YouTube Bulk Hide

April 19, 2026 • ☕︎ 2 min read

YouTube Bulk Hide is a Chrome extension (Manifest V3) that lets you select and hide multiple videos from your YouTube subscriptions feed at once, plus set auto-hide rules for channels and title keywords. It scratches a personal itch: a subscriptions feed full of stuff I do not want to scroll past one tile at a time.

🔗 github.com/spbavarva/yt-bulk-hide

What it does

Bulk select and hide. Hover any video tile on your subscriptions page and a checkbox appears in the corner. Check as many as you want, then click Hide selected (or press Shift+Alt+H).
Auto-hide rules. From the settings popup, add channel names or title keywords (one per line, case-insensitive substring match). Matching videos are hidden automatically on page load.

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The interesting part: how the hiding works

The obvious way to hide a video is to reconstruct YouTube’s internal youtubei/v1/feedback API call. That is 2 to 3 times faster, but it needs the full auth dance (SAPISIDHASH, X-Goog-AuthUser, visitor data) and breaks every time YouTube rotates its header contracts.

Instead, the extension programmatically opens each tile’s 3-dot menu and clicks the native Hide item. It is exactly what happens when you hide a video by hand, so it is as stable as YouTube’s own UI. DOM interaction only breaks when YouTube restructures tile markup, which is rare, versus header contracts that change often. A deliberate trade of speed for durability.

To stay safe, hiding throttles at about 250 ms per video to avoid menu-open race conditions, so hiding 40 videos takes roughly 10 seconds.

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Under the hood

manifest.json       MV3 manifest
background.js       Service worker, routes the keyboard shortcut
content.js          Injected on the subscriptions page, core logic
content.css         Checkbox + toolbar styles
popup.html/css/js   Settings popup for auto-hide rules
icons/              16 / 48 / 128 px icons

No network calls, no tracking, no permissions beyond the YouTube subscriptions page. It is built for personal use and loads as an unpacked extension in Developer mode.

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Room to grow

The code is written to be extended:

Regex keywords by swapping the substring check in applyAutoHide() for a guarded RegExp.
Hide by video age by parsing the published-time text on each tile and filtering anything older than N days.
Bulk undo by keeping references to hidden tiles and re-clicking YouTube’s own short-lived Undo link.