8 ms·

Shutting down the letsblock.it project and its official instance

321 points by imbnwa 3y ago

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
What’s the reason? Cost?
- davidmurdoch 3y ago
  > This project is making the commercial web more bearable, but I'd rather spend my energy on making the non-commercial web more attractive. Sounds like they got bored.
  - mock-possum 3y ago
    ‘Bored’ isn’t what I’d read into this - it sounds more like a shift in priorities to me.
  - ramon156 3y ago
    Inatead of asking for a new maintainer they "shut it down", making it a more attractive project to pick up. Smart
  - boesboes 3y ago
    More like 'Frustrated' if you ask me
  - 63stack 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - davidmurdoch 3y ago
      Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.
      - davidmurdoch 3y ago
        No Big Lebowski fans on HN? The commenter called me a liar, there's just no dialogue worth having with this person.
  - nalinidash 3y ago
    > This project is making the commercial web more bearable, but I'd rather spend my energy on making the non-commercial web more attractive. I want to support communities and applications that respect their users and value what we have to say. These websites don't need letsblock.it rules, because they don't shove low-quality content and anti-features down our throats. Does this sound "bored"?
    - davidmurdoch 3y ago
      Yeah, perfectly. That's why I suggested it. It sounds like he was super interested in one thing, 2 years passed, and now he isn't interested in that one thing and wants to do something else. Bored. There's nothing wrong with that. Being bored isn't a bad thing.
      - maxcoder4 3y ago
        I don't think I would call that bored. It's say this project let them grow enough that they realized that what they really want is something different than what they're working on. But to me "bored" sounds like a bad thing, so maybe I'm just arguing semantics.
        davidmurdoch 3y ago
        Boredom isn't bad; its often how we become creative and create novel things. Not really the same quality of boredom as what I'm talking about, but this video from Veritasium is still relevant, I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKPwKFigF8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKPwKFigF8U
- mtlynch 3y ago
  >This project is making the commercial web more bearable, but I'd rather spend my energy on making the non-commercial web more attractive. They don't spell it out explicitly, but I think the author realized that they were effectively acting as an enabler. The letsblock.it tool encouraged customers to use workarounds so that they could still continue engaging with big tech companies that are so customer-hostile. Instead, the author is choosing to let big tech make their experience worse, and customers have more incentive to seek out non-commercial alternatives.
  - Handprint4469 3y ago
    ding ding ding! Exactly. If the commercial enshittified web bothers you to the point of trying to fix it, at some point you'll realize that it's a quixotic crusade, and that you don't even want to engage with the content offered on these platforms anymore. Why would you? The shittier the platform, the shittier the content. The future of good online interactions is in small, closed, well-maintained and asynchronous communities.
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      > Why would you? The shittier the platform, the shittier the content. Paradoxically that's the way some people find salvation. They have to hit the bottom. Instead of making their experience of digital abuse more palatable what they need is more YouTube, more Facebook, more Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. Until something inside snaps and their soul pukes. I'd totally get it if the author realised they were just prolonging users' misery. As Nietzsche said; "What is shaky, push it!"
    - blindstitch 3y ago
      The last line resonates with me as the discord I hang out in is my only source of good recommendations anymore. Almost all of the good stuff I've seen in the past years comes from there. My algorithmic feeds by comparison are all high-viewcount trash for idiots. That onion article from years ago about the lowest common denominator dropping at an alarming rate has only gotten more true over time.
  - 3y ago
politelemon 3y ago
I hadn't heard of this until now, but it seems (seemed) like a decent idea. From what I can tell it's a UI that lets you configure what you'd like to block on certain sites, and there can be community contributed templates. You get a URL, you then add that URL to your UBO filters. It actually reminds me of nextdns.
- vidyesh 3y ago
  I heard of this project on HN sometime last year, I never used their instance but I have been using their YouTube UBO filters and even contributed to fix some after some YouTube updates. And the UBO filters are fairly easy to maintain which is why I was a little surprised that they are shutting down this project, I understand the instance might be hard to maintain but the filters can very well be maintained I think. Either way, there seems to be other alternatives that do similar things. I will likely be using those then.
- discardedrefuse 3y ago
  If by UBO you mean uBlock Origin, you can do one better. Use it's eye dropper tool to select elements of a web page to block. I use is it to block Youtube premium nags, comments, side bar of other content, etc.
doncho 3y ago
[flagged]
crest 3y ago
I have to applaud taking even "failed" projects serious enough to come up with a reasonable exit plan (unlike some large companies).
- andsoitis 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - danShumway 3y ago
