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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

It seems futile to filter Amazon products by name, but it's interesting that it seems to be able to filter YouTube shorts.

Given that after two years there are only about 30 templates, I'm guessing it's too difficult to actually accomplish something useful given the tools provided. That's not a knock on the creator -- off the top of my head I don't know how I'd provide an easy way to customize/filter/modify web content -- I'm just saying I understand the shutdown given the apparent lack of traction.

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Ublock origin's filter syntax is very good but has limitations that make it borderline impossible to filter out some elements and also very brittle. For example, this one is one of 20 lines of filters to get rid of Shorts: `www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer a.yt-simple-endpoint path[d^="M10 14.65v-5.3L15 12l-5 2.65zm7.77-4.33"]:upward(ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer)`

The frontend code is so abstracted that as soon as it is updated it is probably going to break. With userscripts you can filter these things with more sophisticated functions, but it slows down the interface more than UBO. In google's case that type of frontend abstraction (imo) is not intentionally designed to break interface filtering but it has that effect. For other companies like facebook and amazon they actively make filtering elements harder, because of their anti-adblock strategies, but they are all casting a wide enough net that element filtering is affected too. It's a long game of cat and mouse.

The way YouTube forces shorts on users who likes long form content is really frustrating. uBlock filters are great but doesn’t solve the fundamental issue here. There should be a way to opt out of YouTube shorts.

It's not just the length that's frustrating, it's the near total lack of control. Miss the first few seconds because your sound was off/low? Gotta watch the whole fucking thing to the end and then let it replay because there's no slider or restart/rewind button.

All because either they purposefully wanted to force us to do that (view count boosting I guess, or it's more likely to be remembered?) or some google exec got Shorts barely done enough to show off at a board meeting and say "done, made something that competes against reels!" and then ran off to work on something else to try and boost their stature in the company.

I think the reason is they know they'll lose the market share if they don't force them. Most people know that they are addictive and "bad for you" so many people would not opt in to them. But if they're almost forced, they will succumb to the addiction.

I wish they kept the “don’t be evil” motto.

Does Premium provide this?

No, sadly.

> For example, this one is one of 20 lines of filters to get rid of Shorts

Just get this plugin: <https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions> and enable “Hide all Shorts” under Homepage/General.

Funnily enough, the code responsible for hiding shorts in that is just under 20 lines long :P

https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions/b...

Sure, but you don’t have to maintain them.

Well, someone does; just like someone has to maintain, say, https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts

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