An adblocker for humans, by humans!

FAQ

How does Butter work?

Butter uses machine learning to detect sponsored content. Instead of looking at keywords or the metadata provided by Google, it analyzes the video content itself. This allows Butter to detect sponsored segments even if the creator doesn't mention them explicitly. Other browser extensions rely on manual, human work to achieve that, but Butter is not that smart.

Why is Butter?

Butter is an experiment that proved to be more useful than I expected, so I decided to share it. However, in reality, it should not exist.

Advertisers like to say that they support publishers, but in fact they're the ones keeping them hostage. We've brainwashed ourselves into thinking it's normal to be bombarded with ads, that consent to psychological warfare is opt-in. And, that being able to compensate someone for their work is such a complex process that it requires either a bunch of unknown middlemen, or an overengineered ponzi scheme.

This project is a half-serious, half-assed attempt to demonstrate that in the next few years the process of blocking this type of content could be almost entirely automated. Yes, it would be wasteful from a computational and human potential perspective, and otherwise completely unnecessary, but hey, more money would change hands!

Is it private?

Butter doesn't collect any personal data. I might cache the URLs of the watched videos and the timestamps of the detected sponsored segments to keep things running a bit smoother.

Is it... good?

It's good for my own purposes, but it's work in progress. It might miss a shorter sponsored segment here and there. Then in certain situations, you can expect false positives. An example would be a review video where the creator mentions a product they genuinely like.

If you're looking for a more stable solution that’s crowd-sourced and free, check out SponsorBlock.

Why is it called Butter?

My partner made banana bread a few days ago. Toasted banana bread tastes amazing if you grill it in a pan with a mixture of honey, butter, and cinnamon. Mix the ingredients, microwave them in for 20 seconds, then spread on the banana bread.

The browser extension might fail you, but this recipe won't.