Emojery vs YouTube Dislikes Democratized
This comparison is mostly about privacy disclosure. YouTube Dislikes Democratized is a niche YouTube counter; what makes it stand out in the store catalog is what it tells Chrome it collects, and Emojery's approach is the opposite end of that spectrum.
TL;DR
On the public Chrome Web Store card, YouTube Dislikes Democratized declares collection of personally identifiable information
and web history. The extension is closed source, lists 26 users, and its last release on the public store card is dated January 2022.
Emojery stores nothing about pages you did not react on. Its own store card ticks web history all the same, because count lookups send the public identifiers of items on screen, which the server answers without keeping; the permissions page explains each box. The only
thing tied to your identity is a one-way identifier derived from an opaque provider id; no name or email is ever requested, and the id itself is never written to a database. The full policy is on the
privacy page.
At a glance
| Emojery | YouTube Dislikes Democratized |
| What is collected (per the store / policy) | An opaque provider id transiently (kept only as a one-way hash), reactions and their public targets, a random installation identifier, a daily-rotating one-way network marker for rate-limiting, and, unless switched off, the country, city, language, browser family and OS of a reaction | Personally identifiable information; web history (per the Chrome Web Store card) |
| Source code | Public on GitHub, GPL-3
| Closed source |
| Identity model | Provider sign-in → one-way identifier | Not publicly documented |
| Sites covered | 14 and growing — Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, GitHub, GitLab, YouTube, X, Threads, Amazon, Rotten Tomatoes, TMDB, IMDb, Metacritic, and OpenCritic | YouTube only |
| Public reach |
In public beta, with a small user base. Why install one anyway | 26 users listed on the store card |
| Last public release | Continuous | 2022-01-08 per the Chrome Web Store card |
| "Delete my account" flow | Yes — one button in the popup; erases your account record and reverses your reactions back out of the counts | Not publicly documented |
Where the privacy gap shows
Nothing stored about pages you only viewed
"Web history" in the Chrome Web Store taxonomy means the extension may collect a list of pages you visit. The box says nothing about whether that list is kept, which is the question that matters.
Emojery sees the page only long enough to find the public anchor it's about to render a reaction picker next to. It asks the server for the counts of the items on screen by their public identifiers, and the server keeps nothing from that request. The only page stored on our side is the one you actually react
on, next to your reaction, plus the aggregate count for it.
No name, no email: an opaque id, hashed
Emojery's PII-handling story is intentionally tiny: you sign in with a provider you already use, and the request asks it for the standard openid scope only, so no name, email or picture reaches us. What we store is an identifier derived from the opaque id in one direction only. Even an attacker with full
database access can't recover the id from it.
Closed-source extensions can claim anything they want about how they handle PII; you have to take their word for it.
Deleting the account is one button
The Emojery extension popup has a "Delete account" button. When pressed, the server erases your account record and takes every reaction you left back out of the public counts. The pseudonymous entries already written to the append-only log stay there, each reversed by a public revocation
appended after it. No queue, no review, no email exchange.
We didn't find a comparable flow disclosed for YouTube Dislikes Democratized on its store card.
Choosing between them
The 2 extensions aren't aimed at the same reader. Democratized goes after the missing dislike signal on YouTube and, by its own store card, collects personal data and web history along the way. Emojery adds a counted reaction layer across 14 sites, keeps no name or email on its server and stores
no page you only viewed, with the code public so the claim can be checked rather than believed.
So the decision is short if that web-history line is a dealbreaker for you. If it isn't, the deciding question is scope: one YouTube counter, or the same reaction layer on every supported site.
Curious how the layer looks on the video page itself? See
Emojery for YouTube.
Sources
-
YouTube Dislikes Democratized Chrome Web Store —
listing. The "personally identifiable information" and "web history" disclosures, the 26-user count, and the 2022-01-08 last-update date all come from that public
store card. Its star rating is left out here: at that number of users it measures nothing.
-
Emojery's privacy claims are documented and code-backed in our
privacy policy and the
public repository.
- We're not affiliated with the other extension or its author. This page only compares what each project publicly discloses about itself.
