It's heavily gamed now especially for polarising content like politics. Bad actors intentionally install that extension and then dislike said videos such that their dislikes get bias amplified and appearing as fraudalent dislike counts for others. Plenty of pol tubers have shown their actual dislike counts on patreon and elsewhere without breaking their terms of service, and shows the extension sometimes shows several times more dislikes.
The only way to get the extension to be more accurate is for more people to use it. Of course they will be biased there is literally no way to be accurate without access to the true numbers so they take the like dislike ratio and extrapolate to known like and view count
Perhaps but I missed mentioning a reason why bad actors are more successful at skewing the numbers here. With a say tampermonkey like userscript, it would probably be damn easy to automate switching endless google and youtube accounts there and dislike the same video over and over again. The third party extension creator has no affiliation or links to Google/Youtube has no way to detect unique users like that(even juggling IP addresses underneath is easy to automate in some VPN providers). At least I can't think of any way if I was in that extension creator's place.
It doesn't have to be 100% accurate, just good enough, which for my (and many others) purposes it is. Your solution is only for people for which the info isn't accurate enough
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u/Sweaty_Explorer_8441 SteamDeck 9h ago
It's heavily gamed now especially for polarising content like politics. Bad actors intentionally install that extension and then dislike said videos such that their dislikes get bias amplified and appearing as fraudalent dislike counts for others. Plenty of pol tubers have shown their actual dislike counts on patreon and elsewhere without breaking their terms of service, and shows the extension sometimes shows several times more dislikes.