[HN Gopher] Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube - a cross-browser pl...
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Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube - a cross-browser plugin
Author : jessedrain
Score : 123 points
Date : 2021-07-01 08:22 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| User2000 wrote:
| useless plugin
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| I have this idea for a long time: a separate page with predefined
| "algorithms" which you use the Youtube API to query video
| selection. You can change the algorithm any time, and it shows
| videos similar to the YouTube home page, but the search results
| are based only on the selected algorithm.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| Excellent! I installed a similar plugin for facebook that
| disables the news feed and it worked _wonders_. I can still
| access my messages and invitations which is what keeps me locked
| in, but facebook itself is now a boring site that I never use for
| procrastination.
|
| I wish I had a solution for this here site. I've tried noprocrast
| several times but it doesn't really work for me, I always end up
| disabling it.
| villgax wrote:
| I just want a ephemeral playlist bar where I can drop videos from
| all subs without making or adding to another playlist
| cf100clunk wrote:
| A welcome addition to my desktop, but sadly it is currently
| unavailable for Firefox on Android, from what I can tell.
| splatzone wrote:
| This is great. Looking for similar tools I found a helpful
| list[0] on Github
|
| https://github.com/humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech#...
| gnull wrote:
| I achieved many of the things this extension does with the
| following uBlock Origin filters.
| www.youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer.style-
| scope.ytd-watch-flexy www.youtube.com###comments.ytd-
| watch-flexy.style-scope www.youtube.com##ytd-browse.ytd-
| page-manager.style-scope[page-subtype="home"]
| www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-renderer www.youtube.com##ytd-
| vertical-channel-section-renderer
|
| They rip off pretty much everything except videos, search bar and
| search results. Although I found myself commenting out the first
| line to keep the "related videos" bar next to the video, because
| sometimes it has useful things.
|
| But know that these filters break some functionality (which I,
| personally, do not use) like uploading videos or showing your
| subscriptions page.
| aswerty wrote:
| Just applied these filters - I think I'm going to like them. I
| definitely fall down the YouTube rabbit hole from time to time.
| Cheers.
| paulintrognon wrote:
| I love those kind of plugins. I myself use Unhook[0], which works
| really well.
|
| [0] - https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/youtube-
| recommen... - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-
| remove-yout...
| whydoineedthis wrote:
| This is beautiful. So easy and so clean. Terrific project.
| ASpaceCowboi wrote:
| THIS IS AMAZING!!!! Thank you!
| arlk wrote:
| Nice work.
|
| Personally I use uBlock Origin plugin to hide elements I don't
| want to see on any website, and that made Facebook less
| "enjoyable" with no like buttons and reaction counts, no news
| feed, and no account photos and names (I took it a bit far I
| know). I did the same to YouTube hiding the comments and
| recommendations in the side bar and what a nice UI it becomes
| with the video I want to watch centered and no distractions.
| jessedrain wrote:
| I also use uBlock Origin in the same way. But my friend, who's
| a great developer, didn't know you could use uBlock Origin to
| hide elements, so I created a plugin that streamlines that
| process for her most addictive website.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Tbh UX is an aspect of uBlock that could need serious rework.
| I still haven't figured out what the patchwork of colored
| squares means...
| 12ian34 wrote:
| the "advanced users" setting you manually select after
| installation to enable the patchwork does state "required
| reading" which explains it. It's relatively straightforward
| Arubis wrote:
| I don't think Quietube (http://quietube.com/) has been updated
| since 2009, but it does this as a bookmarklet and still works
| today.
| jessedrain wrote:
| Hello, this is my first plugin that I submit on Hacker News and
| hopefully not the last. This plugin was inspired by my friend,
| who's a great developer and power user, who didn't know you could
| use uBlock Origin to hide elements, so I created a plugin that
| streamlines that process for her most addictive website.
|
| (Forgive me if this breaks HN etiquette) I am located between San
| Francisco and Seattle and I'm looking for a Junior, front-end
| position (remote okay). CV and contact:
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IGtneIUixBnrFBzBdAbBNaGf4yo...
| WetBeef wrote:
| I'm not adding an extension from a Google drive link, are you
| insane?
| ztgasdf wrote:
| That (now dead) link lead to his CV and contact, not an
| extension.....
| thiago_fm wrote:
| Can't access the link. Wish you great success on your dev
| journey :-)
| RMPR wrote:
| > (Forgive me if this breaks HN etiquette) I am located between
| San Francisco and Seattle and I'm looking for a Junior, front-
| end position (remote okay). CV and contact:
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IGtneIUixBnrFBzBdAbBNaGf4yo...
|
| You can post this on "Who wants to be hired" threads e.g.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27355390 there is one each
| month. Good luck with your job search.
