As described in https://letsblock.it/help/about, this project is a home for rules that cannot be included in the default content blocking lists, because everyone has their own definition of low-value content.
Our goal is to curate a list of templates that allow you to tune up the signal/noise ratio and avoid distractions. You can just copy-paste rules in your uBlockOrigin / AdGuard settings, but the project is best used by signing-up to create your customized rule list. This gives you automatic updates when rules are improved and updated by the community, and the ability to use that list on all your devices.
I use the extension BlockTube to filter out videos by channel and I think it works pretty well since I only need to right click on a video and can block the entire channel. That means you have to trust another extension.
That being said, it is an understatement to say I can't tolerate the internet without uBlock Origin. I get so much value out of this project I would donate 10-20% of my salary to the project if they allowed donations.
For YouTube, I go the other way and instead of blacklisting channels, I use https://unhook.app to only see my subscriptions and nothing else. No Home feed suggestions, no sidebar, no end screen cards, etc.
there are some gems the YT homepage can bring you. be sure to delete the dumb meme recap you watched at 3am from the watch history and the algorithm can work for you.
Oh, wow. Didn't know I can do that. Thanks, it was getting really hard to train the algo again with the things I want recommended on a certain account after accidentally searching for something of interest for another account.
Be sure to also mark videos as "Not interested" on your homepage, if you also did not know about that.
You can even tell them not to recommend an entire channel.
The not interested button doesn't really work for me, it just blocks that particular video but other videos in that category still show up no matter what.
The “Don’t recommend channel” button also doesn’t really work for me. It used to work, but now the channels keep coming back. YouTube has been trying to get me to watch videos from “Dr.” Sten Ekberg. After watching one video a couple years ago I quickly realised he’s full of shit. I’ve clicked the “Don’t suggest channel” button so many times, but after a short while his videos return to my feed.
Often if I want to watch a one-off video topic, I'll view it in private mode, so it doesn't get added to history. Then I don't really mess up the algorithm.
Any idea if this is smart enough to show all new content from your subscriptions or does it only show the select choices that YouTube makes for you (another infuriating YouTube design choice).
Didn't know this extension existed, thank you. I don't actually subscribe to any Youtube channels and mainly search for what I want at the time but this may be a healthier way to use Youtube.
this is such a bad analogy, unprotected sex is objectively way better just riskier. ads on the web are in no way better, and maybe marginally riskier than no ads
I can't use Youtube without Blocktube. Currently at 11,000 blocked channels and still going strong - it's amazing how the same junk keeps cropping up just under different names.
I wish I knew about it sooner, it took me almost a year to "train" the algo to recommended me only certain topics of interest. I could've saved some scrolling time at the beginning.
I find it sad how many websites, or even programs have atrociously low information density. In our quest to flat and minimalistic design™, we have managed to lower information density so much that very simple websites require lots of scrolling and menu-opening just to get simple information.
I read a comment on a forum where the user had a job to audit google home voice command and search result alignment. Meaning, did the google home user get what they wanted or not. The forum user made a side comment on how a surprising number of people have horrible diction. Makes me think, maybe low information density is the optimal design for the majority of users.
I find myself doing this (and feeling stupid doing so) with my Amazon Echo Dots. They seem to understand very little, so I simplify and reduce like crazy. Nevertheless, lots of searches/commands go wrong.
Good example probably: I've tried to play music from German rap artist "Disarstar" which is pronounced like "disaster". I did not get Alexa to play music from this artist from Spotify, it only searched for "disaster" and played music it found... Not a good experience.
There are at least two bands named Disaster Area. One 90s Skate Punk band from Berlin, Earth, and the famous one from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, an unpopular and unpopulated region around 400 light years from the Soulianis/Rahm system in direction Betelgeuse.
Information density as we had it in the 90s and 2000s was far too dense, let's be real. We might have liked it, but most people essentially saw an insurmountable column of text and immediately keeled over, eyes glazed. The response to reduce information density in and of itself is reasonable.
What isn't reasonable is how low information density has gotten. Yes, information was too dense before, but now we have the opposite problem: It's not dense enough. There is a fine balance in density that designers seemingly can't seem to find.
Magazines and newspapers interleaved articles and news; books were just either straight stories or short tale compilations, there were no short tales in the middle of a page or at the bottom/top/edge placed sides.
My wife is one of these people - an artistic ADHD type whose brain bounces around in a very non-linear way. The commands she speaks to Google leave me completely confused.
And in the scriptlets.js file, text between the line "/// ScriptName.js" and an empty line is considered a separate scriptlet, which you can add to an URL in "My filters" like:
news.ycombinator.com##+js(ScriptName.js)
The annoying bit is that scriptlets are cached, and to update them, you have to edit the "userResourcesLocation" setting, for that reason I made "scriptlets1.js" a symlink to the original file and switch back and forth whenever I edit it.
No, I'm using Vivaldi. Chromium-based browsers have an option "Allow access to file URLs" for extensions. In Firefox this functionality is missing. But it might be possible to patch omni.ja to get it anyway:
I use uBlock Origin for a banlist of sites and keywords that are repeat offenders for off-topic[0] HN posts: https://pifke.org/hn.txt
My rules hide the title line but not the number of comments/points, and sometimes I'll click through stories that have been highly upvoted, to see what I'm missing (rarely anything of interest to me).
