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Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin

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Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin

#51

Post by lucideer »

isoskeles wrote: post #42
lucideer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't used it, but how representative/helpful are the replaced frames? I can imagine that would be something that would be very difficult to get right (even with the help of AI). My thinking is that with curated thumbs I can at least get a good idea of the author's intent (particularly when one's a relatively experienced regular YT user). I kinda thing targeting curated thumbnail selection is looking at the wrong c…

A browser plug-in can only do so much. It can attempt to fix the symptoms of perverse commercial incentives. But I t cannot fix those underlying incentives.

100% agree, and not saying it should try. Just questioning the validity of the apparent benefits of this particular attempt at fixing symptoms.

Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin

#53

Post by orange_puff »

Out of curiosity, what is the typical way of building stuff like this? (will dig into the code but might not understand if very well) Do you have to read the youtube html code to figure out which things to hide, or is there a completely different approach?

Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin

#54

Post by hawski »

lucideer wrote: post #35
hawski wrote: post #18

A less drastic extension is Clickbait Remover. It replaces thumbnails to an actual frame from the video and de-capitalizes titles: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

Haven't used it, but how representative/helpful are the replaced frames? I can imagine that would be something that would be very difficult to get right (even with the help of AI). My thinking is that with curated thumbs I can at least get a good idea of the author's intent (particularly when one's a relatively experienced regular YT user). I kinda thing targeting curated thumbnail selection is looking at the wrong c…

Far too often author's intent is to deceive. On better channels less so, but even then I can't stand those typical youtube thumbnails with exaggerated facial expressions and big titles. I now it works for them, but for me personally it makes the world a worse place. I also recognize, that if this extension would gain a major following authors would once again put those in video. With video previews it is also less of a concern.

Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin

#58

Post by HWR_14 »

willmadden wrote: post #47
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google YouTube recommendations are simplistic, to the point of being unusable. What I would really like to see is a YouTube video collection powered by the TikTok recommendation algorithm. TikTok video proposals are much more adaptive and much more nuanced. There I found out some content through recommendations that I would never search for, but truly liked it. Of course, not sure how that would work with longer vide…

My problem with youtube isn't their recommendation algorithm, it's that they ban and censor so much of the content I want to watch. Youtube and the major social media outlets have turned into broadcast TV over the last five years. I use it for "how to" videos, and that's about it. I find a higher concentration of interesting/intellectual content on other platforms.

Other than their overzealous enforcement of copyright (and, via ContentID, more expansive than copyright rights), I'm not really aware of anything valuable being banned or censored. But maybe I'm ignorant.

Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin

#60

Post by lstamour »

racuna wrote: post #59

Since Firefox 88+ (on a Linux distro) started to play Youtube videos with a lot of issues: choppy, bad audio, and so on. That make it "less addictive" to me. And I don't have plans to upgrade my laptop to hardware decoding vp9 streams

It might not be exclusive to Linux, I'm seeing the same choppy video playback on Windows 11, Firefox 90. Had to switch to Edge/Chrome to watch a YouTube video yesterday. And I've an Nvidia GTX 2060.
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