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
If you use uBO then Ghostery is redundant. It can also cause some of uBO’s filters to not work correctly.
Also uBO can do what you did with stylebot. (If you use the full uBO extension, and not the limited Lite version for Chromium browsers):
youtube.com##ytd-ad-slot-renderer youtube.com##ytd-rich-item-renderer:has(ytd-ad-slot-renderer)I don’t think uBO removes trackers. I originally wanted to do the filter with uBO ) I have a filter for promoted LinkedIn jobs) but found a reddit thread that used Style Bot with instructions
Not only is Ghostery redundant when you use uBlock Origin (you can choose the tracking removal lists, like EasyPrivacy, for example), Ghostery has a conflict of interests as it works with the ads industry at the same time it has this tool, and it reports the ads and tracking it finds back to advertisers, who can then make them bypass that detection better.
If you insist in a separate add-on, Privacy Badger does the same blocking of trackers and it is maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit for digital privacy.
uBO do remove trackers with the
EasyPrivacyanduBlock filters – Privacyfilters. More filters and options can also be enabled if you know what you’re doing. For beginners it’s best to stick to the default settings as more additions can lead to more breakage.
Is there ANY way to turn of the auto dubbing of Youtube Shorts? I tried “Youtube Anti Translate” but it doesn’t work.
setting your account language, probably
Jep that works, but then the other language is dubbed. 🙃
use an alternative frontend, then :)
What do you mean?
NewPipe/Tubular/FreeTube/GrayJay.
Unhook is also a good one - removes shorts, suggested etc…
To also add, I really like Youtube Nonstop
If you like throwing on the youtube mixes for background music, this stops the annoying “are you still watching” pop ups.
This one’s not strictly enshittification-related, but I find YouTube Comment Search (Firefox, Chrome) extremely useful. YouTube videos frequently have way more comments than any sensible person is going to read through. By searching for keywords, you can check whether somebody else already said what you were thinking and 👍 that instead of posting another duplicate comment that will get buried forever.
deleted by creator
I would suggest using another frontend like freetube then trying to fix google’s frontend.
Freetube is great but keeps breaking every now and then. I assume YouTube is making an effort to block it and others.
This. Youtube is dead to me.
Sounds like OP actually interacts on the site with comments and likes and whatever so I can’t account for that.
In my case I get by with a combination of freetube and tubearchivist. I expect that one day youtube will find a way to finally close the door on this type of freeloading. Hopefully that will provide the incentive for more people to use more platforms.
I like interacting with actual YouTube because it keeps track of my subscriptions and watch history across my devices. (It’s not that I want Google to know my habits; it’s that I don’t want videos I already watched coming up in my feed.)
If one of these YouTube alternative front ends would solve for that use-case without too much faff and hassle, I’d happily switch.
You can usually export & import your subscriptions and bookmarks.
Mileage varies between different apps.
Many would call that faff and hassle. I’m not that attached to my subscriptions.
I need you to understand that manually exporting and importing subscriptions isn’t even slightly like automatically synchronizing watch history (including non-subscribed channels).
Sure. This functionality just isn’t important to me.
Also maybe just be aware that starting sentences with “I need you to understand” makes you sound like a bit of an ass.
Biggest YouTube feature i miss was putting channels into folders so you could put all of your diy channels into one feed. I’ve not seen that replicated anywhere yet
Freetube has profiles for that. I use it to group channels which post longer video essays
Yes, seems like such an odd oversight from Google. They want you to subscribe to channels, but after even moderate use over a few years, you end up with a massive list of subscriptions. I guess it’s not actually an oversight, the bad UX (for finding specific content) is probably on purpose, they want to funnel you through their suggestions. But still, surprised they don’t include a way to organize it.
I use an extension called PocketTube to organize them – but it stores data locally and doesn’t sync very well, so it wouldn’t fit your use case.
They removed it so they could make standard users reliant on the recommended feed so they’re more likely to watch high earning ad-backed videos.
But I’m stuck of how short sighted their recommended algorithm is, it only takes into account the very recent videos you’ve watched so over time you get out of touch of old subscriptions unless they somehow go viral again or you search them up explicitly.
Grayjay has subscription groups, which would be what you’re describing. Grayjay desktop is currently in alpha tho
Does that allow your watch history and other stuff to get stored back on your Google account though?
You can toggle that
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.
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
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…
It works really good.
Any channel with constant 10k views typically get a submission within a day, channels with 1mil views typically get submissions within 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.
I run isponsorblocktv in docker to mute/skip ads and sponsor segments on my smart TV and it works beautifully.
Sponsor block just uses crowd sourced submissions people vote on. No reason an ai bot couldn’t submit entries too, if they’re good they’ll get upvoted
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
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
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/
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
