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Comment by alternatetwo | Hacker News Reader

I feel anxiety when watching videos with the thumbnails for other videos visible below. Also, I was unable to find the description of videos for waaay too long. Absolutely horrible.

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I've been using for many years now the unhook youtube[1] extension to hide any distracting nonsense on youtube, you can select piecemeal what to hide, like the recommended trash in the sidebar, cards at the end of the video and even the main page. Supports firefox, chrome and edge.

[1] https://unhook.app/

I second this recommendation. Unhook is a game-changer if you spend a lot of time on YouTube. It makes the site so much more pleasant to use.

In addition to Unhook, I also use SponsorBlock [1] and Return YouTube Dislike [2].

While SponsorBlock is something that some people might not want/need, I find Return YouTube Dislike to be particularly useful because the like/dislike ratio is a valuable data point for a video I'm about to watch even if it's just an approximate/predicted value.

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

[2] https://returnyoutubedislike.com/

interesting, why do you get anxiety? Is this the equivalent of doom scrolling? Doom watching a never ending queue of videos?

Not the OP, but I sometimes get rather disgusting/distressing "you might also like" in search results (not home screen). Think thumbnails for diseases/injuries/gore, with shock thumbail and so on.

No, I do not want to see thumbnail for parasite infested arm in my search results.

I guess if you’re watching YouTube because you’re avoiding something else, your mind already learned to keep whopping between videos and suddenly it’s a TikTok experience.

I can't really explain it. First of all, because thumbnails are mostly eyegore I guess and because it takes the focus away from a much less visually assaulting video? It also doesn't help they're not fully visible.

How am I supposed to focus on the video like this?

https://i.imgur.com/A0DRmD5.png

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