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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

I turned off "watch history" just now, and the home page still shows me (personalized) recommendations--which makes me sad because I hoped this would an easy way for me to quit my bad habit of scanning the recommendations when I am bored.

I used to welcome these recommendations, BTW, but they've been crap for the last 5 weeks or so.

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My self discipline hack was only navigating to my subscription feed, that way it "ends" and there is only a handful of videos to check each day.

But now they put Shorts into the subscription feed, a gateway into another endless feed. So I have blocked YT altogether until I can update my little chrome extension to remove them. When my executive function started to falter shorts could vacuum up so much of my attention. You can't remove them from that page either like you can on the homepage, and on the homepage you can only hide them for 30 days (why is that I wonder...)

You can also block Shorts with uBlock Origin.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube...

This is a superpower, I had uBlock but didn't realise it had the element picker feature. It took seconds to clear up the annoying parts of YT. Cheers for the recommendation.

Glad to hear it. Note how it can also re-style elements, eg restoring the old (non-bold) Youtube titles

  www.youtube.com##h3.title:style(font-weight: 400 !important;)

or un-float navbars:

  ! Disable floating navbars
  nytimes.com##.live-blog-above-main-content:style(position:absolute !important)
  latimes.com##header[data-element=header]:style(position:absolute !important)
  wired.com##.persistent-top:style(position:absolute !important)
  vice.com##.nav-bar:style(position:absolute !important)

You can even run a selection of scripts from a built-in library.[0] For instance, to disable Youtube rollover previews (including network traffic), you can interrupt the event handler with addEventListener-defuser:

  www.youtube.com##+js(aeld, /^(?:mousemove|pointermove|pointerenter|mouseenter|mouseleave)$/, buttons)

The best thing is to read the wiki (which I procrastinated for way too long!), especially the parts on filter syntax[1][2] and blocking modes[3]. I used uBO for years without appreciating its full power.

Maybe this whets your interest. Cheers

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Resources-Library

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...

[3] (watch this first: https://youtu.be/2lisQQmWQkY?t=114) https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode

Have you considered using an ublock origin filter?

    youtube.com##[page-subtype="home"]

Thank you for that.

I had `||www.youtube.com/|`, but it didn't always work.

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