BlockTube, a YouTube Content Blocker | Hacker News Reader

BlockTube, a YouTube Content Blocker

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72 pointsunnervingduck64 comments

Has anyone noticed YouTube now likes to surface shock content in the "For You" suggestions even if you've never searched for it? I search for recipe videos all the time and in the past week alone the 7th or so search result (Always the 3rd result in the For You box) has been a shock video.

So YouTube this week alone has tried to show me Blackhead videos twice, one video of a deformed baby just after it was born, one video of a child dying free fall in an elevator.

All when I'm getting ready to eat dinner so thanks for that Neal Mohan...

Wish I was joking, never watched videos like these on YouTube in my life but yeah I search for a recipe and there it is, a gore or grossout video....

Yeah! Seeing blackhead popping thumbnails for this stuff in my crafting/hacking/cooking feed of videos is absolutely terrifying, especially as someone with mild trypophobia. I cannot believe that these are surfaced for me given the amount of data they have or that they are surfaced for anyone without explicit searches given the content - even if considered medical/educational in nature I wouldn't expect surgery or animal dissection videos to be surfaced likewise.

You guys using a VPN or something? Only surprises I get is more ... mature content Shorts in search results. Generally my recommended feed and "New For You" is free of anything terrible.

That’s what I was thinking … if you are sharing a VPN with the average VPN user then you are likely to be served this bottom tier content based off of the IP alone.

I don't buy that explaination. Several of us are getting the same sort of intrusive shock content; are we all using the same VPN endpoint? Doubtlessly not. Furthermore, I've seen no other kinds of videos that would suggest recommendations bleeding through from other viewers; particularly youtube never suggests any sports content to me. Sports are extremely popular so if recommendations bleed through IPs, I should be getting lots of sports content. I get none, youtube's suggestions are almost perfectly tailored to me with the sole exception of these occasional shock videos.

Adding another data point here. Same videos you described, no watch history, no VPN, pimple gore videos and the like mixed into unrelated results. Very odd.

Honestly, no. Lately I regularly get videos with less than 100 views (sometimes as few as 1) usually someone’s homemade music or lately someone driving a car on a track. It’s not the majority of my recommendations at all, but I’d never see stuff like this recommended before a few months ago.

Same pattern for me. Keep getting videos with nearly no views and occassionaly I comment on them and get real feedback from the creator.

Definitely an odd experience.

Same here, I did some NBA research yesterday and was served low view count videos (some as low as 700 views) for popular players and topics.

I've been getting very low view-count videos lately too, but they're at least tangentially related to whatever I've been watching. I'll watch a video about Doctor Who, then I'll get some random person's episode review or convention recap. This never happened before.

Some are alright, some are just weird, and some are unpleasant hatespeechy screeds, but I haven't had even a single shock video recommendation so far.

I believe I read somewhere that they changed this a few months ago, along the lines of promoting new content or something. For me, I've been 100% uninterested so far.

No, not at all, I actually really like the tab because it's basically only stuff relevant to my watching habits.

They have added a button "propose me something different" which will add new topics for you to discover, maybe you accidentally clicked it.

I disabled watch history, which appears to disable most personalization features, and my suggested videos are mostly sensible. (This disables the "Home" page entirely, but the chronological Subscriptions feed is still fully functional)

i.e. the suggested videos in the sidebar will always be relevant to what I'm currently watching, whatever that is, rather than stuff youtube thinks I might like in general.

I know it's doing something good because youtube keeps nagging me to turn watch history back on again.

Came here to say exactly this. Disabling watch history is gold.

Same here on the watch history. I like the blank home page.

One thing I did notice is when I upload an unlisted video the sidebar suggestions are lots of fighting clips, maybe some Joe Rogan, and all the baby Rush Limbaugh's getting rich off of hate. I'm assuming this is like the default for an unknown user who is not logged in.

Doesn't sound familiar, no, but I have my watch history off. So I don't think I get "for you" recommendations.

I just searched for chicken tikka masala on the android app and got nothing but cooking/recipe videos.

So try turning off your watch history? Or at least start it over?

The other suggestion I have is check the videos you "liked" to make sure you didn't accidentally hit "like" on one of these videos. Especially if you don't use the "like" button.

I've been recommended the deformed baby video a few times recently - it's somewhat reassuring, though worrying, that others are seeing the same thing. I'm especially frustrated about it, as it'll show up inline with search results for otherwise "normal" things (product reviews, music videos, woodworking, etc).

> I'm especially frustrated about it, as it'll show up inline with search results for otherwise "normal" things (product reviews, music videos, woodworking, etc).