    > If those communities and apps already respect their users, then do they need this author? What difference would they make? What? Does software development just go away if you respect your users? Do people not want 3rd-party Mastodon or Matrix clients just because the orgs aren't running advertisements on their servers? Is the idea that I install Linux and everything just magically works because Linus isn't trying to sell me something? Building services that respect users is still work. It's still a thing that people can help with and support, either directly or through 3rd-party tooling and extensions.
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      > Do people not want 3rd-party Mastodon or Matrix clients No, there isn't a reasonably sized market for many 3rd party Mastodon or Matrix clients.
      - Bjartr 3y ago
        What does "reasonably sized market" mean in this context, and what does it imply about projects that lack them? More specifically, why does there being some people that want those things mean something other than some people want those things? It almost sounds like you're trying to have a different conversation.
        andsoitis 3y ago
        > What does "reasonably sized market" mean in this context, and what does it imply about projects that lack them? Projects that lack a reasonably sized market are fine, but their impact will be confined. It is a tradeoff you choose to make. > More specifically, why does there being some people that want those things mean something other than some people want those things? It almost sounds like you're trying to have a different conversation. Because if you want to have an impact, you should choose where and how to spend your time. You should pour a different amount of effort and resources into doing something for 1 person vs. 800 people vs. 1,000,000.
gcanyon 3y ago
I have to wonder what the creator has against Mike Boyd? "Nebula: filter out videos by creator... To get the code for a creator, go to their page... For example, Mike Boyd’s page..." Filtering Nebula in general seems like a low-probability use-case?
- Y-bar 3y ago
  I don’t know who that is. But I am a Nebula subscriber and I do wish there were a way to hide a few channels in the app.
  - gcanyon 3y ago
    Fair point -- I think Mike Boyd is the "how long will it take me to learn this obscure thing" guy. I can see why that might not be to everyone's taste, but he seems relatively innocuous. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The obvious question to me in a situation like this is: how does Nebula provide preference? And honestly, I get it -- I am a subscriber, and I have a hard time getting a feed of the people I'm interested in, to the extent that I just do it to support the creators, I don't actually use Nebula. I continue to watch Nebula creators on YouTube, which has got to be a bottom-tier result for them.
  - magnetowasright 3y ago
    Same here. I have discovered so many new creators on Nebula I never would have found otherwise^* but there's definitely channels I just never want to see. * I never watched youtube as a primary source of entertainment like pretty much everyone uses youtube. I just had channel pages bookmarked (invidious instance links usually lol) so I never stumbled upon relevant channels even on the off chance something not terrible was in the recommendations which I always ignored. I got onto nebula because almost all of the very small handful of creators I watched were on it and it was cheap enough to justify the subscription lol
    - itopaloglu83 3y ago
      I have a similar issue with some YouTube channels that despite liking their content I cannot subscribe to their channel because they publish dozens of shorts every week. So I just have a memory list of channels I visit every so often to see if they published anything. The shorts practically broke the subscription system for me.
gcanyon 3y ago
It seems futile to filter Amazon products by name, but it's interesting that it seems to be able to filter YouTube shorts. Given that after two years there are only about 30 templates, I'm guessing it's too difficult to actually accomplish something useful given the tools provided. That's not a knock on the creator -- off the top of my head I don't know how I'd provide an easy way to customize/filter/modify web content -- I'm just saying I understand the shutdown given the apparent lack of traction.
- blindstitch 3y ago
  Ublock origin's filter syntax is very good but has limitations that make it borderline impossible to filter out some elements and also very brittle. For example, this one is one of 20 lines of filters to get rid of Shorts: `www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer a.yt-simple-endpoint path[d^="M10 14.65v-5.3L15 12l-5 2.65zm7.77-4.33"]:upward(ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer)` The frontend code is so abstracted that as soon as it is updated it is probably going to break. With userscripts you can filter these things with more sophisticated functions, but it slows down the interface more than UBO. In google's case that type of frontend abstraction (imo) is not intentionally designed to break interface filtering but it has that effect. For other companies like facebook and amazon they actively make filtering elements harder, because of their anti-adblock strategies, but they are all casting a wide enough net that element filtering is affected too. It's a long game of cat and mouse.
  - itopaloglu83 3y ago
    The way YouTube forces shorts on users who likes long form content is really frustrating. uBlock filters are great but doesn’t solve the fundamental issue here. There should be a way to opt out of YouTube shorts.
    - KennyBlanken 3y ago