|
| Edit: The one for this month
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699702
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _This plugin was inspired by my friend, who 's a great
| developer and power user, who didn't know you could use uBlock
| Origin to hide elements_
|
| I have tried to do the same but wasn't really able to figure
| the system. Are there good youtube videos that show how to use
| this feature?
| throwamon wrote:
| There's already "DF (Distraction Free for) YouTube", which does
| (almost?) the same and a bit more. Not sure if it's open source
| and it looks like it's not being maintained but it still works.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/
|
| Personally, I'd benefit more from a "Less Addictive HN".
| yewenjie wrote:
| I really like DF Tube. And I use Youtube Blocker for regex
| based suggested video blocking (really useful if you are trying
| to take a break from one particular interest of yours).
| vincent-toups wrote:
| Are you using Hackernews' built in anti-procrastination
| features?
| hawski wrote:
| A less drastic extension is Clickbait Remover. It replaces
| thumbnails to an actual frame from the video and de-capitalizes
| titles: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-
| rem...
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Which should be done anyway. YouTube dropped the ball on that
| one.
| sksksk wrote:
| YouTube used to select the preview image by taking a freeze
| frame at a certain point in the video.
|
| Older YouTubers used to manipulate this by putting the
| suggestive part of the video at the right time.
|
| Here's a blast from the past doing just that:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8tXjJL3xcM
| csunbird wrote:
| I am also not sure why they allow thumbnails outside of the
| video content anyways.
| lucideer wrote:
| I think largely because not allowing it doesn't make that
| much of a difference; I can just as easily place a click-
| baity frame within my actual video and use that as the
| thumb.
| jperry wrote:
| Because it's great for analytics. The formula of "face in
| thumbnail, big text, bold colours" works and YouTube WANT
| you to be clickbaited so that you watch the ads.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Because otherwise people would just put a 1-frame endcard
| in their video with whatever they want to have as a
| thumbnail?
|
| And if the thumbnail is picked randomly, you are just
| rewarding videos that show dramatic content with text
| overlay at all times. And the best-researched Tom Scott
| video might get randomly punished because the thumbnail is
| a brown-grey blur in the middle of a transition.
|
| The existence of the medium "thumbnail" is not more of a
| problem than the existence of book cover. Breeding a
| healthy culture of what should be on it is the problem we
| should focus on, both by audience behavior and suggestion
| algorithm.
| lucideer wrote:
| Haven't used it, but how representative/helpful are the
| replaced frames? I can imagine that would be something that
| would be very difficult to get right (even with the help of
| AI).
|
| My thinking is that with curated thumbs I can at least get a
| good idea of the author's intent (particularly when one's a
| relatively experienced regular YT user).
|
| I kinda thing targeting curated thumbnail selection is looking
| at the wrong cause: curated thumbnails don't cause clickbaity
| thumbnail choice, perverse commercial incentives do.
| hawski wrote:
| Far too often author's intent is to deceive. On better
| channels less so, but even then I can't stand those typical
| youtube thumbnails with exaggerated facial expressions and
| big titles. I now it works for them, but for me personally it
| makes the world a worse place. I also recognize, that if this
| extension would gain a major following authors would once
| again put those in video. With video previews it is also less
| of a concern.
| lucideer wrote:
| My concern is mainly just missing stuff I may be interested
| in in favour of uninteresting videos because the luck of
| the draw picked a highly relevant/irrelevant frame. Yes
| this is a 1st-world problem but this is Youtube.
|
| I'd like to think I could select videos on title alone but
| if that's your route then just remove rather than replace
| thumbs (and text can still mislead).
|
| To put it another way: even if we agree the current thumbs
| are bad (annoying, misleading), are the replacements better
| (or just irrelevant). Most people like to judge things on
| intent, but intentionally bad is still better than
| unintentionally worse.
|
| And in the end, I can much more easily develop intuition to
| spot intentionally deceptive common human patterns than
| spotting unintentionally irrelevant random automated
| patterns.
| isoskeles wrote:
| A browser plug-in can only do so much. It can attempt to fix
| the symptoms of perverse commercial incentives. But I t
| cannot fix those underlying incentives.
| lucideer wrote:
| 100% agree, and not saying it should try. Just questioning
| the validity of the apparent benefits of this particular
| attempt at fixing symptoms.
| surajs wrote:
| i bow before thee my lord!
| Ghexor wrote:
| I'm a big fan of reducing the webs addictive footprint. So thank
| you for building this, I hope it gains traction :)
|
| I've found ublock origin's "picking"-feature quite powerful. It
| allows you to just pick and permanently remove any element on a
| page. My youtube pretty much looks just like what this addon
| does. I think with a simpler UI it could empower many more people
| to handle their online addictions. This seems especially
| important on mobile and sadly also particularly difficult.
| [deleted]
| TheFreim wrote:
| I watch a lot of technology overviews/previews explanation videos
| and in many cases people will point out issues in the comments. I
| wonder if there would be a good solution to be able to see that
| kind of comment but not useless ones.
