The Closest You’ll Get to Addiction-Free Youtube
This essay’s advice works for Google Chrome, Firefox, and for Android phones, but might be applicable to other media as well.
If you’re like me, you have a history with “The Tube”.
And you haven’t shaken the addiction yet. If you do have, great! Let me know what worked for you.
But if you haven’t: Try getting to the root of the problem. For me, it was recommendations.
Watch with blinders
Recommendations are quite powerful. Neural networks really have their way of studying your behavior, and keeping you on the site as long as possible. And even knowing this, you still can’t help but click and stay.
So blocking them out doesn’t feel like defeat to me - the way I see it, the only way to win this battle is by not taking part.
And complete celibacy was no option for me - thankfully, there are awesome people on the internet who help you throw out the bathwater while keeping the baby:
“Unhook - Remove YouTube Recommended Videos”
This Chrome extension changed the game for me. I look at my subscriptions, watch what’s worth watching, and close Youtube again. I mean, look at this:
No recommendations, no problems
It’s like putting on a fresh pair of underwear on New Year's Day.
You can block out other parts of the website, too:
So yeah, highly recommended. You can get it here.
Android
On Android, what you’ll want to do is
uninstall/deactivate the Youtube app
download BlockSite and block “youtube.com”
If you still want to watch Youtube on the phone, without recommendations, download Kiwi Browser.
Kiwi Browser is a Chrome-based browser that supports extensions and is somehow not affected by BlockSite. So what you do next is add the Youtube Recommendations Blocker to Kiwi, set it up and you’re good to go.
Let me know if this helps. Cheers.