      It's not just the length that's frustrating, it's the near total lack of control. Miss the first few seconds because your sound was off/low? Gotta watch the whole fucking thing to the end and then let it replay because there's no slider or restart/rewind button. All because either they purposefully wanted to force us to do that (view count boosting I guess, or it's more likely to be remembered?) or some google exec got Shorts barely done enough to show off at a board meeting and say "done, made something that competes against reels!" and then ran off to work on something else to try and boost their stature in the company.
blindstitch 3y ago
It was a great project but it's kind of pissing in the wind. These things break constantly as new awful features get added. And there's not much you can do with ublock about high-level frontend changes that are the real problem, like google switching to infinite scroll or removing the plus operator. I can understand getting worn down.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  It really is an arms race, and bigger/more well-known services like ublock origin are in the front lines of responding to the changes.
- rcpt 3y ago
  I feel like you could use an AI to keep your blockers up to date
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    I don't think the ai will help you bite their corporate masters long term.
  - kumio 3y ago
    honestly it looks promising given that a lot of people is going to use it, the AI will learn faster to remove all kinds of ads and unwanted stuff.
andsoitis 3y ago
> It has been running for more than two years now and its official instance currently serves more than 800 active users and hundreds of anonymous visitors every day. We achieved this thanks to dozens of contributors and financial sponsors who I am grateful for. Failing to find product/market fit is a good time to reflect upon one's assumptions, biases, and perspective. Another piece of unsolicited constructive feedback I would offer the author is that from where I sit, I think they would be more successful if they are motivated and inspired by a more positive and strategic outlook.
- monkey_monkey 3y ago
  Unsolicited, generic, drive-by advice, given with almost no understanding of the context and people involved is generally worthless.
  - idontknowifican 3y ago
    i love how he hides from being an asshole via calling his behavior “constructive ideas”. imagine being a child raised with this cognitive dissonance. “if i do not think i am mean i can not be mean” is fundamentally the go to for bullies, this person included
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      I suggest relaxing, lest your comment become funny, because it describes itself better than the mind it is trying to read. Want an "asshole" version? i.e. the honest version? (note, I'm not the guy you're diagnosing and mind-reading, just want to highlight how absurd your conception of OP is) That was one of the strangest deprecation announcements I've ever seen, foaming at the mouth, blaming massive external factors (companies...pursuing money? is an odd thing to be surprised by), way overly dramatic lies about ex. Google "content-blocking extensions with MV3 under false security claims and planning to lock down the OS and browser with DRM." I have no love for Google, but as soon as someone starts saying "MV3 [makes] false security claims", I remember MV3 is just Safari's more private content blocking from years ago. When I see "planning to lock down the OS and browser with DRM.", I'm like "wait...he can't be describing...", click through, and see he's describing the one-off public announcement of beginning a prototype of a browser API that a user is human (transparent!), that was cancelled, publicly, extremely shortly after, because of reactions like this. (thankfully!) Much like the constructive version of this comment, I bet they'd be able to keep going if they didn't see their project in such epic terms, given they framed giving up in terms of companies continuing to pursue money and Google.
romseb 3y ago
At least for the YouTube filter templates, https://unhook.app https://unhook.app is a great alternative.
- amarcheschi 3y ago
  I'm looking forward installing this on brave as soon as I get my hands on my pc, my attention span is so low that sometimes when I open up YouTube in incognito, I get overwhelmed. (I often do that to not mess with my actual recommended comment if I know I just need to search a video or two for one offs) The homepage shows a lot of crap and clickbait thumbnails, and especially thumbnails with people having weird expressions and staring at me makes my brain completely lose context and lose focus for a few seconds, so that I have actually to think again about what I was gonna search, and sometimes I can't even remember it
  - itopaloglu83 3y ago
    I wish YouTube had a premium feature called the focus mode where we can just watch our subscriptions with no hassle.
    - amarcheschi 3y ago
      Although I hope something similar will exist, I do believe the push towards promoting bullshit and shallow content is too strong
      - itopaloglu83 3y ago
        You’re right and that push for shallow content just frustrates me. I wish at least they took my subscription fee and distributed to the channels and videos I watched.
    - eddd-ddde 3y ago
      I use New Pipe for this. Also no ads.
lawn 3y ago
I've been using this as a good way to filter and configure the familys browsers. For example to filter unwanted YouTube videos oe hiding shorts. Is there another easy way to sync blocklists like this?
throw310324 3y ago