Heya, you can take inspiration the rules I posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35676840 for hiding the second line and the separator. I messed up the last newline, the bottom block is the following two lines:
I have disabled YouTube Watch history and I really enjoy seeing YouTube struggle to provide me anything meaningful in the Home feed. Most suggestions are just based on my subscriptions and I see a lot of repeated suggestions as it doesn't know what I have watched.
This keeps me away from the echo chamber that it creates for most people.
An echo chamber propagates the same idea through various channels making it look like the echo chamber is the only truth.
My subscriptions stay limited, no every creator creates the same video again and again, once I watch a video I am not going to rewatch it and get another new idea which solidifies the idea.
So I would argue that it isn't creating an echo chamber.
All the past 12-14 years I've used YouTube, it was always in a private window. With or without login. Earlier I had an account but when google signup was mandated, I quit and since then I just manually go and search for stuff.
I have newpipe and libretube on my phone so I have some semblance of "subscriptions and channels" but not much.
Another really useful rule I like is for disabling the recommendation overlay that shows up on youtube when you pause a video, which is really annoying.
interesting point of view. i think content creators would look at it the other way -- never has it been so easy to steal content as it is on an ad-supported internet.
It even blocks self-hosted analytics scripts from the same domain. By default.
I don't see how that is a good thing. It just makes the lives of people who run websites harder. When I visit a website, I have some sympathy towards the person who runs it.
Disabling scripts which talk to self-hosted analytics software makes it hard to figure out how users use a website. Especially when the site is using a CDN. So people enable tracking on the CDN level. Which means now CloudFlare, Amazon etc store that data again. Lose-lose for everybody.
> makes it hard to figure out how users use a website
Isn't that the whole point? A user with the no tracking filters turned on in uBO is intentionally trying to opt out. I don't have much sympathy for site owners unless they also offer a first party opt-out option (which I've never seen so far even given the cookie banners). Site owners are no more entitled to track than a site user is to block even first party trackers. (Also wouldn't a site owner be able to use server logs anyways?)
As for defaults, I think when it comes to the point that someone is installing uBO specifically, they're usually sophiscated enough to configure filters. Most of the people I know (even those in tech) don't use any form of adblock or tracking blocking. (I don't know how they can manage to always be vigilant and avoid all the dark patterns, but to each their own.)
It is an unfortunate reality of how the Internet is built.
There's quite a few people like you, that are fine with self-hosted analytics, either because you believe the principles of the websites you visit, or because you've done so-called "good" analytics, and so disable that kind of blocking, hoping your trust won't be abused.
Problem is, some of us don't believe those principles hold, and/or have seen people doing vacuum-style analytics. I've listened to conversations of otherwise well-intentioned devs who are otherwise anti-ads and anti-unnecessary data collection ask for more data to be collected in analytics because "we might need it". Leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. So I block it all - what I can, of course. If they find ways around it that I can't block, at least I've done my best.
Same domain doesn't always mean your information won't get leaked to wherever. For example, Sentry supports sending data through a proxy hosted on the same domain used by the website. If you don't block it, your data ends up on sentry.io anyway (in most cases; some users probably self-host their own Sentry instance, but how many? It's quite painful from my personal experience.)
> It just makes the lives of people who run websites harder.
User agent. The browser is meant to serve the user's interests. The wants or desires of people who run websites are their own problems, not the user agent's problems.
I don't even run first party javascript by default, only on a whitelist basis. Most of the time, even first party javascript only makes the website worse from my perspective as a user. Javascript's most common purpose is to implement annoyances and spyware, legitimate functionality comes third.
I think we put up with a lot because we give smaller businesses a pass on bad practices and focus our energy on the "bad" bigger players. But I don't think being an underdog means that society should accept PII surveillance - society is made up of underdogs.
It is frustrating. At the end of the day uBlock can only block what it can see. If I'm an asshole web host I can still take your IP and every other bit of data that I can gobble up from the HTTP headers and sell those off to the highest bidder and uBlock can't do anything about that. So, nefarious actors still be nefarious actors.
I share this sentiment. I use content blockers to avoid annoyances and trackers, but I'm ok with healthy ads and other local stats. The problem is not being able to distinguish them at scale.
I've never gotten the hang of writing uBO rules for myself. There's a lot more to it than is in the tutorial. Learned about letsblock.it last week through a support request to the uBO project and it has been a great help. It is very good at filtering out low quality search results sites[0]. Additionally it takes the pain out of blocking sites or domains I don't want to see.
As described in https://letsblock.it/help/about, this project is a home for rules that cannot be included in the default content blocking lists, because everyone has their own definition of low-value content.
Our goal is to curate a list of templates that allow you to tune up the signal/noise ratio and avoid distractions. You can just copy-paste rules in your uBlockOrigin / AdGuard settings, but the project is best used by signing-up to create your customized rule list. This gives you automatic updates when rules are improved and updated by the community, and the ability to use that list on all your devices.