! YouTube Fix & Customization by Arch v1.8.4 ! (1/11) YouTube 4 Videos Per Row Fix (Home and Channel Pages) / YouTube Fix & Customization
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-row, #contents.ytd-rich-grid-row:style(display:contents !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;)
youtube.com##ytd-rich-grid-renderer, html:style(--ytd-rich-grid-posts-per-row: 5 !important;)
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
https://cinemaphile.com/watch?v=VIDEO_IDhttps://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
Edit: for comparison with the screenshot in TFA, this is my Home feed on a 14" MacBook. No Shorts, no Mixes, videos which are 85% (configurable) watched or more are hidden, stream VODs from channels which also stream, Movies and TV, and any channels "Don't recommend channel" refuses to work on, can all be hidden for you:
I still use AppleTV for pretty much everything else, but got a firetv stick just to use that. https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
So many websites are not tested on large monitors ffs.
From the top of my head I remember the previous Gumroad marketing website. It looked terrible. Everything was huge. Even the new one doesn't work that well on a large monitor:
More guidelines available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I also hate shorts, however, if this is to believed, we're for sure stuck with it: https://www.zebracat.ai/post/youtube-shorts-statistics
Like why do thumbnails have an invisible overlay that appears on hover over, hijacks the click and takes you to a support page about paid product placement?
I'm clicking on the thumbnail to watch the video not for a jarring detour off the youtube page to a boring help article. Honestly WTF. Maybe the UI designers don't use youtube themselves?
This freakin page:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10588440?nohelpkit...
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-shorts-bloc...
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/thi...
YouTubes frontend people just don't care about bloat, even when other Googlers are yelling at them to cut it out.
https://gist.github.com/insin/ef93c7d87b1f97f1c9411e6128d520...
http://www.sebastianmihai.com/idiocracy.html
and no wonder they write papers about "negative sampling" because they don't collect clean data. I made the mistake once of clicking on a video where a Chinese lady transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and oh my god I am suddenly scheduled for thousands of AI slop videos where some Chinese girl transforms into something on that show with the same music and with the same reaction shots.
There is an answer to the coldest cold start problem and that is have a hand curated collection of about 100 or so content pieces that are of broad interest and stupendously high quality. Instagram will show you videos that are amazing (like somebody cooking a fine meal under rustic conditions) if you're cold and Stumbleupon did the same back in the day. Now Instagram 2025 and Stumbleupon 2012 are not "cold" from the viewpoint of content the way YT Shorts is, but Google has the money to pay professionals to make something -- but their ideology is against it.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/
Greasyfork restricts what 3rd party libraries can be pulled in + you have the option of disabling automatic updates in your userscript manager.
https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/the-flywheel.html
and you might think, "I have (say) N=250,000 people playing game A and I can get them playing game B" you are probably going to be disappointed and very lucky if you get somewhere between 250 and 2500 of them playing your new game.
The two-sided market that makes YouTube impossible to dethrone makes it just as hard to change direction. For one thing you have to change the behavior of the viewers, but you also have to change the behavior of the creators, who know how to make videos, who know how to monetize them, all of that.
Myself I find I don't have a big attention span for short videos. I mean, Chinese girls doing the robot turn on my mirror neurons as much as anything. I can watch a 30 second video and get 30 seconds of fun but I don't want to watch another and another and another. However I cannot get enough of Techmoan talking about tape decks and such
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...
This filter list is the most up-to-date that I've found to hide shorts with uBlock Origin:
* download a release zip: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/releases (expand Assets). * go to chrome://extensions, toggle developer mode on * click load unpacked and select the file you unzipped the release
then you also have to watch out because chrome will, still time later, disable ublock origin. You have to go to your extensions page and find the option for 'Keep it for now' or something. Then you can continue to browse the internet like a real gee! Thanks ublock origin!
Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
Conway's law is expressed as "communication structure -> program structure" but it's actually even stronger than that; the arrow is bidirectional. If either the organization wants to break up the homepage into different teams, or if the organization has to have multiple teams work on their homepage for whatever reason, the homepage will reflect the organizational structure. YouTube falls into the second branch, which is that their home page is so complicated it has to be broken up between teams due to sheer organizational size. At YouTube's size you'll even have organizational distinctions you can't even see on the homepage like dedicated reliability engineering teams. At their scale I see at least six teams most likely, the "normal" video team, the shorts team, the sidebar menu, the hamburger menu, the search team, and the team responsible for the top-level all-Google interaction, plus multiple invisible ones like recommendation algorithm, reliability, possibly a dedicated performance team, etc.
You can, organizationally, try to put these all under one manager, but even when you do that it is a surprisingly uphill battle to maintain coherence, even when it is a goal, which it often isn't particularly. There's a lot of reasons few companies have the visual and design coherence of a ~2010 Apple, including arguably even 2025 Apple.
