Reducing YouTube Usage
Over time, I've tried to slowly reduce the amount of social media that I browse. I don't need to completely cut it out of my life, but I need to use it in very strict moderation. YouTube has always ended up being the hardest platform to cut down on. As much as I would like to just not use it, it does remain as the video sharing platform and is where a lot of creators put their work that I want to see. So, instead of outright cutting it out, I took some steps to modify how I use YouTube in the efforts of making it serve me better.
The guiding principle is that I want to be more intentional when using the platform. I want to use it with a specific purpose instead of submitting to the endless flow of algorithmic recommendations.
Small Things
I basically don't use my home feed at all. I have a bookmark to YouTube that goes directly to my subscriptions page instead of the home page, so that I can see precisely what I subscribed to. Sometimes it's fun to see what I get recommended, but I very much try to not make that a habit.
I started using the Watch Later playlist much more. If there is something that I want to watch, then I pop it onto that list and I can go directly to the playlist when I want to find a video to watch. Nowadays, I don't actually use the playlist, and I have my own bespoke setup with bookmarking videos, but that's a whole thing.
Extensions
I primarily use YouTube in a web browser, so I can leverage extensions to customize YouTube. It would be harder (or impossible?) to do this if I used the YouTube App on a mobile device.
There are a couple of extensions specifically made for YouTube that are meant to do exactly what I want. I started using Unhook which worked well, but then YouTube changed something with the recommended videos that show up when a video is over that made Unhook unable to block it, so I started using Remove YouTube Suggestions.
Both of these extensions allowed for blocking specific elements on YouTube so that they don't appear.
Things that I like to change:
- Hide Shorts in all contexts forever (grr i hate shorts)
- Hide Homepage suggestions
- Hide Sidebar Suggestions
- Hide end of video suggestions
- Hide annotations
- On the left navigation bar:
- Hide home button
- Auto navigate to subscriptions page if home page is loaded
- Hide Explore / Trending
- Hide More From Youtube
As an exercise, I just disabled the extension and holy heck, this is awful. Just so many things in my face that I do not want to see.
Secret Technique: RSS
Yes, RSS once again swoops in and makes things a lot better for me.
Fun Fact: Every YouTube channel can be accessed as an RSS Feed! Most RSS feed readers / aggregators will be able to find them if you try and add a YouTube channel as a feed. It's even possible to filter out things like shorts using this method, which is so useful.
If I have feeds for the channels that I'm subscribed for, then I barely need to go to YouTube to find the videos I want. It's even better if your RSS feed reader embeds the video into the post so that you don't need to go to YouTube to watch the video at all. I use FreshRSS which has an extension that is supposed to embed videos, but it's very broken for me, so I don't use it currently.
In its simplest form, this is basically as good as going to the subscriptions page. If set up right, this may be even better than the subscriptions page because most feed readers allow you to organize your feeds into different categories. It's very easy to group different YouTube channels into categories like "Video Games" or "Educational Videos" or "Extremely Long Video Essays".
Playlists also have RSS feeds, but it's a bit weird and not very usable. It only shows the first 15 videos in a Playlist, but if the channel decides to put the videos in chronological order, it will forever show the first 15 videos and never any of the recent ones. I have never been able to find any comprehensive documentation on this functionality except for this very old StackExchange post.
Final Thoughts
The only difficulty is that recommendations are good sometimes. It is nice to be able to discover and branch out and find new people with amazing work. However, I would much rather opt-in to that instead of dealing with the deluge of recommendations by default. Besides: that's what following people is for! If there's a video that is worth watching, then I'll likely hear about it through blogs anyways. Word of mouth is powerful!!!