This was a failed idea from the start. Furthermore, the "commercial web" is not so bad. Sometimes I'm not sure if peoole like this dude truly live in a bubble. I mean, you have to take HN with a grain of salt, opinions here not representative at all and not better than the ones from the general population.
- frankzander 3y ago
  Well ... Bubbles are everywhere ... you may live in one too? So maybe I am. "not so bad" ... means what? It's bad but I got used to it. For me this is always the beginning of the end ;-)
  - throw310324 3y ago
    Well, I've been using (surfing?) the web since the late 90s and sure, some things have become more commercial, there are new walled-gardens, some ads are annoying, cookie banners annoying but really you can do everything you could do back then an 100x more. Would I want to go back to the so-called golden, idealized age of the web in the late 90s/early 2000s? No. So, what I'm saying is that it hasn't deteriorated. The only thing that's happening is that HN is an echo chamber.
nickdothutton 3y ago
Reading this submission and the comments here, I am struck by how much pressure build-up there is now against the ensh*ttified web. Surely something good much come of this, and if it is via the mechanism of creative destruction… so be it. It may not come this year or next, but within 5 years? I could see that happening.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ryandrake 3y ago
What a cool project and much-needed idea! Had I known about it, I'd probably be user #801. It's a shame it's shutting down. The modern web is exceedingly user-hostile, and browsers are not doing a good job as the User's Agent. Browsers are the ones that should provide users control over what they see, what they use, and what they skip. But, instead of giving the user the choice and respecting the user's preferences, browsers are acting like dumb canvases, allowing web developers to just spew whatever they want at the user. We shouldn't need extensions and third party hacks like this to keep control over what our browser does. And we should not accept browsers that just enable the web developer to do whatever they want. Rant over. Awesome project, sorry to see it go, wish I had a chance to experiment with it.
throwaway81523 3y ago
I didn't know about this project and had for a while been thinking of writing something like it. Now maybe I know better. Oh well, thanks for all the fish.
- gnyman 3y ago
  Something along the same line is StopTheMadness (get the new Pro version). Also on some pages disabling JavaScript makes the experience better (although nowadays most pages just break), but if you don't have a way to easily disable it per-website you could check out my pet project https://noscript.it https://noscript.it Combined it with STM's automatic url-rewrite and you can get automatic per-site noscript even on the iPhone.
  - throwaway81523 3y ago
    Shutting off JS often makes things worse. What I really want is an ultra-aggressive Reader Mode that doesn't get fooled by so many sites. That means it has to know how to extricate the relevant text from a bunch of specific sites. At one point I had a special proxy just to clean up a few sites that I was reading frequently, but it broke. I also fooled around with running a headless Firefox under Selenium to get the text out, but I got bored with that. I might try to get that going again, or might try to figure out how browser plugins work.
    - eek2121 3y ago
      I've been toying with the idea of using headless firefox with UBO as a filtering proxy, but nothing has come of it so far. I'm actually focused more on writing a quality search engine that ranks pages based on the amount of anti-user behavior, dark patterns, etc. a site has. Have a really crappy site with tons of ads, popup modals, and trackers? No clicks for you! So I'm doing something similar to what the author is doing I guess.
OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
I am sorry to hear this. I have been a satisfied user since I found out about this project on HN a few months ago. It has kept Amazon and a lot of other garbage out of my search results for starters. I use uBlock Origin extensively but have never been able to learn to write my own filters. letsblock.it handled a lot of that seamlessly. My sincere thanks to the developer for his valiant efforts.
Quenhus 3y ago
I'm sad to learn this projet is shutting down. The maintainer (xvello) contributed a lot to my uBlock dev filter [0]. We tried to reduce the time lost on deceptive and low-quality content for search engine users. Generative ML and aggressive SEO technics hit hard. Bye letsblockit and I wish you well @xvello. [0] https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter
yinser 3y ago
They’re not wrong that generative AI is enshittifying content but ironically they could leverage it to keep up with the template generation letsblockit could benefit from.
Funes- 3y ago
I think it's time we build real alternatives to dystopian web services rather than try to salvage or parasitize them in any way.
nipperkinfeet 3y ago
Sad to see it go. Thanks for all the years! I used it a lot to hide YouTube Shorts garbage.
musicale 3y ago
> This project is making the commercial web more bearable, but I'd rather spend my energy on making the non-commercial web more attractive. I want to support communities and applications that respect their users and value what we have to say. These websites don't need letsblock.it rules, because they don't shove low-quality content and anti-features down our throats. Interesting idea - I like the non-commercial web and am inspired by attempts to invigorate it, and yet I also get the feeling that its ship sailed when everyone left for the commercial web. I don't see them (us?) coming back.
edpichler 3y ago
I just discovered this tool. Amazing and inspiring!

