18 ms·

How I spend less time on YouTube

182 points by pawurb 5y ago

szarnyasg 5y ago
The News Feed Eradicator browser plugin (available for Chrome and Firefox) supports hiding the recommended videos on both the YouTube home page and in the sidebar next to videos. It did wonders for my focus.
alvarlagerlof 5y ago
This is the way. Only subscriptions.
johnsimer 5y ago
I simply installed a browser extension to block YouTube recommendations. Haven’t surfed YouTube on my laptop since Phone is a different story tho
tomkat0789 5y ago
Just implemented this! Thanks for posting! For those who don't click, he suggests some uBlock Origin filters to remove the suggestion lists from YouTube. For example, currently I'm watching a video and all I see is THE VIDEO - no list of suggestions off to the side. I guess we can say YouTube's suggestions are "too good"! I might just apply this to my work computer. I'll probably keep them around for my casual viewing on personal machines since I find some new stuff with them. It'll be interesting to see how this changes my browsing!
- pawurb 5y ago
  Glad to hear you find it useful!
  - 4mitkumar 5y ago
    Can confirm this approach works, based on my experience over just year or so. Have not blocked the landing page recommendations but I'm never logged in. And so they default videos are so outside of my taste, it's easy to ignore. Still, sometimes i actively go on actively binging one video after another (from Veritassium, for example). But that's on me :)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
moooo99 5y ago
Personally I can really recommend the „Unhook YouTube“ extension. It’s really customizable and allows you to remove autoplay, recommendations and even the homepage. It’s really easy to configure and really did help me reducing my time spend on YouTube without breaking the entire website.
- baal80spam 5y ago
  I can vouch for DF Tube (Distraction Free for YouTube™).
- amlib 5y ago
  Same here, extensions such as unhook youtube have helped me reduce my youtube addiction. I also unsubbed from some channels that released videos a bit too often (like LTT)
- toppy 5y ago
  URLs for the spoken extensions: https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/youtube-recommen... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
- medstrom 5y ago
  I also love Clickbait Remover (1) to get rid of the customized thumbnail and instead show a random snapshot from the middle of the vid. These days the thumbnails are all noise and no signal anyway. 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-remover-for-youtube/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...
crawl_soever 5y ago
I do the same thing for linkedin. Pick and select the "timeline" post page or whatever it is called and block it. Completely eliminates the social media bloat so I can focus on the only reason I still keep a profile on there. Now mostly for just chatting anyhow.
j7ake 5y ago
I recently found a distraction-free youtube client which works very well: http://yt.dudzik.co/ http://yt.dudzik.co/ Problem is sometimes if you click on a generic youtube link, it won't automatically open up the link in the distraction-free client.
- reayn 5y ago
  I personally find IdiotBox[1] to be better than this as it opens links in ad free youtube embeds and also links channel and other information alongside the video itself. P.S. you can replace the “watch?=“ part of a youtube url with “/embed/“ and get a distraction free view of the video. Or you could just open it in mpv or something. 1. https://codemadness.org/idiotbox https://codemadness.org/idiotbox
ochronus 5y ago
I was expecting a /etc/hosts entry :D
deleted 5y ago
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bellyfullofbac 5y ago
You can do the same with StackOverflow's "Hot Network" questions, and "New from our blog"... How is that not a dark pattern, I'm trying to find how to do blah in Java, and a question about world building would pique my interest...
lardolan 5y ago
Thank you for sharing. I use extensions blockers to block feed on linkedin and facebook. Will try for youtube too!
diplodocusaur 5y ago
You can also play faster than the 2x speed limit cap using document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate=4 is there a way to also make this the default max play speed without entering it in console?
- wjdp 5y ago
  I'm using https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed This extension adds keyboard shortcuts as well as a UI to all <video> elements (YT and other sites). I have 'G' set playback rate to 2.2x.
- madsohm 5y ago
  I find that the audio gets out of sync when playing faster than 2x. Have you also noticed that - and perhaps have a solution?
- Aromasin 5y ago
  I use the "video speed controller" extension. You can set it to whatever speed you like, and it will default videos across all websites to that. You can also set exceptions for things like Netflix. There is no way to set YouTube default speed unfortunately, hence the work around.
throw8932894 5y ago
On Android there is Kiwi browser with desktop uBlock extension can do this blocking.
ballenf 5y ago
What I really want is all my subscriptions to get auto-downloaded into Plex. And for Plex to have better library management tools from the player, so I can delete after watching or move to a category. Then show me all the algorithmic stuff when I'm on the website so I can find better stuff to subscribe to.
- josteink 5y ago
  From a user-perspective that would be a great user experience, but would remove any possible way for YouTube to show you ads and pay the bills (and keep you “engaged”). Could be a premium-only feature, I guess?
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The algorithmic stuff could actually be good if you could use it on demand and control its parameters, like a supercharged search page. There are times I want to discover new content, it would be nice to be able to set the algorithm's parameters just right for a particular topic and see what it has to offer, then rinse and repeat for other topics.
- bobmagoo 5y ago
  I was actually looking at building a script like this. Have you found anything that does it already? If not, I was just going to make a small python script with readonly access to my Youtube account that pulls down my Watch Later video IDs and feeds them to youtube-dl on my NAS. Sounds like a fun Christmas vacation project.
  - enzoaguado 5y ago
    There are multiple articles automating this task using youtube-dl. There's also a recent project called tubesync[0] that provides a GUI and advertises itself as the sonarr/radarr for Youtube [0] https://github.com/meeb/tubesync https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
- nirav72 5y ago
  I've been using TubeArchivist for grabbing newly posted videos in my subscriptions. It will grab the meta info and thumbnails as well. Has a built in video player, so you can watch the videos directly within the web app. https://github.com/bbilly1/tubearchivist https://github.com/bbilly1/tubearchivist Another one I've used before is Tubesync- although it doesn't have a built-in player. But it has the ability to integrate with Plex. https://github.com/meeb/tubesync https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
blueflow 5y ago
The official UI has some weird bugs. Like, when i listen to a long video, and then seek back to some position near the beginning, it gets stuck loading forever. At this point, running youtube-dl via mpv on it is faster than the official UI for me. I set ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=480]+bestaudio/best[height<=480] in the mpv config so i dont use up more bandwith than my eyes can consume. Youtube-dl is somewhat wonky some days, tho.
