ClearTube

YouTube content filter with local AI topic banning: one stop-word hides the whole topic. On-device beta Shorts recommendations.

ClearTube hides unwanted content on YouTube - and it does the thinking on your own machine. WHAT IT DOES • Keyword dictionary. Rules by substring, phrase or regular expression, searched in title, description, channel name, hashtags and (where the page exposes them) subtitles. Each rule can be toggled without deleting it, and exceptions override matches. • Local AI topic ban. Your rules are used as seeds: a small transformer (intfloat/multilingual-e5-small, INT8, bundled inside the extension - 118 MB, no download, no server) compares the MEANING of a title/description with each seed and with topic prototypes learned from your own likes and dislikes. That is how one stop-word removes an entire topic even when the literal word never appears. Matching uses excess-over-background thresholds, not raw cosine, because multilingual embeddings are anisotropic; taxonomy, learned and generic topics each carry their own calibrated threshold. • Channels and whitelist. Block a channel from the right-click menu or the list; whitelist a channel or a single video to always let it through. • Blocking modes. Blur (a blurred tile with the reason and an "Allow" button), hide, or a warning interstitial. • Shorts. Optionally remove Shorts shelves and the Shorts tab entirely, and a beta on-device recommender that re-orders what the Shorts feed shows you from your own feedback history — its profile never leaves the device either. PRIVACY • No servers, no analytics, no telemetry. There is no place for your data to go: the model ships in the package and all inference runs in WebAssembly on your machine. • The UI bundles make no network requests. The only outbound request in the extension fetches the YouTube page you right-clicked (with cookies omitted, cache disabled) to resolve a channel handle like /@name into a channel id. • Everything is stored locally in your browser profile: rules, channel lists, learned topics, a decision cache and counters. "Reset settings" and "Clear AI learning" in the Options remove them; the Diagnostics tab exports a JSON file of its own - note that this file contains your dictionary and learned topics, so read it before sending it anywhere. • No audio, no video, no viewing history is uploaded. ClearTube never reads your watch page content beyond what is needed to decide about a card. LIMITATIONS • It only works on youtube.com / m.youtube.com, and YouTube's DOM changes eventually break any scraper. • Subtitle-based matching depends on what the page has already loaded; captions are not downloaded on purpose. • Visual/C2PA-based signals depend on page access and are weaker than the text pipeline. • "Audit mode" marks blocked cards without hiding them - useful to check what the filter would do, not useful as protection. • The Shorts recommender is a beta; the dictionary and semantic filter work without it. • 158 MB on disk is mostly the model. That is the price of doing this locally. Keyboard: none claimed. Permissions: storage, context menus and an offscreen document, plus YouTube host access - no tabs permission, no browsing-history warning, web-accessible resources are empty on purpose. ClearTube is not affiliated with Google or YouTube.