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Comment by sebastien_b | Hacker News Reader

> Also, HN: I won't pay for YouTube Premium. Here is how I use adblock to block ads.

I pay for YT premium, because I got sick of all the preroll and mid-video ads.

What am I greeted with now? A bunch of "Sponsored Content" during videos - the kind of thing I specifically paid to get away from.

View on HN

check out sponsorblock if you hadn't heard of it before. it's a crowdsourced browser add on to skip sponsored segments

How can that even work?

amazingly well! you get a few extra buttons to mark the beginning / end of a segment when watching a video, you upload the segment to a database along with a category (sponsor, self promotion, asking for engagement, etc) - everyone else with the addon will now have that segment be auto-skipped. a little option to unskip pops up when this happens and you can downvote bad segments, but so far I've never had a false positive

Unfortunately if you’re using the YouTube app on iOS/Android...

...or could it work for those by using iOS/Android’s accessibility+automation services?

YouTube Vanced has integrated support for sponsorblock and in my experience it just works, you just have to turn it on! I've not watched a single sponsored segment in at least half a year now, it's really amazing. Even very very recent or niche videos usually have their ads properly tagged.

(make sure you install Vanced from the right website, go on the subreddit for the always updated link)

Crowdsourced timestamps

I'm not sure but maybe it's a database of videos and time intervals to be skipped.

I’m in the same boat and would love to be able to filter out videos with embedded sponsor shilling.

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