A lot of things YouTube has done in the last few years have pissed me off, but haven't really effected the amount of it I watched. This is different, not because it pisses me off, but because it genuinely reduces the usefulness of the whole service. I used to have a vague idea of the quality of a tutorial from the like/dislike ratio, but now I actually have to watch each one instead. For anything where my need to know is marginal, it's a large disincentive. So suddenly I'm searching on search engines instead of YouTube and trying out various other video services. And finding that some aren't bad.

I hope this extension catches on. Not only will it make YouTube more useful again, but it has the potential to bypass the games YouTube plays with those numbers. I hope something similar can emerge that indexes the content independently of YouTube. I hope some other open protocol emerges that lets us disintermediate YouTube all together.