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Comment by madamelic | Hacker News Reader

Hey all!

I tossed this together because I had trouble with YouTube and its rabbit hole. I wanted a way to still watch my favorite people without a lot of noise + distraction. I also use YouTube for live music while working (which is an issue if I get distracted by a neat looking video)

So I made Tube. It is just a search box and it shows you the top few results, you click on one and all you get is the player.

Let me know what you think. This is the first time I'm showing it off so there is likely still some rough edges! :)

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First, I'm probably not the only one but I find ads really annoying. Also, I always find myself spending so much time on Youtube when I was just coming for one video, that can be problematic. I think Tube is simple but effective.

Unfortunately, it won't filter out pre-roll ads, but there is always YouTube Red, if you dislike ads and don't hate Google.

And there are always ad blockers, if you dislike ads but do hate Google!

And hate the content producers too!

All the content producers I follow have either a Patreon or a Tipeee page, which allows me to give them some money (probably much more than what they would earn if I watched the ads).

Considering just about everyone I watch ends up being demonized that’s not such a bad thing.

YouTube Red is nice, but so many videos bake-in ads. It would be nice to have a player only play selected portions of a video; for a video with an ad baked in from 0:11 to 0:41, the player would play from 0:00 to 0:11, then auto-skip from 0:11 to 0:41, and continue playing. These could be set from an earlier viewing, suggested by the site by other viewer behavior, or have common shows have a "time file"of clips to skip to. "Abridged" shows could use a "time file" and subtitle track for easier content creation.

> but there is always YouTube Red

For the majority of the World there is not

This is awesome! Is the code available as open source anywhere? I might be interested in making my own personal deployment because I think youtube is far too distracting

Oh! Yeah, I can totally do that tonight. I'll link it (I have to remove a key from the code... oooops. :))

I would look at Youtube Feather. It was a stripped-down version of Youtube Google made several years back. Sadly it's discontinued now.

I think you've gone too far. Tearing out bloat and psychological manipulation is good, but it should have playlists, channels, and search filters. Those are important features for finding videos.

>Tearing out bloat and psychological manipulation is good, but it should have playlists, channels, and search filters.

I'll definitely consider it. I didn't expect it to get this response to be honest.

The target is more about cutting out the psychological rabbit hole, less about making it really light (although it would be a nice side effect)

This is the best software ever written. Salut.

Aww, thanks! :)

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