It seems futile to filter Amazon products by name, but it's interesting that it seems to be able to filter YouTube shorts.
Given that after two years there are only about 30 templates, I'm guessing it's too difficult to actually accomplish something useful given the tools provided. That's not a knock on the creator -- off the top of my head I don't know how I'd provide an easy way to customize/filter/modify web content -- I'm just saying I understand the shutdown given the apparent lack of traction.
Ublock origin's filter syntax is very good but has limitations that make it borderline impossible to filter out some elements and also very brittle. For example, this one is one of 20 lines of filters to get rid of Shorts: `www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer a.yt-simple-endpoint path[d^="M10 14.65v-5.3L15 12l-5 2.65zm7.77-4.33"]:upward(ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer)`
The frontend code is so abstracted that as soon as it is updated it is probably going to break. With userscripts you can filter these things with more sophisticated functions, but it slows down the interface more than UBO. In google's case that type of frontend abstraction (imo) is not intentionally designed to break interface filtering but it has that effect. For other companies like facebook and amazon they actively make filtering elements harder, because of their anti-adblock strategies, but they are all casting a wide enough net that element filtering is affected too. It's a long game of cat and mouse.
The way YouTube forces shorts on users who likes long form content is really frustrating. uBlock filters are great but doesn’t solve the fundamental issue here. There should be a way to opt out of YouTube shorts.
It was a great project but it's kind of pissing in the wind. These things break constantly as new awful features get added. And there's not much you can do with ublock about high-level frontend changes that are the real problem, like google switching to infinite scroll or removing the plus operator. I can understand getting worn down.
I'm sad to learn this projet is shutting down. The maintainer (xvello) contributed a lot to my uBlock dev filter [0]. We tried to reduce the time lost on deceptive and low-quality content for search engine users. Generative ML and aggressive SEO technics hit hard.
I'm looking forward installing this on brave as soon as I get my hands on my pc, my attention span is so low that sometimes when I open up YouTube in incognito, I get overwhelmed. (I often do that to not mess with my actual recommended comment if I know I just need to search a video or two for one offs)
The homepage shows a lot of crap and clickbait thumbnails, and especially thumbnails with people having weird expressions and staring at me makes my brain completely lose context and lose focus for a few seconds, so that I have actually to think again about what I was gonna search, and sometimes I can't even remember it
I have to wonder what the creator has against Mike Boyd? "Nebula: filter out videos by creator... To get the code for a creator, go to their page... For example, Mike Boyd’s page..."
Filtering Nebula in general seems like a low-probability use-case?
Nebula used to not have a discovery feed and just a most recent videos one, so I could see someone wanting to filter out creators who they've watched and decided aren't for them to have a better chance of potentially finding new channels they do want to watch.
EDIT: Also, not sure if you're just joking or not, but I'd bet the author is a Mike Boyd fan. I feel like people tend to use examples of things they like in documentation, and it's just an example.
Same here. I have discovered so many new creators on Nebula I never would have found otherwise^* but there's definitely channels I just never want to see.
* I never watched youtube as a primary source of entertainment like pretty much everyone uses youtube. I just had channel pages bookmarked (invidious instance links usually lol) so I never stumbled upon relevant channels even on the off chance something not terrible was in the recommendations which I always ignored. I got onto nebula because almost all of the very small handful of creators I watched were on it and it was cheap enough to justify the subscription lol
Fair point -- I think Mike Boyd is the "how long will it take me to learn this obscure thing" guy. I can see why that might not be to everyone's taste, but he seems relatively innocuous. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The obvious question to me in a situation like this is: how does Nebula provide preference? And honestly, I get it -- I am a subscriber, and I have a hard time getting a feed of the people I'm interested in, to the extent that I just do it to support the creators, I don't actually use Nebula. I continue to watch Nebula creators on YouTube, which has got to be a bottom-tier result for them.
I hadn't heard of this until now, but it seems (seemed) like a decent idea. From what I can tell it's a UI that lets you configure what you'd like to block on certain sites, and there can be community contributed templates. You get a URL, you then add that URL to your UBO filters. It actually reminds me of nextdns.
I heard of this project on HN sometime last year, I never used their instance but I have been using their YouTube UBO filters and even contributed to fix some after some YouTube updates.
And the UBO filters are fairly easy to maintain which is why I was a little surprised that they are shutting down this project, I understand the instance might be hard to maintain but the filters can very well be maintained I think.
Either way, there seems to be other alternatives that do similar things. I will likely be using those then.
If by UBO you mean uBlock Origin, you can do one better. Use it's eye dropper tool to select elements of a web page to block. I use is it to block Youtube premium nags, comments, side bar of other content, etc.
I am sorry to hear this. I have been a satisfied user since I found out about this project on HN a few months ago. It has kept Amazon and a lot of other garbage out of my search results for starters. I use uBlock Origin extensively but have never been able to learn to write my own filters. letsblock.it handled a lot of that seamlessly. My sincere thanks to the developer for his valiant efforts.
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Given that after two years there are only about 30 templates, I'm guessing it's too difficult to actually accomplish something useful given the tools provided. That's not a knock on the creator -- off the top of my head I don't know how I'd provide an easy way to customize/filter/modify web content -- I'm just saying I understand the shutdown given the apparent lack of traction.
The frontend code is so abstracted that as soon as it is updated it is probably going to break. With userscripts you can filter these things with more sophisticated functions, but it slows down the interface more than UBO. In google's case that type of frontend abstraction (imo) is not intentionally designed to break interface filtering but it has that effect. For other companies like facebook and amazon they actively make filtering elements harder, because of their anti-adblock strategies, but they are all casting a wide enough net that element filtering is affected too. It's a long game of cat and mouse.
Just get this plugin: <https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions> and enable “Hide all Shorts” under Homepage/General.
Bye letsblockit and I wish you well @xvello.
[0] https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
The homepage shows a lot of crap and clickbait thumbnails, and especially thumbnails with people having weird expressions and staring at me makes my brain completely lose context and lose focus for a few seconds, so that I have actually to think again about what I was gonna search, and sometimes I can't even remember it
Filtering Nebula in general seems like a low-probability use-case?
EDIT: Also, not sure if you're just joking or not, but I'd bet the author is a Mike Boyd fan. I feel like people tend to use examples of things they like in documentation, and it's just an example.
* I never watched youtube as a primary source of entertainment like pretty much everyone uses youtube. I just had channel pages bookmarked (invidious instance links usually lol) so I never stumbled upon relevant channels even on the off chance something not terrible was in the recommendations which I always ignored. I got onto nebula because almost all of the very small handful of creators I watched were on it and it was cheap enough to justify the subscription lol
The obvious question to me in a situation like this is: how does Nebula provide preference? And honestly, I get it -- I am a subscriber, and I have a hard time getting a feed of the people I'm interested in, to the extent that I just do it to support the creators, I don't actually use Nebula. I continue to watch Nebula creators on YouTube, which has got to be a bottom-tier result for them.
And the UBO filters are fairly easy to maintain which is why I was a little surprised that they are shutting down this project, I understand the instance might be hard to maintain but the filters can very well be maintained I think.
Either way, there seems to be other alternatives that do similar things. I will likely be using those then.