As Youtube becomes filled with more and more shit, I’m increasingly interested in block/hide type features. Even for videos that aren’t shit, I’m seeing the same ones appear constantly in the recommendations, even if I’ve already watched them.

Or in the ‘videos’ page of a channel, being able to zap-out-of-existence ones I know I don’t want to or have already seen: basically the channel should appear completely blank eventually if I’ve had enough time to pick through it, giving me an at-a-glance gauge of whether there’s new content in future visits.

Figured there’d likely be an extension that does this, but I’m not seeing one…

Using Firefox. I do have uBlock Origin, and my first thought was to use the block-element feature to accomplish this, but that’s doing things like hiding all the thumbnails vs the content specific to the video I targeted with it.

Any tips?

  • @[email protected]English
    1•7 days ago

    I’ve been looking for something like this too but gave up a few years ago. The ability to block channels, mainly.

    But what I can say that works fairly decently, is YouTube’s recommendation system. It just doesn’t work on music if in the music section, go figure.

    But like me, on Apple TV mostly, if I hold down the select button on a video, I can select “Don’t recommend channel” and I can confirm that works. This works on other devices too if you click the little 3 dots in the bottom corner of the video to get the same options I’ll describe below.

    I’ve done this on a few channels and I don’t think I’ve ever seen those same ones pop up again since. I can think of 3 channels, in particular, that I used to watch a lot but then they made some videos that pissed me right the fuck off, and I selected this after unsubbing and haven’t seen those channels being recommended again. I do see them in collabs on other channels I watch, unfortunately. But thats to be expected because it’s not on their channel.

    The other option is “Not interested” and then you can either say “I’ve already seen the video” or “I don’t like this video”. Using either or depending on the reason why you want to train the algorithm for your tastes.

    This has worked pretty well for me and my algorithm is actually pretty decent. Why they don’t do this for music is beyond me because it works well elsewhere when YouTube is recommending me stuff.