pjc50 5y ago
Android users may enjoy NewPipe: just lets you watch the video, no ads, no suggestions.
loloquwowndueo 5y ago
The best way I’ve found to spend less time on YouTube is realizing that the vast majority of content is pure garbage and just stay the hell away from it. These days I only visit it when I need something specific (a tutorial on how to do a particular thing, a video the kid wants to watch, etc). And of course uBlock origin is enabled to spare me from the “unskippable ads that are longer than the video itself” experience.
- whalesalad 5y ago
  The bar is certainly lower. Lots of stuff that amounts to a PowerPoint presentation full of stock art/video with poor narration.
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  Yeah it's exceedingly rare that better, more parseable information isn't available in text somewhere. Unfortunately though, it is becoming more common for people to make a video instead of a well written tutorial or guide or better documentation.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  My strategy is to have a curated list of subscriptions (in an RSS reader - I don't have a Google account) and just stick to those. I very rarely explore outside of that exactly for the reason you mention.
- sabjut 5y ago
  While I agree that "the vast majority of content is pure garbage", I have to make an argument that a non-negligible portion of the site delivers high-quality educational videos with excellent research. The curiosity-seeking part of my brain is subject to being very easy to get hooked on this.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  YouTube has some of the best, highest quality free content available on the internet today. Stay away from the crap, remove it from your recommendations, subscribe to some good channels. It’s that simple. Don’t if that’s not your thing but you’re missing out. If you change your mind here are a few exceptional channels to get you started, they should cater well to a HN style audience: Technology Connections (misc tech) Wendover Productions (Logistics) DefunctLand (Documentaries on old defunct stuff) Not Just Bikes (Cycling, public transport, urban design, walkability) Practical Engineering (civil engineering) 3Blue1Brown (Math)
tomlue 5y ago
I got off yt after seeing how much time I was losing with a time tracking app.
1121redblackgo 5y ago
I appreciate the post. Implemented it and immediately I feel like I am off the attention treadmill that youtube puts me on. Thanks
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
What I do to minimize the trash heap of sponsored content on the homepage is I have a youtube bookmark to my channel. It's empty and has no videos. Then if I wanna see something, I just type it in. I don't have to see a single piece of content I'm not interested in at that moment. Also you could just use enhancer for youtube to hide sidebar content.
elcapitan 5y ago
It's nice, unfortunately the filters break also playlists, which is unfortunate, because those are actually created by me for distraction-free watching of stuff that I'm really interested in.
Demcox 5y ago
YouTube started as such a great way to explore niche interests but has, as the author describes well, turned into a large hooking mechanism and I hate it for that. Used to spend a lot of good quality time watching videos on there and interacting with like minded people but now YT is blocked on my network.
- deleted 5y ago
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scoutt 5y ago
> Am I the only one who launches YouTube just to watch a single tutorial and ends up devouring dozens of fine-tuned recommendations? I'm hitting 40 next week, and seeing others asking for recommendations of videos on "programming a microcontroller" (or programming related) is something I can't understand. One day I sat and watched some of the videos they were recommending, and in most of them there were a person talking for 40 minutes while showing the screen. Also, the video, at least to me, makes the person doing the tutorial to be seen as "more authoritative" than through text, even if you can tell the person talking has little experience with microcontrollers (or whatever, if you have experience in the field). The same applies for "making a gradient in Gimp". I don't want a 5 minutes videos. Give me a bullet-point list on text. 20 seconds read. I can "rewind" easily and repeat a step I missed. I will always prefer text for some types of tutorials. I can "ctrl + f" and search for the parts I want, and see the code examples in peace, without rushing them while someone is talking. I might watch a video tutorial for, I don't know, fixing a dishwater. But I guess I am just getting old.
- DavidCole1 5y ago
  It's not only you. I feel the same. Whenever I stumble upon a video for a programming related tutorial ( mostly AWS ), I want a text copy by the side so that I can get what I want and move on. Maybe Youtube should give ability to "seek to" on its autogenerated subtitles in the sidebar. I would find it useful at least.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  People learn in different ways.
  - bena 5y ago
    This has been shown to be not true many times over. Different subjects need to be taught in different ways, but there are optimal ways to present information that works for everyone. No one is a "visual learner", there are topics that are best presented in a visual format.
    - 5y ago
toastal 5y ago
I don't know who asked for it to be like a social network, but I did similar thing with GitHub removing the social sidebar and reactions on the home screen making it less distracting with github.com##aside[aria-label="Explore"], #dashboard.dashboard .reactions-with-gap
octatrack 5y ago
Is there something that we can use on iOS to hide recommendations?
spcebar 5y ago
I wrote the following CSS for the Stylus extension to keep me focused--it blocks out suggested videos at the end of a video, the videos in the sidebar, and the comments section: .style-scope.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer,.style-scope.ytd-comments,.style-scope.ytd-mealbar-promo-renderer,.html5-endscreen.ytp-player-content.videowall-endscreen { display:none; }
sixothree 5y ago
I am going to be the voice of dissent here. In September my OTA antenna fell and I never put it back up. I have Netflix but I usually don't watch it. What I spend most of my time on is YouTube and I consider that time to be quality time. I like falling asleep to Adrian's Digital Basement.
marbu 5y ago
The main problem with youtube is lack of control. I would pay youtube if it allowed me to fully control and monitor how it works so that I can fine tune it's behaviour to fit my needs. For example I would like to: - disable recommendations in some contexts (similar to how OP does it) - label videos and let youtube to classify videos into these set of labels, so that I can either block of filter videos accordingly (eg. I could label certain videos as "junk" and would keep those hidden unless I really want to see such videos) - search by video length, eg. show me only talks which takes about an hour - say, show me something I found entertaining, but I have just half an hour, so that after the time is up, it no longer shows such stuff - setup a "watch budget time" to spend or disable service during certain time periods - see metrics about my watch behaviour, so that I can fine tune youtube options accordingly I would be even ok for youtube to show me some ads based on my behaviour, if I have some control over it. Eg. disable ads with too small target group or ads I find annoying. And while there could be some monetization options (eg. you configure your account not to show you something or don't provide service in given timerange - but you would be able to cancel that for a fee :-)) I doubt that it would make sense for them from business perspective: it would decrease the value of the advertising they are selling while it would cost a lot. So in the end I'm not sure if I would be able the real price of all this.
