amalgamy's tips on filtering YouTube for maximum usefulness

Thanks to amalgamy on Charlie Stross' blog, we have a series of mods to make YouTube less obnoxious.

A few things that make youtube far less annoying for me:

Firefox, with content filtering add-ons

• View on Firefox, both desktop and Android mobile
• Install these extensions:
  • uBlock Origin
  • SponsorBlock for YouTube
  • Enhancer for YouTube
  • Violentmonkey

SponsorBlock:

Note: this depends on enabling one of the yt-neuter uBlock Origin filter lists

Enable these content-blocking options:

• Sponsor: "Auto Skip"
• Unpaid/Self Promotion: Disable
• Interaction Reminder (Subscribe): Disable
• Endcards/Credits: Disable
• Preview/Recap/Hook: Disable

Enhancer for YouTube:

Enable these options:

• Disable autoplay
• Prevent videos loaded in background tabs from automatically playing

uBlock Origin:

add these block list subscriptions:

• ALL lists of these bundled groups
  • uBlock filters
  • Ads
  • Privacy
  • Annoyances
• add these custom block lists:
  • Dandelion Sprout:
    • hides almost everything except the video player, description, and playback controls
    • https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/
    • YouTube: Even More Pure Video Experience
    • https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/raw/refs/heads/master/YouTubeEvenMorePureVideoExperience.txt
    • see list of elements removed in filter source text:
      • https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/YouTubeEvenMorePureVideoExperience.txt
  • YouTube Neuter(yt-neuter):
    • hides the most annoying bits
    • home page: https://github.com/mchangrh/yt-neuter
    • pick one of these two filters:
    • Aggressive YouTube uBlock filter list
      • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mchangrh/yt-neuter/main/yt-neuter.txt
    • SponsorBlock sub-list (Subset of yt-neuter for sponsorblock)
      • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mchangrh/yt-neuter/main/filters/sponsorblock.txt
      • product shopping/ merch (Creator)
      • paid comments (Creator)
      • membership (Creator)
      • tickets (YT + Creator)
      • generic popup (YT)
      • brand features (YT)

FYI: check filterlists for more / updated youtube annoyances content-blocking lists

Violentmonkey userscripts manager:

(or tampermonkey, or pick your favorite userscripts add-on)

Optional, used for additional content filtering scripts, I don't enable these userscript bits

• see userscripts listed at yt-neuter project:
  • https://github.com/mchangrh/yt-neuter/blob/main/README.md