Hush

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Hush: Main Page

I love how the Hush post thumbnail is exactly what I loathe about YouTube as a video platform. It’s just constant, in-your-face noise.

So I’m keeping this post intentionally short as I could rant about YouTube for days. There’s just too much to be angry about to fit in one post.

The problem

I feel incredibly sorry for users of the vanilla YouTube interface. It’s one of the most horribly designed and off-putting websites anyone can come across. The site is engineered to the moon for engagement, and it seems to be working for them. The problem is that you get a ton of content shoved in your face that may or may not be relevant, while the bulk of what gets suggested is lowest common denominator. They push channels that churn out garbage, AI slop, and “ow my balls” videos. Anyone looking for something intellectually interesting, or just above throw-away entertainment, gets lost in the noise.

Beastman's stupid face

The first thing you see when you visit YouTube is an overwhelming wall of clickbait thumbnails. It feels like walking down Times Square. Everywhere you look something is trying to get your attention. It doesn’t help that they push for thumbnails to have what I refer to as “stupid arrow face”. If you can ignore that long enough, every video has a clickbait title. There’s always some variation of that garbage, on every page.

🚨🚨 You wouldn’t believe what happened when I added mayo to my toothbrush! 🪥 😱 Click to find out! 🔥🔥"

Typical YouTube ad

Most people complain about the ads, and they’re right to. Watch a video for a few seconds and you get unskippable ads. What gets me is that I won’t even know if the video is worth watching before I have to sit through at least two of them. Since they removed downvotes a few years back (due to political and advertiser pressure) there’s no community feedback to give you a heads up. A lot of high-profile channels even turn off their comments pre-emptively (looking at you, Disney and White House). If you didn’t want people talking negatively about your stuff, stop doing terrible things.

Hush

So I made Hush to silence the noise. The rest of the features came later to make it a more usable and independent experience, designed around how we should actually watch videos.

Hush: Mobile-ly sized

There are other front-ends out there like Invidious, Piped, FreeTube, etc. They’re just not mine. I like it when things are mine. Part of it was also wanting to see what it takes to build something like this and understand how the systems tick.

The things that annoyed me most on YouTube were the thumbnails and the in-video sponsors. Hush handles both. DeArrow replaces clickbait thumbnails and titles with community-sourced alternatives, so no more “stupid arrow face.” If there’s no community entry for a video it falls back to a mid-video frame, which is almost always better than whatever was chosen to make you click. SponsorBlock auto-skips sponsors, intros, outros, and other categories you can choose. You get to the content without sitting through the parts designed to waste your time.

Hush: Discover section

For subscriptions, Hush pulls from YouTube’s channel RSS feeds, so you get a clean list of new uploads without needing a Google account. There’s also a Discover feed that gets recommendations from your watch history, and an Up Next section that loads alongside whatever you’re watching. Personalized to what you actually watch, not what keeps you engaged longest.

There’s no login, external tracking, or account requirements. Your watch history and settings live in a local SQLite database and nowhere else. Honestly it’s cool af and I’ve been using it for months. I even built a Firefox browser extension that automatically redirects all YouTube video links to Hush for simplicity. Let me know if you want me to upload that too. Lastly, Hush is mobile friendly, plays in the background, and is ~50kb zipped.

Running it

Download this zip, run python3 server.py, open http://localhost:8737. That’s it. If you want it to persist as a service, there’s a systemd file included.

I’ll probably get in trouble for posting this, but Google honestly went off the rails with their products years ago. I’m just fixing the problem for the user. Remember when tech and the internet were fun? Now every site you visit is trying to harvest your data, push ads, and contain you within some ecosystem, while hardware manufacturers are charging you thousands for the same planned obsolescence crap every year.

On that note, let me know if you find this useful. I sure do. If you run Android TV, check out things I use for the best YouTube app available.

🤯 Don’t forget to like and smash that subscribe button! 🔔 Hit the bell for notifications! ✉️ Message below if you also brush your teeth with mayo! 🦷

hush on Chris McWain ᗧ··ᗣ·

Hush

The problem

Hush

Running it