> Am I the only one who launches YouTube just to watch a single tutorial and ends up devouring dozens of fine-tuned recommendations?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>I might watch a video tutorial for, I don't know, fixing a dishwater. But I guess I am just getting old.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>RSS URLs are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<chanel_id>" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<chanel_...</a>
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:<p>1)<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...</a><p>2)<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>It'll be interesting to see how this changes my browsing!
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>Then show me all the algorithmic stuff when I'm on the website so I can find better stuff to subscribe to.
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.<p>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.
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.<p><pre><code> <div class="erslblw0"> ... </div>
</code></pre>
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:<p><pre><code> .erslblw0.css-163q563 > .css-13dv6mc
</code></pre>
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..)?
I turn off "viewing history" and then only subscribe to the channels I am interested in, and ONLY visit <a href="https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions</a>
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.
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.
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.
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?<p>I've seen tubearchivist and tubesync, mentioned below, and these just don't operate with the sort of technology I'm comfortable with.
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 <i>my</i> needs.<p>For example I would like to:<p>- disable recommendations in some contexts (similar to how OP does it)<p>- 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)<p>- search by video length, eg. show me only talks which takes about an hour<p>- 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<p>- setup a "watch budget time" to spend or disable service during certain time periods<p>- see metrics about my watch behaviour, so that I can fine tune youtube options accordingly<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
You can also play faster than the 2x speed limit cap using<p>document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate=4<p>is there a way to also make this the default max play speed without entering it in console?
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.<p>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.
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.
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:<p>.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; }
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
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.
I recently found a distraction-free youtube client which works very well:<p><a href="http://yt.dudzik.co/" rel="nofollow">http://yt.dudzik.co/</a><p>Problem is sometimes if you click on a generic youtube link, it won't automatically open up the link in the distraction-free client.
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.
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.
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.<p>How do you review what you have blocked/removed and re-add it?
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.
I use the browser extension <a href="https://unhook.app" rel="nofollow">https://unhook.app</a>, it works great and you can choose to hide/show specific elements.
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.<p>Making Youtube more inconvenient makes me happier.
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.
Thanks for sharing this! I just implemented this.<p>I didn't realize uBlock had this capability. It runs faster than other extensions I've tried. Cheers!
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.
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...