There are a few different ways you could configure Plucky to allow you to watch YouTube videos under certain conditions.

Allowing individual videos

One option is allow only specific videos. This has the downside of copy-pasting urls, but the upside of not getting distracted by videos that you haven’t decided in advance to allow.

Allowing many videos at once from a channel

It is possible to add many videos from a specific YouTube channel using Link Grabber, which can help you copy all the urls that are linked from the current webpage. You’d probably want to:

  1. Visit a channel such as https://www.youtube.com/ChessNetworkTV/videos.
  2. Page down at least 10 times to load many videos from the channel.
  3. Click the button in Link Grabber.
  4. Type “watch” in the filter.
  5. Click “Copy” to copy the urls.
  6. Paste the urls into one of your dynamically imported url-allowing configurations.
  7. Wait for your delay.
  8. Watch.

Another extension that could work is Linkclump . It requires some configuration to copy the urls instead of opening them each in a new tab, but it allows you to select a rectangle in a web page from which to allow urls.

YouTube Kids

Another option is to allow YouTube Kids, which only gives access to videos considered appropriate for kids:

pluck + allow youtubekids.com

moderate or strict mode

Another option is to use a Chromium-based browser and enforce “moderate mode” (the safe feature):

pluck + safe

or “restricted mode” (the safer feature):

pluck + safer

Possibly with the nofirefox feature:

pluck + nofirefox

Blocking the main YouTube site without blocking all embedded videos

Some prefer to block the main youtube site while still being able to watch embedded youtube videos on other sites (typically by allowing each sites that has the videos). This can be accomplished with the following command.

pluck + block youtube.com text/html

Allowing YouTube at certain times

Another option is to schedule access to YouTube using a when rule. E.g., to only allow media from YouTube on Mondays 10am - 12pm:

pluck + when M10-12 allow youtube.com

Allowing audio but not video from YouTube.

This tip is from a user named Scott.

The webpage https://ytaud.io/ allows you to play audio of YouTube videos but not see the videos themselves.

pluck + allow ytaud.io
pluck + block ytaud.io image/

Another way to do it, reported by another user, is to use the usual YouTube site, but use the following rule to block the visual content:

block youtube.com selector:.html5-video-container

Avoiding clickbait and distractions

Some prefer youtube without any images. This removes images of video previews, even on allowed pages, but some prefer this anyway.

pluck + block i.ytimg.com

Purging your youtube history to avoid problematic suggestions

As explained on https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6342839 , you can remove content from your youtube search and viewing history (aka clear your history), and items can be removed from your google activity by using https://myactivity.google.com/ . This can be helpful if you keep getting recommendations for videos you would really rather not see.

Here are a few screenshots of the process, starting from the “3 dots” on https://www.youtube.com/ .

Other approaches

Last updated: 2024-09-23