321 points by imbnwa 3y ago

rrr_oh_man 3y ago

What’s the reason? Cost?

davidmurdoch 3y ago
> This project is making the commercial web more bearable, but I'd rather spend my energy on making the non-commercial web more attractive. Sounds like they got bored.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  ‘Bored’ isn’t what I’d read into this - it sounds more like a shift in priorities to me.
- ramon156 3y ago
  Inatead of asking for a new maintainer they "shut it down", making it a more attractive project to pick up. Smart
- boesboes 3y ago
  More like 'Frustrated' if you ask me
- 63stack 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - davidmurdoch 3y ago
    Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man.
    - davidmurdoch 3y ago
      No Big Lebowski fans on HN? The commenter called me a liar, there's just no dialogue worth having with this person.
- nalinidash 3y ago
  > This project is making the commercial web more bearable, but I'd rather spend my energy on making the non-commercial web more attractive. I want to support communities and applications that respect their users and value what we have to say. These websites don't need letsblock.it rules, because they don't shove low-quality content and anti-features down our throats. Does this sound "bored"?
  - davidmurdoch 3y ago
    Yeah, perfectly. That's why I suggested it. It sounds like he was super interested in one thing, 2 years passed, and now he isn't interested in that one thing and wants to do something else. Bored. There's nothing wrong with that. Being bored isn't a bad thing.
    - maxcoder4 3y ago
      I don't think I would call that bored. It's say this project let them grow enough that they realized that what they really want is something different than what they're working on. But to me "bored" sounds like a bad thing, so maybe I'm just arguing semantics.
      - davidmurdoch 3y ago
        Boredom isn't bad; its often how we become creative and create novel things. Not really the same quality of boredom as what I'm talking about, but this video from Veritasium is still relevant, I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKPwKFigF8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKPwKFigF8U
mtlynch 3y ago
>This project is making the commercial web more bearable, but I'd rather spend my energy on making the non-commercial web more attractive. They don't spell it out explicitly, but I think the author realized that they were effectively acting as an enabler. The letsblock.it tool encouraged customers to use workarounds so that they could still continue engaging with big tech companies that are so customer-hostile. Instead, the author is choosing to let big tech make their experience worse, and customers have more incentive to seek out non-commercial alternatives.
- Handprint4469 3y ago
  ding ding ding! Exactly. If the commercial enshittified web bothers you to the point of trying to fix it, at some point you'll realize that it's a quixotic crusade, and that you don't even want to engage with the content offered on these platforms anymore. Why would you? The shittier the platform, the shittier the content. The future of good online interactions is in small, closed, well-maintained and asynchronous communities.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    > Why would you? The shittier the platform, the shittier the content. Paradoxically that's the way some people find salvation. They have to hit the bottom. Instead of making their experience of digital abuse more palatable what they need is more YouTube, more Facebook, more Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. Until something inside snaps and their soul pukes. I'd totally get it if the author realised they were just prolonging users' misery. As Nietzsche said; "What is shaky, push it!"
  - blindstitch 3y ago
    The last line resonates with me as the discord I hang out in is my only source of good recommendations anymore. Almost all of the good stuff I've seen in the past years comes from there. My algorithmic feeds by comparison are all high-viewcount trash for idiots. That onion article from years ago about the lowest common denominator dropping at an alarming rate has only gotten more true over time.
- 3y ago

politelemon 3y ago

I hadn't heard of this until now, but it seems (seemed) like a decent idea. From what I can tell it's a UI that lets you configure what you'd like to block on certain sites, and there can be community contributed templates. You get a URL, you then add that URL to your UBO filters. It actually reminds me of nextdns.

vidyesh 3y ago
I heard of this project on HN sometime last year, I never used their instance but I have been using their YouTube UBO filters and even contributed to fix some after some YouTube updates. And the UBO filters are fairly easy to maintain which is why I was a little surprised that they are shutting down this project, I understand the instance might be hard to maintain but the filters can very well be maintained I think. Either way, there seems to be other alternatives that do similar things. I will likely be using those then.
discardedrefuse 3y ago
If by UBO you mean uBlock Origin, you can do one better. Use it's eye dropper tool to select elements of a web page to block. I use is it to block Youtube premium nags, comments, side bar of other content, etc.

doncho 3y ago

[flagged]

crest 3y ago

I have to applaud taking even "failed" projects serious enough to come up with a reasonable exit plan (unlike some large companies).

