The tax nobody bills you for#
A thumbnail promises something. A title promises something else, usually bigger. You click, you watch four minutes of padding waiting for the payoff, and the payoff either doesn’t arrive or arrives compressed into the last thirty seconds. Multiply that by however many videos you open in a week and it adds up to real hours spent on content engineered to be clicked, not to be worth clicking.
That’s the problem Worth my time? is built to solve. It’s a Chrome extension that opens alongside any YouTube video, reads what you’d otherwise have to watch, and tells you, before you commit any time, whether it’s worth it.
What it actually does#
Open a video, open the side panel, and within seconds you get:
- A category fit chart. Every video gets matched against six content types (Entertainment, Politics/News, Advice/How-To, Review/Product, Vlog/Personal, and General), each with a confidence score, so at a glance you can see what kind of video it really is versus what it’s pretending to be.
- Key highlights, timestamped. The concrete points the video makes, each one a clickable timestamp that jumps straight to that moment. If the whole video is one good idea stretched to twelve minutes, you can go get the idea and skip the stretching.
- A “Plugs and Promotions” list. Every sponsor read, affiliate code, and “link in the description” pitch, called out on its own, separate from the actual content, so you know exactly what’s being sold to you and by whom.
- Signal Insights, scored specifically for whatever category the video landed in. A prank video and a financial-advice video shouldn’t be judged by the same yardstick, so the signals adapt: Balance and Outrage Bait for political content, Evidence-Backing and Actionability for advice, Independence and Comparison Depth for reviews, and so on. You can reweight any of these in Settings to match what you personally care about.
None of it requires watching the video first. That’s the entire point.
Why it doesn’t run on my servers#
There is no backend, and for a security audience that’s the headline. The extension doesn’t phone home to anything I operate, by default, ever.
Every provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Kimi, or Poe) is called directly from your browser, using an API key you supply and control. Your title, description, and transcript data go straight from your machine to the AI vendor you picked. I never see it. Settings, provider keys, and your signal weighting preferences live in chrome.storage.local — on your device, full stop.
The one optional exception is a toggle, off by default, called “Share anonymous watch counts.” If you turn it on, the extension sends a video’s YouTube ID and title to a small Cloudflare Worker I run, purely so I can see in aggregate which videos people are checking: no account, no user identifier, no browsing history, and I don’t log IP addresses. The privacy policy that ships with the extension documents the exact schema that endpoint writes to, not just a paragraph promising good behavior. If you’re the kind of person who reads privacy policies looking for the sentence that walks everything back, there isn’t one — I’d rather you not turn the toggle on at all than have it be worth reading the fine print to find out what it really does.
I’d rather ship something with a genuinely small attack surface and an honest changelog than something that quietly grows a bigger one every version.
One thing it deliberately doesn’t do#
The extension shows likes and comments (scraped best-effort from YouTube’s own page, or exactly via an optional YouTube Data API key you can add yourself). It does not show dislikes. YouTube removed public dislike counts in December 2021, and no extension, this one included, can show you a real number anymore. Rather than fake one from a third-party estimation service, it says so.
Try it#
It’s live on the Chrome Web Store: Worth My Time?. Install it, add a provider key in Settings, and open any YouTube video.
It’s also a plain, unbundled Manifest V3 extension: no build step, nothing hidden, so you can load it unpacked from source if you’d rather poke at it yourself first.
If you build browser extensions, or you’re evaluating one you didn’t write, the two things I’d want you to take away aren’t about YouTube at all: give users their own API keys instead of proxying through your infrastructure whenever you can, and if you do collect anything, write down the schema, not just the promise.