Ask HN: How to watch/read YouTube without watching videos? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to watch/read YouTube without watching videos?

7 pointseimrine9 comments

I have spent at least 10000k hours watching youtube, unfortunately. I have noticed that most videos have clickbait title, even more clickbait splashscreen (a picture we are clicking to) and advertisment on the description. Only the comment section sheds a light on the subject without watching. So, is this possible to load a comment section only but not to load a video at all? If the video is really interesting, sometimes (almost always) it is better to send the link to youtube-dl for watching the video later.

For example, my hobby is welding and I want to get playing some welding playlist in my garage while I am welding, instead of some music. But I do not want to chose what welding video to watch because I am already doing some welding and do not want to distract from metals to computer. That welding videos are needed for me not because I can not weld but because there might be some useful ideas hidden in those tons of speaking. Autoplay is not an option for me because there is a difference between selected videos and proposed.

1150 years watching videos and you haven't figured out how to get what you want out of youtube?

geesh.

but as with any data set the more you put into it the more relevant data you'll get out of it. subscribe, thumbs up or down, don't recommend channels.. eventually you'll get to the point where the system suggests stuff you actually care about.

in your 2nd paragraph it sounds more like you want podcasts not pre filtered clickbaity youtube videos. Especially if you're looking for nuggets of information. It would probably faster to read the transcripts / comments to gain those insightful ideas. Especially if the idea is only 30 seconds out of a 30 min video.

You can use youtube-dl to download the transcript of a video alone; the comments are maybe not so easy - possibly you need a headless browser for it.

youtube-dlp, a popular fork, has support for downloading comments!

I think the output format is json, so not the cleanest to simply read though.

"Don't recommend channel" is an excellent inbuilt feature. Weed out offending channels from your feed every time you use the app and you'll gradually have a much better YouTube experience.

i use the blocktube browser extension to block anything clickbaity or that I'm not interested in. for some reason sometimes blocks don't take and you have to block the video a second time, but it's still pretty great. I've got over 4000 channels blocked. and another extension to turn the splashscreens into just a random frame of the video, forget what it's called

> blocktube

Never heard of it, but it sounds just like the thing I need!

> splashscreens

Must be thumbnails. God I hate clickbait thumbnails. They are even worse than clickbait titles! And those, in return, are even worse than Hitler.

YouTube premium allows background play.

Don't have a smartphone

Wow, I envy you.

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