deleted 5y ago
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mill 5y ago
A really convenient workaround is the extension called Unhook. It's very neat and lets you to control many aspects of your Youtube experience. Available both for Chrome/Firefox: 1)https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout... 2)https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
- JasonSage 5y ago
  This looks really nice, so I'm going to give it a shot. Thanks for the recommendation!
sAbakumoff 5y ago
Just use the full screen mode or theatre mode
antoineMoPa 5y ago
I think have a basic human need to fill time with video or similar content. Before, it was tv, after, it was youtube, now it's mostly tik tok for me. The ancestor of all this is probably watching the campfire for hours.
deephdave 5y ago
I prioritise reading, read on Kindle and on Readup https://readup.com/ https://readup.com/
XCSme 5y ago
I use the browser extension https://unhook.app https://unhook.app, it works great and you can choose to hide/show specific elements.
zczc 5y ago
What helped me was moving channels from YouTube subscriptions to RSS feeds. Thus I stopped opening YouTube homepage and play videos straight from RSS client. RSS URLs are https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<chanel_id> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<chanel_...
- ghostly_s 5y ago
  I’m getting a 404.
  - neogodless 5y ago
    See where the OP put <channel_id>? You have to copy and paste the YouTube channel ID into that space, and then you can use the whole URL in an RSS feed reader.
- em-bee 5y ago
  this is an excellent tip for someone who doesn't want to sign up to youtube/google just to be able to follow a channel.
- latexr 5y ago
  For specific playlists: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<playlist_id> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<playli...
- delecti 5y ago
  There's also the youtube subscription page. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions If you only use youtube to watch videos posted by your subscribed channels, then go to the page that youtube fills exclusively with all of the videos posted by your subscribed channels. It's wild to me how many people use the homepage to consume their subscriptions.
titzer 5y ago
In the past few weeks the homepage changed radically and basically broke recommendations for me, even when signed in. TBH I was kind of bothered how quickly it would adapt to what I was watching, pushing me quickly down rabbit holes. However, with the new change it does not seem to learn very quickly at all, and every time I go there the same dozen videos or so that I probably don't want to see (but don't want to mark "Not Interested") are there. It really can't take a hint. That, and it keeps finding away around my ad blocker. I used to use YouTube for jam/backing tracks to play guitar along to. That's completely broken if an ad interrupts it! Talking about dang frustrating.
mavhc 5y ago
So the recommendations are useless crap, but also the author keeps clicking on them? After the 10th time doing that didn't they learn better?
mediocregopher 5y ago
PSA for all, you can go into your YouTube settings and disable Search History (and a bunch of other things? It's been a while), and surprisingly the algorithm more or less respects that. It completely neuters the algorithm, it won't target you worth a damn, and YouTube becomes a lot less engaging overall. Highly recommend for everyone.
- gpvos 5y ago
  I only get the option to disable that when I've completely deleted my (Youtube/Google) cookies. If later I go to the Settings, it wants me to log in (which I am not going to do). Does anyone here known which button lets me revisit these settings without logging in?
- tryauuum 5y ago
  Pretty much. My life went downhill after I discovered that I had disabled search history and re-enabled it
  - physicles 5y ago
    Why not disable it again? I just followed GP’s instructions and am looking forward to my life going uphill.
gpvos 5y ago
I've found that recently, when I disable search customization and video history, Youtube indeed appears to not remember previous videos I've seen and to recommend only videos related to the one that just ended, and I'm fine with that.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Are there any tools that will download either the metadata or even the entire video from my YT subscriptions, and that just runs natively on my Linux system (i.e. no Docker/container stuff) ? Something I could look at that isn't YT but would show me the latest (if any) stuff from channel's I've expressed interest in? I've seen tubearchivist and tubesync, mentioned below, and these just don't operate with the sort of technology I'm comfortable with.
kgwxd 5y ago
I "subscribe" to any channel I think is decent, supposedly it helps their numbers, but I rarely use the YouTube interface to figure out what to watch next. My real subscription list is my RSS reader and I'm highly selective about what goes in there. When I do watch something on the site, I habitually put it in theater mode right away, which hides the suggestions. I'm sure lots of people would set theater mode as the default if it were an option. I'm sure it's not on purpose.
teh_klev 5y ago
The way I've done this is to be quite aggressive and only allow content from my channel subscriptions appear on my landing page. Anything else that shouldn't be there gets a "Don't Recommend Channel" ding. If I'm looking for new material such as tutorials or documentaries, that kind of thing then I search in a separate non-logged in browser profile so the YT algorithm doesn't try to pollute my signed in account with junk. This has mostly worked quite well for me.
psacawa 5y ago
I use this technique of DOM filtering with uBlock to defeat "engagement" features and improve site experience a lot. My problem comes with pages where the HTML element classes are not semantic, but compiled by a tool like tailwind, e.g. <div class="erslblw0"> ... </div> For example, if you go to nytimes.com and use uBlock's 'zapper' to select an element to hide, you'll get a query selector like this: .erslblw0.css-163q563 > .css-13dv6mc These are dependent on the build, and can change day to day. Has any one come up with a solution for this situation, beyond painstakingly manually constructing positional CSS selectors (nth-of-type, etc..)?
the_arun 5y ago
Thing is - YouTube has got one of the best recommendation engines - much better than Netflix. So I wouldn't blame ourselves but the algorithm doing its job.
DeathArrow 5y ago
My problem is that I spend too much time on HN. :)
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vijaybritto 5y ago
