Top Extensions to Make YouTube Bearable

just one needed: LibRedirect set to automatically redirect the URLs to Piped or Invidious. no.ads, no shorts, no tracking, and Piped comes with SponsorBlock built in.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/libredirect/

Reminder to all, Firefox on Android can use UBlock Origin. It's an easy setup, no more ads.

Use youtube revanced with microg on non rooted phones, it comes with all the premium and unique features....

For YouTube Shorts, you can copy this filter into the uBlock My Filters.

Two things I also like to do is changing my Youtube bookmark to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions and adding the following two filters to uBlock:

www.youtube.com##.ytp-endscreen-content
www.youtube.com###related

This basically makes it so that I only see videos from channels I'm actually subscribed to, without having any content pushed on me from the algorithm.

Permanently Deleted

I came across Unhook, which lets you remove parts of YouTube that are designed to keep you there.

Changed the YT home page to subscriptions instead of 'the algorithm'.

If you use a script manager (Tampermonkey, Violentmonkey, Greasemonkey, Firemonkey) I can recommend some userscripts:

1. Tabview for Youtube - condenses comments, description, playlists and chat into a neatly organised sidebar,
2. YT Resource Unholder - improves how YT handles resources and improves performance,
3. YT CPU Tamer - more performance improvements,
4. YT AV1 - forces YT to use AV1 for all videos.

Youtube search fix: This is not a extension but if you save this as a bookmark javascript:location.href=location.href+'&sp=CAASAhAB'; in your browser it can be used to remove youtubes recommended / "people also watched" videos from a search.

To use it, search for something on youtube and then click the bookmark you have made and it will then reload the search page and only show listings for what you searched for and remove youtubes recommended / “people also watched" videos from the search.

All I'm wishing for on Android is for NewPipe or LibreTube to let me login to get my suggested front page. On desktop, Sponserblock is awesome, and I've been liking DeArrow.

uBlock Origin is simply a requirement on every single browser and should always be installed. I'd recommend going into the settings and enabling all the extra filters as well.

It's bearable on smartube next if you have an android TV, firestick or similar

My biggest problem with YouTube is they keep giving me videos I've already watched and it seems they wipe them from the watch list very quickly to try and trick you into clicking it again.

I also hate the fact that if I say I'm not interested In something they take no notice and send it to my recommendations again regardless.

Probably not the crowd for this but I just use YouTube premium at this point. I used ublock previously to manage some of this but the kicker was ensuring I could watch YT seamlessly on all devices (TV - fire stick, ipad, ios). I know I can setup a pi hole but have been moving last couple years. Perhaps soon once I settle.

For people on Apple devices and Safari, check these out: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app-bundle/fizzy-water-bundle/id1601247237

Vinegar is for YT and Baking Soda for the rest of the web. Little annoying the devs split them up but they are both great as they give you a basic video. No ads, overlays, nothing. It may seem like a small thing but man does it have a huge impact.

• Pay for youtube premium

^ducks

Perhaps it bears mentioning that DeArrow is developed by the same person as SponsorBlock. That gave me a lot of faith in it right off the bat.

NewPipe is more than enough.

lemmings

where mr beast addon???

Please keep in mind that every extension you install is an attack vector for hackers. Just because an extension does something cool doesn't mean you should install it.

Please stick with the most used extensions, the ones that Mozilla recommends. This is for your safety.

Truffle improves the livestream watching experience on YouTube significantly, adding a Twitch-style theatre mode (with chat on the side), BetterTTV emotes, and more.

• FreeTube has Sponsorblock built in as a default option
• NewPipe on Android (Fdroid store) or NewPipe X SponsorBlock via IzzyOnDroid repo

df tube (distraction-free youtube): toggleable options that allow hiding the recommendation feed and featured videos on the homepage, so as to reduce distractions.

To those who allow their free time to be consumed by youtube because they consider it to be a good investment of their time since they're learning new things, please try this. You might realize that Youtube really just is a poisonous social media amongst all the others and that you really don't need the suggestions.

What about for twitch? cause its actually worst that cable tv was sometimes

That is a long list of things to make the site usable. I wonder if we as the fediverse community can leverage Peertube and eliminate the need for all these blockers.

I never Heard of DeArrow thats nice thanks

For custom settings during playback and some granular tweaks, the extension enhancer for YouTube might come in handy 👍.
I’ll take a look at DeArrow, looks like a great project thx

Permanently Deleted

Does this stuff work on mobile?