I have it turned on, but leave my mouse to the right of the screen if I don't want autoplay. It's habit now.
* Block shorts
* Adjust the number of thumbnails per line, thumbnail shape, border, etc
* Limit the length of titles/descriptions
* Force titles/descriptions into normal upper/lowercase
* Change the default player window size
* Show thumbnails actually in the video (from start, middle or end)
* Fix literally dozens of other annoyances
For Windows desktop under Firefox:
* "Nova YouTube" https://github.com/raingart/Nova-YouTube-extension script running under ViolentMonkey add-on. Nova YouTube is framework that puts modular YouTube fix scripts under one UI.
* "AdashimaaTube" script running under Stylus add-on.
* "Enhancer for YouTube" add-on
* uBlock Origin (of course)
For Android phones: Revanced Extended
For Android-based streaming sticks: SmartTube
Note: The set of add-ons & scripts I use in desktop Firefox is just what I happened to end up with at the time I finally got fed up a few years ago, looked for solutions, tried out several and settled on this mix as working for my needs and preferences. YouTube is constantly changing (usually for the worse), so the landscape of community add-ons and scripts is constantly evolving in response. You'll probably need to update to latest version on whatever solution(s) you use at least every couple months.
https://github.com/insin/control-panel-for-youtube/blob/cf18...
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id647728...
[0] https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions
ytd-rich-grid-renderer div#contents {
/* number of video thumbnails per row */
--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;
/* number of Shorts per row in its dedicated section */
--ytd-rich-grid-slim-items-per-row: 6 !important;
}
If someone can recommend a better alternative for custom CSS, I'd be interested to hear it. I guess Tampermonkey could work, if you have that.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/custom-css-by-denis...
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCS0N5ba...
... works but:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UULFS0N5...
... is 404.
I'm guessing it's only a feature of playlist URLs which that SO answer is about, not RSS feed URLs.
https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-par...
Relevant articles:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/simplicity-vs-choice/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/short-term-memory-and-web-u...
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/working-memory-external-mem...
I'm more than a little disgusted by how moronic we are made to look now that every video tile caters to the dumbest person with the most base instincts. If YOU aren't SHOCKED by this TITLE how will we get you to CLICK IT? :O :O :O MUST SEE this video BEFORE YOU CONTINUE READING HN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvFZjo5PgG0
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFS0N...
Filmed in HI8 480p, but YouTube's 480p looks like mud and doesn't do the uncompressed analog source justice. You can see this when you select 4K
You're excuse for doing something shitty is... that someone else will? What does another person even have to do with it?! Seriously, let them have the blood on their hands. You can't even assume that someone else will! If you do it, you guarantee that it happens. Even if it is likely that someone else will, there's a big difference between a certainty. This is literally what creates enshitification.
Plus, the logic is pretty slippery. Certainly you're not going to commit crimes or acts of genocide! You were "just following orders"[0], right? Or parents often say to their children "if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?" Certainly the line is drawn somewhere, but frankly, it is the same "excuse" given when that extreme shit happened, so no, I won't accept it.
You have autonomy[1], that makes you accountable. You aren't just some mindless automata. You may not be the root cause, but at best you enable it. You can't ignore that you play a role.
And consider the dual: if you don't make it better, who will?
I believe you have the power to make change, do you? Maybe not big, but hey, every big thing is composed of many smaller things, right? So the question is which big thing you want to contribute to.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
[1] https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incent...
On Smart TV devices, there is One large ad on the first row, then 2.5 video thumbnails on the second row, no other thumbnails.
Looks like this...
https://www.google.com/imgres?q=youtube%20app%20on%20smart%2...
This guys posts only shorts: https://www.youtube.com/@hydronyc and he's got the best/funniest plumbing video you YouTube.
The bad shorts are when you scroll to the next short after watching one - never do that, only watch shorts from subscriptions.
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery: https://pastebin.com/gLXiqKyd
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery -- Dark Mode: https://pastebin.com/6PF3dCXH
(Both in my HN profile page.)
I'm reading via the first now.
I've recently re-skinned Algolia's search to match this. What the heck, posted:
(Own tool, local-only, inquire if you're interested, email in profile.)
Source currently is CNN, which really isn't a particularly good news source or article selection. I'm working on a version based on The Guardian's RSS feeds.
I find the result far more readable and calming than any current online news presentation.
Starting point was CNN's "lite" page, which turns out to be unordered headlines. First cut organised those heads by section, the link above adds lede lines to those stories, with more prominence and significance to earlier stories and selected sections, less to the fluff bits (sport, entertainment, food, style, etc.).
it does jank up a bit sometimes (i can't change the youtube region, and some other defects), but it's sufficiently good that i keep it.
e.g., https://www.t-mobile.com/offer/binge-on-streaming-video.html
> All detectable video streaming is optimized for your mobile device so you can watch up to three times more video using the same amount of high-speed data.