I think I'm inadvertently escaping this by viewing all videos in theatre mode! I find it hard to keep my focus on video and instead look for long texts that explain them. But nothing beats well produced videos. Its the same as well explained topics in text with good diagrams.
treacle 5y ago
Never managed to get stuck in a Youtube rabbit hole, as my hardware has been so utterly useless.
treacle 5y ago
In the article there is mention of using ublock to block elements. I didn't even know this was a thing. I zapped the recommendations block on home as suggested in the article. How do you review what you have blocked/removed and re-add it?
- ask_b123 5y ago
  Go to the settings and the My Filters tab. Your latest added filter should be at the bottom.
  - treacle 5y ago
    Thanks for this, I did find the filters via that route. But thought there might be a quick shortcut for the site you are on.
godshatter 5y ago
I reduce my time on YouTube by going there with a specific subject in mind, search on it, and use yt-dlp to download the likely candidates and watch them offline. It has the added bonus of being able to re-watch them offline without going back to YT. It's similar, now that I think about it, to my shopping routine. Research what I want, go in, grab it, and get the heck out. I've learned over the years that if I don't want to buy too much or spend a few hours watching videos I could do without, I limit my interactions voluntarily.
matthewmueller 5y ago
Thanks for sharing this! I just implemented this. I didn't realize uBlock had this capability. It runs faster than other extensions I've tried. Cheers!
threeaccents 5y ago
I just update my hosts file haha
funOtter 5y ago
I turn off "viewing history" and then only subscribe to the channels I am interested in, and ONLY visit https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
- asdff 5y ago
  Take it a step even further and just follow these channels via RSS and watch with mpv. Don't even point the browser to the site at all.
  - funOtter 5y ago
    Thanks! I'll look into that. Is there a good way to track a "to watch" list using youtube RSS and MPV?
mlboss 5y ago
I use chrome plugins that hide recommendations.
GaylordTuring 5y ago
My big problem with YouTube recommendations isn't that they're so good that I get sucked in; it's that they're so bad. I would happily spend more time on the site watching interesting videos if they only would show up in my recommendation feed. Instead, I get recommended the same old crap, all coming from a small set of the same video categories over and over again (except for the occasional America's Got Talent or any other clip that've reached over 100 million views). It's not like I don't like airplane and board repair videos, but it's not the only thing that I'm interested in, which YouTube seems to think. Show me something new! Try recommending a video about how to grow flowers or about Titanic rather than thinking that the only thing I'm interested in are whatever I've been watching for the last couple of months.
- joenot443 5y ago
  I've found the same thing. I like snowmobiling and I like Dota 2. Surely in the billions and billions of hours of content on YouTube, there's something else I would like as well, but the algorithm seems content to only ever serve me up videos from two categories. Some kind of forced flavor in an "I'm Feeling Lucky" or "Discover Weekly" format would be a great improvement I think.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  The recommendation engine does tend to hover around recommending more of the same topics you like, because it looks like it's mostly driven off "people who like the stuff you like also liked this other stuff". The solution to that is to bootstrap the engine with a variety of topics. I'm subscribed to channels about game design, film critics, engineering, urban planning, math, sudoku, beat saber, figure skating, history, and stand ups. This much does mean the homepage gets pretty diverse and once in a while new topics do show up.
- mdrzn 5y ago
  Lately YouTube started proposing "Wanna watch something new?" and offered me a tab "New to you" with only videos from creators I've never watched before. That was a good change of pace for once, instead of showing me videos I've watched less than a week ago.
alexitosrv 5y ago
I am in a new job as of lately, and found myself wandering a lot in youtube, reddit and twitter. I also used ublock for removing the recommendation section and it makes my life much simpler. We should use an adversarial approach to all those UX hyper optimizations from big cos. I also had to install LeechBlock to limit my time on time wasting activities, now I sleep better and have an easier time focusing on work stuff, even just freeing some mind-CPU to accomplish more meaningful tasks. Glad that I am not alone in this battle for our own sanity.
jollybean 5y ago
Youtube's recommendations for some reason are pitiful next to TikTok. It may be an inherent advantage of the super-short format.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
How I spend less time on YouTube: I spend ~0 time on YouTube. I’m definitely not the average user, but I find video content overwhelming and usually low signal:noise. So I just don’t consume it for the most part. I’m sure I’m missing out on stuff that I’d find valuable, but the vast majority of the time I find the same content summarized in a tweet or thread with links to readable reference material where appropriate. And usually that’s how I get introduced to the video I’m not gonna watch in the first place.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Love to be downvoted for… finding videos overwhelming.
  - ekanes 5y ago
    More likely you’re being downvoted for the casual non-solution to a common and real problem people are wrestling with. If people were all talking about how they try to avoid over-eating, saying “oh I just don’t over-eat. That’s my solution” contributes little to the conversation.
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      I felt that: 1. Acknowledging that some people find consuming video content challenging is always worth mentioning. It’s not the problem being discussed, but it’s a related problem with so much content being on YouTube. Your analogy would be closer as “I very seldom eat, because I don’t react well to food.” Which is obviously absurd when put that way. 2. The fact that transcripts or summaries are often available is a contribution, as it presents another potential option for those who want to access one piece of content without falling into a recommendations hole.
rootsudo 5y ago
I should post things like this too. Ublock is great for this kind of thing, and same blocking the landing page, and comments but not playlists. Making Youtube more inconvenient makes me happier.
cambaceres 5y ago
I have gone from spending at least an hour a day on YT to basically nothing in just the past weeks. The reason for this is that YT removed the dislikes count. The like vs dislike ratio was the only way to know the quality of a video before watching it, and after getting really used to that it feels like a totally waste of time to watch random videos just because yt recommends them.
skilled 5y ago
It's sad knowing that YouTube has done very little to optimize its browsing UI and the algorithm has remained largely stale over the years. As such, it's hard to enjoy the platform beyond the absolute necessities of watching a tutorial, podcast, or catching up on news.
sheinsheish 5y ago
Turn history off and/or watch via DuckDuckGo
deleted 5y ago
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182 points by pawurb 5y ago