andsoitis 3y ago
[flagged]
- danShumway 3y ago
  > If those communities and apps already respect their users, then do they need this author? What difference would they make? What? Does software development just go away if you respect your users? Do people not want 3rd-party Mastodon or Matrix clients just because the orgs aren't running advertisements on their servers? Is the idea that I install Linux and everything just magically works because Linus isn't trying to sell me something? Building services that respect users is still work. It's still a thing that people can help with and support, either directly or through 3rd-party tooling and extensions.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > Do people not want 3rd-party Mastodon or Matrix clients No, there isn't a reasonably sized market for many 3rd party Mastodon or Matrix clients.
    - Bjartr 3y ago
      What does "reasonably sized market" mean in this context, and what does it imply about projects that lack them? More specifically, why does there being some people that want those things mean something other than some people want those things? It almost sounds like you're trying to have a different conversation.
      - andsoitis 3y ago
        > What does "reasonably sized market" mean in this context, and what does it imply about projects that lack them? Projects that lack a reasonably sized market are fine, but their impact will be confined. It is a tradeoff you choose to make. > More specifically, why does there being some people that want those things mean something other than some people want those things? It almost sounds like you're trying to have a different conversation. Because if you want to have an impact, you should choose where and how to spend your time. You should pour a different amount of effort and resources into doing something for 1 person vs. 800 people vs. 1,000,000.

gcanyon 3y ago

I have to wonder what the creator has against Mike Boyd? "Nebula: filter out videos by creator... To get the code for a creator, go to their page... For example, Mike Boyd’s page..." Filtering Nebula in general seems like a low-probability use-case?

Y-bar 3y ago
I don’t know who that is. But I am a Nebula subscriber and I do wish there were a way to hide a few channels in the app.
- gcanyon 3y ago
  Fair point -- I think Mike Boyd is the "how long will it take me to learn this obscure thing" guy. I can see why that might not be to everyone's taste, but he seems relatively innocuous. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The obvious question to me in a situation like this is: how does Nebula provide preference? And honestly, I get it -- I am a subscriber, and I have a hard time getting a feed of the people I'm interested in, to the extent that I just do it to support the creators, I don't actually use Nebula. I continue to watch Nebula creators on YouTube, which has got to be a bottom-tier result for them.
- magnetowasright 3y ago
  Same here. I have discovered so many new creators on Nebula I never would have found otherwise^* but there's definitely channels I just never want to see. * I never watched youtube as a primary source of entertainment like pretty much everyone uses youtube. I just had channel pages bookmarked (invidious instance links usually lol) so I never stumbled upon relevant channels even on the off chance something not terrible was in the recommendations which I always ignored. I got onto nebula because almost all of the very small handful of creators I watched were on it and it was cheap enough to justify the subscription lol
  - itopaloglu83 3y ago
    I have a similar issue with some YouTube channels that despite liking their content I cannot subscribe to their channel because they publish dozens of shorts every week. So I just have a memory list of channels I visit every so often to see if they published anything. The shorts practically broke the subscription system for me.

gcanyon 3y ago

It seems futile to filter Amazon products by name, but it's interesting that it seems to be able to filter YouTube shorts. Given that after two years there are only about 30 templates, I'm guessing it's too difficult to actually accomplish something useful given the tools provided. That's not a knock on the creator -- off the top of my head I don't know how I'd provide an easy way to customize/filter/modify web content -- I'm just saying I understand the shutdown given the apparent lack of traction.

blindstitch 3y ago
Ublock origin's filter syntax is very good but has limitations that make it borderline impossible to filter out some elements and also very brittle. For example, this one is one of 20 lines of filters to get rid of Shorts: `www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer a.yt-simple-endpoint path[d^="M10 14.65v-5.3L15 12l-5 2.65zm7.77-4.33"]:upward(ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer)` The frontend code is so abstracted that as soon as it is updated it is probably going to break. With userscripts you can filter these things with more sophisticated functions, but it slows down the interface more than UBO. In google's case that type of frontend abstraction (imo) is not intentionally designed to break interface filtering but it has that effect. For other companies like facebook and amazon they actively make filtering elements harder, because of their anti-adblock strategies, but they are all casting a wide enough net that element filtering is affected too. It's a long game of cat and mouse.
- itopaloglu83 3y ago
  The way YouTube forces shorts on users who likes long form content is really frustrating. uBlock filters are great but doesn’t solve the fundamental issue here. There should be a way to opt out of YouTube shorts.
  - KennyBlanken 3y ago
    It's not just the length that's frustrating, it's the near total lack of control. Miss the first few seconds because your sound was off/low? Gotta watch the whole fucking thing to the end and then let it replay because there's no slider or restart/rewind button. All because either they purposefully wanted to force us to do that (view count boosting I guess, or it's more likely to be remembered?) or some google exec got Shorts barely done enough to show off at a board meeting and say "done, made something that competes against reels!" and then ran off to work on something else to try and boost their stature in the company.

