Feeds Considered Harmful

Re:Feeds Considered Harmful by nexthash on Friday February 12, 2021 @07:11PM (#26120168)

The level of engineering put into creating feeds and distracting you from your purpose on some websites is terrifying. As part of my attempts to lessen my digital addiction, I wrote filters in ublock origin to block off anything on youtube that was distracting (auto suggestions, feeds). I had to target at least 4 different places to get the site looking clean.

There's the home page, the video suggestions at the side of a video you are watching, the video suggestions that pop up when a video ends, and much more. All equally distracting algorithmically-curated rakes that you have to step over. Here are some of the filter strings I used:

   www.youtube.com###secondary
   www.youtube.com###chips-below > .ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope
   www.youtube.com###primary > .ytd-two-column-browse-results-renderer.style-scope
   www.youtube.com##.ytp-endscreen-content

Unreal, in my opinion, how firm of a hold these kinds of sites can get over your brain through dopamine addiction and distraction.

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Re:Feeds Considered Harmful by oriel on Friday February 12, 2021 @07:23PM (#26120244)

Thanks for this! <3 immediately useful contributions.

I'm curious, how often do you have to update the selectors?

context: I've maintained various website parsers over the years, and it seems to be a constant struggle, depending on the targeted function.

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Re:Feeds Considered Harmful by nexthash on Friday February 12, 2021 @07:27PM (#26120275)

Fortunately, ublock origin does most of the targeting for me, although it focuses on ads not content. I'm pretty sure those people work night and day to keep the filters accurate. As for my filters, I've set them over the last couple years and haven't needed to change them since. Changing them probably corresponds to UI overhauls of the site. If it is too difficult or costly for me to filter, I usually just block the site outright.

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Re:Feeds Considered Harmful by oriel on Friday February 12, 2021 @08:18PM (#26120568)

I'm the same way with blocking.

That's good insight, and mostly aligns with my experience. In the past it was mostly js players and similar api calls via scraping/injection, which are more prone to changing their selectors and interfaces.

(for reference, this was as a FOSS maintainer for a project called BeardedSpice which tapped into a bunch of different media sites for background play/pause/next control).

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Re:Feeds Considered Harmful by suketk on Sunday February 14, 2021 @01:02PM (#26134498)

This is awesome, thanks for sharing! I personally use this Chrome extension so I don't have to bother updating the filters: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout.... YouTube was by far the biggest distraction for me.

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Re:Feeds Considered Harmful by rtkaratekid on Friday February 12, 2021 @10:11PM (#26121064)

Didn't even know I could do this with uBlock! I will most certainly be using this feature extensively. Thank you for the filters!

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