This drives me insane. For some searches, you're not going to find anything near what you're looking for if YouTube decides that their "personalized" search results will be better. I was looking for clips from a comedy podcast once and they refused to show them, they'd only show clips of one of the hosts on other podcasts. It was so odd to break something that worked perfectly fine, especially when it actively decreased my engagement.

> This drives me insane. For some searches, you're not going to find anything near what you're looking for if YouTube decides that their "personalized" search results will be better.

Yup. YouTube search is essentially entirely worthless. The purpose of the search bar isn't "show the user want they want to find," it's "show the user the videos that will make us the most money."

Amazon does the same thing, but with product search results.

For both of these, I never end up using the built-in search engine, I always go to an external search engine like DuckDuckGo or Bing. Which have their own problems of course, the least of which is that they generally only index YouTube, but there is no other decent alternative.

> especially when it actively decreased my engagement.

Agreed, but it's likely that you and I are in the tiny, tiny minority. Most of the people who use the YouTube search function are looking for entertainment, not content related to specific interests, tutorials, or information. See the top search queries for YouTube over the last year, basically ALL of them are to do with music, movies/tv, and video games: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?gprop=youtube

I've never seen these; perhaps you need to scrub your watch history as well as use "never recommend me this again" and reporting content. It's possible that it's counted a mouseover preview as a "watch" on one of those, and now you're doomed to get more of them.

(I note that if you go to youtube .com in incognito and refuse cookies, you get no suggestions at all, not even the default homepage.)

I do wonder what, if anything would happen about reporting this stuff to OFCOM; https://variety.com/2023/tv/global/ofcom-media-bill-streamer... if we're going to have an overly intrusive regulator we might as well use it against things that are genuinely bad.

Android's YT app will do the same autopreview behavior if a video is roughly in the middle of the top half of the screen. If the video runs for long enough in this state, it will show up in your watch history even though you never interacted with the video in the UI.

If you see that stuff, just ignore it and move on. I think their algorithm targets engagement and counts dislikes/blocks/reports as engagement as well.

I blocked one video like that and all of a sudden my recommendations that were tech and comedy centric started being prepper/anti-antifa/weaponry/pro-republican/Jordan Petersen/Ben Shapiro/Pro-trump general dog crap, and the more I blocked and reported the more it sent my way.

I cleaned my browser history and it kept coming.

I was losing my mind with frustration as it got so bad I had to explicitly go to my favorite channels just to see their videos.

Then, I deleted my youtube watch history and it stopped but reset all of my stuff to their generic front page. That was exasperating.

Why aren't you using an rss feed reader to "subscribe" to all the channels you like and filtering through that? I have all my stuff subscribed in commafeed (https://github.com/Athou/commafeed/ but freshrss is also quite good https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS) I only ever go to youtube main page if I have time to spare and want to see something new, it's wonderful. If you combine this with some ad blocks and sponsorblock it makes youtube splendid again.

I didn't know about this functionality.

Thanks!

Its' really the way to go in my opinion. I have my feeds grouped by interest so if I'm in the mood for something specific I click on the specific feed and see what's new, but if I'm interested in something carpentry, or rving, or hiking, or networking/selfhosting I just click on the directory I have those feeds in and see them all most recent first. It also makes it dead simple to switch a youtube feed out for rumble/bitchute/peertub/lbry/etc. if the creator you are following starts publishing elsewhere.

It's not just you, same exact issue here. YouTube algorithm has gone down the drain in the past few years.

Along with the Google Search algorithm, it's hard to get anything that's actually relevant out of it anymore

Nothing this extreme on my end. Mind you, the recommendations have gone completely off rails. I will give them that, it's no longer the same popular stuff everyone sees and I do see content from small time creators who have less than 500 views and whatnot, which is good(I do occasionally find something good in there). The big channels I am subscribed to have really dropped the ball when it comes to quality or outright abandoned youtube altogether.

But on the subject of blocking, I have two things going on: ad blocker, courtesy of Brave and a plugin that removes youtube shorts, which I hate with a passion.

I sometimes use YouTube in a "no cookies" Firefox profile, and holy cow the vitriol and hate that is on the front page is staggering. Shocked that blue chip advertisers are willing to put their content on that stuff to be frank.

Instagram does this too on the Explore page. Really graphic things like you mentioned. I'm guessing they're tricking the algorithm by being "high engagement" since, for Instagram at least, you have to click the offending post to hit "don't show me this".

I have noticed this too, its not just you. They do it in search results too; I search for airplanes or trains and get mostly relevant results except for a single medical gore video. What the hell. I never watch that kind of shit. I don't even mouse over it.

