YT-Shell is a browser extension that helps you stay focused while browsing YouTube. The extension ensures that you are not distracted by recommendations and other stuff with the goal of spending your time on 'quality content'. The extension works by injecting CSS & JS that hide things from the website. There are various settings for blocking stuff including blocking recommendations, hiding upcummies and thumbnails: see features.
The extension is currently only available in the Microsoft Edge Add-ons store because I don't want to pay for the registration fees for the Chrome Web Store. If you want to install the extension for other chromium-based browsers like Chrome or Brave follow the manual installation instructions below.
Get from Microsoft Edge Add-ons store
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Download and unpack the latest release archive from GitHub or clone the repository.
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Go to the extensions page of your chromium browser. On Chrome and Brave the extension page can be found in the menu on upper right corner.
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To install a downloaded extension, developer mode must be enabled. Find the 'Developper mode' toggle and enable it.
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Press 'load unpacked' and select the extension folder to load and enable it.
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The extension is now installed! Go to YouTube to test it out and open the settings panel to tweak the settings.
Recommendations are the main reason the YouTube-algorithm makes you keep watching more and more. While the algoritm can sometimes do a great job of recommendating videos you might like, most of the time the videos are really distracting and aren't really what you're looking for. Recommendations can sometimes even be harmful. This option blocks recommendations in all parts of the website.
There's also an option for blocking 'explore' feeds like the trending or gaming pages wich can be distracting sometimes.
One of the simplest steps to avoid getting distracted is to disable notifications. This option will hide the notification panel and all of the notification-bells next to the subscibe button.
Upcummies, on YouTube subsciber and (dis)like counts, are the things that make social media so addicting. People are constantly looking how much subscribers or likes they got like you can represend everything by a number thats actually meaningless. This option will completely hide the upcummies on YouTube.
Thumbnails can be very disturbing and misleading due to a phenomenon called 'clickbait'. These days, there are hardly any videos on YouTube that don't have a clickbaity thumbnail. By simply hiding those thumbnails and only showing the title of the video (wich unfortunately can also be clickbaity) you'll may find yourself less distracted. Additionally you can hide avatars as well.
This project is licensed under the MIT License.