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Auto-skip disliked music in YouTube Music

· 2 min read

This is a bit off-topic from the usual blog posts, but I want to post it as the default user experience of YouTube Music to play disliked music is baffling to me. I simply don't understand why YouTube Music plays songs you've disliked. I could see maybe if it played them only after a certain "snooze" period of weeks, months, etc. But regardless...

I'm justifying this post as a post about considering user experience in application design 😄

How to automatically skip disliked songs​

Install TamperMonkey​

First, this assumes you're using a TamperMonkey compatible browser and are willing / able to install TamperMonkey as an extension to your browser.

This can be an extremely useful tool if you want or need to make small tweaks to the behavior of a website that you frequently use.

Add the following user script to TamperMonkey​

Credit goes entirely to GrayStrider on GitHub for posting a UserScript on how to do this about 4 years prior to the writing of this article.

Here is a slightly modified version of the original gist, which includes the required UserScript comment header:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         YouTube Music: skip dislikes
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      2024-11-18
// @description  try to take over the world!
// @author       You
// @match        https://music.youtube.com/*
// @icon         https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?sz=64&domain=github.com
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==
(function () {
    'use strict';

    const $$ = (id) => document.getElementById(id);
    const $ = (className) => document.getElementsByClassName(className);

    const check = () => {
        // Log something so it's clear the script is active and working.
        // The noise is fine for this use case.
        console.log('Checking to see if the current song is disliked...');

        let container = $$('like-button-renderer');
        let skipBtn = $('next-button')[0];
        if (container.getAttribute('like-status') === 'DISLIKE') {
            skipBtn.click();
            setTimeout(check, 5000);
        } else {
            setTimeout(check, 500);
        }
    };
    setTimeout(check, 2500);
})();

The original references are here:

Aside: Set up UserScript auto-sync​

TamperMonkey supports syncing your scripts between computers and browsers. This is definitely worth setting up and only takes a minute.