I use my phone to cast, and/or a google dongle on the TV for Youtube primarily. Almost never from a desktop.... does this work still?

Any idea if there's a way to block shorts using PiHole? I mostly consume YouTube on mobile devices (Android and iOS) but would love to get rid of that garbage.

Recommendation: add Vinegar for all the Apple (iOS, macOS, iPadOS) users. It’s suuuuper good

I am currently stuck with a super old ipad3 on ios9.3.6 and the only way I have been able to watch youtube on it is through the edge browser, nothing else seems to work. But the version of edge is so old that there aren't any working extensions. I have jailbroken it with phoenix and installed cydia (both of which suddenly stopped working), but it turns out the cydia app that lets you install older versions of stuff has also been discontinued.

I have never not used some sort of adblocker, I am shocked at how often I have to interact with the device to skip ads. You also have to unfullscreen to be able to skip so sometimes I just let the ads run.

I get that ads keep youtube chugging along but, jesus christ, maybe it shouldn't be chugging along any longer. I was trying to watch a 40 minute video yesterday and there were double ads basically every 6 minutes! I feel the freedom to place ads wherever you want in your own video has really destroyed the youtube experience for those who can't or won't use adblockers.

I really like Distraction Free Youtube You can remove the trending tab, shorts, recommendations, comments aka all of the time wasting fluff which really helped me cut back my YouTube usage

Also don't forget these two:

• De-mainstream Youtube
• Clickbait remover for Youtube

In addition to some of the ones listed in OP, I use

• YouTube Auto Like - automatically likes videos you open them (optionally only when you're subscribed to the channel). If you're on a Chromium browser, Google removed this extension from their web store so you can't install it from there anymore. But you can install it manually if you want by downloading it from the Github repo here.
  
  I also use the following userscripts:

• Return Youtube Dislike - Does the same thing as the Return Youtube Dislike extension in the OP

• Youtube Shorts Redirect - redirects Youtube Shorts to a full watch page, so you can watch them like a regular video.

• Resize YT To Window Size - resizes the video player so that it fills in the entire dimensions of the browser window and moves video players to the top of the page so you can scroll down to see comments, recommend videos, etc.

• YouTube CPU Tamer by AnimationFrame - reduces Youtube's CPU usage during video playback. I don't really understand the technical aspects but it's all explained in the description of the userscript. This script IS NOT compatible with SponsorBlock!
  
  Stuff I'm looking for (if anyone has any recommendations):

• Remove duplicate videos from a playlist

• display playlists in a grid layout instead of a list layout

• block youtube channels i don't like

edit: fixed a formatting mistake

Google does not like this...

Ive been yearning for a while a "video or channel for later, go away now. dont show me the same video more than 5 times" plugin

Its ment to cull the garbage and get a more inde youtube, I like an artist called Sui uzi but listen to their diskography once and youtube will drive you to listen to the same tracks repeatedly.

I love to see all this fantastic innovation but it’s a shame that most of it is confined to desktop/laptop computers. 95% of my YouTube consumption is on my phone, iPad, and Roku. Those platforms just aren’t extensible in the same ways. It’s too bad because I’m least likely to sit at my gaming PC watching videos.

I will mention that if you go premium, ads are removed on all devices.

Annotations Restored For Youtube is also a really good one, adds back the old styled annotations to old videos that had them, makes old videos a little bit more watchable if they had important info in the annotations

I'll gladly take YouTube Shorts Block. It is by far, to me, the most unnecessary thing I've found on YouTube. So when you watch one of these things, note that you cannot control the volume of them. It's always mute or not mute. They also have a tendency to snap in place when you're between videos and in doing so, will restart the video all over again. It is annoying.

I get it's purpose, but I don't need it in my face.

YouTube Unhook is also great

I use YouTube Archivist to download channels I want and view them in Jellyfin. There's now a companion app for FF/Chrome to subscribe or download stuff you're interested in from a browser.

I didn’t see it listed in the comments but Stopthe Madness is the best extension I use, helps with YouTube but also other sites:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id1583082931

Youtube non-stop basically prevents the "are you still watching" thing. Useful if you're like me and listen to playlists on the background while studying.

Its a little odd, but onetab+yt-dlp+musicolet alongside newpipe is the best combo for me

for quite some time I use newpipe on mobile and freetube on desktop to watch youtube videos... Its not without its problems, but it gets rid of tracking, adds and other nuisance on their sites.

