Show HN: YouTube Addiction Rehab - content filter chrome extension using LLMs

Hi HN, my name is Joey, I’m building a chrome extension to help myself recover from YouTube addiction. Hope I can help others like me.

I have a love hate relationship with YouTube, I love how much I learn from it. But a lot of times, a 10 minute tutorial becomes a three hour watch marathon.

It feels bad when you clearly know you are wasting time, but you have no control. I’ve tried dozens of blocker but they all end up being disabled and never turn on again.

Recently, with LLM models becoming smarter, faster, and cheaper, I started experimenting using them to hack the algorithm, allowing it to intercept information and filter based on my own rules. It works surprisingly well, so I've begun building the YouTube Addiction Rehab chrome extension.

How it works: Setup your personal goals, what you want to focus on, what you want to avoid.

AI Focus filter: The extension will analyze all the content when loaded (right not is the video titles), send it to LLM with your goals. And return only the relevant videos. It then blur out the distractions, and only keep what you should watch.

AI Smart Blocker: It also has a blocker that blocks videos based on the relevance of your goal and the video.

Last but not least, it hide shorts: IMO, shorts are just evil, hiding them is the best solution

I think LLM technology opens opportunities to fight the algorithm. The addictive data driven algorithm has already caused so many issues. We should have an “attention firewall” to protect us.

Open to Feedback: This project is still work in progress, would love to get your feedback.

There’s an open sourced version, where you can input your own API key and select provider + model. I’ve tested it with Groq with llama 3.1 70 B, the latency is amazing. https://github.com/JoeyWangTW/youtube-addiction-rehab-chrome...

I’ve also got a hosted version on chrome web store, using GPT-4o-mini. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-addiction-r...

More info on https://YouTubeAddiction.Rehab

There are couple next steps I’m thinking - Get it to safari, desktop and mobile. Mobile is tricky, browser extension seem to be the only way. - Work on more platforms, I’ve done an addiction poll and instagram is on the second place after YouTube - Work on a recovery coach to check-in every day ,track your recovery progress, and make the rules dynamic