When you need 4 extensions (counting ublock as well) to make a site useable, maybe it is time to reconsider what site you spend your time on?
When you need 4 extensions (counting ublock as well) to make a site useable, maybe it is time to reconsider what site you spend your time on?
Ya we are sick and addicted.
Not only do I need the above 4, I need a separate browser because YouTube breaks with Firefox, private tabs to not taint my preferences when I watch one-ofs, and other addons such as a channel and video blocker.
Interesting, I'm using Firefox, what breaks with YouTube for you? I also like PocketTube for subscription management as I find that much better than trying to trawl through the mountains of BS on the homepage.
It’s two things on YouTube. Certain videos (seems to not occur for super popular videos) dont load. Just a white browser screen and black area for the video, but no video, suggested videos, or text at all. The second is searching. Certain terms that seem unremarkable and unrelated will leave out the channels I’m after. Eg. “Cop body cam videos” will only suggest videos from 1-3 channels, or “Hardcore WoW clips” won’t include the channel I’m after (the most obvious and largest for this search). Using Brave or Chrome produces the expected/desired behavior (but isn’t fixed with some other browsers or local YouTube clients).
There's an unsolved problem of some content only existing in youtube. Until that's solved, using 4 extensions is one of the best workarounds to making it usable.
What a silly point of view. Instead what should they do? Post comments like this on HN?
They clearly enjoy watching and digesting information from YouTube- the biggest platform for this. But people need to make money from it hence the ailment these these plugins remedy
>Instead what should they do?
Read a book, touch grass, etc.
>They clearly enjoy watching and digesting information from YouTube- the biggest platform for this.
I'd probably enjoy heroin but I still choose not do take it because I know it's not good for me. What's your point?
> Read a book
I wanted to say something flippant, but dang with the halo on my shoulder urges me otherwise.
so here goes: books can also full of filler crap and useless and outright wrong material. just because it's a different medium doesn't make it any better for wasting time. in fact, a bad book can waste weeks of your life whereas a bad video on YouTube could waste about 10 minutes.
ultimately I approve of any tools that allow one to extract the information that they are after without paying the cost of giving more attention to somebody than they've earned.
Being a different medium does in fact make it much better for wasting time. Skipping a paragraph in a book takes 100 milliseconds. Referring back to a previous paragraph to understand a seeming contradiction does too. Pausing a book requires no effort, and no effort to return to the place where you were. Books can be excerpted and quoted, not just in other books, but also in conversation or in videos, in a way that videos just can't. (Talking-head filler scripts can be quoted that way, but the video can only be quoted in video or still images.) Errata sheets, errata websites, and later editions of books can correct errors in earlier editions. Books are much smaller and therefore easier to archive than videos, making them less likely to get lost.
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death is an extended and very persuasive reflection on precisely this difference in the tendencies of these two media, although particularly attuned to the form of video that was popular at the time, TV, which had commercials and didn't even have pause and rewind.
somehow I doubt that the person I was replying to would consider ebooks as a book.
videos can be viewed in double speed, and they can be rewound. they can be watched over and over if needed. they can describe/demonstrate information in ways that books can only project into 2 dimensions. a picture is worth a thousand words - well imagine 24 of those per second.
certainly with STEM subjects, nothing beats a good animation.
even for things like history/geography, I find animations and progressive disclosure to be much more engaging and easier to remember than dry words on a page.
Books at least go through a minimal amount of vetting before they are published, and there are meaningful differences between forms of media. As McLuhan wrote: "The medium is the message".
Lol, no they don't.
If you have a pdf with enough words in it, you can go from that to a published paperback on Amazon in 15 minutes.
Those aren't books. They're printed blogs you pay for.
Every book can be published as a pdf. That doesn't mean that every pdf is a book.
> Those aren't books. They're printed blogs you pay for.
If you are going to make an outlandish claim like this, at least try to post some criteria to defend. Not doing so has led to you not realizing that you can't without also excluding works of classical literature like Sense & Sensibility (which was self-published by Jane Austin).
