I don't think Quietube (http://quietube.com/) has been updated since 2009, but it does this as a bookmarklet and still works today.
Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
1) Countless medical doctors and researchers discussing COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics like Ivermectin have been banned and censored. This includes world famous, Nobel Prize winning researchers.
Here are some dead links:
1) Discussing Ivermectin (proven by dozens of double blind randomized trials to be 85% effective at treating COVID: https://youtu.be/f0FmjsWwFXs
2) Interview with Dr. Malone, the guy who invented mRNA vaccines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_NNTVJzqtY
3) A US Senator gets canceled: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/youtube-suspe...
4) Half of this guy's videos are canceled: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAWCKUrmvK5F_ynBY_CMlIA
5) I'll stop here.
Here's a good video on the censorship of COVID on youtube and others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COyQVUhtMDQ
That's just COVID. They suspend anything that isn't mainstream politics. It's Orwellian, and normies have no idea.
Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin
#63I don't click on related videos, and have a bookmark straight to my subscriptions, but even still I get caught on YouTube for too long. My subscriptions produce almost daily content, and whilst I find it valuable, it's also just far too much content to consume in a day and still be productive, so I can get stuck on it. So I blocked it entirely. It's just another casualty in my continued attempt to rid myself of feed…
Consider replacing your Youtube subscriptions + watching in the browser with RSS feeds of the channels + youtube-dl. [1]
My setup for a few years has been to have a "virtual desktop" for "media" that has the video downloads directory, RSS reader, and a terminal running a script. The script is essentially:
while read -r url; do
youtube-dl --... "$url"
done
Every so often during the day, I switch to that virtual desktop, check if the RSS reader has new unread articles, copy-paste each URL from the reader to the terminal, delete the articles from the reader list, and then leave the terminal downloading the videos in sequence.
I have DSL but even then videos download faster than I can watch them (which is something youtube.com in the browser is unable to do, even though I configured youtube-dl to download the highest quality [1]: Of course you can remain subscribed to the channels on youtube.com if you wish to contribute to their subscriptions count. I assume youtube-dl'ing a video counts towards its views count too.
Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
1) Countless medical doctors and researchers discussing COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics like Ivermectin have been banned and censored. This includes world famous, Nobel Prize winning researchers. Here are some dead links: 1) Discussing Ivermectin (proven by dozens of double blind randomized trials to be 85% effective at treating COVID: https://youtu.be/f0FmjsWwFXs 2) Interview with Dr. Malone, the guy who invented…
Pardon me if that sounds rude, but it is unfathomable to me why anyone would attempt to watch scientific/or medical discussion on YouTube (or any social media, for that matter).
My alarm bells start ringing if I read a paper and the authors are overly committed to pointing out the prestige of the institutions or seem to optimize for citations. What possible use could you get out of the discussion of "science" on a platform where flashiness of the thumbnail, shortness of message and flamebait are directly related to your income?
Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which should be done anyway. YouTube dropped the ball on that one.
I am also not sure why they allow thumbnails outside of the video content anyways.
Because otherwise people would just put a 1-frame endcard in their video with whatever they want to have as a thumbnail?
And if the thumbnail is picked randomly, you are just rewarding videos that show dramatic content with text overlay at all times. And the best-researched Tom Scott video might get randomly punished because the thumbnail is a brown-grey blur in the middle of a transition.
The existence of the medium "thumbnail" is not more of a problem than the existence of book cover. Breeding a healthy culture of what should be on it is the problem we should focus on, both by audience behavior and suggestion algorithm.
Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Countless medical doctors and researchers discussing COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics like Ivermectin have been banned and censored. This includes world famous, Nobel Prize winning researchers. Here are some dead links: 1) Discussing Ivermectin (proven by dozens of double blind randomized trials to be 85% effective at treating COVID: https://youtu.be/f0FmjsWwFXs 2) Interview with Dr. Malone, the guy who invented…
Pardon me if that sounds rude, but it is unfathomable to me why anyone would attempt to watch scientific/or medical discussion on YouTube (or any social media, for that matter). My alarm bells start ringing if I read a paper and the authors are overly committed to pointing out the prestige of the institutions or seem to optimize for citations. What possible use could you get out of the discussion of "science" on a pl…
These videos weren't appeals to authority or optimized for citations. They were scientific discussions of therapeutics for COVID as well as the mRNA therapies and what's wrong with the current approaches.
Youtube targeting content based on income and being "flashy" doesn't make their egregious censorship of inconvenient information on their platform OK.
Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin
#67Earlier 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…
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…
My concern is mainly just missing stuff I may be interested in in favour of uninteresting videos because the luck of the draw picked a highly relevant/irrelevant frame. Yes this is a 1st-world problem but this is Youtube.
I'd like to think I could select videos on title alone but if that's your route then just remove rather than replace thumbs (and text can still mislead).
To put it another way: even if we agree the current thumbs are bad (annoying, misleading), are the replacements better (or just irrelevant). Most people like to judge things on intent, but intentionally bad is still better than unintentionally worse.
And in the end, I can much more easily develop intuition to spot intentionally deceptive common human patterns than spotting unintentionally irrelevant random automated patterns.
Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin
#68Hello, this is my first plugin that I submit on Hacker News and hopefully not the last. This plugin was inspired by my friend, who's a great developer and power user, who didn't know you could use uBlock Origin to hide elements, so I created a plugin that streamlines that process for her most addictive website. (Forgive me if this breaks HN etiquette) I am located between San Francisco and Seattle and I'm looking for…
> This plugin was inspired by my friend, who's a great developer and power user, who didn't know you could use uBlock Origin to hide elements
I have tried to do the same but wasn't really able to figure the system. Are there good youtube videos that show how to use this feature?
Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also use uBlock Origin in the same way. But my friend, who's a great developer, didn't know you could use uBlock Origin to hide elements, so I created a plugin that streamlines that process for her most addictive website.
Tbh UX is an aspect of uBlock that could need serious rework. I still haven't figured out what the patchwork of colored squares means...
the "advanced users" setting you manually select after installation to enable the patchwork does state "required reading" which explains it. It's relatively straightforward
Re: Show HN: Less Addictive YouTube – a cross-browser plugin
#70I achieved many of the things this extension does with the following uBlock Origin filters. www.youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer.style-scope.ytd-watch-flexy www.youtube.com###comments.ytd-watch-flexy.style-scope www.youtube.com##ytd-browse.ytd-page-manager.style-scope[page-subtype="home"] www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-renderer www.youtube.com##ytd-vertical-channel-section-renderer They rip off pret…
Just applied these filters - I think I'm going to like them. I definitely fall down the YouTube rabbit hole from time to time. Cheers.