The News Feed Eradicator browser plugin (available for Chrome and Firefox) supports hiding the recommended videos on both the YouTube home page and in the sidebar next to videos. It did wonders for my focus.

alvarlagerlof 5y ago

This is the way. Only subscriptions.

johnsimer 5y ago

I simply installed a browser extension to block YouTube recommendations. Haven’t surfed YouTube on my laptop since Phone is a different story tho

tomkat0789 5y ago

Just implemented this! Thanks for posting! For those who don't click, he suggests some uBlock Origin filters to remove the suggestion lists from YouTube. For example, currently I'm watching a video and all I see is THE VIDEO - no list of suggestions off to the side. I guess we can say YouTube's suggestions are "too good"! I might just apply this to my work computer. I'll probably keep them around for my casual viewing on personal machines since I find some new stuff with them. It'll be interesting to see how this changes my browsing!

pawurb 5y ago
Glad to hear you find it useful!
- 4mitkumar 5y ago
  Can confirm this approach works, based on my experience over just year or so. Have not blocked the landing page recommendations but I'm never logged in. And so they default videos are so outside of my taste, it's easy to ignore. Still, sometimes i actively go on actively binging one video after another (from Veritassium, for example). But that's on me :)
deleted 5y ago
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moooo99 5y ago

Personally I can really recommend the „Unhook YouTube“ extension. It’s really customizable and allows you to remove autoplay, recommendations and even the homepage. It’s really easy to configure and really did help me reducing my time spend on YouTube without breaking the entire website.

baal80spam 5y ago
I can vouch for DF Tube (Distraction Free for YouTube™).
amlib 5y ago
Same here, extensions such as unhook youtube have helped me reduce my youtube addiction. I also unsubbed from some channels that released videos a bit too often (like LTT)
toppy 5y ago
URLs for the spoken extensions: https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/youtube-recommen... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
medstrom 5y ago
I also love Clickbait Remover (1) to get rid of the customized thumbnail and instead show a random snapshot from the middle of the vid. These days the thumbnails are all noise and no signal anyway. 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-remover-for-youtube/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

crawl_soever 5y ago

I do the same thing for linkedin. Pick and select the "timeline" post page or whatever it is called and block it. Completely eliminates the social media bloat so I can focus on the only reason I still keep a profile on there. Now mostly for just chatting anyhow.

j7ake 5y ago

I recently found a distraction-free youtube client which works very well: http://yt.dudzik.co/ http://yt.dudzik.co/ Problem is sometimes if you click on a generic youtube link, it won't automatically open up the link in the distraction-free client.

reayn 5y ago
I personally find IdiotBox[1] to be better than this as it opens links in ad free youtube embeds and also links channel and other information alongside the video itself. P.S. you can replace the “watch?=“ part of a youtube url with “/embed/“ and get a distraction free view of the video. Or you could just open it in mpv or something. 1. https://codemadness.org/idiotbox https://codemadness.org/idiotbox

ochronus 5y ago

I was expecting a /etc/hosts entry :D

deleted 5y ago

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bellyfullofbac 5y ago

You can do the same with StackOverflow's "Hot Network" questions, and "New from our blog"... How is that not a dark pattern, I'm trying to find how to do blah in Java, and a question about world building would pique my interest...

lardolan 5y ago

Thank you for sharing. I use extensions blockers to block feed on linkedin and facebook. Will try for youtube too!

diplodocusaur 5y ago

You can also play faster than the 2x speed limit cap using document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate=4 is there a way to also make this the default max play speed without entering it in console?

wjdp 5y ago
I'm using https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed This extension adds keyboard shortcuts as well as a UI to all <video> elements (YT and other sites). I have 'G' set playback rate to 2.2x.
madsohm 5y ago
I find that the audio gets out of sync when playing faster than 2x. Have you also noticed that - and perhaps have a solution?
Aromasin 5y ago
I use the "video speed controller" extension. You can set it to whatever speed you like, and it will default videos across all websites to that. You can also set exceptions for things like Netflix. There is no way to set YouTube default speed unfortunately, hence the work around.

throw8932894 5y ago

On Android there is Kiwi browser with desktop uBlock extension can do this blocking.

ballenf 5y ago

What I really want is all my subscriptions to get auto-downloaded into Plex. And for Plex to have better library management tools from the player, so I can delete after watching or move to a category. Then show me all the algorithmic stuff when I'm on the website so I can find better stuff to subscribe to.

josteink 5y ago
From a user-perspective that would be a great user experience, but would remove any possible way for YouTube to show you ads and pay the bills (and keep you “engaged”). Could be a premium-only feature, I guess?
Nextgrid 5y ago
The algorithmic stuff could actually be good if you could use it on demand and control its parameters, like a supercharged search page. There are times I want to discover new content, it would be nice to be able to set the algorithm's parameters just right for a particular topic and see what it has to offer, then rinse and repeat for other topics.
bobmagoo 5y ago
I was actually looking at building a script like this. Have you found anything that does it already? If not, I was just going to make a small python script with readonly access to my Youtube account that pulls down my Watch Later video IDs and feeds them to youtube-dl on my NAS. Sounds like a fun Christmas vacation project.
- enzoaguado 5y ago
  There are multiple articles automating this task using youtube-dl. There's also a recent project called tubesync[0] that provides a GUI and advertises itself as the sonarr/radarr for Youtube [0] https://github.com/meeb/tubesync https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
nirav72 5y ago
I've been using TubeArchivist for grabbing newly posted videos in my subscriptions. It will grab the meta info and thumbnails as well. Has a built in video player, so you can watch the videos directly within the web app. https://github.com/bbilly1/tubearchivist https://github.com/bbilly1/tubearchivist Another one I've used before is Tubesync- although it doesn't have a built-in player. But it has the ability to integrate with Plex. https://github.com/meeb/tubesync https://github.com/meeb/tubesync

blueflow 5y ago

The official UI has some weird bugs. Like, when i listen to a long video, and then seek back to some position near the beginning, it gets stuck loading forever. At this point, running youtube-dl via mpv on it is faster than the official UI for me. I set ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=480]+bestaudio/best[height<=480] in the mpv config so i dont use up more bandwith than my eyes can consume. Youtube-dl is somewhat wonky some days, tho.

