Recently, I’ve been trying to find ways to manage my time better. The biggest problem is that I would get stuck in YouTube binge-watching sessions that I couldn’t pry myself away from. I would constantly be looking for the next thing to click on that was just interesting enough to keep my attention.
As I became more and more disillusioned with my situation, I began to realize just how severe the problem had become. I spent most of my free time just watching videos. Not socializing, not making anything cool, not learning any new hobbies. Just YouTube. Was this the life I really wanted? How many of those videos do I even remember anyway? Oh god. Thousands of hours of my life are being lost forever… I HAVE to stop this. How?
Analyzing my behavior quickly revealed the culprit — YouTube video recommendations keep tempting me with content that I never planned on watching. My eyes would always be drawn to the wall of titles and thumbnails for me to click on next, and that kept me in a vicious cycle. Click on a mildly entertaining video, look for another mildly entertaining recommended video, click. Rinse and repeat.
What if instead of doing that, I threw it all out and only chose a select few really good channels to watch? Oh wait, that’s called the subscription feed!
I went through all of the channels I subscribed to over the years. Disturbingly, I found that I didn’t actually care about most of them. It was cheap, mass-produced content to make the creator lots of money, and it was just barely entertaining enough to keep my attention.
I removed 95% of my subscriptions and kept only the best channels. These were often beautifully presented, thought-provoking STEM content, which prioritized quality over quantity. Now, instead of a binge of 30 videos, my subscription feed for the day had… just three. That’s it. After those three videos, I would be done for the day.
There was only one thing left to do now — delete the recommendations.
I wrote a hacky script that simply removed the recommended video column and end screen, and finally, I added the YouTube homepage in a webpage blocking plugin so I only looked at the subscription feed. Just like that, I had fixed YouTube. There were no more distracting recommendations. The choice of what to watch was back in my hands.
It only took 20 minutes before I grew completely bored and wanted to do something else. But that’s not a bug; it’s a feature. That sense of boredom is there to push me to do something meaningful with my life — make something, pick up a new hobby, or meet people. The fact that I felt it so strongly meant that my plan was working. All of those things I always wanted to do… now I can actually do them. As long as I never allow endless scroll feeds and recommendation algorithms to rule my life again. But knowing the damage they’ve done to me, I never want to go back.
Because to be free, I ultimately need to make the Internet boring again.
What about you? Do you have measures to prevent the Internet from taking away all of your free time?
If you turn off your watch history, YouTube gives you no recommendations and the main page is just a blank page.
Thanks! (I feel so dumb now lol)
Definitely wouldn’t be the first time I immediately jumped to scripting instead of finding an easier way to do something!
I know that feeling. Scripting is fun!
It’s honestly one of the reasons I love Lemmy. After about 10 minutes of scrolling I start seeing all the posts from yesterday and it makes it super easy to put down and move on.
This is why I self host invidious. I enjoy YouTube content, but I want a clean, targeted experience when viewing videos.
This is also why I self host FreshRSS and use a client like Lire. I want clean and targeted news feeds.
This is why I haven’t had cable in 20 years and self hosted my own videos by legally purchasing dvds/blurays and ripping them. ( later adding ad free subscriptions ). I hate commercials with a passion and refuse to experience them ever again.
All of this has allowed me to have a very controlled experience and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
For YouTube I hate the algorithm so i disabled YouTube app & only watch through browser. Of course mobile & desktop browsers are running uBlock Origin, Sponsorblock & DeArrow.
I never sign in. Instead of subscribing to channels or “watch later” I’m an avid user of Joplin notes so i have a specific note for YouTube for subscriptions & for any interesting looking videos I stumble across. The note is broken into video time length so i can watch something depending on available time, which helps if mindlessly watching stuff. Joplin syncs to all devices.
Its an extra few seconds for me to add a url & title to the note but its second nature now. The beauty is I only see stuff I’m interested in not crap they think I want to see. Plus this way its easy to save links for any video site.
Another thing I do is for audio style videos I’ve enabled background play so i can listen at night with a timer when going to sleep rather than having to sit & watch a video.
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Seconding Enhancer For YouTube. Great browser extension.
Rss reader. Nowadays I do not find myself wasting time surfing the web. I will check my feed once or twice a day and thats it. You will have everything in one place yt channels, blogs, articles etc.
Same here! I use nothing but RSS feeds for everything. I even use them to keep up with new arrivals on sites I shop on. They’re 🔥
I started using YouTube back when it was new. When the default view was the videos from the channels you subscribed to, and I have kept that pattern.
It seems to work, except for the few weeks after a holiday I empty my YouTube, nebula, and podcast feeds early each day
You can also block the web element with ublock origin
Or write a script that automatically downloads your subscriptions to a jellyfin server.
Invidious is nice but google does sometimes do stuff that breaks it. Yt-dlp scripts on the other hand are solid.
Not a great design, but does the main job of getting updates and running yt-dlp.
When Youtube removed dislikes from showing, apart from putting the dislike plugin on my browser, I went and disabled the youtube app on my phone. I installed newpipe which doesnt use any account. I never imported my subscriptions to the app on my phone and I set the homescreen to show an empty screen.
I used to spend ~1-2hours watching memes or whatever (I used to watch more serious stuff in the past, related to physics and such). Almost as soon as I made the change, I vary rarely watch youtube. It is ~usually stuff I search up (~mainly music when I choose not to use Innertune or listen to my local stuff) or stuff people share with me. This week I watched on average about 7mins of yt per day. It’s liberating
Voyager app with continuous scrolling turned off. Once I’ve read a few pages, I’m done for a while.
For facebook, the search icon shows which groups have new posts since last visit, so that too has a finite end.
I only use YouTube Shorts Redirect because as soon as I click on a short somehow 2 hours are gone. With this extension shorts are viewed like normale YouTube videos and you are not trapped in this neverending scrolling view.
I think that there is an android app, perhaps “pipeline”, which is YouTube, with a subscription list separate from your yt account. Not sure how it handles ads though.
I definitely agree that making the internet boring again makes it less addictive. I’d use Invidious or Piped if I could get the subscriptions to work.
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