I used the like/dislike ratio to see if something is actually a good video about the topic I'm searching, or should I continue further.
For example, if I search "volvo s40 MAF sensor replacement", I won't watch someone ramble 20 minutes about how volvos are good, and why they chose the car in white instead of blue color... I want someone who'll pop the hood and replace the sensor, and those videos will usually have a better like/dislike ratio compared to the random rambling videos.
The ratio was the telling thing if a "how to" video was good. I'd rather watch a video that has only 100 likes, but 0 dislikes, than a video that has 1000 likes and 5000 dislikes. But now that's gone, R.I.P.
Apparently some previously-scrapped data for older videos that gets updated, and heuristic estimates combined with extrapolating data from those who use that extension and like/dislike. LTT did a video where they found the accuracy really good.
Beating Google at their own game, they (apparently) are.
I think the accuracy doesn't even matter too much. Personally, I believe I base my decision to watch the video after clicking on it on the ballpark the like/dislike ratio is in. "Almost only likes", "2/3 likes", "50/50 likes/dislikes", ... For that purpose, the extension does its job.
> with extrapolating data from those who use that extension and like/dislike.
Often you see the opposite, where a third party service provides customers with a feature extending the features of a big service like youtube or twitter, and then the big service buys the startup offering that extension, or integrates the feature themselves, leaving the extension dead. Now we see it happening in reverse direction, very interesting.
Apparently, the Youtube API documented here - https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos - returns both likes and dislikes. All Google did was remove the rendering of that API response field onto the webpage.
Extensions probably acquire the video url and make their own API call just to retrieve the dislike count. To me, that seems cleaner than trying to snoop on the main API call response (I think extensions might not have access to those, maybe they do). Basically, the data is available via API calls.
That's the analytics API. We already know they show dislikes to the channel owner. Isn't this the same thing?
And your other comment says "The dislike count is also still present in the [0] video API response." but the page says right there "Note: The statistics.dislikeCount property was made private as of December 13, 2021."
Since they removed the dislike count, I've watched zero technical/programming and related videos on youtube. I'm not going to sit for 30 minutes and then realise the video is a pile of garbage.
I'm amazed that anyone can find any decent programming content on YouTube. There are low-quality beginners webdev tutorials as far as the eye can see, but otherwise there's seemingly very little outside of rambling and superficial conference talks. And on the odd occasion when I do watch a video, YouTube decides that I must be a beginning webdev and bombards me with the aforementioned low-quality Javascript and HTML tutorials for the next several weeks.