pjc50 5y ago

Android users may enjoy NewPipe: just lets you watch the video, no ads, no suggestions.

loloquwowndueo 5y ago

The best way I’ve found to spend less time on YouTube is realizing that the vast majority of content is pure garbage and just stay the hell away from it. These days I only visit it when I need something specific (a tutorial on how to do a particular thing, a video the kid wants to watch, etc). And of course uBlock origin is enabled to spare me from the “unskippable ads that are longer than the video itself” experience.

whalesalad 5y ago
The bar is certainly lower. Lots of stuff that amounts to a PowerPoint presentation full of stock art/video with poor narration.
Enginerrrd 5y ago
Yeah it's exceedingly rare that better, more parseable information isn't available in text somewhere. Unfortunately though, it is becoming more common for people to make a video instead of a well written tutorial or guide or better documentation.
Nextgrid 5y ago
My strategy is to have a curated list of subscriptions (in an RSS reader - I don't have a Google account) and just stick to those. I very rarely explore outside of that exactly for the reason you mention.
sabjut 5y ago
While I agree that "the vast majority of content is pure garbage", I have to make an argument that a non-negligible portion of the site delivers high-quality educational videos with excellent research. The curiosity-seeking part of my brain is subject to being very easy to get hooked on this.
scrollaway 5y ago
YouTube has some of the best, highest quality free content available on the internet today. Stay away from the crap, remove it from your recommendations, subscribe to some good channels. It’s that simple. Don’t if that’s not your thing but you’re missing out. If you change your mind here are a few exceptional channels to get you started, they should cater well to a HN style audience: Technology Connections (misc tech) Wendover Productions (Logistics) DefunctLand (Documentaries on old defunct stuff) Not Just Bikes (Cycling, public transport, urban design, walkability) Practical Engineering (civil engineering) 3Blue1Brown (Math)

tomlue 5y ago

I got off yt after seeing how much time I was losing with a time tracking app.

1121redblackgo 5y ago

I appreciate the post. Implemented it and immediately I feel like I am off the attention treadmill that youtube puts me on. Thanks

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

What I do to minimize the trash heap of sponsored content on the homepage is I have a youtube bookmark to my channel. It's empty and has no videos. Then if I wanna see something, I just type it in. I don't have to see a single piece of content I'm not interested in at that moment. Also you could just use enhancer for youtube to hide sidebar content.

elcapitan 5y ago

It's nice, unfortunately the filters break also playlists, which is unfortunate, because those are actually created by me for distraction-free watching of stuff that I'm really interested in.

Demcox 5y ago

YouTube started as such a great way to explore niche interests but has, as the author describes well, turned into a large hooking mechanism and I hate it for that. Used to spend a lot of good quality time watching videos on there and interacting with like minded people but now YT is blocked on my network.

deleted 5y ago
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scoutt 5y ago

> Am I the only one who launches YouTube just to watch a single tutorial and ends up devouring dozens of fine-tuned recommendations? I'm hitting 40 next week, and seeing others asking for recommendations of videos on "programming a microcontroller" (or programming related) is something I can't understand. One day I sat and watched some of the videos they were recommending, and in most of them there were a person talking for 40 minutes while showing the screen. Also, the video, at least to me, makes the person doing the tutorial to be seen as "more authoritative" than through text, even if you can tell the person talking has little experience with microcontrollers (or whatever, if you have experience in the field). The same applies for "making a gradient in Gimp". I don't want a 5 minutes videos. Give me a bullet-point list on text. 20 seconds read. I can "rewind" easily and repeat a step I missed. I will always prefer text for some types of tutorials. I can "ctrl + f" and search for the parts I want, and see the code examples in peace, without rushing them while someone is talking. I might watch a video tutorial for, I don't know, fixing a dishwater. But I guess I am just getting old.

DavidCole1 5y ago
It's not only you. I feel the same. Whenever I stumble upon a video for a programming related tutorial ( mostly AWS ), I want a text copy by the side so that I can get what I want and move on. Maybe Youtube should give ability to "seek to" on its autogenerated subtitles in the sidebar. I would find it useful at least.
scrollaway 5y ago
People learn in different ways.
- bena 5y ago
  This has been shown to be not true many times over. Different subjects need to be taught in different ways, but there are optimal ways to present information that works for everyone. No one is a "visual learner", there are topics that are best presented in a visual format.
  - 5y ago

toastal 5y ago

I don't know who asked for it to be like a social network, but I did similar thing with GitHub removing the social sidebar and reactions on the home screen making it less distracting with github.com##aside[aria-label="Explore"], #dashboard.dashboard .reactions-with-gap

octatrack 5y ago

Is there something that we can use on iOS to hide recommendations?

spcebar 5y ago

I wrote the following CSS for the Stylus extension to keep me focused--it blocks out suggested videos at the end of a video, the videos in the sidebar, and the comments section: .style-scope.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer,.style-scope.ytd-comments,.style-scope.ytd-mealbar-promo-renderer,.html5-endscreen.ytp-player-content.videowall-endscreen { display:none; }

sixothree 5y ago

I am going to be the voice of dissent here. In September my OTA antenna fell and I never put it back up. I have Netflix but I usually don't watch it. What I spend most of my time on is YouTube and I consider that time to be quality time. I like falling asleep to Adrian's Digital Basement.

marbu 5y ago

The main problem with youtube is lack of control. I would pay youtube if it allowed me to fully control and monitor how it works so that I can fine tune it's behaviour to fit my needs. For example I would like to: - disable recommendations in some contexts (similar to how OP does it) - label videos and let youtube to classify videos into these set of labels, so that I can either block of filter videos accordingly (eg. I could label certain videos as "junk" and would keep those hidden unless I really want to see such videos) - search by video length, eg. show me only talks which takes about an hour - say, show me something I found entertaining, but I have just half an hour, so that after the time is up, it no longer shows such stuff - setup a "watch budget time" to spend or disable service during certain time periods - see metrics about my watch behaviour, so that I can fine tune youtube options accordingly I would be even ok for youtube to show me some ads based on my behaviour, if I have some control over it. Eg. disable ads with too small target group or ads I find annoying. And while there could be some monetization options (eg. you configure your account not to show you something or don't provide service in given timerange - but you would be able to cancel that for a fee :-)) I doubt that it would make sense for them from business perspective: it would decrease the value of the advertising they are selling while it would cost a lot. So in the end I'm not sure if I would be able the real price of all this.

