Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin

github.com

140 pointsjessedrain68 comments

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...

> (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

Can't access the link. Wish you great success on your dev journey :-)

You should post as well to the "Who Wants to Be Hired" thread - they go out at the start of each month so today's thread is still pretty new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27699702. Good luck!

> 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?

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.

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.

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...

the "advanced users" setting you manually select after installation to enable the patchwork does state "required reading" which explains it. It's relatively straightforward

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.

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...

This is great. Looking for similar tools I found a helpful list[0] on Github

https://github.com/humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech#...

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

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

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)

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.

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.

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?

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.

If this plugin gains traction I might add more features such as leaving the top comments from being hidden.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I think it's missing a "get rid of videos" option.

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!

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.

A welcome addition to my desktop, but sadly it is currently unavailable for Firefox on Android, from what I can tell.

I just want a ephemeral playlist bar where I can drop videos from all subs without making or adding to another playlist

This is beautiful. So easy and so clean. Terrific project.

Need one for TikTok. please help.

I've got you: Settings > Screen Time > App Limits > Add Limit > Social > TikTok

THIS IS AMAZING!!!! Thank you!

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?

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.

Yep, I miss the days when it would just recommend similar videos. Was so much easier to find new stuff and hidden gems

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

100% agree, and not saying it should try. Just questioning the validity of the apparent benefits of this particular attempt at fixing symptoms.

Which should be done anyway. YouTube dropped the ball on that one.

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

I am also not sure why they allow thumbnails outside of the video content anyways.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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).

Are you using Hackernews' built in anti-procrastination features?

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.

Great, thanks for sharing these. When I read the OP I initially started trying to apply the filters in uBlock by myself. But I couldn't figure out how to remove recommendations but keep search results (kinda essential) visible.

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.

I don't think Quietube (http://quietube.com/) has been updated since 2009, but it does this as a bookmarklet and still works today.

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

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.

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