Hello fellow, lemmings, lemmur !

If you are like me, you probably spend a lot of time on YouTube, more than you want to admit.

I remember the days when videos had stars instead of thumbs up or down, and when YouTube had, let’s say, more mature content on it.

Now the site has a lot of functionalitys that are great for Google, but that I don’t need nor want.

So, to improve the enjoyment of the platform, I present to you the ultimate extension survival kit for YouTube:

  1. uBlock Origin: (or your favorite ad-blocker) This is an absolute must-have. It’s a good ad-blocker that not only blocks YouTube ads but also works across all websites. It’s lightweight, efficient, and open-source. Say goodbye to ads.
  2. SponsorBlock: Skip over the sponsored segments of videos. It’s a community-driven project, with users submitting the timestamps of sponsored content. You can even customize it to skip over different types of segments like intros, outros, and more.
  3. Return YouTube Dislike: Since YouTube removed the dislike count, it’s been harder to gauge the quality of videos. This extension brings back the dislike count.
  4. DeArrow: Extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails. It removes click-bait titles and thumbnails providing a cleaner Youtube.
  5. YouTube Shorts Block: If you’re not a fan of shorts, this extension is for you. It plays the Youtube shorts video as if it were a normal video and hides the “shorts” tab from the left menu. Firefox Link Chrome Link
  6. Enhancer for YouTube: Allows you to add theming options, auto-HD, keyboard shortcuts and more.

These are the extensions I use. Don’t hesitate to suggest more. I will edit the post accordingly.

It’s not lost on me that these extensions remove many things that were not initially a problem on YouTube but that either arose because of the monetary incentive of Google handling the website, Youtubers trying to make money, or as countermeasures to problems that were taken care of by a previous extension. This kind of feels like an arms race…

Edit 1: Changed the YouTube Shorts Block description and added Enhancer for YouTube

  • Zeek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    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.
      • Zeek@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Videos encoded with AV1 are smaller and look better on lower bitrates so you save some bandwidth. I noticed it’s also a bit less straining on the CPU which is nice if you wanna save some battery juice if you’re on a laptop without a dGPU.

        • ryo@lemmy.eco.brEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          If you have constrained CPU power it’s better to use HW decoding on the iGPU so you have more headroom.

          You can use AV1 but most hardware that’s not the latest will only be compatible with VP9 or even AVC1.