For me, it's just constant cable news cycle clutter on my home page. At least with cable TV I could change the channel to Food Network and all I would see was Food Network stuff. With Youtube, even though 90% of what I watch is cooking content and travel shows, every time I launch that app on my TV there's a high chance the recommended carousel on the first screen I see will be full of violence overseas, suffering refugees, crime, etc. Even when my recommended carousel is only full of stuff I actually watch, YouTube will simply insert another row of videos titled [Outrageous News Topic of the Day].

And just like you, I'm sitting down to eat dinner. It makes me, sad? Hard to say what the emotion is. But I feel something when I sit down at the end of a day to watch content I like on a device I own, the only content I ever watch on a platform I subscribe to, and I am forced to see violent, emotionally outrageous, troublesome thumbnails instead because some metric says that for someone statistically "good number go up get performance bonus" if everyone gets that shoved in their face. Oh, you want to relax and watch SortedFood? No - you will feel rage, you will feel sorrow, you will feel stress, YouTube demands it of you. This specific word is hyperbole, but I feel abused by big tech these days.

Not a single popping or gore video in my "Home" page, both logged in and in a private browser window. Is it possible someone else in your home is looking at this stuff? Or like other users have mentioned, perhaps sharing an IP via a VPN or the like?

The YouTube recommendation algorithm is terrible. I _wish_ it simply recommended videos that are similar to ones you've watched recently. But it doesn't do that. Not even close.

What it _actually_ does is build a demographic profile of each user based on the videos you watch and tries to lump you into a stereotype and then recommends videos that other people in that stereotype watch. I hope the engineers/managers at Google don't try to fool themselves into believing they are "woke" because this is one of the most un-woke things I can think of.

For instance, if I start watching woodworking and motorcycle repair videos (just two of my MANY hobbies), YouTube decides I am a retired rural conservative christian conspiracy theorist, when in fact I am none of those things. I start getting video recommendations of gun reviews, Fox News clips, religious debates, and suchlike.

Oh yes, and girls in bikinis jumping on trampolines. I mean, I am not exactly against the _concept_ of girls in bikinis jumping on trampolines as such, but it's not something I've ever searched for or even watched videos of. But more importantly, it's not the kind of thing I prefer to have pop up on my phone or computer screen when a friend or family member is nearby.

I looked this extension over and found that it had two issues:

It can lose data if you use it from more than one tab.

It uses local storage and so has a much lower limit on size of its block list and the information it can retain about what was blocked than if it used IndexedDB instead.

What do you mean by lose data?

When you load a page it makes a copy of the current block list in memory for that page and when another page updates the database it does so by writing the modified copy to the extension which stores it in the extension's local storage.

If an a page was loaded in the past, and you have since interacted with the extension via another tab, interacting with that page will revert the block list to what it was when that page was loaded. Losing the updates which have been done since.

I can't work out why youtube doesn't let you block a channel from search results with a single click.

I regularly search for nature videos. There are a handful of notorious channels that create absurd thumbnails and stitch together footage from completely different animal encounters to create an extravagant story that would be incredibly interesting if only it were real. Such channels are easy to spot but clutter results and keep showing up because they do trick a lot of people and are therefore seen as popular by youtube's algorithm.

I've taken to removing videos that are obvious clickbait based on the title using uBlock Origin. Turns out that some words like 'but' pretty much only shows up in clickbait.

That is interesting. What do you think the accuracy is? (I'd be a little worried about false positives i.e. omitting results I want to keep). Care to share the uBlock filter list you use? I'd like to try it.

So far I think I've had one false positive for the word 'but', and tens of true positives. My theory is that the one thing clickbait video makers are not is creative.

To allow for false positives I've stolen an idea from HN and simply made the videos hard to see.

The current iteration of the filter looks something like:

     www.youtube.com###video-title-link:has-text(/^you won\'t|^you will not| but | except |^when the|reacts to|^when you|wait for it|^\d+ (\w+y|amazing|strange|best)/i):upward(.ytd-rich-item-renderer.style-scope):not(:hover):style(opacity:0.1)

I haven't gone through all possible ways that youtube pushes videos at you, so I may have missed a couple.

On mobile you can click the dot menu and choose "Don't recommend channel." I have clearly done this sufficiently to not have any of the issues the other commenters are having.

I think that only blocks them from recommendations, not search results.

I hate to use this thread as a general forum for complaints against YouTube, but I've come across some concerning behavior.

