> Hopefully the community will come together and figure out a good solution for the mess that YT is creating.

If youtube won't host the information, it becomes a search problem: who has voted on this link? How have they voted?

Certainly the easiest path would be to create a new centralized site that hosts all these votes. Then create an extension to add these downvotes back in.

Ideally you'd probably want to also have folks be willing to track views too, since downvotes is pretty much a consideration of ratios; 22 downvotes doesn't sound like a lot if there's a million views but it's a lot if there's 100 views.

So now we have an extension that tracks every youtube video you view and submits it to some centralized site, along with upvote/downvotes.

It'd be excellent to try to evolve a more distributed p2p architecture for doing this, but short of recording it on a blockchain- and a roll-up side-chain probably won't help- there's not a lot of good ways to do this. An intermediary step would be to have folks create micro-pages that record their votes. Then we can search "link:https://youtube.com/1a2s3d4f" to use google to go find all the votes people have created.

It's sad & bitter Youtube is de-democratizing this way, is serving their customers & not the audience, but it does interestingly highlight what a hard problem it is to create real demoncratic systems online.

I think it's as simple as commenting "dislike" on the video instead. It will fill the comments with negative responses that are easily recognized, and while you don't get counts it won't be hard to tell if a video has a lot of dislikes.

It would be better to get a count and ratio of like to dislikes but Google doesn't want that so comments it is.

The other option is an off-site like/dislike page that is hosted off of Google's servers and not subject to their tos. Maybe accessible through an extension. Abandon YouTube like/comments since they clearly can't handle the engagement and host the discussion on a third party page - one page with a like/dislike count for each YouTube video and with better forum type tools than YouTube comments offer. A good opportunity for a third party to build a tool that solves the problem outside of YouTube.

ive used youtube daily for years and never once looked at or clicked the dislike button (or the like button). seems to work fine for me

Hopefully the community has something more interesting in their life to care about.

Most of the community likely watches videos through Reddit or FB which have built-in downvotes so they won't even notice.

I'm guessing YouTube regrets putting comments and votes on its videos in the first place. Embedding YT videos still gives YT views (unlike, say, reposting a gif to 4chan) and I would think that they'd prefer FB/Reddit would just eat the controversy over curating comments and votes instead of having to subsidize it themselves.

Yes, the way it’s always done.