| jessedrain wrote:
| If this plugin gains traction I might add more features such as
| leaving the top comments from being hidden.
| ramoz wrote:
| Need one for TikTok. please help.
| mansilladev wrote:
| I've got you: Settings > Screen Time > App Limits > Add Limit >
| Social > TikTok
| luffapi wrote:
| I have the opposite problem with YT, I'd really like for it to
| offer me great suggestions so I could sit back for hours and
| watch, instead of having to actively search for new content. The
| problem is the recommendations are _really_ narrow. Want to watch
| a video on how to make cheese? I hope you like being recommended
| every video from that channel and every other cheese making video
| for the next 30 days. I feel like it doesn't look holistically at
| my viewing habits to provide something that fits me.
|
| Maybe I watch stuff like that mixed with Australia nature docs
| and C++ videos. What do other people that watch those things
| watch that I'd find _novel_. They should also try to get rid of
| repetition, especially in music recommendations.
|
| Does anyone know if there are alternatives to the native YT recs
| that operate over YT content?
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I noticed that the suggestions for novelties improve once I
| scroll very far in the suggestions, and then watch one or two
| videos of what I would like to have as a suggestion.
|
| This is purely empirical but seems to work more or less in my
| case.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Google YouTube recommendations are simplistic, to the point of
| being unusable.
|
| What I would really like to see is a YouTube video collection
| powered by the TikTok recommendation algorithm.
|
| TikTok video proposals are much more adaptive and much more
| nuanced. There I found out some content through recommendations
| that I would never search for, but truly liked it.
|
| Of course, not sure how that would work with longer videos, but
| I can suppose at least for music length it would be good
| enough, and for longer videos it may need more time to train
| the engine before starting to recommend.
| willmadden wrote:
| My problem with youtube isn't their recommendation algorithm,
| it's that they ban and censor so much of the content I want
| to watch. Youtube and the major social media outlets have
| turned into broadcast TV over the last five years. I use it
| for "how to" videos, and that's about it. I find a higher
| concentration of interesting/intellectual content on other
| platforms.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Other than their overzealous enforcement of copyright (and,
| via ContentID, more expansive than copyright rights), I'm
| not really aware of anything valuable being banned or
| censored. But maybe I'm ignorant.
| willmadden wrote:
| 1) Countless medical doctors and researchers discussing
| COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics like Ivermectin have
| been banned and censored. This includes world famous,
| Nobel Prize winning researchers.
|
| Here are some dead links:
|
| 1) Discussing Ivermectin (proven by dozens of double
| blind randomized trials to be 85% effective at treating
| COVID: https://youtu.be/f0FmjsWwFXs
|
| 2) Interview with Dr. Malone, the guy who invented mRNA
| vaccines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_NNTVJzqtY
|
| 3) A US Senator gets canceled:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/youtube-
| suspe...
|
| 4) Half of this guy's videos are canceled:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAWCKUrmvK5F_ynBY_CMlIA
|
| 5) I'll stop here.
|
| Here's a good video on the censorship of COVID on youtube
| and others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COyQVUhtMDQ
|
| That's just COVID. They suspend anything that isn't
| mainstream politics. It's Orwellian, and normies have no
| idea.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Pardon me if that sounds rude, but it is unfathomable to
| me why anyone would attempt to watch scientific/or
| medical discussion on YouTube (or any social media, for
| that matter).
|
| My alarm bells start ringing if I read a paper and the
| authors are overly committed to pointing out the prestige
| of the institutions or seem to optimize for citations.
| What possible use could you get out of the discussion of
| "science" on a platform where flashiness of the
| thumbnail, shortness of message and flamebait are
| _directly_ related to your income?
| willmadden wrote:
| These videos weren't appeals to authority or optimized
| for citations. They were scientific discussions of
| therapeutics for COVID as well as the mRNA therapies and
| what's wrong with the current approaches.
|
| Youtube targeting content based on income and being
| "flashy" doesn't make their egregious censorship of
| inconvenient information on their platform OK.
| riggsdk wrote:
| I also have this issue with Spotify. I barely know the names of
| the bands/groups/dj's I listen to. I tend to have both a broad
| and narrow music taste at the same time. When I like one song
| from a band I rarely like their other stuff - but Spotify keeps
| suggesting it to me.
| 46756e wrote:
| I feel this. I feel like a decade ago, video suggestions where
| based on what you were currently watching and you could find
| tiny channels and new content easily.
|
| Nowadays the suggestions are basically 1/2 videos I have seen
| and 1/2 videos that are either big youtubers or I have
| subscribed to.
