 Everybody loves to complain about YouTube. They've removed the dislike button, there's too many ads and too much clickbait now. Maybe you're tired of hearing about Raid Shadow Legends or YouTube Shorts gave you brain rot. And look, I get it, YouTube has made some pretty questionable decisions over the years. But what if I were to tell you that you can actually fix all of these issues and, dare I say it, make YouTube great again? Now, I understand that we're not going back to the glory days of YouTube, but in this video, I at least want to show you how you can improve a lot of the annoyances that I usually have with YouTube and basically just make the whole YouTube experience much better. Now, first things first, we're going to restore the YouTube Dislike button. And we're going to do this with an extension called Appropriately Return YouTube Dislike. And this is a browser extension. I'll leave links to all of these in the description, but you can install these on Chrome or Firefox, whichever browser you're using. And once you install it, this is how it's going to look. We'll go to a video and the dislikes are now back and better than ever. So now you can actually dislike a video and see your opinion actually matter in real time. I'm sure as you know, this was almost a universally dislike change from YouTube. So it's good to have that back and now you can actually see if the video is trying to scam you or not. That's always nice. Now, of course, YouTube doesn't really want to tell you the amount of dislikes a video has anymore. So this is not going to be the exact number. But the way that they get this number is they take some of the historical data. So dislike data before the dislike button was removed. And every time you dislike a video with this extension enabled, it will track it and kind of keep a database logged of all the dislikes and then extrapolate those numbers from there. So it's not an exact science. And so this won't be the exact number of dislikes a video has, but at least based on my own videos, I can tell you that this number is actually pretty accurate. And now if you go to a movie trailer or something that Reddit doesn't like this week for whatever reason, you can now see the nice fat dislike bar just like how it used to be. And if you found this useful, feel free to leave a dislike on this video. Now I like to talk to you about the sponsor of this video. Just kidding, but isn't it really annoying whenever YouTubers do that and you have to skip ahead about a minute into the video? There are some channels that just have a sponsor on every single video and it gets really annoying, especially when they're talking about red shadow legends or better help, things that you will never ever use in a million years and you just get tired of skipping past them. Well, that is what this extension sponsor block is for. And basically what sponsor block will do is it will automatically skip past a sponsor. So we have a sponsor here in this Linus Tech Tips video. And as soon as it hits this little green spot in the video and the screen spot over here, that is a sponsored segment. And as you can see, it has just skipped past that. So that is extremely useful. You no longer have to waste minutes, which turn into hours of your life, watching stupid sponsorships. So that's already very useful, but sponsor block can do a lot more than just block sponsors. So if I mouse over this, there is now a skip to highlight button. And you know how some videos just have this extremely long intro before they actually get to the point of the video. I've been guilty of this before. Sometimes I do a little bit too much yapping, but sometimes you're in a hurry. You just want to get to the point of the video and you can click skip to highlight. And this pink part here on the seek bar is the highlighted section. So you can just skip immediately to that and bypass a lot of the fluff that most YouTube videos have these days. Now, that's not all. There's even more that sponsor block and skip over. So if you go into the settings here, we can see a complete list of everything that you can skip. And some of this you may want to enable some of it. You may want to disable, but sponsors are not the only annoying section of the video. Sometimes they go too long about an interaction reminder. You know, they tell you to like the video or subscribe or leave a comment, all this stuff that you already know how to do. And sometimes they start rambling on for 30 seconds about this and you're just like, can you get to the point of the video? That's when you can turn this on and skip past that completely. You can also skip self-promotion if they're talking about donating to them or buying some merchandise that can also be useful. With sponsor block, you can even skip past things like the intro or end cards. So there is just a ton of time you can save with this extension and I really recommend it if you're just tired of the monotony of modern YouTube videos. Look, you can even skip over the joke segments when some YouTubers try to be funny and it really lands flat on his face. I mean, I wouldn't know anything about this, but maybe some YouTubers you watch are just not funny. You can skip over that. So of course, any skippable parts of the video will be highlighted accordingly on the seek bar. But these segments, of course, are not automatically made. They are kind of crowdsourced by different users around the internet. And since this is a big video, it's already been done. But if you're watching a smaller video from your favorite creator with only a hundred subs, you can do it yourself by starting a segment right here and then uploading it to the database and marking it as a sponsor or whatever else. And that's why I like about this extension. The data is all crowdsourced and you can contribute yourself. So I find this extension pretty helpful. And I understand some people don't have a problem with the sponsors like YouTubers have to get a big somehow. So if you're watching a channel and their sponsors are not that annoying, you can just whitelist a channel. So I can click this button and add this channel to the whitelist. If I don't mind the sponsors on this one, it's not too intrusive. You can just add that. And of course, just support your favorite creators financially if you are able to donate. Link is in the