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mill 5y ago

A really convenient workaround is the extension called Unhook. It's very neat and lets you to control many aspects of your Youtube experience. Available both for Chrome/Firefox: 1)https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout... 2)https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

JasonSage 5y ago
This looks really nice, so I'm going to give it a shot. Thanks for the recommendation!

sAbakumoff 5y ago

Just use the full screen mode or theatre mode

antoineMoPa 5y ago

I think have a basic human need to fill time with video or similar content. Before, it was tv, after, it was youtube, now it's mostly tik tok for me. The ancestor of all this is probably watching the campfire for hours.

deephdave 5y ago

I prioritise reading, read on Kindle and on Readup https://readup.com/ https://readup.com/

XCSme 5y ago

I use the browser extension https://unhook.app https://unhook.app, it works great and you can choose to hide/show specific elements.

zczc 5y ago

What helped me was moving channels from YouTube subscriptions to RSS feeds. Thus I stopped opening YouTube homepage and play videos straight from RSS client. RSS URLs are https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<chanel_id> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<chanel_...

ghostly_s 5y ago
I’m getting a 404.
- neogodless 5y ago
  See where the OP put <channel_id>? You have to copy and paste the YouTube channel ID into that space, and then you can use the whole URL in an RSS feed reader.
em-bee 5y ago
this is an excellent tip for someone who doesn't want to sign up to youtube/google just to be able to follow a channel.
latexr 5y ago
For specific playlists: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<playlist_id> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<playli...
delecti 5y ago
There's also the youtube subscription page. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions If you only use youtube to watch videos posted by your subscribed channels, then go to the page that youtube fills exclusively with all of the videos posted by your subscribed channels. It's wild to me how many people use the homepage to consume their subscriptions.

titzer 5y ago

In the past few weeks the homepage changed radically and basically broke recommendations for me, even when signed in. TBH I was kind of bothered how quickly it would adapt to what I was watching, pushing me quickly down rabbit holes. However, with the new change it does not seem to learn very quickly at all, and every time I go there the same dozen videos or so that I probably don't want to see (but don't want to mark "Not Interested") are there. It really can't take a hint. That, and it keeps finding away around my ad blocker. I used to use YouTube for jam/backing tracks to play guitar along to. That's completely broken if an ad interrupts it! Talking about dang frustrating.

mavhc 5y ago

So the recommendations are useless crap, but also the author keeps clicking on them? After the 10th time doing that didn't they learn better?

mediocregopher 5y ago

PSA for all, you can go into your YouTube settings and disable Search History (and a bunch of other things? It's been a while), and surprisingly the algorithm more or less respects that. It completely neuters the algorithm, it won't target you worth a damn, and YouTube becomes a lot less engaging overall. Highly recommend for everyone.

gpvos 5y ago
I only get the option to disable that when I've completely deleted my (Youtube/Google) cookies. If later I go to the Settings, it wants me to log in (which I am not going to do). Does anyone here known which button lets me revisit these settings without logging in?
tryauuum 5y ago
Pretty much. My life went downhill after I discovered that I had disabled search history and re-enabled it
- physicles 5y ago
  Why not disable it again? I just followed GP’s instructions and am looking forward to my life going uphill.

gpvos 5y ago

I've found that recently, when I disable search customization and video history, Youtube indeed appears to not remember previous videos I've seen and to recommend only videos related to the one that just ended, and I'm fine with that.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

Are there any tools that will download either the metadata or even the entire video from my YT subscriptions, and that just runs natively on my Linux system (i.e. no Docker/container stuff) ? Something I could look at that isn't YT but would show me the latest (if any) stuff from channel's I've expressed interest in? I've seen tubearchivist and tubesync, mentioned below, and these just don't operate with the sort of technology I'm comfortable with.

kgwxd 5y ago

I "subscribe" to any channel I think is decent, supposedly it helps their numbers, but I rarely use the YouTube interface to figure out what to watch next. My real subscription list is my RSS reader and I'm highly selective about what goes in there. When I do watch something on the site, I habitually put it in theater mode right away, which hides the suggestions. I'm sure lots of people would set theater mode as the default if it were an option. I'm sure it's not on purpose.

teh_klev 5y ago

The way I've done this is to be quite aggressive and only allow content from my channel subscriptions appear on my landing page. Anything else that shouldn't be there gets a "Don't Recommend Channel" ding. If I'm looking for new material such as tutorials or documentaries, that kind of thing then I search in a separate non-logged in browser profile so the YT algorithm doesn't try to pollute my signed in account with junk. This has mostly worked quite well for me.

psacawa 5y ago

I use this technique of DOM filtering with uBlock to defeat "engagement" features and improve site experience a lot. My problem comes with pages where the HTML element classes are not semantic, but compiled by a tool like tailwind, e.g. <div class="erslblw0"> ... </div> For example, if you go to nytimes.com and use uBlock's 'zapper' to select an element to hide, you'll get a query selector like this: .erslblw0.css-163q563 > .css-13dv6mc These are dependent on the build, and can change day to day. Has any one come up with a solution for this situation, beyond painstakingly manually constructing positional CSS selectors (nth-of-type, etc..)?

the_arun 5y ago

Thing is - YouTube has got one of the best recommendation engines - much better than Netflix. So I wouldn't blame ourselves but the algorithm doing its job.

