YouTube is uniquely dangerous for spoilers. Unlike Reddit, where you can at least try to avoid certain subreddits, YouTube's recommendation engine is designed to surface exactly what you're most interested in — which means if you've been watching a show, it will aggressively recommend videos about the season finale the moment it drops, whether you've watched it or not.

Sports scores are even worse. The thumbnail for a match recap will literally show the scoreline in the image. Reaction videos to a film twist are titled with the twist. There's no opt-out built into YouTube itself.

Here's what actually works.

Why Incognito and History Clearing Don't Help

A common suggestion is to use Incognito mode so YouTube can't personalise recommendations. This half-works — but it doesn't stop YouTube from showing trending videos, and trending is often where spoiler content lives right after a big release. You'll also lose all your subscriptions, history, and preferences, which makes YouTube much less useful overall.

Clearing your watch history and telling YouTube "not interested" on spoiler videos helps the algorithm eventually, but you have to see the spoiler first to dismiss it. That defeats the purpose.

Keyword Filtering: How It Actually Works

The most reliable approach is to filter video titles by keyword at the browser level before they render on your screen. ElementHider watches the page as it loads and removes any video card, title, or description that contains your blocked keywords — before you have a chance to read them.

Because it uses a real-time DOM observer, it also catches videos that load as you scroll down the homepage or a channel page — the extension doesn't just filter the initial page load, it filters everything that appears after.

Setting Up ElementHider for YouTube

1

Install ElementHider (free)

Get it from the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons.

2

Add the show, film, or team name as a keyword

Open the extension and type the exact name you want to hide. For example: Dune Part 3 Champions League final Severance season 3

3

Set it to YouTube only

Toggle "This site only" so the keyword only fires on youtube.com. Otherwise the rule would also hide the term in Google search results, which you probably don't want.

4

Choose Blur or Hide

Use Hide to remove matching video cards entirely. Use Blur if you want to see that something was filtered without reading the title — enable hover-to-reveal in settings if you want to peek at blurred content before deciding to watch.

Blocking Sports Scores Specifically

For live sports, the challenge is that the match hasn't happened yet when you set up the rule. Here's a practical workflow:

If you use the Supporter Pack's Groups feature, you can create a group per sport (e.g. Football, NBA) and toggle an entire group on or off with a single switch before and after a game day.

Hiding Thumbnails with Point & Click

ElementHider also has a point-and-click hiding mode. Activate it from the extension popup, then click any element on the page to create a permanent hiding rule for that element type. This is useful for hiding entire sections of the YouTube homepage — like the Shorts row or the "Trending" section — that you'd rather not see at all.

Tip: Click-to-hide rules target elements by CSS selector, so hiding one YouTube Shorts card also hides all of them on every page you visit afterwards.

Note: ElementHider filters text it can read — video titles and descriptions. It doesn't blur thumbnail images themselves (images don't contain text). If a thumbnail shows a score or result without text, you'd need to use click-to-hide to hide the entire video card.

The Upside

Once your keywords are set, you can open YouTube normally, scroll through your subscriptions, and check the homepage — and any video about the thing you're avoiding simply won't be there. The rest of YouTube works exactly as normal. No Incognito, no account-clearing, no disabling history. Just the parts you actually want to see.