Why YSK: Youtube’s enshittification creates an abysmal experience. There’s a list of Chrome extensions I’ve collected over the years that each fix an aspect of Youtube to bring back a genuine experience. I’ve seen in comments people mention one or two of these at a time, so this is a pack that contains everything you could need, and more.
Sample:
Essential Plugins:
- Ghostery: Blocks trackers and ads
- uBlock Origin: Blocks In-video ads
- SponsorBlock: Skips in-video sponsor segments
- Return Youtube Dislike: Returns the dislike button
- DeArrow: Better titles and thumbnails, removes clickbait
- Youtube Redux: Returns youtube to the older style
- Style Bot: This tool allows you to edit CSS. With a bit of setup, you can use it to block sponsored videos from appearing in our video suggestions:
- Open Stylebot options
- Styles > New Style
URL: Youtube.com
CSS (copy and paste):
ytd-ad-slot-renderer,
ytd-rich-item-renderer:has(
> #content
> ytd-ad-slot-renderer
){
display: none;
}
- Save Style and Refresh Youtube
Optional:
- Dark Reader: Dark mode on any web page (and you can toggle it per page as well)
- Video Speed Controller: More control over video speed
This post is a bit of a mess. It links to images hosted on discord, meaning it’s a temporary link that has already expired and post links only to chrome addon store
I want something that can reliably remove the YouTube shorts. They are absolute cancer.
Just don’t look?
Annoying that they clog the search results I guess, but they are a great way for creators to drive engagement with their long form content. Sports has guided me to some really interesting content I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Thanks for the list! I use a handful of these (in Firefox), but wasn’t aware of all of them. Youtube Redux especially seems cool.
There’s a list of Chrome extensions
If you don’t want to have an enshittified internet, it would be reasonable to not use and thereby support software by a company which actively works on enshittifying virtually everything it touches.
In other words: stop using Google / Alphabet products.
uBlock origin is not even available on chrome anymore.
Or you could just stop using shitty-youtube. It sucks ever since googol bought it.
-“Stop using toilet paper!”
Monopolies are bad mmkay
Pretty sure none of that will work for VPN and Tor users.
I recommend PeerTube
Ok I think I read all the comments sufficiently and I still don’t see the feature I most want: sort by duration.
Dinner is in 20 minutes. Click time range, set for 15-20 minutes. Look through suggestions from subscriptions that are 15-20min long. Pick one. Enjoy video knowing when it ends you’ll be able to go eat dinner/go to bed/leave for work.
Shameless plug for !mealtimevideos@lemmy.cafe - duration is in the post title.
Some relevant userscripts:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/498145-youtube-hd-premium
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/457319-youtube-video-resize-fix
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/13040-youtube-hide-watched-videos
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/480312-compact-youtube-layout
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/528305-youtube-channel-auto-redirect-to-videos-section
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/447727-youtube-disable-inline-playback-keep-hovering-to-play
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/479883-youtube-shorts-to-traditional-video
im pretty sure ublock blocks trackers, and does it in a more open way.
“enhancer for youtube” is also great, i like how it only allows one video playback at once. has some visual customisation options as well.
the other is “youtube search fixer” , which disables the related and recommend crap from the search.
Clarification: you can set YT Enhancer to only allow one video to play, but you can enable multiple playback, too
YouTube search fixer sounds like something I need, I hate that only the first ten or so search results are actually relevant
uBlock origin, Sponsor block, dark reader and return YouTube dislike will do the trick.
Use those on a privacy orientented browser like librewolf on desktop or fennec on android.
Also setting a private DNS would be helpfull. Adguard is a good one.
Lastly there is always the choice of Revanved if you’re a little tech savvy and use Android
Enhancer for YouTube is another good one. Set things like speed, playback quality, and video size as defaults.
Add buttons, like speed, and volume boost to the player bar (a few settings to change, out of the box it makes its own floating toolbar).
Enable a mini-player as you scroll comments. Tons of other things too.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/
How well does sponsor block work?
I wrote a small script that filtered it by grabbing the transcription, uploading it to chatgpt through api, analyzing and sending back timestamps of suspected ads.
These were overlayed on the video scroll bar in yellow blocks. As the video played it skipped these blocks altogether.
It was fun to build and worked well. Now I’m on Firefox and would like something similar…
I run isponsorblocktv in docker to mute/skip ads and sponsor segments on my smart TV and it works beautifully.
It works really good.
Any channel with constant 10k views typically get a submission with in a day, channels with 1mil views typically get submissions with the hour.
Its not hard to submit times your self, its all built in to the player bar.
There are multiple categories that you can choose what get automatically skipped or not.
Some categories are; sponser, self-promotion, into/recap, credits, filler/tangents, non-music (for music videos) and highlight, which is a marker showing where the “point” of the video is.
Sponsor block just uses crowd sources submissions people vote on. No reason an ai bot couldn’t submit entries too, if they’re good they’ll get upvoted
DeArrow should be optional because it’s not a strict improvement. Some thumbnails and titles are good and many times at least better than the title someone comes up with to de-clickbait it.
Also sometimes I like to to click not interested on any video with a red arrow in hopes the algorithm will learn someday
One I use is called “Unhook”. You can use it to block different features e.g. Suggestions, video end screen suggestion, front page feed, shorts. It’s great if you spend too much time on YT and going on a cycle of watching suggested videos. Now, I only watch videos that appear in my subscriptions or those that I search for.
I also use Better Subscriptions allowing me to hide watched or unwanted videos, and Return YouTube Dislike.
