5 Sites and Extensions to Tweak YouTube for a Better Experience
YouTube is awesome. It’s the best video-streaming website for general purpose videos, and it’s choc-a-bloc full of great features. But with a few tweaks, it can be even better.
The many problems with YouTube are well documented, from a comments section that often draws trolls and miscreants, to more benign annoyances like the cluttered and distracting interface. Most of these can be solved with the use of extensions and add-ons for a browser. Some of them require third-party websites, but it’s still easy to do.
1. Healthy Productive YouTube (Web): Remove Distractions, Focus on Good Content
Userscripts are an easy option to customize how a website appears to you. You can use Stylish
to install Healthy Productive YouTube in your browser. The script
removes the “Trending” tab from the homepage and replaces it with
content that you already subscribe to and want more of.
Similarly, it removes distractions like recommended videos, “Watch
Next”, and the comments section, so that you are simply watching the
video you came to watch, and don’t get involved in an argument with a
stranger on the internet.Download: Healthy Productive YouTube (Free)
2. Tune by Google (Chrome): AI to Remove Toxic Comments
Tune uses Perspective, a machine-learning tool that “reads” comments and figures out how they might affect the conversation. You can set Tune to show it all, blaring, loud, medium, low, or hide it all. In the settings, you can choose to filter only toxic comments or try the “experimental” filter which filters comments that are profane, sexually explicit, insulting, or identity attacks.
Tune works on more than just YouTube, and takes a little while to work on each page. After a video page loads, wait about 10 seconds before you scroll down to check the comments. Tune will have spruced things up by then.
The extension also works for several other comments-based sites on the internet, including Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter.
Download: Tune for Chrome (free)
3. Mirror The Video (Web): Flip Any Video Horizontally
What you see from a person’s demonstration on screen can be difficult to follow, since it’s an inverse image. When they are facing you and go right, you instinctively go left. A simple flip of the video will have them say “right” and mean your right.
Mirror The Video works fast to flip any YouTube clip. Simply change the “youtube.com” part of the video to “mirrorthevideo.com” and the app will take care of the rest.
4. Yout-ube (Web): Make Any Video Full-Screen, Ad-Free, and Repeat
YouTube has a lot of non-skippable ads that show up at the beginning,
end, or even sometimes in the middle of a video. If you’d rather not
have your experience ruined by these, just add a dash between the
letters “t” and “u” in the URL, and press enter.
Yout-ube takes any video and turns it into a full-screen video without ads, and on endless repeat. Yout-ube also works with videos banned in your region, so you can use it as an effective bypass
The endless repeat part might not be particularly useful all the time, but if you have a clip that you need to keep showing for the duration of an event, this would be a quick and easy way to do it.
5. Bookmark It (Chrome, Firefox): Add Bookmarks Within Videos
After you install the extension and sign up, while watching any video, press “b” and add a note. The moment you press Enter, it’ll be automatically saved and the video resumes playing too. It’s perhaps the smoothest and most seamless way of saving points in a video, while still enjoying your viewing experience.
You can check out these bookmarks later on any browser, as Bookmark It syncs across computers by using your Google login.
Download: Bookmark It for Chrome | Firefox (Free)
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