https://pawelurbanek.com/youtube-addiction-selfcontrol Pawel Urbanek Performance Consultant Tune Your Performance Blog Contact << Using Dynamic Config Variables in Ruby on Rails Apps Using Dynamic Config Variables in Ruby on Rails Apps << Prev How to Spend Less Time on YouTube Updated Dec 8, 2021 2 minute read Funny cat is also addicted to YouTube and is suffering from a lack of self control Photo by Cats Coming from Pexels Sponsored by ScoutAPM A leading-edge performance and error monitoring tool for Ruby applications. Scout APM banner Maybe I'm paranoid. But, I think there's a lot of smart people dedicating their life's work to make others keep watching videos. Since YouTube's incomprehensible decision to remove dislikes count it's become even easier to waste time on worthless content. In this blog post, I'll describe a simple trick that helped me start using YouTube in a more deliberate and focused manner. Are those funny cats in the room with us right now? Am I the only one who launches YouTube just to watch a single tutorial and ends up devouring dozens of fine-tuned recommendations? I've always had little self-control. You can check out my other blog post for info about the measures I take to fight my internet and mobile addiction. The problem is that you cannot watch a video without being attacked by highly-engaging-thumbnail suggestions: YouTube addictive UI with recommendations Before I came up with the current solution, I regularly cleared cookies to reset my profile and make recommendations less personalized. But, this approach works only for a short while. Algorithms are astonishingly quick to catch up. How to break the optimized UI? The UX of YouTube has been A/B battle-tested to make users consume content for as long as possible. A way to break out of this loop can be to make the UI worse. A uBlock Origin extension can help you with that. Using the extension, you can cherry-pick any part of the website and create a filter that will prevent it from displaying: uBlock origin picker tool uBlock origin in action As a result, you can get a less cluttered viewing experience that is unlikely to make you binge on worthless content: Watching YouTube with suggestions hidden The more focused viewing experience I've also applied a similar filter to the YT landing so that I can open it and deliberately enter my search phrase without being bombarded by recommendations: Landing page of YouTube without suggested videos Less distracting YT landing page And that's it, that's the trick! It might not seem much, but since I've applied it, my usage of YouTube has been much more focused. I'm using the following uBlock Origin filters list: ! 2021-11-29 https://www.youtube.com www.youtube.com###secondary ! 2021-12-06 https://www.youtube.com www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"] #primary ! 2021-12-08 https://www.youtube.com www.youtube.com##.ytp-show-tiles.ytp-endscreen-paginate.videowall-endscreen.ytp-player-content.html5-endscreen Summary I don't know how long before YT introduces random selectors and other countermeasures against this technique. As long as it works, I highly recommend you give it a try. You can turn the recommendations on at any time. But, I prefer to choose what to waste my time on without the help of algorithms. Hire me I'm available to conduct a performance tuning and security audit of your Rails app. Tune Your Performance Pawel Urbanek avatar You can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my mailing list . << Using Dynamic Config Variables in Ruby on Rails Apps Sponsored by ScoutAPM A leading-edge performance and error monitoring tool for Ruby applications. Scout APM banner Back to top Back to index Copyright (c) Pawel Urbanek 2021 Terms [noscript]