
Show HN: BlockTube - YouTube content blocker - amitbl
https://github.com/amitbl/blocktube
======
amitbl
An Extension I developed to combat today's YouTube "quality" content.

You can easily block videos, channels and comments based on your own rule-set.

The block is 100% site wide, an unsuspecting user wouldn't know it's enabled,
unless they're actively looking for a specific blocked video.

It's still an initial version, but there shouldn't be any issues. Also, the
options page is not quite visually impressive, but functional. (A better one
will come sometime)

This is a must have if you have little children browsing the site with no
supervision.

It's compatible with Firefox 52+(ESR) & Chrome

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WorldMaker
I've been complaining a lot about YouTube's "recommendations" lately so this
sounds like a good idea. I may try to see how much work it is to convert to an
Edge extension.

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amitbl
That's sound great, it shouldn't be too much work I guess, because the chrome
API usage here is pretty minimal

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Rotdhizon
Honestly if it can block anything with the words/phrases "Fortnite, PUBG, Must
Watch, _new_ , World Record, Never Before Seen, and similar topics then it is
a winner in my book.

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roryisok
"destroys trump", "Reaction", "surprise egg"

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WorldMaker
"Reaction" is a big one. I wonder if the beginning of the wasteland was
YouTube trying to make "Reaction" videos a thing by directly encouraging that
nonsense.

"vlog" is another word that seemed like a good idea at the time but seems to
have degenerated into near uselessness as a marker of content.

~~~
amitbl
In my opinion, a good indicator of pro "content creator" video is usually all
capital letters/multiple question&exclamation marks in the title.

You can setup this matching quite easily with regex

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WorldMaker
Similarly, things like: /^Top \d+/, /^Best \d+/, /^Worst \d+/, /\d+ Things You
(May|May Have)? Miss(ed)?/

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Rjevski
It would be good if you could combine this with some OCR/computer vision to
automatically detect and block click bait thumbnails like with a red circle,
or proeminent boobs, or similar.

~~~
amitbl
It does sounds like a great idea, but would require setting up a remote
service which I'm not ready to maintain at this time

~~~
roryisok
Not ready to be paid to find boobs

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roryisok
I'd actually love to see this work at the router level so it can filter stuff
from my iPad

~~~
amitbl
Unfortunately, probably won't ever be possible because of TLS encrypted
connection to YouTube (unless you can install custom root CA on apple
devices??)

