alt Hacker NewsShow HN: NoSuggest – Watch YouTube without the recommendation algorithm
NoSuggest is a quiet act of resistance against YouTube algorithms always trying to pull you into a loop of unlimited videos in turn into unlimited screen time. With unending side cards of videos, auto-play, what's next suggestions, YouTube shorts and notifications, users will be doom scrolling for many hours in a day.
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.
Comments
This is a welcome output, it is quite tiring to be stuck on Youtube for hours.
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.
I like watching streams from a few authors, but I'm not interested in their videos. Your website now shows only videos. Could you also add streams? And it would also be useful to have a setting for hiding streams and videos - for people like me.
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.
This is exactly what I have been looking for. It's way too easy to get lost in the auto-suggested videos and shorts on YouTube. It was also always a hassle keeping up a local Invidious instance up and running in my homelab.
Thank you so much for creating this! I'll try it out for a few days and provide feedback.
What are the biggest differences between this and going into your google settings to disable history/recommendations? I personally feel like that works well, on all platforms and removes shorts as well.
I feel this would have more success if you use 1:1 (or very close) the actual Youtube template. Many have attempted "clones" and so-on, never really understood why it doesn't look the SAME, that way there is no switching curve.
I made a podcast feed from YT with podsync so that I can take videos on the go. I use the playlist feature to pull them down. this feels like a great way for me to pull out only select videos. a direct way to put vids on a feed would be great, but understand if that doesnt make any sense. thanks for putting it together.
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.
Great idea, but requires learning a new UI, doesn't fetch "streams"...
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.
This is fantastic, I've been using the DF youtube browser extension for a while but will definitely start using this. It's great there's no accounts or sign-up needed.
You can just disable history in YT. It disables all the recommendations. Home and Shorts tabs are fully empty, so only Subscriptions tab is available.
hi, my feedback is that I would like to be able to create an account, because I have my browser (Firefox) set to always clear all cookies and history on shutdown, so when I re-open this later I assume all my added channels would be lost, and would need to start from scratch. If it wasn't for that, I think it's great and would use it.
> Source available in Github through NoSuggest website.
Where? I couldn't find any link to the source on the website.
Is this using the youtube per-channel RSS feeds?
For people already using RSS feed readers, this is another way to achieve the same result (i do that with miniflux)
I find youtube, but also netflix, prime, Spotify etc some of the weirdest things in tech; for me they all are complete shite. How is it possible? I vote up and down stuff; how can I vote down sappy drama and then get recommended the same drama the next refresh? How can it recommend movies, shows, clips I JUST watched? How does any of this not lead to frustration? I was listening to a generated playlist at a small dinner party and it put in music I literally down voted and hate. There are 1000s of people working at these companies ; I don't know why more than 1 dev and Claude code are working at netflix in IT as it's just complete garbage. Maybe someone can explain it here.
Is there alternative discovery algo? I dont want to be suggested same things, I want to see something new
This is desperately needed. I currently use https://freetubeapp.io/ but this seems to have more flexible deployment options.
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If you would like to keep the native youtube.com experience, in addition to disabling the watch history, which gets rid of the first screen recommendations, you can also use a filter list such as https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/YouTub....
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.