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I faced the same problem. Acknowledging that, not all content in YouTube is bad. There are educational videos, genuine news contents without political bias which is very hard to find outside YouTube and many other good relaxing, entertainment stuff.
NoSuggest lets you only follow the YouTube channels you like and removes all types of recommendation YouTube has. So you don't waste time on watching things which you never wanted to watch anyways.
UI is very simple. You add your favourite channels in "Channels" tab and latest 5 videos per channel excluding shorts would appear in "Feed" tab. "Search" tab is to search for specific videos to watch and "Saved" tab is to bookmark any video you want to watch later. Intention of NoSuggest is to provide whatever is necessary to extract whats good from YouTube all inside NoSuggest and leave out bad parts.
NoSuggest works in any devices. Install it as an app (PWA) in android and iPhone, or simply open in browser in laptops. No sign-in, no account creation or no card details. NoSuggest won't even ask your name. Total privacy for the users.
Parents can add the channels and save some educational videos and lock it with the pin for kids mode. Kids won't be able access unwanted additive contents inside NoSuggest.
Completely free, no string attached. Source available in Github through NoSuggest website.
I would love genuine feedback. Thank you very much for your attention on this matter.
Discussion (61 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Another point: it would make sense to be able to access all videos from a channel rather than the last five videos.
And a small thing: the channels in the Channels tab are not clickable - seems counterintuitive.
On streams: I never thought about it as an use-case. Thank you for bring it up. Will look into it.
Showing 5 videos/channel is intentional. Idea is to only surface latest videos and not re-create a scroll feed like Youtube. But if I get more feedback from users that it is too restrictive then I can easily make it to recent 10 or 15 videos. What do you feel as an appropriate number of recent videos per channel is?
Good catch on the channels tab. Currently it just manages your list. Tapping a channel to jump to their feed section is a neat idea though, will look into adding it.
I think 5 videos per channel is an appropriate limit. I understand what you want to achieve with this. But suppose I want to watch an older video from the same channel. A simple 'Expand' button would do the trick. Otherwise I'd have to go to YouTube which I wanted to avoid in the first place.
And I think you don't have to stick to a certain number of videos as the only type of limit. How about showing as many videos as would fit within the width of the window?
The Expand idea is interesting though, will think about it. Thank you.
Thank you so much for creating this! I'll try it out for a few days and provide feedback.
- I'd recommend adding a way to add multiple channels at once. The current workflow works great for adding a single channel, but it was tedious to add more than one channel. I imagine most people using this service will add many channels at the beginning.
- I'd like to be able to keep the same channel selections on multiple devices. Accounts and/or sync would probably be a lot of overhead to implement. Maybe some kind of unique link that contains a list of channels, like how PCPartPicker creates unique links for each build?
- Someone else mentioned this, and I'd like to +1 it - clicking the channel in the Channels section does nothing, when I'd expect it to show the channel's videos.
Other than that, I love it! Great work!
an option for no thumbnails, or just the first screen instead ot thumbnails + lower case titles also helps lower the lizard brain pull even further.
And one more benefit that NoSuggest will not have as much ads as YouTube. Although I am using YouTube official player, meaning they could serve ads but definitely would be far less than what you see in YouTube app.
[0]: https://tournesol.app/
I use it with AdGuard and it not only blocks the side cards of video recommendations on what to watch next, it also blocks comments which can be an endless pit of doomscrolling on its own.
This way if you want to watch a video the only way to do so its to search for it, otherwise you won't ever get anything else recommended to you.
In any case, it's great to see the family of FBPurity and Antigram being joined by a new tool.
>I would love genuine feedback. Thank you very much for your attention on this matter
Maybe a harsh thing to say, but I'd say that the approach is wrong. I think that the approach by FBPurity and Antigram is more practical. Just hook into the website itself, hide the dopamine-production inducing elements, such as "shorts", hide recommendations, but keep the UI the same.
Both work, even though they require turning on "desktop mode to be full-featured (even though even on mobile versions some features wotk).
For people already using RSS feed readers, this is another way to achieve the same result (i do that with miniflux)
Hoping NoSuggest would be useful to you in any ways.
I think a better angle to push for is having accounts so that data can be shared among multiple devices.
Where? I couldn't find any link to the source on the website.
Anything that can:
- break the algorithm
- help reduce time on there
- discover organically
Would have a huge product market fit. We are all zonked from the algorithm saturation.
One thing I recently started doing is use the before: search filter
ex) playthroughs before: 2010
I think its really neat that we've had Youtube for such a long time its become sort of a Archive.org on its own
I especially take great joy in watching people with low subscriber count or Youtube videos from before 2015
I feel like that was the inflection point where you just had a lot of freedom to speak your mind without the permanently online crowd getting offended by everything.
And date filter: that is a fun way to use YouTube. The search tab in NoSuggest lets you search for specific videos without recommendations creeping in around them, so you can do that kind of intentional digging. Date filtering isn't there though. And the feed only shows the latest 5 videos per channel so it won't surface older content.
There are a lot of approaches to recommendations, and I imagine the biggest players having a mix of them, so that _something_ sticks. Some of them might rely on data / features / models which are recalculated "once every X", so they don't react immediately to your input.
There's also patterns which are normal to some people but seem insane to others: "oh, I've liked this show so much I watched it 3 times!".
I highly appreciate you using the app. Please provide your feedback. Thank you.