If you're like me, you loathe and despise the toxic mental ordure that YouTube often plasters up and down the right side of each video page, such as POLITICAL DEMAGOGUERY in MIXED CAPS to PIQUE your OUTRAGE enough to KEEP YOU WATCHING YOUTUBE instead of doing something PRODUCTIVE! [insert thumbnail of someone looking amazed here.]
At a certain point, I started to notice that there was more likely to be things I didn't even want to know existed in that section than anything I actually wanted to see. So, I added a simple rule to the uBlock Origin browser plugin that hides that section of the page:
!https://www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com###relatedAnd that's it. That's all you need to add. No more "related videos" section.
While I was at it, I added a rule to block the "suggested videos" thumbnails that appear at the end of videos, by adding this line below the above:
www.youtube.com##.ytp-fullscreen-grid-stills-container > *Technical note: about that > *
For any web developers who may be wondering about that ancestor selector > *, the reason it's there because I'm not sure that .ytp-fullscreen-grid-stills-container always reliably contains the same elements, but if you block that element itself, YouTube's scripts keep trying to load it, and you get an endless loading spinner while your browser pointlessly cycles. With the ancestor selector, the video just stops. There may be a better way to do this, but I'm just trying to git 'er done, and it works.
As of this writing, you'll probably need to run Firefox to use this tip, or whatever other browsers support uBlock Origin. Last I heard, Google disabled plugins like uBlock Origin in Chrome and removed it from their web store (I presume this is to be expected when you use a web browser made by an advertising company.)
As a point of information, uBlock Origin also allows blocking ad interruptions from of video streams on YouTube and other ad-driven video sites. The plugin includes options to use some reputable blocking lists, one of which (I'm not sure which) seems to do that. The only default blocklists I use in it are EasyList, EasyPrivacy (those first two are from the same source), Online Malicious URL Blocklist, and Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list, all of which come as built-in options available in uBlock Origin's settings, so it's one of those.
Note, this tip has been added to Indieweb's YouTube wiki page by request, as this came up in Indieweb chat recently.