|
| No going down the rabbit hole to find new stuff unless you
| search yourself.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Yep, I miss the days when it would just recommend similar
| videos. Was so much easier to find new stuff and hidden gems
| ehnto wrote:
| I don't click on related videos, and have a bookmark straight to
| my subscriptions, but even still I get caught on YouTube for too
| long. My subscriptions produce almost daily content, and whilst I
| find it valuable, it's also just far too much content to consume
| in a day and still be productive, so I can get stuck on it.
|
| So I blocked it entirely. It's just another casualty in my
| continued attempt to rid myself of feed content, and things that
| help me procrastinate in ways I no longer consider a good use of
| my time.
|
| (HN is on a short leash too, but it's one of the few online
| communities I stick around in, and it's not mindless so I tend
| not to procrastinate on it for too long. I get tired of reading
| pretty quickly when procrastinating, whereas I can absorb YouTube
| mindlessly for hours)
| jessedrain wrote:
| I attempted going down the route of blocking completely but I
| always come back after missing at least one too good video, or
| if a song isn't being streamed on Spotify. I do agree that the
| majority of Youtube isn't of good use for anyone.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Consider replacing your Youtube subscriptions + watching in the
| browser with RSS feeds of the channels + youtube-dl. [1]
|
| My setup for a few years has been to have a "virtual desktop"
| for "media" that has the video downloads directory, RSS reader,
| and a terminal running a script. The script is essentially:
| while read -r url; do youtube-dl --... "$url"
| done
|
| The RSS reader is configured with feeds of the channels I
| "subscribe" to, and configured to only show the titles of the
| articles, not the content. (I use newsboat with a custom
| article list to aggregate all articles from all feeds.)
|
| Every so often during the day, I switch to that virtual
| desktop, check if the RSS reader has new unread articles, copy-
| paste each URL from the reader to the terminal, delete the
| articles from the reader list, and then leave the terminal
| downloading the videos in sequence.
|
| I have DSL but even then videos download faster than I can
| watch them (which is something youtube.com in the browser is
| unable to do, even though I configured youtube-dl to download
| the highest quality <= my monitor size). So I just make sure to
| queue the videos from the channels that make smaller videos
| first (ie live action stuff rather than video games), so I can
| start watching while the rest are downloading in the
| background.
|
| [1]: Of course you can remain subscribed to the channels on
| youtube.com if you wish to contribute to their subscriptions
| count. I assume youtube-dl'ing a video counts towards its views
| count too.
| ozzyoli wrote:
| Love it. Browser extensions like yours are one of the few things
| we have that act as "condom"s to protect us from the nefarious
| features of these websites that aren't working in our best
| interests.
| rockyj wrote:
| Nice! A similar extension is Stylebot
| (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...)
| I use it for a few sites. Basically select "divs" with selectors
| and hide them with CSS.
| orange_puff wrote:
| This is beautiful, and something I thought about building myself,
| but I am pretty good at avoiding Youtube suggested videos so I
| never had a deep incentive. Congrats!
| racuna wrote:
| Since Firefox 88+ (on a Linux distro) started to play Youtube
| videos with a lot of issues: choppy, bad audio, and so on.
|
| That make it "less addictive" to me.
|
| And I don't have plans to upgrade my laptop to hardware decoding
| vp9 streams
| lstamour wrote:
| It might not be exclusive to Linux, I'm seeing the same choppy
| video playback on Windows 11, Firefox 90. Had to switch to
| Edge/Chrome to watch a YouTube video yesterday. And I've an
| Nvidia GTX 2060.
| hart_russell wrote:
| Awesome! Youtube really has a lot of patterns that try to
| maximize engagement and I've noticed I spend way more time on the
| platform than I intend.
| gylterud wrote:
| This might be what I need. A few years ago I made a short
| tutorial on YouTube self-defence [0] but the measures are quite
| drastic.
|
| [0]. https://hakon.gylterud.net/tutorials/youtube.html
| orange_puff wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what is the typical way of building stuff like
| this? (will dig into the code but might not understand if very
| well) Do you have to read the youtube html code to figure out
| which things to hide, or is there a completely different
| approach?
| qq4 wrote:
| To solve a similar problem I nuked the site with uBlock Origin. I
| don't see anything on YouTube now other than a search bar. I
| never had an addiction problem with YouTube, but I certainly had
| an annoyed one.
| emehrkay wrote:
| I love this and will use it.
|
| I watch video at 2x and made a simple bookmarklet to control
| speed for video/audio https://github.com/emehrkay/media_speed
| mdaniel wrote:
| If you haven't seen it yet, the gear on their player offers a
| number of playback speeds (including 2x) and seems to remember
| the setting across videos. I suspect it does that because
| they're reusing the <video> element for playback until a fresh
| page load, because it's not _persisted_ as much as just not
| reset between videos
| elcapitan wrote:
| I think it's missing a "get rid of videos" option.
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(page generated 2021-07-01 23:01 UTC)