Why YSK: Youtube’s enshittification creates an abysmal experience. There’s a list of Chrome extensions I’ve collected over the years that each fix an aspect of Youtube to bring back a genuine experience. I’ve seen in comments people mention one or two of these at a time, so this is a pack that contains everything you could need, and more.
Sample:
Essential Plugins:
- Ghostery: Blocks trackers and ads
- uBlock Origin: Blocks In-video ads
- SponsorBlock: Skips in-video sponsor segments
- Return Youtube Dislike: Returns the dislike button
- DeArrow: Better titles and thumbnails, removes clickbait
- Youtube Redux: Returns youtube to the older style
- Style Bot: This tool allows you to edit CSS. With a bit of setup, you can use it to block sponsored videos from appearing in our video suggestions:
- Open Stylebot options
- Styles > New Style
URL: Youtube.com
CSS (copy and paste):
ytd-ad-slot-renderer,
ytd-rich-item-renderer:has(
> #content
> ytd-ad-slot-renderer
){
display: none;
}
- Save Style and Refresh Youtube
Optional:
- Dark Reader: Dark mode on any web page (and you can toggle it per page as well)
- Video Speed Controller: More control over video speed
How well does sponsor block work?
I wrote a small script that filtered it by grabbing the transcription, uploading it to chatgpt through api, analyzing and sending back timestamps of suspected ads.
These were overlayed on the video scroll bar in yellow blocks. As the video played it skipped these blocks altogether.
It was fun to build and worked well. Now I’m on Firefox and would like something similar…
It works really good.
Any channel with constant 10k views typically get a submission within a day, channels with 1mil views typically get submissions within the hour.
Its not hard to submit times your self, its all built in to the player bar.
There are multiple categories that you can choose what get automatically skipped or not.
Some categories are; sponser, self-promotion, into/recap, credits, filler/tangents, non-music (for music videos) and highlight, which is a marker showing where the “point” of the video is.
Reminds me of this: https://butter.sonnet.io/
Which also doesn’t have a Firefox version, but I was always kinda curious about.
Actually, is that your project? Lol, you mentioned yellow blocks which made me think of butter.
Sponsor block just uses crowd sourced submissions people vote on. No reason an ai bot couldn’t submit entries too, if they’re good they’ll get upvoted
I run isponsorblocktv in docker to mute/skip ads and sponsor segments on my smart TV and it works beautifully.
Stop The Madness is also a great extension for this on Safari :D
uBlock origin, Sponsor block, dark reader and return YouTube dislike will do the trick.
Use those on a privacy orientented browser like librewolf on desktop or fennec on android.
Also setting a private DNS would be helpfull. Adguard is a good one.
Lastly there is always the choice of Revanved if you’re a little tech savvy and use Android
Or Newpipe for Android which you simply install.
DeArrow should be optional because it’s not a strict improvement. Some thumbnails and titles are good and many times at least better than the title someone comes up with to de-clickbait it.
Also sometimes I like to to click not interested on any video with a red arrow in hopes the algorithm will learn someday
Some relevant userscripts:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/498145-youtube-hd-premium
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/457319-youtube-video-resize-fix
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/13040-youtube-hide-watched-videos
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/480312-compact-youtube-layout
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/528305-youtube-channel-auto-redirect-to-videos-section
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/447727-youtube-disable-inline-playback-keep-hovering-to-play
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/479883-youtube-shorts-to-traditional-video
Does anyone know if/what the closest there might be to a mobile device equivalent to this stuff? Refusing to pay another cent going forward for YT premium isn’t changing, but I’d love to be able to get through the occasional stream minus the torturous ad algorithm.
One I use is called “Unhook”. You can use it to block different features e.g. Suggestions, video end screen suggestion, front page feed, shorts. It’s great if you spend too much time on YT and going on a cycle of watching suggested videos. Now, I only watch videos that appear in my subscriptions or those that I search for.
I also use Better Subscriptions allowing me to hide watched or unwanted videos.
Ok I think I read all the comments sufficiently and I still don’t see the feature I most want: sort by duration.
Dinner is in 20 minutes. Click time range, set for 15-20 minutes. Look through suggestions from subscriptions that are 15-20min long. Pick one. Enjoy video knowing when it ends you’ll be able to go eat dinner/go to bed/leave for work.
Shameless plug for [email protected] - duration is in the post title.
Amazing, thanks for sharing!!
Enhancer for YouTube is another good one. Set things like speed, playback quality, and video size as defaults.
Add buttons, like speed, and volume boost to the player bar (a few settings to change, out of the box it makes its own floating toolbar).
Enable a mini-player as you scroll comments. Tons of other things too.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/
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Or you could just stop using shitty-youtube. It sucks ever since googol bought it.
-“Stop using toilet paper!”
Monopolies are bad mmkay
If you use uBO then Ghostery is redundant. It can also cause some of uBO’s filters to not work correctly.
Also uBO can do what you did with stylebot. (If you use the full uBO extension, and not the limited Lite version for Chromium browsers):
youtube.com##ytd-ad-slot-renderer youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:has(ytd-ad-slot-renderer)I don’t think uBO removes trackers. I originally wanted to do the filter with uBO ) I have a filter for promoted LinkedIn jobs) but found a reddit thread that used Style Bot with instructions
Not only is Ghostery redundant when you use uBlock Origin (you can choose the tracking removal lists, like EasyPrivacy, for example), Ghostery has a conflict of interests as it works with the ads industry at the same time it has this tool, and it reports the ads and tracking it finds back to advertisers, who can then make them bypass that detection better.
If you insist in a separate add-on, Privacy Badger does the same blocking of trackers and it is maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit for digital privacy.
uBO do remove trackers with the
EasyPrivacyanduBlock filters – Privacyfilters. More filters and options can also be enabled if you know what you’re doing. For beginners it’s best to stick to the default settings as more additions can lead to more breakage.
I would suggest using another frontend like freetube then trying to fix google’s frontend.
Freetube is great but keeps breaking every now and then. I assume YouTube is making an effort to block it and others.
This. Youtube is dead to me.
Sounds like OP actually interacts on the site with comments and likes and whatever so I can’t account for that.
In my case I get by with a combination of freetube and tubearchivist. I expect that one day youtube will find a way to finally close the door on this type of freeloading. Hopefully that will provide the incentive for more people to use more platforms.
I like interacting with actual YouTube because it keeps track of my subscriptions and watch history across my devices. (It’s not that I want Google to know my habits; it’s that I don’t want videos I already watched coming up in my feed.)
If one of these YouTube alternative front ends would solve for that use-case without too much faff and hassle, I’d happily switch.
You can usually export & import your subscriptions and bookmarks.
Mileage varies between different apps.
Many would call that faff and hassle. I’m not that attached to my subscriptions.
I need you to understand that manually exporting and importing subscriptions isn’t even slightly like automatically synchronizing watch history (including non-subscribed channels).
Sure. This functionality just isn’t important to me.
Also maybe just be aware that starting sentences with “I need you to understand” makes you sound like a bit of an ass.
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I want something that can reliably remove the YouTube shorts. They are absolute cancer.
Just don’t look?
Annoying that they clog the search results I guess, but they are a great way for creators to drive engagement with their long form content. Sports has guided me to some really interesting content I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
This post is a bit of a mess. It links to images hosted on discord, meaning it’s a temporary link that has already expired and post links only to chrome addon store
