Let's Block It | Hacker News Reader

Let's Block It

letsblock.it

164 pointsalexzeitler60 comments

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36585371 (6 months ago, 292 points, 72 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30057442 (Show HN, 2 years ago, 261 points, 83 comments)

Thanks! Macroexpanded below.

Current thread counts as a [dupe] because the page had significant attention within the last year. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. Reposts are fine after a year or so.

A curated list of uBlock origin filters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36585371 - July 2023 (71 comments)

Let’s Block It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30826234 - March 2022 (2 comments)

Show HN: Let's Block It – Custom uBlock Origin Filters Made Easy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30057442 - Jan 2022 (82 comments)

Mhm, for the first story I said 72 comments and that's what I see on this page[0]

And for the last story I said 83 comments, that's also what I see at [0]

Both of your comment counts are exactly one less than what I see and have written.

Is this just a typo on your end, or do you really see one less comment than I do?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=letsblock.it

That's probably because you have 'showdead' turned on in your profile. Since only a minority of readers turn that setting on, I only count live comments when posting 'related' links.

Oh, that makes perfect sense, thank you

I like the tool.

I would remove the example on the nebula service, that channel is a real creator. Add any oficial nebula channel as example for the blocklist instead. Don't screw one guy just for the sake of it, it's not a nice move.

In their defense, I use Nebula a lot and I have specifically wondered "how can I block Rene Ritchie?". I'm sure he's a good person and has his own fans, but he covers Apple stuff I don't care about and had particularly egregious "YouTube face" thumbnails that really grind my gears.

Aargh... the "YouTube face"! On YouTube I use the "Don't recommend channel" feature for anyone who shows up in my feed with those faces.

Still amazes me how widespread this is - I recently looked up some lawn care videos on Youtube and then I started to see these "YouTube face" thumbnails from gardeners show up in my feed. It's like all aspiring YouTubers are reading the same advice for getting views, regardless of age, demographic, or subject?

This is a good example of just doing what's popular instead of A/B testing. Or a good example of the analytics showing the ridiculous wins out over the reasonable. I too avoid clicking links with Youtube Face. Why would someone be pointing at their own thumbnail? With a shocked expression.

> Still amazes me how widespread this is

It works⁰ surprisingly well for a range of target audiences – I've seen a few proper tests of the effect.

> It's like all aspiring YouTubers are reading the same advice for getting views, regardless of age, demographic, or subject?

While it won't work that well for all channels, it is unlikely to put off enough people¹ that it is worth a try just in case. Also, some do it just because it is current fashion, or because that is currently the default and they lack an original thought in thumbnail making², rather than thinking there is any other benefit.

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[0] gets more clicks than thumbnails without

[1] those, like you and I, who dislike it enough for it to make us simply click away, are apparently rare enough that losing us is not a big problem

[2] because that sort of marketing isn't their game, and they don't want it to be more than it has to be

Allegedly this advice (making the Youtube face) actually works, prevails in A/B tests, and at this point is basically required in order to get enough viewers to sustain a channel. Veritasium did a video on it a while back, and the guys on Linus Tech Tips’ podcast have talked about it a bunch of times. It seems that the number of people who dislike Youtube Face enough to actually block a channel are low enough so as to not matter.

So as a viewer, you have a choice: You can continue to block channels that do the Youtube Face, knowing that you’ll be missing out on good content (because yes even good channels do it), out of a desire to send a message that no one will heed. Or you can put up with it and watch the videos anyway.

I used youtube with all thumbnails blocked for a while. Also, no recommendations or comments, or ratings (FF Unhook extension + uBlock rules). Only subscriptions, text feed with titles.

It was a good middle ground, but eventually the thumbnail URL format changed and it started appearing again. Also re-enabled recommendations and comments, but my front page remains subs only (more or less 5 videos a day of select channels).

The “dearrow” extension changes all youtube thumbnails to random stills from each video. Goodbye faces. And obnoxious red arrows

How would you feel if I made popular a tool that has a side effect of making you invisible before people even have a chance to judge whether the thumbnail face is good enough for a click or not? Dude, cmon

If grown men want to pull emoji faces that fine but I won’t click, and that’s fine too.

I get you, if I had a channel like that and I was the example to block I think I'd be miffed.

In this case I've already decided I don't want to watch that channel and seeing the thumbnails irks me. Lots of channels I like play the creator-meta game and put red arrows and clickbaity stuff up front but still produce quality content and I respect that decision. I don't think anyone intends to block that channel by default, but it's nice to be able to do so deliberately.

I'd be willing to bet that Ritchie is doing well enough that his channel wouldn't be seriously harmed by an example like this, but even so you could say it's careless by the documentation author.

To be honest, I get the feeling he would be amused to end up on the list. I wonder if anyone's made him aware of it.

Project maintainer here, thanks for the feedback. For context, this template was created two years ago when that creator's videos filled almost 20% of the Nebula timeline and "How do I hide his videos?" questions were a monthly occurrence on forums.

I agree in retrospect that it was a petty move, and I deleted the default values today, as the project now works fine without default values.

This is the HN dark mode template. I hadn't realized that UBO could be used as a way of modifying content on a page, I thought it was a content blocker. Is this an unintentional use of UBO?

https://letsblock.it/filters/hackernews-darkmode

As I understand it, uBlock Origin has support for modifying CSS because sometimes sites pull stunts like hiding/dimming all their content with CSS and then un-hiding it in a script that also shows ads, or similar mechanisms.