But mostly if I can, I use and support other sites like odysee.com

I use a browser extension that is called "Comments Sidebar for YouTube". It just puts the comments along the side instead of under the video so I can scroll through them without leaving the video. I think YouTube used to do this? I remember finding this extension to replace that function.

Or just use a proper third-party client. You wouldn't use Reddit with a browser, or God forbid, the official app? It's the same with YouTube. Or everything, really.

Is there a reliable channel blocker addon or front end that let's you keep a list of channels you want blocked. Some channels just keep populating play next or searches when I don't want them to because of how popular the channels are.

Thank you for this, I was able to watch YouTube videos just fine with ublock enabled, but I didn't really know about the YouTube shorts blocker addon. YouTube shorts are just annoying to look at.

Sponsorblock is a life safer.

I use DF YouTube which lets you hide various parts of the UI

If you want some of these features on mobile Android TV, you've still got options!

For Android TV, there's SmartTubeNext: https://smarttubenext.com/ It includes ad blocking and SponsorBlock. I also think the UX is a bit better than the official YouTube app.

For Android, there's obviously ReVanced: https://revanced.app/

And for iOS there's uYou+ (hasn't been updated in a while): https://github.com/qnblackcat/uYouPlus or iVanced (https://github.com/TherionRO/YouTubeiVanced) they will need AltStore to be installed, and will need to be re-signed with a PC/Mac every week.

You can also use AdGuard on iOS though safari and the SponsorBlock extension in the App Store too, but video quality isn't great.

If you want to avoid resigning with AltStore or using Google services, there's also Yattee for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1595136629 and Invidious and Piped client!

I don't have an android device so if any of my info is wrong let me know!

Thanks for the helpful list. Running a few of these, I will checkout some of the others!

Is there something which alters the algorithm to have less company videos?

If you're on Android, Newpipe, from Newpipe.net, is great.

I found out about it when Google delisted it.

Commenting so I can find this later. Thank you OP 🍻

Sadly ad blockers will soon stop working on YouTube…. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/29/23778879/youtube-videos-disabling-ad-blockers-detection

Might I add also: Unhook

Great post OP!

I use Firefox as my everyday browser and a Chromium browser for all my Google services.

Those of you that are using YouTube with Firefox, are you concerned about tracking while you're signed into your Google account? Do you notice a decrease in performance while using YouTube on Firefox?

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-resumer/](Video Resumer) is one of my favorites. It resumes video where you left.

I am loving Darrow, and for some reason I just never bothered adding dislikes but it's great to have them back.

Wondering if anyone knows of a script to get the likes and dislikes onto the video preview page instead of having to click on the video to see it. Would help me get a sense of the videos YouTube is recommending.

Thanks for the tip! Using dearrow has been great so far. I wish I could use it on my iPad too, but I guess now there’s another reason to use my laptop more.

For older/lower end computers, enhanced-h264ify is a godsend. It blocks youtube from playing VP9 codec which can cause heavy cpu usage on older hardware. It can also block 60fps video as well.

Restore YouTube Username from Handle to Custom

This script restores REAL NAMES in comments instead of @user-xxxxxx, I am so sick of that shit, I hope revanced will have this function soon. (Edit: I guess that will never happen)

Tamper monkey with user script to stream YouTube videos as audio...

test

YouTube Premium feels pretty bearable as is. I'm not really sure what I'd want it to do besides have the option to turn the algorithm on and off. When I leave 5hrs of Bob Ross on for my dog for an afternoon I would prefer that not counted in future pushed content.

Youtube shorts block is a godsend by the sounds of it, installing now.

I have the best extension or add on, I don’t watch YouTube

I wouldn't mind YouTube Shorts, except it seems that most of them are of such low quality and value. I don't have a TikTok account but I have seen many great TikToks (because they get reposted elsewhere). I have seen comparatively few quality YouTube Shorts.

Vanced. Still works like a charm! Get Vanced Manager from APK Mirror and install.

Won't most of these get you the warning from youtube? I stopped using YouTube except libretube and newpip sb because of it. I don't want any of my accounts banned.

I won't be using ad blockers in YouTube as they help creaters get paid

Or you could just subscribe to YouTube Premium (same price as Spotify) and get YouTube Music with it.. Also it seems like Google is planning on having a three strike policy on ad blocking.