blindstitch 3y ago

It was a great project but it's kind of pissing in the wind. These things break constantly as new awful features get added. And there's not much you can do with ublock about high-level frontend changes that are the real problem, like google switching to infinite scroll or removing the plus operator. I can understand getting worn down.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
It really is an arms race, and bigger/more well-known services like ublock origin are in the front lines of responding to the changes.
rcpt 3y ago
I feel like you could use an AI to keep your blockers up to date
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  I don't think the ai will help you bite their corporate masters long term.
- kumio 3y ago
  honestly it looks promising given that a lot of people is going to use it, the AI will learn faster to remove all kinds of ads and unwanted stuff.

andsoitis 3y ago

> It has been running for more than two years now and its official instance currently serves more than 800 active users and hundreds of anonymous visitors every day. We achieved this thanks to dozens of contributors and financial sponsors who I am grateful for. Failing to find product/market fit is a good time to reflect upon one's assumptions, biases, and perspective. Another piece of unsolicited constructive feedback I would offer the author is that from where I sit, I think they would be more successful if they are motivated and inspired by a more positive and strategic outlook.

monkey_monkey 3y ago
Unsolicited, generic, drive-by advice, given with almost no understanding of the context and people involved is generally worthless.
- idontknowifican 3y ago
  i love how he hides from being an asshole via calling his behavior “constructive ideas”. imagine being a child raised with this cognitive dissonance. “if i do not think i am mean i can not be mean” is fundamentally the go to for bullies, this person included
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    I suggest relaxing, lest your comment become funny, because it describes itself better than the mind it is trying to read. Want an "asshole" version? i.e. the honest version? (note, I'm not the guy you're diagnosing and mind-reading, just want to highlight how absurd your conception of OP is) That was one of the strangest deprecation announcements I've ever seen, foaming at the mouth, blaming massive external factors (companies...pursuing money? is an odd thing to be surprised by), way overly dramatic lies about ex. Google "content-blocking extensions with MV3 under false security claims and planning to lock down the OS and browser with DRM." I have no love for Google, but as soon as someone starts saying "MV3 [makes] false security claims", I remember MV3 is just Safari's more private content blocking from years ago. When I see "planning to lock down the OS and browser with DRM.", I'm like "wait...he can't be describing...", click through, and see he's describing the one-off public announcement of beginning a prototype of a browser API that a user is human (transparent!), that was cancelled, publicly, extremely shortly after, because of reactions like this. (thankfully!) Much like the constructive version of this comment, I bet they'd be able to keep going if they didn't see their project in such epic terms, given they framed giving up in terms of companies continuing to pursue money and Google.

romseb 3y ago

At least for the YouTube filter templates, https://unhook.app https://unhook.app is a great alternative.

amarcheschi 3y ago
I'm looking forward installing this on brave as soon as I get my hands on my pc, my attention span is so low that sometimes when I open up YouTube in incognito, I get overwhelmed. (I often do that to not mess with my actual recommended comment if I know I just need to search a video or two for one offs) The homepage shows a lot of crap and clickbait thumbnails, and especially thumbnails with people having weird expressions and staring at me makes my brain completely lose context and lose focus for a few seconds, so that I have actually to think again about what I was gonna search, and sometimes I can't even remember it
- itopaloglu83 3y ago
  I wish YouTube had a premium feature called the focus mode where we can just watch our subscriptions with no hassle.
  - amarcheschi 3y ago
    Although I hope something similar will exist, I do believe the push towards promoting bullshit and shallow content is too strong
    - itopaloglu83 3y ago
      You’re right and that push for shallow content just frustrates me. I wish at least they took my subscription fee and distributed to the channels and videos I watched.
  - eddd-ddde 3y ago
    I use New Pipe for this. Also no ads.

lawn 3y ago

I've been using this as a good way to filter and configure the familys browsers. For example to filter unwanted YouTube videos oe hiding shorts. Is there another easy way to sync blocklists like this?

throw310324 3y ago

This was a failed idea from the start. Furthermore, the "commercial web" is not so bad. Sometimes I'm not sure if peoole like this dude truly live in a bubble. I mean, you have to take HN with a grain of salt, opinions here not representative at all and not better than the ones from the general population.