I've gotten fed up with the app, so this morning I decided to use Firefox mobile to play a video on YouTube.com

Whenever the video plays, my microphone turns on. The thing is I have my microphone permissions in Firefox turned off, with no exceptions. Has anyone else encountered this behaviour?

That isn't possible on Android and most likely iOS if you actually have the permission off.

I did some more digging just now since this was bugging me so much. Behavior persisted after restarting firefox.

Under firefox settings/site permissions the microphone is "Blocked by Android"

So I decided to double check my android settings, and was greeted by some splash page explaining what the permissions settings page was for. (Perhaps this page appeared after a recent update?)

After clearing the page I see Firefox microphone permissions sitting in the "ask every time" catagory. Im 100% sure i did not get asked or give permission for microphone usage.

I go back to Firefox and YouTube no longer accesses my microphone when playing a video. The only variable I can think of was clearing that splash page. Mysterious. :)

Ah, it can also block shorts - excellent. No more pseudo choice harassment before they shove the feed down your throat anyway.

Just found about this handy extension and thought you all might appreciate it. Never thought I needed it but recently I've seen so many bs channels in my search results, when searching CERN for example.

I'd like to have an configurable AI-based content blocker which scans the video's thumbnail and subtitles and decides if this is wrong or too stupid or anything for my x year old kids

Heh, I was playing with modifying YT content using AI a year ago, but for sponsored content: https://butter.sonnet.io

The project is not 100% serious, but I'm starting to think that within the next 1-2 years we'll get tools for purely offline/on-device AI based content moderation. It's sad.

I find "BlockTube" OK for blocking key words in video titles or channel names but I much prefer "Channel Blocker" for blocking channels. It puts an X in front of the channel name on each video. Clicking the X blocks the entire channel and its video instantly disappear from whatever page you're on.

Blocktube let's you blacklist channels and videos like that, the buttons for it are placed in the "..." menu beside each video.

To YouTube: you really need to skip Sponsored segments when you are YouTube Red subscriber...

You don't pay xx USD per month, to get LinusTechTips shoveling ads down your throat.

The content creator is already paid for the content as he receives a small % of the subscription as revenue.

It would be very logical that content creators have to mark these segments.

Even better, don't watch LTT? It's the "Big Bang Theory" of tech content and they shovel 3 or 4 ads in there just for fun.

It's a lot worse now than it used to be. Pretty sad.

I can't believe I'm going to defend YouTube here, but I don't agree with this.

YouTube Red/ads, and sponsored content in the creator's videos are totally separate things, and should stay separate things.

I'm not a creator myself but I've done some research on the idea and there are basically three ways to make anything like decent money with a YouTube channel, in increasing likelihood of success:

1) Get stunningly popular over a short period of time, a.k.a. Go Viral. This is almost entirely down to luck, so is not a strategy for normal people having a serious go at it.

2) Accept (and generally beg for) donations from subscribers via Patreon or similar. Optionally, lock up some percentage of your videos behind a subscription via Patreon or similar. This only works well if you can generate a significant following that will not also abandon you the instant you decide to start monetizing things.

3) Product placements and sponsored content. Typically this means accepting a significant chunk of change in exchange for a 3-4 minute ad for a VPN or some crap smack-dab in the middle of your video.

Notice that nowhere in this list is "rake in the cash from YouTube ads" because there is no such thing. Yes, YouTube pays creators _something_ for ads, but unless you are the top video creator in your broad field (e.g. LTT -> computers), you are never going to be able to live off it. (And we'll put aside the difficulties that content creators regularly encounter with monetizing their videos through YouTube ads, due to bogus copyright claims, and false positives from the AI thinking it heard something politically incorrect. And to be clear, YouTube will still show ads in demonetized videos, it just keeps the ad revenue to itself in those cases.)

So if you are paying for YouTube Red, you are REALLY only paying YouTube, not content creators. This is why most semi-serious content creators go with either the donation or sponsorship model.

You may wish to know about Sponsorblock, a browser extension that clips out sponsored segments. It only works if at least a few people have marked the sponsored sections before you watched the video. It works a lot better than it has any right to.

YouTubers can and should put whatever they want in their videos.

Shoutout to https://github.com/EvHaus/youtube-hide-watched. Works in Safari

Gods I wish I could put this on the gateway to cover all devices.

like a pihole sort of thing.

found a somewhat similar ios alternative https://apps.apple.com/dk/app/blockyt-for-safari/id157537946...

any popular youtube alternatives?

There are alternatives but none that are generally popular.

Invidious is popular but I find its design uninspiring

Does that count as a "Youtube alternative"? It's just a different frontend.

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