Hide sponsored comments and video descriptions

[Youngblood50]

I don't know if this would be possible, just an idea :)

Basically, how I'd imagine how it could work is that you could, for example in the video description, mark the sponsored text, then right click and select sponsorblock to block this content. With comments, either do the same (i.e. mark the text) or add a button to block the comment.

Sorry if this has been already discussed, I searched for it but couldn't find anyone talking about this.

[chirag127]

i don't think comment and video description are very annoying. and if started hiding comments there will be no end of that. we should only focus on how we can increase the skip segments database like making a neural network to automatically mark redundant animation( which i think is possible)

[GermanAizek]

@whyiswhen @Youngblood50,
Number of phishing sites and just advertising will decrease, a very good idea. Hopefully the community will help add this feature.

[bbb651]

Provided this feature is opt-in (there will always be false-positives), I think a system to automatically detect sponsored text and hide it is pretty doable, for example looking for key words (like "sponsor", "sponsored", /\d\d% off/g, name from list or sponsors, etc.) and hides the paragraph (separated by line-breaks). Maybe instead of hiding it completely, it'll replace it with gray text saying "sponsored message" that you can hover over and see the original if you wanted to.

[DRSDavidSoft]

@whyiswhen To me, the constant repeated "GET A 1000% OFF WITH CODE XXXX ON SITE YYYY" message is very annoying, as I always read the video description, and the pinned comments by the author.

So, I'd like to express my 👍 and interest for any features that would allow me and others to submit a regex, or part of the text, that SponsorBlock would block on all videos (or still, in the video that was submitted).

I understand that some or many users would not find this annoying, but personally, I do, and would like to help remove this stuff from the videos if it's possible.

@bbb651 Very good idea. As I understand that skipping for each segment in SponsorBlock is already an opt-in thing, e.g. it doesn't skip intros and end credits by default. It only makes sense that this feature would also be opt-in, if @ajayyy ever decides to implement it.

Again, personally, I'm very interested in this, and would like to opt-in, if this feature is implemented.

[Skyedra]

I also think this is a great idea; these descriptions in the ad always bug me (especially if I'm digging through the description to find a non-sponsor link that's actually relevant to the video content)

[DetachHead]

i'm going to try to add this functionality https://github.com/DetachHead/SponsorBlockServer/tree/description

[ajayyy]

@DetachHead I'm not sure if something like this will work since descriptions change very often.

I guess it could include a hash of the description too?

[Skyedra]

I think hash is a good idea. Maybe it could work like this:

1. Contributing user edits description to create a clean (ad-free) description
2. The server saves both the clean description and the hash of the original unmodified description
3. Subsequently, the cleaned up description is shown by default to all opted-in users. However, at the bottom of the description field, one of the following is shown in small grey font:
   A. If text hash matches (unchanged), display "Sponsored content has been redacted from this description, click here to view original description"
   B. If text hash does not match (changed), display "[Newer description available] Showing a sponsor-redacted version of an old description, click here to view latest unredacted description"

This way, even if the text is changing constantly or an ad agency writes a bot to make superfluous text changes automatically, ads don't sneak in.