommended that is for a specific how-to search; if it has a poor rating then you can be confident it's a bad match for your search.

E.g. a plumbing video for fixing a tap with a bad rating is unlikely to actually tell you how to do so.