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Comment by charrondev | Hacker News Reader

I work on a community forum platform and we detect YouTube embeds and replace them proxied thumbnails that don’t load until clicked.

Just because one person in a thread shares a YouTube video doesn’t mean everyone else loading that page should have to download 1MB+ of YouTube’s JavaScript bloat and have their IPs tracked by google.

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I've got a site that is basically infinite scroll of mostly YouTube, SoundCloud, and Reddit embeds and had to do this for YouTube for it to even be functional. Using the YouTube provided thumbnails though since I'm not too concerned about tracking.

Please more respect for your users, as should be appropriate for a webmaster. If you personally do not mind tracking, OK, but please do respect that a visitor of your website might have different opinions. Thank you!

Users are also capable of blocking traffic from their client if that's something they care about.

This is not something they should have to care about. And once you leave the tech savvy community then can not take care of it via content-blockers... You should do the correct thing by default, which is not supporting adtechs' psychological warfare agains the population imho.

It sounds like the users visiting this site are there to watch YouTube videos

God this comment is obnoxious.

If a visitor has different opinions then they can implement their opinions. Webmaster didn't stop that.

Nearly every user won't care.

Is there a similar solution for SoundCloud?

Their player is also super bloated.

You can basically do this with any embeds (granted they don't do a lot of global fuckery, which is a lot of them). Make sure the embed code gets evaluated within a function, then call that function when the user clicks on your "proxy" image. You might have to do a replace of the DOM elements as well, so the embed code gets what its expecting.

There are a few "facade" solutions listed at https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/thi... But.. AFAIK nobody has made one for Soundcloud.

Any tips or examples you are able to point for on this solution? I am coincidentally working on this exact problem at the moment.

Yes! @OP, would love to hear more on how you’ve done this.

Do you also cache or proxy the thumbnail? Google can also track them when hotlinking it.

GP says "proxied thumbnails", so it sounds like yes.

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