[treesknees]

In the past I've had some success with the SponsorBlock extension [1] available for Chrome, Firefox, iOS/Android, etc. It's a crowd-sourced list of videos and timestamps of sponsor shoutouts, and it will skip the video ahead past the ad for you. It implements some methods to keep your privacy so you're not just uploading a list of every watched video to their servers.

It's not perfect, being crowd-sourced it won't have brand-new videos in its database. It would be interesting to see if some ML/algorithm could buffer your video and detect the ad and skip it.

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

[lajosbacs]

I disagree -- it is perfect.

On a channel with 100k+ subscribers, the segments to be skipped appear almost instantly after the video is posted.

A bonus is that it skips repetitive content, not necessarily just ads.

[treesknees]

By its design it cannot be perfect. You are getting lucky that someone else with SponsorBlock watched the video before you and recorded the timestamp in the database.

[throwoutway]

That’s great, but I can’t help cringe at the “yet another extension”. I have so many for each little thing to block.

I wonder if Firefox can make the premise of these things “block X or Y or Z” and bake it into Firefox directly and then you subscribe to lists of them

[2Gkashmiri]

pair this with newpipe+sponsorblock on android at least and you have a "decent" youtube frontend that lets you watch without

1. getting sucked into the recomendations blackhole 2. stop getting used to in-video adverts and sponsorships