description, obviously. All right, we've gotten rid of sponsors, but now we have to deal with clickbait. If you're like a lot of people on YouTube, you find the clickbait a little bit annoying sometimes. Sometimes it's done tastefully, but other times you just have no idea what this video is about. Like, I really have no idea what this video, your internet is too fast going to be talking about. And all of the colorful thumbnails sometimes just give you a misleading portrayal of the actual video. And so sometimes you just want to cut through all the BS and see what the video is actually about. And that's why I would recommend this extension called the arrow. So this is basically an anti-clickbait extension. And if we enable this right away, you can see all of the flashy thumbnails are gone and all of the sensationalized titles are gone as well. So this video about the faster internet, it now gives me a much more informative title. How to make an informed decision about buying faster internet. And that way you can make a much more informed decision on if you actually want to watch this YouTube video or not. And of course, this extension will also help you save a little bit of time on YouTube because YouTube videos look a lot less enticing when you just have these plain sort of thumbnails right here instead of the bright colorful visuals that you usually see. So if you go to a channel like mine and turn off the clickbait, well, things look a lot different. First of all, my channel looks a lot more boring, but a lot of people might prefer this. Now personally, I don't actually use this because I don't mind a little bit of clickbait. As long as it's not completely misleading about what the video actually is about, then I don't really mind a nice looking thumbnail. But I know this annoys a lot of people. So I highly suggest this for those types of people and you can scale it back a little bit. If you still like the thumbnails, but you want more accurate titles, then you can disable this and still get all the cool thumbnails. One nice thing it also does is it can remove the big capital letters from all the titles that a lot of YouTubers, including me, like to put in. It just makes the video titles a little bit less sensationalist. Now this extension is actually created by the same person who did sponsor block. So similarly, it is also crowdsourced. And so if you're going through here and you see a video that has not been done yet. So this title is the same as the original. You can go in here and basically add an alternate title yourself and upload it to the database. And so that's how these alternate titles are generated. They're all written by other users as well. One more thing I have to tell you is that technically this is a paid extension. So whenever you try to download this, the creator asks you for a dollar in order to purchase the extension. And it actually is optional. If you don't want to pay the money, you can still use the extension. You just have to wait a little bit before you can actually activate it. So don't be scared off by the $1 price tag. You can still download it without paying for it, but really it's only a dollar. So if you really find this extension useful, just throw the creator a dollar. He's made a couple of very useful extensions and he just wants to make some money. So support him if you can. Next up, one of the most common complaints I hear about YouTube is how distracting it is. How many times have you come to YouTube just to watch one or two videos and then basically get sucked down the rabbit hole of all these recommended videos on the side? And you only meant to spend like five or 10 minutes on YouTube, but you end up spending an hour or two. Especially if you're trying to get some work done, this can be really annoying. And this has happened to me countless times. And so I really recommend downloading this extension called Unhook. And what this is is basically a distraction for YouTube. So if I turn this on all of a sudden, all the videos on the sidebar are gone and you can tweak around in the settings how strict you want it to be. You can also hide the home feed as well. So if you don't want to get all these recommendations, you can turn these off and you can just redirect straight to subscriptions. But besides just removing distractions, this is a really useful extension just for tweaking around YouTube a little bit. I'm sure everybody has some features that you find annoying with YouTube and maybe you want to hide the end screen cards or hide the comments. If you spend too much time reading that, you can even do things like hide the explore page or the trending page because who uses that? Honestly, you can hide the shorts tab, disable autoplay and you can even hide those annoying search results. You know, when you search for something and just give you some irrelevant recommended videos as well, you can turn those off. So there are a ton of useful options in here and I would really recommend just going through this and customizing YouTube to your heart's content. And honestly, YouTube is just so much nicer without all the recommendations. So now you can just browse YouTube and not waste your entire life on YouTube. So I highly recommend this if you're the kind of person who gets easily distracted like I do. Now, next up, we have to talk about ads on YouTube because I'm sure you're aware but YouTube has gotten really crazy with the ads recently and they've really been pushing just tons of ads on you and also they've recently gone to war against ad blockers as well. So you might be wondering what to do now and I would say my recommendation is to get YouTube premium, pay the $15 a month monthly fee and never have to see another ad ever again. Okay, are they gone now? So if you actually want to block ads, I would definitely recommend using UBlock Origin and this ad blocker specifically. Don't accept any imitations. You want UBlock Origin, of course, is available on Chrome and Firefox. But I'm sure you've seen some popups basically telling you that the age of ad blockers is over and maybe you've just accepted that ad blockers aren't going to work. And I will say it's been kind of a cat and mouse game with UBlock Origin versus YouTube. So YouTube will find some way to circumvent these ad blockers and then these ad blockers in turn will find some