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Comment by Atlas667 | Hacker News Reader

I've tried adding rules to ublock origin but sites like youtube and many others now have "component obfuscation". Meaning there is no unique ID on their components/elements and it makes it much harder to target.

And some element titles/names are even on a different component than the content, which is even harder still. So it says "reels" on one component and the actual reels are on another.

Blocking now has to be a logical combination of CSS selection, text identification and a target-action component.

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I agree U-Block origin is sometimes hit or miss. What has restored some faith for me was recently discovering that when I use the element picker and select something I want blocked it gives me a list at the bottom right of things it recognized, and if I click through them I can often find exactly what I want to block though often its not the default element anymore. It's not perfect but it has massively improved my satisfaction with Ublock and general enjoyment of being online.

Good point. I remember Facebook doing obfuscation just to hide the word "sponsored" long ago just so you couldn't easily hide its ads.

That said, they put up a fight in the browser because user interventions (browser plugins, greasemonkey scripts, ad blockers) are viable in the browser but not in native apps.

Though this is also why they want to force you to use their app, and I'm not sure how to incentivize apps to even exist as websites. It feels like a dying fluke that places like Reddit even maintain a web frontend for their app.

What are you not able to block on YouTube? I've had all ads, shorts, those games, etc blocked successfully for years.

Usually selecting is something like .class.subclass:nth-child(4).

Which will sometimes block what you want, but not always since they switch their layout so much.

You need conditions.

Its really finnicky to get right and I usually want to block views on cards, recommended tabs, trending and I have to redo it every 2 or 3 weeks.

I think unTrap for Chrome based browsers works. It also is a scary level of plugin, but have it limited to Youtube.

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