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Comment by ohgodplsno | Hacker News Reader

In addition:

- SponsorBlock - Automatically tag and skip portions of youtube videos, such as sponsors, intros, recaps, and others. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/

- Firefox Relay - Automatically create up to 5 (for free, more if paying for it) email addresses that redirect to your actual address, to avoid giving your private address to everyone. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/private-relay...

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Ha, thanks for sharing Firefox Relay - I actually work on that, so I was a bit hesitant about sharing it. I'll add that "paying for it" is €1 a month for unlimited email addresses.

Not a paying customer but if there was a way to sign up and pay anonymously (crypto and/or cash via mail), I'd be banging on the door even at a significant markup.

Is something like privacy dot com (virtual card numbers) not anonymous enough? I kinda don’t wanna know what you’re doing with these email addresses

There are a lot of people who just want privacy wherever they can get it. It's not necessarily something nefarious, but the result of the question "Does this person need to know who I am? No. Therefore there is nothing to gain and only something to lose by telling them."

For me it's more like "Do I want to waste time dredging this info back up in case they ever get breached", to which the answer is almost always "No".

Those are some really interesting extensions you've suggested.

I'll be sure to keep Relay in the back of my mind, I haven't had need of it yet.

Though I do have requirement for SponsorBlock avid watcher of YT that I am, I am a little hesitant to add SponsorBlock as I am not quite sure how it would work flawlessly without some really complicated algorithms potentially involving ML work. I am curious to know if in your experience it has ever erred and automatically skipped portions it wasn't supposed to ? Or any other type of errors ?

It's crowdsourced. The downside to that is that less popular videos may not have the sponsor information skipped, although you do have the ability to post start and end timestamps for videos that don't have it in place yet.

From my understanding SponsorBlock doesn't use any ML stuff, but is simply a database that allows other users to submit what they think is a sponsor (or other annoyance). I've found it to sometimes not get all sponsors (especially for more niche videos), and the self-promotion sections are usually too agressive (but they can be disabled). I'd say give it a go honestly

Yeah, the word "automatically" does a lot of heavy lifting there. But like others said, it's crowsourced. You watch a video, tag it, done. There's some anti abuse tools, like tags done by new users being served not all the time and tested by other users before it's trusted.

I have never seen bad section tagging over the past two years.

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