There's also more direct problems with the arbitary line you are trying to draw, like best-selling book The Martian, which was originally published as a blog, then self-published as an e-book, then officially published as a book by a major publisher.
1. Some blogs are better than most books.
2. Some carefully-written ebooks now are self-published, and I don't care if their cover design and promotion campaign aren't as professional.
What a textbook (sorry, printed blog) example of a No True Scotsman.
No true Scottsman!
Actually its implication: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implication
Maybe in the 1900s. Not any more
so if they're good, they're books. if not, they're not _really_ books.
>Read a book, touch grass, etc.
There's a ton of useful information that's only available in Youtube videos and not books such as DIY tutorials, repairs, etc.
Unfortunately, many helpful videos also include useless fluff. E.g. a "good" 10 minute video on how to disassemble a Samsung dryer to replace the heating element also has 2 extra minutes of "click my link to Nord VPN" and "please smash that Like button and subscribe". Therefore, tools using AI to remove the extra time-wasting fluff can help. There is no book in the public library or Amazon that will show the tricky steps to repair a Samsung dryer. It's Youtube videos uploaded by random people that has information like that.
My friend learned how to use her new Apple Watch by watching Youtube videos. Yes, there's official Apple documentation but it's hard to learn from a wall of text with static screen shots. In contrast, watching youtubers do live demonstrations with their fingers manipulating the screen accompanied by voiceover narration is easier to understand.
EDIT reply to: >When you've saved "years of watching" by using sponsorblock and 2x speed, that's not how you use YT. Sponsorblock saves 25% at most.
Your math is incomplete in your characterization of the gp you replied to because he also mentioned "DeArrow (de-clickbaits thumbnails and titles). That tool saves 100% of the watch time when the re-titled videos instantly informs him he can totally skip it.
When you've saved "years of watching" by using sponsorblock and 2x speed, that's not how you use YT. Sponsorblock saves 25% at most.
To be clear, I am not saying that youtube has no use, but the commenter I originally responded to is clearly in excess of whatever that reasonable level is.
How exactly does one "use YouTube," in your opinion then? You also forgot the effects of the other extensions than just SponsorBlock, even 2x speed (I watch at higher than that usually) saves 50% immediately. You presume I don't also do those things you listed, I now have more time to do them because of the time saved, not less.
You watch and enjoy the content that you like, find useful or otherwise enjoy instead of min-maxing your way to not supporting the platform or creators that are spending their time creating that content.
If the platform and creators are incentivized to waste my time, then why would I support that? I watch and enjoy the content even more knowing that I am not wasting my time.
This is where the snide touch grass comment above was awkwardly pointing. If you feel like you're wasting your time and can't be bothered to do so in a holistically responsible way (supporting the creators at the very least) then perhaps your time would be better spent doing something else.
i.e. you may be wasting your time already.
I probably shouldn't have wandered into a thread that's ostensibly about ripping off content creators to begin with. I'll take my moral high horse elsewhere lol.
Why would I care about responsibility when I waste my time, much less "holistic responsibility?" Sounds like your moral systems are different from others' in this thread.
I totally agree, you're absolutely right about that. have a good one.
They shared a list of plugins that might be useful to other people, so the comment has value. I recently found out about the "press to 2X speed" and I love it. Does that mean I should go touch grass because I use it in a non-stock way? Or are you the ultimate decider on the maximum limit of plugins or hacks?
It’s the seventh commandment, don’t you know?
7. Thou shalt not use more than two browser plugins.
I agree with you about there not being anything wrong with watching YT videos (no virtue signaling about "grass" here) but at the same time, couldn't you just watch the video on 1.5x - 2x? You can easily skip the VPN ad reads, I don't know, how valuable is your time, really, at the level of minutes? I know that there will be people on here that have autistic levels of min-max optimization of their entire lives like some kind of techno-vampires or something but if you're watching a couple dozen videos, plus or minus, a day is this really enough time to be worth a bunch of micro-optimization?
“Touch grass”
This turn of phrase says everything to be honest.