way to circumvent YouTube's new ads. And so sometimes whenever YouTube rolls out some new ads or some new updates, it will stop working for a little while. But if you already have UBlock Origin installed and you're still seeing ads, what you want to do is go into the settings here and go to Filter Lists and click the Update Now button. You may also have to manually click these in order to update the lists. But once you do this and reload the browser, you should be good and not see any more ads. So I personally haven't seen any ads since they started cracking down on ad blockers. But I'm also going to leave a link to this in the description. So this page basically tells you if UBlock Origin can bypass the latest YouTube anti ad block script. And if this says yes, then you should just be good to go. If it says no, you might have to wait a little bit for them to update and kind of fight back against YouTube's new changes. Because as of when I'm recording this video, ad blocking in YouTube is still definitely possible. And also you shouldn't be getting any of the slowdown with UBlock Origin as well. So it has ways to circumvent that. And a lot of the big hullabaloo about YouTube slowing down videos if you have an ad blocker enabled, that was actually caused by some faulty ad blockers. So there were a couple of ad blockers that had a bug that just slowed down YouTube videos. But UBlock Origin has never had this problem. So again, that's why I recommend this one specifically. But I'll also leave a link to this one as well. This is a giant thread of basically troubleshooting. If your ad block is still not working, then I would check this page out because there's probably a way to fix it. You just have to maybe clear the cache or something like that. But I'll leave a link to this in the description if you're still having trouble. Now starting in June of 2024, I know that Google Chrome at least is going to nerf ad blockers. So UBlock Origin may be less effective then. And I'm not sure if it will still block ads in the future. So hopefully cross your fingers. But this is a change that is only coming to Google Chrome and Chrome based browsers like Microsoft Edge. And so if in the future you're having problems with the ad block, UBlock Origin in its fullness should still work in Mozilla Firefox at least for the foreseeable future. So you can always switch browsers to Firefox if this is something that's really important to you. That's just something to keep in mind if you're watching this in the future. I'll try to leave a comment on this video posting about any updates that might occur in the future. But I'm just not sure because, you know, I can't see the future. Finally, something that annoys a lot of people is of course YouTube shorts. A lot of people really dislike YouTube shorts. Basically it's rotting your brain and it's reducing your attention span to the attention span of a goldfish. I'm not going to go on some boomer rant about how YouTube shorts are destroying the youth and all that. But personally I do also find them very distracting whenever you click on one YouTube short. All of a sudden an hour of your life is gone, never to be seen again. And so I want to just remove YouTube shorts completely from my feed. I don't want to have to see any of them if at all possible. And I recommend using UBlock Origin as well for this. So more than just an ad blocker, it can also just block any sort of content. And I'll leave a link to this GitHub in the description. But you can go here, go to list.txt and this will be a filter list, which you can copy with this button right here. You'll then want to go to UBlock Origin, go to the settings, go to my rules or my filters and then paste this in. Apply changes and then once you reload this, all traces of YouTube shorts will be gone permanently and you'll never have to see them again. So that's pretty good. There are no more YouTube shorts anywhere to be seen. So you'll no longer have to waste hundreds of hours of your life watching useless YouTube shorts. And that is about it. But of course I also have to address what about on your phone? So of course this is all great when you're on your desktop. You can add all these extensions easily, but you might be wondering what to do if you're on a phone. So first off, I'm going to address Android. And if you aren't Android, there are a couple of options. I recommend Eftroid, which cannot be found in the Google Play Store, but you can download it from their website or you can also get it from Eftroid if you know what that is. But NewPipe gives you a lot of options in customizing your YouTube. You can remove all the recommended videos and you can watch everything without ads. And unfortunately it doesn't have some features like sponsor block or return YouTube dislike. So its scope is very limited in what it wants to do. It's not going to do everything for you like I've shown you in this video, but at least it'll get you started and give you a better YouTube experience on your phone. But one other thing you can do is you can download Firefox for Android and Firefox for Android actually allows you to install extensions. And so I believe you can install all these extensions that I went over in this video. And so you would just do that on Firefox for Android. And the only downside is you don't get the nice app UI. You have to use the web UI. But what you can do is click Add this to the home screen and then you can add it to the home screen and click on it like you would an app for iOS. I honestly don't know just because I don't have an Apple device and things are much more limited on iOS just because of how locked down it is. You're not able to sideload apps easily. And since I don't have a lot of experience, again, I'll deferred to somebody else. If somebody else has an iPhone and wants to give some suggestions on what to use, you can leave that in the comments too. But of course, for the best experience just browse YouTube on the desktop instead of on your phone. It's probably better for you anyway. And that's it. Hopefully with these extensions, I've given you a much better YouTube experience. And even if we haven't gone back to the good old days of YouTube, at least you'll have a much better experience than you would usually on YouTube. Well, at least until the next bad decision that YouTube makes.