frankzander 3y ago
Well ... Bubbles are everywhere ... you may live in one too? So maybe I am. "not so bad" ... means what? It's bad but I got used to it. For me this is always the beginning of the end ;-)
- throw310324 3y ago
  Well, I've been using (surfing?) the web since the late 90s and sure, some things have become more commercial, there are new walled-gardens, some ads are annoying, cookie banners annoying but really you can do everything you could do back then an 100x more. Would I want to go back to the so-called golden, idealized age of the web in the late 90s/early 2000s? No. So, what I'm saying is that it hasn't deteriorated. The only thing that's happening is that HN is an echo chamber.

nickdothutton 3y ago

Reading this submission and the comments here, I am struck by how much pressure build-up there is now against the ensh*ttified web. Surely something good much come of this, and if it is via the mechanism of creative destruction… so be it. It may not come this year or next, but within 5 years? I could see that happening.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ryandrake 3y ago

What a cool project and much-needed idea! Had I known about it, I'd probably be user #801. It's a shame it's shutting down. The modern web is exceedingly user-hostile, and browsers are not doing a good job as the User's Agent. Browsers are the ones that should provide users control over what they see, what they use, and what they skip. But, instead of giving the user the choice and respecting the user's preferences, browsers are acting like dumb canvases, allowing web developers to just spew whatever they want at the user. We shouldn't need extensions and third party hacks like this to keep control over what our browser does. And we should not accept browsers that just enable the web developer to do whatever they want. Rant over. Awesome project, sorry to see it go, wish I had a chance to experiment with it.

throwaway81523 3y ago

I didn't know about this project and had for a while been thinking of writing something like it. Now maybe I know better. Oh well, thanks for all the fish.

gnyman 3y ago
Something along the same line is StopTheMadness (get the new Pro version). Also on some pages disabling JavaScript makes the experience better (although nowadays most pages just break), but if you don't have a way to easily disable it per-website you could check out my pet project https://noscript.it https://noscript.it Combined it with STM's automatic url-rewrite and you can get automatic per-site noscript even on the iPhone.
- throwaway81523 3y ago
  Shutting off JS often makes things worse. What I really want is an ultra-aggressive Reader Mode that doesn't get fooled by so many sites. That means it has to know how to extricate the relevant text from a bunch of specific sites. At one point I had a special proxy just to clean up a few sites that I was reading frequently, but it broke. I also fooled around with running a headless Firefox under Selenium to get the text out, but I got bored with that. I might try to get that going again, or might try to figure out how browser plugins work.
  - eek2121 3y ago
    I've been toying with the idea of using headless firefox with UBO as a filtering proxy, but nothing has come of it so far. I'm actually focused more on writing a quality search engine that ranks pages based on the amount of anti-user behavior, dark patterns, etc. a site has. Have a really crappy site with tons of ads, popup modals, and trackers? No clicks for you! So I'm doing something similar to what the author is doing I guess.

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago

I am sorry to hear this. I have been a satisfied user since I found out about this project on HN a few months ago. It has kept Amazon and a lot of other garbage out of my search results for starters. I use uBlock Origin extensively but have never been able to learn to write my own filters. letsblock.it handled a lot of that seamlessly. My sincere thanks to the developer for his valiant efforts.

Quenhus 3y ago

I'm sad to learn this projet is shutting down. The maintainer (xvello) contributed a lot to my uBlock dev filter [0]. We tried to reduce the time lost on deceptive and low-quality content for search engine users. Generative ML and aggressive SEO technics hit hard. Bye letsblockit and I wish you well @xvello. [0] https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

yinser 3y ago

They’re not wrong that generative AI is enshittifying content but ironically they could leverage it to keep up with the template generation letsblockit could benefit from.

Funes- 3y ago

I think it's time we build real alternatives to dystopian web services rather than try to salvage or parasitize them in any way.

nipperkinfeet 3y ago

Sad to see it go. Thanks for all the years! I used it a lot to hide YouTube Shorts garbage.

musicale 3y ago

> This project is making the commercial web more bearable, but I'd rather spend my energy on making the non-commercial web more attractive. I want to support communities and applications that respect their users and value what we have to say. These websites don't need letsblock.it rules, because they don't shove low-quality content and anti-features down our throats. Interesting idea - I like the non-commercial web and am inspired by attempts to invigorate it, and yet I also get the feeling that its ship sailed when everyone left for the commercial web. I don't see them (us?) coming back.

edpichler 3y ago

I just discovered this tool. Amazing and inspiring!