tomashubelbauer / firefox-youtube-buddy

Firefox YouTube Buddy

I am currently making use of these three Firefox extensions to make my YouTube experience to be more in my interest as a viewer and less in YouTube's interest as a corporation interested in slurping up all my watch time and attention:

• Better Subscriptions for YouTube™
  • Allow marking videos as watched even if I haven't and won't watch them
  • Allow hiding Premieres and Shorts

    • Premieres are literally worse than useless:

      1. You get tested about content you can't watch yet before it goes live
      2. You get live-stream potato quality until the Premiere ends and the video becomes available as a regular video

    • Shorts can be okay but are mostly attention-seeking low quality garbage

      The Shorts tab still works if I ever decide to use it, but I don't get Shorts in recommendations anymore which is what I want.

• FreshView for YouTube™
  • Hide all videos with a certain watch threshold (I set it to 10 %)
  • Disable hiding watched videos on channel pages
• Replace YouTube's Home with Subscriptions

  • Redirect the Home page to the Subscriptions page every time

    When I am in the mood to discover new content I turn this off for a session and visit the Home page to see what it mixed in for me, usually only to find it has mixed in old content I already watched (which is not hidden) or stuff that I am not interested in watching and the algorithm should know that.

I would like to combine these three to a single extension and add some extra features as well:

• Hide livestream VODs and hour+ long videos in general (setting for exceptions) I will never watch a live stream recording. The only long videos I care about are scripted videos from "documentary" channels like Summoning Salt or Technology Connections or super chill and enjoyable videos like those from Primitive Technology
• Hide super old videos (1 month +) in the video page recommendations panel I prefer to watch new content as it comes out. I f I find a channel whose catalog I want to browse through manually, I will do that, but in general, recommending old content is just attention bait and I don't want to see that.
• Hide videos and comments that are not in the languages I speak Not sure if I will use video titles for this or if there is an easy way to get the video metadata, but basically any video that is not in English or Czech should be removed and the same is true for the video page comments. I don't get why this isn't a feature on all user-generated content based sites already.

If I ever decide to actually do this this repository will be where it happens.