DeathArrow 5y ago

My problem is that I spend too much time on HN. :)

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vijaybritto 5y ago

I think I'm inadvertently escaping this by viewing all videos in theatre mode! I find it hard to keep my focus on video and instead look for long texts that explain them. But nothing beats well produced videos. Its the same as well explained topics in text with good diagrams.

treacle 5y ago

Never managed to get stuck in a Youtube rabbit hole, as my hardware has been so utterly useless.

treacle 5y ago

In the article there is mention of using ublock to block elements. I didn't even know this was a thing. I zapped the recommendations block on home as suggested in the article. How do you review what you have blocked/removed and re-add it?

ask_b123 5y ago
Go to the settings and the My Filters tab. Your latest added filter should be at the bottom.
- treacle 5y ago
  Thanks for this, I did find the filters via that route. But thought there might be a quick shortcut for the site you are on.

godshatter 5y ago

I reduce my time on YouTube by going there with a specific subject in mind, search on it, and use yt-dlp to download the likely candidates and watch them offline. It has the added bonus of being able to re-watch them offline without going back to YT. It's similar, now that I think about it, to my shopping routine. Research what I want, go in, grab it, and get the heck out. I've learned over the years that if I don't want to buy too much or spend a few hours watching videos I could do without, I limit my interactions voluntarily.

matthewmueller 5y ago

Thanks for sharing this! I just implemented this. I didn't realize uBlock had this capability. It runs faster than other extensions I've tried. Cheers!

threeaccents 5y ago

I just update my hosts file haha

funOtter 5y ago

I turn off "viewing history" and then only subscribe to the channels I am interested in, and ONLY visit https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

asdff 5y ago
Take it a step even further and just follow these channels via RSS and watch with mpv. Don't even point the browser to the site at all.
- funOtter 5y ago
  Thanks! I'll look into that. Is there a good way to track a "to watch" list using youtube RSS and MPV?

mlboss 5y ago

I use chrome plugins that hide recommendations.

GaylordTuring 5y ago

My big problem with YouTube recommendations isn't that they're so good that I get sucked in; it's that they're so bad. I would happily spend more time on the site watching interesting videos if they only would show up in my recommendation feed. Instead, I get recommended the same old crap, all coming from a small set of the same video categories over and over again (except for the occasional America's Got Talent or any other clip that've reached over 100 million views). It's not like I don't like airplane and board repair videos, but it's not the only thing that I'm interested in, which YouTube seems to think. Show me something new! Try recommending a video about how to grow flowers or about Titanic rather than thinking that the only thing I'm interested in are whatever I've been watching for the last couple of months.

joenot443 5y ago
I've found the same thing. I like snowmobiling and I like Dota 2. Surely in the billions and billions of hours of content on YouTube, there's something else I would like as well, but the algorithm seems content to only ever serve me up videos from two categories. Some kind of forced flavor in an "I'm Feeling Lucky" or "Discover Weekly" format would be a great improvement I think.
scrollaway 5y ago
The recommendation engine does tend to hover around recommending more of the same topics you like, because it looks like it's mostly driven off "people who like the stuff you like also liked this other stuff". The solution to that is to bootstrap the engine with a variety of topics. I'm subscribed to channels about game design, film critics, engineering, urban planning, math, sudoku, beat saber, figure skating, history, and stand ups. This much does mean the homepage gets pretty diverse and once in a while new topics do show up.
mdrzn 5y ago
Lately YouTube started proposing "Wanna watch something new?" and offered me a tab "New to you" with only videos from creators I've never watched before. That was a good change of pace for once, instead of showing me videos I've watched less than a week ago.

alexitosrv 5y ago

I am in a new job as of lately, and found myself wandering a lot in youtube, reddit and twitter. I also used ublock for removing the recommendation section and it makes my life much simpler. We should use an adversarial approach to all those UX hyper optimizations from big cos. I also had to install LeechBlock to limit my time on time wasting activities, now I sleep better and have an easier time focusing on work stuff, even just freeing some mind-CPU to accomplish more meaningful tasks. Glad that I am not alone in this battle for our own sanity.

jollybean 5y ago

Youtube's recommendations for some reason are pitiful next to TikTok. It may be an inherent advantage of the super-short format.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

How I spend less time on YouTube: I spend ~0 time on YouTube. I’m definitely not the average user, but I find video content overwhelming and usually low signal:noise. So I just don’t consume it for the most part. I’m sure I’m missing out on stuff that I’d find valuable, but the vast majority of the time I find the same content summarized in a tweet or thread with links to readable reference material where appropriate. And usually that’s how I get introduced to the video I’m not gonna watch in the first place.

eyelidlessness 5y ago
Love to be downvoted for… finding videos overwhelming.
- ekanes 5y ago
  More likely you’re being downvoted for the casual non-solution to a common and real problem people are wrestling with. If people were all talking about how they try to avoid over-eating, saying “oh I just don’t over-eat. That’s my solution” contributes little to the conversation.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    I felt that: 1. Acknowledging that some people find consuming video content challenging is always worth mentioning. It’s not the problem being discussed, but it’s a related problem with so much content being on YouTube. Your analogy would be closer as “I very seldom eat, because I don’t react well to food.” Which is obviously absurd when put that way. 2. The fact that transcripts or summaries are often available is a contribution, as it presents another potential option for those who want to access one piece of content without falling into a recommendations hole.

rootsudo 5y ago

I should post things like this too. Ublock is great for this kind of thing, and same blocking the landing page, and comments but not playlists. Making Youtube more inconvenient makes me happier.

cambaceres 5y ago

I have gone from spending at least an hour a day on YT to basically nothing in just the past weeks. The reason for this is that YT removed the dislikes count. The like vs dislike ratio was the only way to know the quality of a video before watching it, and after getting really used to that it feels like a totally waste of time to watch random videos just because yt recommends them.

skilled 5y ago

It's sad knowing that YouTube has done very little to optimize its browsing UI and the algorithm has remained largely stale over the years. As such, it's hard to enjoy the platform beyond the absolute necessities of watching a tutorial, podcast, or catching up on news.

sheinsheish 5y ago

Turn history off and/or watch via DuckDuckGo

deleted 5y ago

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