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Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

It just so happens I'm right in the middle of trying to change how I watch YouTube at my computer. Despite my best efforts, I find myself getting sucked into shorts, so I'm starting investigate if I can take advantage of YouTube RSS syndication. I recently build yt-dlp and got all the dependencies sorted out, so I can bring videos to my machine locally. I'm also checking out elfeed[0] which is an Emacs based RSS reader, and elfeed-tube[1] which further customizes the elfeed experience for YouTube as well as adding an mpv integration that lets you control video playback directly from Emacs.

[0]: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed

[1]: https://github.com/karthink/elfeed-tube

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Not sure if this fits to your needs, but uBlock Origin lets you block elements directly on the page. It works great for removing the pesky shorts section. Haven't seen Youtube shorts since. On top of that, i removed the "suggested videos" on the right side of an already opened video, to avoid the pitfall of continuously moving on to barely related stuff, much like the shorts doomscrolling.

I believe Brave too, has this feature.

Thanks, I ended up using this list[0] from github, and it worked great. I'm still fooling around with RSS and Emacs, but for now the problem is solved.

[0]: https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts

As a clarification, you don't need elfeed-tube to subscribe to YouTube feeds (channels or playlists) with elfeed, or to watch the videos with mpv. elfeed-tube only adds text to the feed entries, in the form of more video metadata, transcripts and synced playback with mpv.

Also, mpv supports lua scripts for a variety of actions on YouTube (or other streaming) videos, such as showing you YouTube's recommended videos in the video player, clipping and downloading videos, sponsorblock and submitting sponsorblock segments, and so on.

I've been doing this for almost a decade, and I do recommend it. In my experience, just importing my YouTube subscriptions into a feed reader was a positive experience. I've had a daily digest of mostly interesting videos and rarely (if ever) the urge to browse YouTube.

But with YouTube's recommendation algorithm out of the picture, it does mean that you'll have to find some other way of discovering new channels.

For what its worth, using mpv directly to watch youtube actually sucks compared to using yt dlp and then opening the downloaded file in mpv.

Turn off your watch history. It disables the front page and shorts, but you can still watch any video you want and also follow your subscriptions. You still get recommendations next to each video but I find those much less problematic personally.

Unfortunately, with watch history off, YouTube still pushes Shorts in the subscriptions page (at least on mobile web, which is where I primarily use YouTube).

The Unhook browser extension gets rid of that. And optionally other things.

I find that a lot less problematic as there's just very few shorts on my feed, I've never been able to scroll through more than 5 or so without just going into ones I've seen before.

You've probably already done this, but first thing, turn off autoplay and make sure it stays off. Much easier to not get sucked into things when you have to actively click on them.

Turning Autoplay off, and getting rid of ads (Youtube Premium is well worth it across all devices) is a big level up. Blocking shorts is the other thing.

There are solutions for blocking shorts. Ie unblock origin filters, as seen previously on front page of HN

There are also solutions for blocking ads without subscribing to premium.

If we all did that they wouldn’t offer an ad free option.

I’m happy to pay so others don’t have to, I’ve been both sides of this fence.

YouTube premium is good value imo.

The "ad free option" is also called "muting and looking away". Don't let them trick you into thinking they have the right and control to shove anything they want into your mind.

Sponsorblock offers by far the best experience. It skips over channel intros and outros, engagement prompts, sponsored segments, tangents, etc (configurable per channel) and offers jumping to "highlight" (that is, the most important part of the video).

Highly ironic that the best experience is free, and no paid option gets even close. Tim Cook watching paid Youtube on Apple TV device has far worse experience than some random kid with Firefox and Sponsorblock gets for free.

Fwiw, I made something similar, but it targets an ancient version of OS X. It's theoretically possible it works on modern macOS too, but I haven't tested it.

https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/media-subscriptions-prefpane

I've been using a version of this for five years, although until recently the PrefPane was built via janky Applescript. I rewrote it in proper Objective-C last summer.

I do something similar as I hate interruptions of various kinds; what I'd love is a way to show a YT playlist in something like Jellyfin, where it downloads the "next" episode while you're watching the current one.

As it is, I can do that somewhat manually and it makes for a nice interface where I'm sure what the kids are watching.

I did this too, I have pi that downloads and combined a bunch of rss feeds every 30min (cron) and downloads the vids, I browse them with Thunderbird on my desktop, I inject a special link to the mp4 on my pi. So I can just watch vids at 192.168.1.106/videos/X.mp4 using the Firefox mp4 player.

Did it in ~300 lines of node.js, was trying to learn how to use JS for server stuff, seemed like a good idea at the time. It still works 5 years later, but it stands as a reminder to me to never use async/await.

> a reminder to me to never use async/await

What issues did you face with async/await?

Not using async/await is worse: you get sucked into then/catch, or worse, callback hell or shudder streams, which are known to be full of footguns and typically only approximate working correctly.

Of course you can go full sync if your app wouldn’t do anything useful during the time it’s blocked waiting for network or I/O.

Try the UnTrap extension. It lets you configure away the things that distract you.

https://untrap.app/

It used to be one time purchase, looks like they turned it into a subscription.

I realize it's not your app, but damn I have never seen a landing page with so little information about the featured product. "200 additional features"

Such as ... ?

fwiw regarding getting sucked into youtube shorts: if you turn off your watch history youtube refuses to let shorts work. It will literally say, "turn on your watch history to continue with shorts".

I’ve had my YouTube History off since before shorts were a thing and never experienced what you described.

Weird. I just went to the shorts page now and it says what I described.

I just tried on Chrome and Firefox on desktop, and the iOS YouTube app. Both show me a message saying "Recommendations are off. Your watch history is off, and we rely on watch history to tailor your Shorts feed. You can change your setting at any time, or try searching for Shorts instead."

I'll also clarify, sometimes if you click on a shorts video that you searched for manually, a few related videos will be queued, but then the feed will try up and the watch history message will display again.

Do you have left over watch history from years ago you've never cleared, and maybe shorts is enabled since it uses that...?

There are greasemonkey scripts available which hide shorts from appearing.

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