Sponsorblock for YouTube. It automatically skips over parts of videos where they try to get you to play Raid Shadow Legends.
This + DeArrow. DeArrow replaces clickbaity titles and thumbnails with better titles submitted by the community. I wouldn’t ever use youtube without it again. With this setup I don’t even want to watch most videos anymore, which is a good thing, because let’s be real, youtube is a big waste of time.
let’s be real, youtube is a big waste of time
I see people say this a lot, especially on the fediverse, and it makes me wonder why people think youtube is a “waste of time” when youtube’s uses are what the user makes of it.
I primarily use youtube for learning things. There are so many thousands of hours of useful, educational content on youtube that I find the suggestion that the entire platform is useless clickbait to be reductive and disingenuous.
Sure, there are channels I watch for typical mind-numbing content like Let’s Plays and such, but I wouldn’t suggest that youtube is wholly a waste of time just because there’s plenty of mindless content on it.
Just like Reddit or Lemmy, I can create an account and subscribe to a bunch of dumb shitposting communities, but I can also subscribe to a bunch of interesting hobbyist/intrigue communities.
How to reduce time on Youtube or make it more enjoyable
- avoid shorts completely (revanced)
- avoid reaction videos
- avoid any video which has someone with a mouth open or just making a ridiculous face
- avoid videos with clickbaity thumbnails/titles (duh) no matter how much you like the creator
- avoid videos which have “watch till the end” in the title
- [Important] watch channels with moderate number of subs and views
Well, of course you are right. The problem is that for many people (including me) it is hard to use it in a way that actually brings value, because it is just too easy to spend hours on there without getting anything in return.
I also think that it is highly subjective what can be considered “good” or “bad” content. When it comes to educational content, I also would consider it a waste of time. Sure, if I have a real life problem and the solution happens to be described in a youtube video, there is nothing wrong with watching it. But often times I was just like “Oh, this could be useful at some point in the future” and at the end of the video I could hardly remember what it was about. I also don’t think that “mindless” content is inherently bad. If it helps someone to relax, go for it. I always felt worse afterwards.
Saying youtube would be a big waste of time in general is indeed reductive, but I think for many people it actually is, because it is just not designed to be used to bring you value. The only objective is that you spend as many hours on their platform as possible.
Reminder to support creators in other ways if you’re going to use this.
Edit: similarly, if you can afford it kick a few bucks to your Lemmy instance. We’re about freedom as in speech, not as in freeloading, people. The whole reason the internet shifted to being ad and data collection based after the dotcom bubble is because no one wants to pay for anything.
You know creators get paid for the sponsor right? Not for if people watch that part or not.
A main reason youtube is so successful as an advertising product is their detailed metrics. Virtually every sponsor will want to see each video’s metrics which show retention during different parts of the video. It would be the same as putting the ad at the end of an hour long video; if they see a huge drop off where almost no one sees the ad, they may decide the creator didn’t fulfill their end of the contract, or pay them proportionally to the retention during the ad.
Thing is, the way a company determines if a sponsorship is working is by using offer codes. If no one is using an offer code, the company is going to assume that that sponsorship isn’t working out and might terminate the deal.
UBlock Origin
NoScript
HTTPSEverywhere
edit: “isn’t this implemented in-browser?” comments: maybe, but it’s to the browser’s implementation. These plugins are reviewable separate from their analogous browser implementation.
Belt & suspenders approach. Camp on it.
I thought HTTPS everywhere was baked into browsers now and didn’t need to be installed anymore? Is that not correct?
Isn’t NoScript redundant if you run UBO in medium mode?
Roughly similar to using Adblock Plus with many filter lists + NoScript with 1st-party scripts/frames automatically trusted. Unlike NoScript however, you can easily point-and-click to block/allow scripts on a per-site basis.
If you go in ublock origin settings, scroll all the way down, you can toggle a setting that disables JS by default. On each site you can whitelist it by clicking ubo and enable JS.
I wasn’t aware of this feature in UBO, but it doesn’t seem to be quite the same. As best I can tell (with a quick test), UBO lets me turn all scripts on or off for a site. I don’t see any sort of granular controls for selecting which domains to load scripts from (and I might just be missing it). For example, I may want to allow first party scripts to run on a site and maybe third party scripts from one or two domains. But, I don’t want scripts from other third party domains to execute. It’s very much a fine grained, least privileged style of script management. It’s a lot more work, as you often have to spend a few minutes sussing out which domains need to be whitelisted to allow a site to reach minimum functionality; but, you are not often caught offguard by a site doing strange things on your system.
