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remove-youtube-suggestions
A browser extension that removes YouTube suggestions, comments, shorts, and more
At some point during Covid they seemed to just decide they wanted to abuse users and its been a steady decline since.
My largest use cases were watching DJ sets, music videos, stand up comedians, instructional videos, and life of (random career) videos
Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now.
Life of videos from channels worth watching have started to turn off ads in place of putting in their own sponsored content. Annoying but similar to TV commercials of the past and are always skippable.
But they have started destroying all of the other content I enjoyed. Instructional videos are overly long with the interrupting ads to the point of questioning whether the visual information with more time but easier understanding vs the extra reading becomes a serious contemplation.
But comedies and extended DJ sets are unwatchable. The ML "predicts" natural breaks in language to insert ads into. When it comes to comedies its usually right before the punch line/the laughing, but the developers do not care at all that after the commercial ends and are resuming a second or two after the punch line. Not only is the timing ruined but you often miss the joke entirely. They have not figured out what to do with DJ sets so they just randomly interrupt in the middle of songs. I had ad breaks 3 times within 10 minutes of a 60 minute set today before I switched to AirPlaying my computer with AdNauseum installed.
Anything I think I might want to watch ever again is immediately added to a playlist for yt-dlp. It makes the content watchable again and protects against channels that will delete content so they can add it back later for increased later views or because of fake DMCA takedowns.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
Obligatory mention of Newpipe, an Android app where you can choose to just show new videos of subscribed channels as your front page. Makes youtube so much more bearable nowadays and you dont miss all the content of older subscriptions yt just doesnt show you anymore after a while. Would be great if it were available on desktop too.
https://newpipe.net/
Yes. SmartTubeNext: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext. I use it with a FireTV stick since it's much easier than hacking my Samsung TV. It supports SponsorBlock too. It lacks some YT features but if you just want to browse and watch videos it works wonderfully.
I’ve given up, and I dislike having content pushed to me in general.
I use a combination of Remove YouTube Suggestions[1] and prefacing “intitle:” before any YouTube search to avoid weird matches that point me to irrelevant content.
I think it’s ridiculous that I need to constantly click “show less like this” and exert so much effort to train YouTube. I also hate how they’ll insert random unrelated videos “For Me” or “Watch it Again” in my search results. It’s all designed to keep me on the site and distracted… better to avoid it entirely.
[1] https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions