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Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

Can I hide all videos with “Minecraft” in the title?

Or anything that references MrBeast?

I want a script which hides all videos which have a thumbnail of a person with their mouth open. Way too many creators have been using that now a days.

I use this, which uses crowd sourced thumbnails from within the video https://dearrow.ajay.app works really well. Made by the dev that made SponsorBlock

I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem... - it replaces thumbnail with a frame from the video.

A dumb thumbnail is a useful signal to know that I won’t want to watch the video anyway :)

As annoying as it is, I remember a channel I subscribed to once mentioned that they did a little AB experimentation and turns out “surprised face” thumbnails do actually attract more views.

I don't doubt that at all. But that's turned into way too many creators using it as the default expression in every thumbnail. I remember visiting a true crime channel and all their videos had the same face....

Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) said pretty much that. They do the "OMG" face for a day or two, and then switch to a less annoying thumbnail.

Understandable but unbearable: these aren’t mutually exclusive.

That's a planned feature [1] - we'll probably add a new item to video menus which lets you flag a channel for reaction faces, then replace their thumbnails with another frame from the video

[1] https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/issues/19

Am I on a different YouTube than yours? Or perhaps the algorithm is working well. I rarely see them.

btw, instead of doing all of those, isn't it just a straight forward thing to, say, just create good content -- it will start paying off way better off in longer term, if not immediately?

It's not one or the other. You can create great content for retention and still use clickbait to get 10x more clicks.

Just hit “not interested” on those, the YouTube algorithm is really good at not showing you stuff you tell it not to

but I want it to hide on the client side.

Out of curiosity, why?

I’m not OP but I use YouTube a lot. I would assume two reasons:

Some people would rather scalp themselves than create a google account (valid)

Even when logged in and using the “Not interested” or the “don’t recommend channel” button, YouTube will sometimes straight up ignore you.

The issue is that there’s an infinite number of channels that do Minecraft videos.

It’s like playing whack-a-trying to hide all the Minecraft channels.

I want to hide the topic, not an individual channel.

There are two options. "Not interested" nudges the algorithm away from the topic while "Don't recommend <type> from this channel" immediately hides the channel from recommendations.

If your nudges don't feel effective enough, you can also manage your view history. Removing any Minecraft videos you may have accidentally watched from your history will help hide them from future recommendations.

I’ve tried all of the above and Minecraft keeps coming up.

I think the engagement numbers are tracked per user, and that’s what they recommend off of. Data outside the scope of the listed user history.

It’s insanity. And infuriating.

I want a diverse set of recommendations, not another 1,000 Minecraft videos.

File feedback in the app. My understanding is that people in charge of the recommendation system actually look at it and try to use it to make the system better.

or ANY youtube shorts?

Dear god. This.

This is already a feature, enabled by default.

I missed a few issues with certain options while developing it because it never occurred to me not to have Shorts hidden all the time.

omg, AND you let me hide "Mixes" i wish i could do these things to the android client as well!

I use uBlock Origin for hiding shorts:

  youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer:has(.ytd-reel-shelf-renderer:has-text(Shorts))

And reaction videos?

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