I don’t understand your edit, how is more things doing the same thing better? It adds complexity, attack surface while taking resources.
Yeah, sorry… My head was in 1000 different places when I wrote that. Sloppy of me.
Overall I agree with the general statement that less code is better, except perhaps in this case it is not.
What I had been trying to say is in-browser privacy implementations are liable to be incomplete from the perspective of privacy minded users because the software publishers, say, Mozilla, are competing for market share of installed, default browsers. One way they maintain market share is by having the fastest and most accurate page renders for the widest base of use cases. To do this requires, in part, some cooperation from website developers whose vested interest in part is in driving ad serves.
Therefore, it’s in the browser publishers’ interest to implement enough privacy and blocking features to effectively stop malware and common nuisances, but not completely cripple ad blocking since ads are a key part of web site operators’ revenue. They’re trying not to alienate that part of the web economy such that their browser suddenly starts hitting those “please turn off you ad blocker or select another browser” paywalls.
Mozilla pretty much said this was the case a few years ago when they opted not to turn on the privacy features by default in new installs because the advertisers threatened to start hobbling websites for Mozilla browsers. I don’t know that the situation has really changed much since then.
Anyway, my point was that the in-browser privacy features are a good start and should be enabled, but also that they amount to little more than a fig leaf over the question of effectively blocking ads. Loading the adblockjng extensions accomplishes a few things for the user. First, the extensions grant a more complete, uncompromised blocking experience for the user. Second, it grants the user finer-grained control over the whole web experience, letting the user decide what ads and cross-site data sharing occurs. Finally, the code is independent of the browser and so it doesn’t alienate the site owners from the browser publisher.
For Mozilla, it shifts the responsibility of incomplete page loads and breakage onto the user, which in my opinion is where we want it.
That’s why I’m advocating for doing both in this case: because the browser publishers have a vested interest to remain relevant in an economy that wants you to see the ads, and will do everything it can to make you click them. The best defense against for the user that is a multilayered approach.
Finally, I do want to acknowledge that I’m using the terms “privacy” and “ad blocking” too loosely here since they are separate, distinctly nuanced topics. The extensions help more in the ad blocking space than the privacy space, but in what I wrote I think its fair to say that overall the extensions do improve outcomes where the two spaces intersect.
Anyway, nice chat. Thanks for keeping me honest
Wow, you are really confused. The argument about the functionality being already implemented by Firefox was about https everywhere. This has nothing to do with adblocking and it does break some sites (the one still not using https) but you can still access them with a click.
For Firefox: uBlock origin (of course)
Privacy Badger - controls which sites are allowed to use cookies
Mind the time - tracks time spent on various Web sites
Video DownloadHelper - detects media and allows you to download and transcode it.
Bitwarden - password manager
ToS;DR (Terms of Service; Didn’t Read). It gives pages a rating based on their terms of service. It also provides you with a plain-english breakdown of the terms of a site/service.
it’s a pretty controversial opinion that’s practically impossible to regulate but I think purposefully making TOS/Legal stuff harder to read solely to get away with stuff that the user would disagree with should be illegal
Imo, ToS;DR isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a replacement for a proper legal document. A proper legal document will contain all of the necessary definitions for clarity, and will word things accurately to cover all possible loopholes. ToS;DR simply provides a sort of point-form summary of the main rules and points that a person should be aware of in a very basic and quick-to-digest manner.
Pretty standard stuff here:
- UBlock Origin
- No Script - Yes, I run both UBO and NoScript, they have slightly different use cases
- Dark Reader
- FireFox Multi-Account Containers
- Redirector - Great for automagically changing links
- KeePassXC-Browser - For password manager integration
- Rested - For monkeying with REST APIs
- User-Agent Switcher and Manager - Why yes, I am the browser you are looking for
- Video DownloadHelper - Because sometimes, you need stuff available offline
In terms of actually recommending extensions to others. I’d recommend most of the above, excepting NoScript. If you are using UBO, then the use case for NoScript is a very narrow one where you want selective whitelisting of javascript while visiting a site. UBO’s blacklisting approach works for most cases and UBO’s whitelisting feature is lacking the granularity of NoScript.
God, I love Dark Reader. I don’t know why anyone makes bright white websites.
I use Dark Reader on my work laptop was well. We had a conference call with a vendor and I was sharing my screen while talking with their team about our usage of their product and one of them stopped me and asked about the UI looking strange. I said, “oh ya, I use Dark Reader because you don’t have a native dark mode. You do lose points for that.” They had a native dark mode a couple months later.
I’ve come to the conclusion that UI designers hate their customers’ retinas.
