19
votes
YouTube without all the crap?
I'm a pretty regular YouTube watcher but if I accidentally glance down at the comments section, I know my night is going to be ruined.
I wondered if there is any kind of YouTube app or service that lets you watch and search for videos (even access my subscribed channels) but with less of the crap, ie. the comments and related videos, which just take you down a YouTube rabbit hole that you won't get out of for hours.
Cheers!
For android there's NewPipe.
I'd also like to back NewPipe! I use the legacy version and it's amazing. You can disable comments, import subscriptions, download videos for later in a variety of formats, features a really nice dark mode, feels very snappy even on my 10 year old Epic 4G with 512MB of RAM, it's open source, and it's conveniently available through F-Droid. It's a really good YouTube experience and I think it's exactly what OP is after.
As an aside, it's weird to me that there's already such a thing as a 10 year old Android phone.
Yeah, it really doesn't feel like it's been 10 years. Seems like yesterday it was on CNET as the best Android phone of the year, haha. For some reason, the late 2000's and today feel a lot closer together than the late 1990's did in the late 2000's, to me at least. Feels like we've slowed down in terms of progress and change.
Lowkey though, it really doesn't feel that dated to actually use, believe it or not. Cyanogenmod 10.1 still feels just as snappy on it today, and all the stuff I use my phone for - watching YouTube on the go, reading and commenting on Reddit and Tildes, listening to music, checking bus times and map info, and sshing into tilde.town and my university's servers - the experience is pretty much on par with a modern phone, with the exception I could multitask with more than just music, but that's the only thing I really care to multitask in the first place with. It's pretty good at emulating old systems and is surprisingly capable at the few native Android games I play too, Samsung really overspecced it in terms of GPU power for 2010.
Except your RSS subs are still unsorted (they're working on it)
Perfect, that sounds ideal!
How would one go about it? I'm not seeing any RSS links, on the desired channels or elsewhere.
Every YouTube channel has an alternate RSS link in the source, just look for:
So all you need to do is put a channel URL into an RSS reader and you will get the feed for that channel. Alternatively, if you go to your subscription manager page, you can scroll to the bottom and export an OPML file of all your subscriptions to import into an RSS reader.
Neat. Thanks!
Look up Iridium for YouTube -- it gives a nice dark theme, blocks comments on load (but you can still load them), and includes a bunch of other features I've come to accept as 'normal'
One thing I really like about it is that it pops out the video to the lower right corner when you scroll down.
Dude, just this morning I was thinking there's gotta be a plug-in or something that can block videos with Youtube Face thumbnails. I think I watched a trailer for something that was posted here, and practically every recommendation after that had someone with the most viscerally irritating expression. Constant exposure to this nonsense can't be great for one's sanity.
Anyway, on topic: there are lots of options; I can vouch for Iridium and ImprovedTube.
There's an extension that replaces comments with reddit posts of the video (if it exists), and there's an extension that just removes the comment section.
half the time reddit comments are identical.
All the time in /r/videos people and bots would steal the top youtube comment, and post it to reddit for the meaningless internet points.
I don't think replacing YT comments with reddit comments is such a big improvement....
That sounds like a lateral move at best
I just use uBlock Origin's cosmetic element-blocking to block elements on sites: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-picker
You have to be somewhat careful with it or you can end up blocking too much, and it can make you think the site's broken if you don't remember that you blocked something. It's fairly easy to remove the filters or toggle it off temporarily if you need to, though.
I was going to recommend the same thing. I have been blocking the recommended videos panel for over a month now and it has made my YouTube experience much better, especially watching videos for games. No more terrible thumbnails and clickbait titles!
DFTube sounds like what you're looking for!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distraction-free/mjdepdfccjgcndkmemponafgioodelna?hl=en
I personally use it to avoid going down endless rabbit holes.
I also use DFTube to hide the feed, subscriptions bar, related videos and any other annoying features and find that it's simple but does the job well!!
I use it together with BlockTube (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blocktube/) to block low-quality/offensive/creaters-that-simply-rub-me-the-wrong-way channels as well as remove entire categories I'd rather pretend didn't exist (cough vlogs/'haul'/'hustle'/videos-with-more-than-three-!!!-in-their-titles). Works like a charm.
https://invidio.us/ can work but you can also use uBlock Origin and block the elements for the comment section and recommended videos.
This has some kind of built-in content classifier that will not show all content.
E.g., I tried to watch the latest episode of Contrapoints and am told that:
Yeah, looks like the kind of thing I'm looking for but the filter isn't. But thanks all the same!
First, uBlock Origin can get rid of the ads. Then there’s another add on called YouTube Classic or something (sorry I’m on a phone) that restores their oldschool layout which I use. Makes it load faster.
Only slightly meeting your requirements, my favourite way to watch YouTube is astronaut