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Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

scrollguard.app

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Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#191

Post by jonathanlb »

herewulf wrote: post #181
keerthiko wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should never expect to have rights to anyone's server API endpoints, esp outside of their TOS, which is basically what trying to build your own front-end independent of youtube.com is. However, with most browsers, you have all the rights to build extensions that hide divs and change styling and add new elements with data that's already loaded (as long as you're not calling API endpoints that aren't called by the…

Of course, now there are pages that detect if their elements or code are being manipulated by the browser (i.e.: Ad blocker detectors). Thankfully, it's rare because people using ad blockers is apparently rare on the whole.

> Thankfully, it's rare because people using ad blockers is apparently rare on the whole.

I wish this were the case. There's quite a number of websites that use Admiral's services to detect adblockers. Admiral got 19m dollars in funding last year, so I imagine the adblock threat is meaty enough.

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#193

Post by bowsamic »

mieubrisse wrote: post #145
coffeecoders wrote: post #63

This is one of those things that should be unnecessary if we all had perfect self-control, but the reality is these apps are engineered explicitly to bypass that. It feels a bit silly to need guardrails for something as trivial as scrolling. Shameless personal plug: I wrote about it here. https://nabraj.com/blog/swipe-scroll-repeat-addiction/

I had an epiphany that faulting myself, and my self-control, is exactly what these sites want you to do. "Oh, it's just your bad self-discipline" No, this is full-on war for control of your mind. And the adversary spends millions to hire teams of the world's best psychologists and engineers to deploy technology that never sleeps with the sole purpose of grabbing and keeping your attention. Once I realized this, I sta…

> not as personal insufficiencies, but as systemic failures in my psychological defense system

I was with you until here but this seems like a restatement of the same thing. No it isn’t a failure of you, it’s simply an attack of overwhelming force

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#196

Post by ckrailo »

Here's what I added to uBlock:

  ! YouTube
  ! Remove blue box
  www.youtube.com###clarify-box
  ! Remove shorts
  www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope:has(#rich-shelf-header:has-text(Shorts))
  www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:has(h2.ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has-text(Shorts))

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#197

Post by bowsamic »

madamelic wrote: post #185
dcsan wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you using their embedded player or some other method to play the raw streams? The embed links back to YT which is a major part of why they provide it for off-platform playback. But if they somehow singled you out for overuse of the embed that seems rather arbitrary

Yep! I was using their embedded player. I thought I was doing everything right but didn't read the ToS because in my mind, ToS is just blocking silly things like "please don't use our product to build nuclear weapons", not "please don't use our product to play videos on another site". Struck me as very anti-user and BigCorpo. It was the project that solidified never building on someone else's 'lawn' again.

> because in my mind, ToS is just blocking silly things like "please don't use our product to build nuclear weapons", not "please don't use our product to play videos on another site".

Why did you think that??

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#198

Post by twalichiewicz »

I ran into the same problem—my reading list kept growing but I never actually got through it. Feeds are engineered to feel effortless; opening my backlog felt like work.

Instead of blocking sites outright, I tried redirecting attention at the key moment. I built a small extension that sets a daily reading goal, then reroutes me from doomscrolling sites until I hit it. After that, I can browse freely. It’s been a better balance: turning the feed’s habit loop into a nudge for something I actually want to do.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/detour/ogddhmpffcgk...

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#200

Post by SoftTalker »

madamelic wrote: post #84

Better suggestion: block these sites entirely. Reddit and YouTube are wastes of time if you are just 'checking in'. Use YouTube-DL to download videos from specific creators and watch independently. I haven't figured out how to view the actually useful subreddits without having access to the frontpage feeds. Feeds are one of the worst things to be invented in the Internet age. I can't imagine how far behind we are bec…

> I haven't figured out how to view the actually useful subreddits without having access to the frontpage feeds.

Maybe I don’t understand what you mean but I follow about 3 subreddits and I just go directly to them in a browser. I don’t use their app.

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