Using it to add a dark mode is certainly an unintended use, but an impressive one.

> Using it to add a dark mode is certainly an unintended use, but an impressive one.

I agree. But now that I think about it, light mode is actually up there or even higher, in terms of things that my computer makes me see that I don’t want to see. Begone, light at night!

Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense.

I believe so. It even has a tool for selecting elements you want to remove interactively.

I've tried a bunch of them, but settled on Dark Reader https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dark-reader/eimadpb...

Yep, if you want to add a dark mode for sites that don't have one, Dark Reader is hard to beat. Also first-class on Firefox Mobile

I'm conflicted about contributing to this repo. My Youtube experience is SO MUCH BETTER because of the filters I use on Ublock Origin, and I really fear that by sharing it publicly, I'll be helping the google salary slaves do the dirty job of making it impossible for me to block their algo and keep seeing only what I want to see over there. It's a cat and mouse game and we are the mouse, unfortunately.

By the next year you'll be prompting your LLM with what is allowed to pass. Seems like local LLMs will be embedded in phones, laptops, browsers and operating systems.

YouTube has over 2 billion active users.

uBlock origin has about 20 million, if we're being generous.

That's literally 1%. It is safe to assume no one at Google or elsewhere cares about our filters, certainly not enough to play a "cat and mouse game".

Oh wow, I can block already watched videos on youtube, at long long last.

Thank you so much!

Interesting that Kagi is listed as available for blocking results. Interesting because Kagi already has a first-class feature for managing that sort of thing. Is there something this can do that Kagi can't that I'm missing? This would replace the requirement to configure it in Kagi which is a plus.

Generally I prefer to do as much as possible in the browser (my user agent) without relying on the website (Kagi, etc.) providing the right filtering techniques I want.

Heya, project maintainer here! Adding Kagi support in https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results was an easy lift, and it allows to use the filtering presets that are available at the bottom of the template. It also allows you to bring your blocklist in and out as you transition between search engines.

This seems lovely, I have custom rules for a few things like this in uBlock already (blocking shorts and google contextual snippets) but having it all in one place with a dedicated tool seems great.

Nice too! Does anyone have any working rules for removing 'suggested post' and 'sponsored posts' on Facebook? The current ones i already have stopped working few weeks ago.

For some idiotic reason this repo has a specific rule that no rule pertaining to Facebook/Meta is allowed "since they are evil". So, being evil allows you to keep showing a terrible experience to it's users and you can't crowd source an escape route. It doesn't make any sense.

It makes perfect sense. The solution is to delete your Facebook account. No more annoyances from their site then :D

(I still use Instagram and WhatsApp even tho I deleted my Fb ages ago. But hey, we’re only human after all.)

I agree unless there are specific content from specific people that are only posted there and there's no alternative.

interesting! didn't notice it. Wouldn't make more sense to have more rules about facebook/meta 'since they are evil?'

Block every element on their site :D

(but set the body background color to black. I don’t want an all white screen to shine anyone in their face at night.)

Well... you can crowd-source an escape route by forking this repo, adding Facebook-specific filters and "@"ing everyone who had their issue on the original repo closed as "out of scope" because of that rule, to let them know about your new alternative. It's work, though. And because I don't use Facebook, I'm not going to do it.

Sure it makes sense: an “escape route” from the annoyances inherent in the late-capitalistic architecture of such a system, is like an opiate to suppress your feeling of being oppressed and used. It would be irresponsible to give out such an opiate, when what you want people to do is to reject the system instead.

Perhaps they don't want the communications load of many people opening issues whenever facebook makes changes which break a large number of filters.

It isn't the explanation they give for why, but that doesn't mean it isn't at least part of the reality of it and it would make sense.

Oh man I used to use FB Purity for that, but getting rid of friend suggestions and suggested/sponsored posts would be amazing, especially if it also worked on mobile.

ublock origin already provides an element zapper, and lists to delete annoyances. you just have to check the box to enable them. go look at your settings it's right there

The benefit of this would be the community curation so that everyone benefits.

Why do I need an account for this?

I just checked, you don't need one, if you go to the filters section you can just copy it from there

At this point, the web is such a mess that a blocker is like trying to stop military drones with a water pistol. What we need now is a content extractor.

>remove pintrest from search results<

These people are god damn heroes.

Other products that do search results filtering seem to often use Pinterest as an example haha! My fave filter is w3schools .

Brave Search Goggles https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31837986

Filter via Chrome https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/166168236/how-ca...

Kagi Lenses https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html

Listing specific creators as examples to block on https://letsblock.it/filters/nebula-creators is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

One could illustrate this example with some fake creators. Dunking on individual creators, especially on a platform outside of the Big Tech sphere feels mean-spirited.

I agree in retrospect that it was a petty move, and I deleted the default values today, as the project now works fine without default values.

Thank you for being receptive to the feedback, and acting accordingly! <3

Ohh even a filter for dark mode on HN!

This is cool, tho I wonder with multi-modal LLMs we can now create full-blown Adnix http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=2223

I only mean this half sarcastically - enough people watch Nebula to justify a filter?

YES!!!!

7161714907

I just want to point out this entire site works and appears 100% functional WITHOUT Javascript. This is worthy of recognition - bravo!

Project maintainer here, thanks for the feedback! It's indeed all rendered server-side with progressive enhancement, as javascript was intended to be used. Happy to read that this work is not in vain!

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