Even with quitting most social media, I couldn’t bring myself to leave YouTube. There’s just too much useful stuff on there. But it still can be pretty distracting if I’m not careful.
Here are some tips for if you want to de-algorithmize your YouTube so you can use it to get valuable content and curate your information diet without getting sucked in.
1. Set Subscriptions as Your Home Page
You can bookmark the Subscriptions page instead of the YouTube home page. That way, you’ll only see the channel you decided to follow, instead of whatever YouTube thinks you should watch. What a concept!
You can also install the browser extension Unhook YouTube. I use it to hide the Home Feed and automatically redirect me to the Subscriptions tab when I go to YouTube.
Unhook YouTube is a free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge that lets you customize what you see when you access YouTube.
2. Hide Recommended Videos
Do you ever go to YouTube for one thing and then end up going down the distraction rabbit hole? Or, worse yet, you somehow end up watching those wretched shorts.
Well, using that same browser extension I mentioned above, you can actually disable a ton of other options, like recommended videos or even video end screens.
3. Hide Thumbnails
This is kind of an extreme move, in my opinion. But I’m an extreme kind of dude. Unless it’s purely entertainment content, thumbnails are rarely a good representation of the video’s content. They are designed to get clicks, even if you aren’t especially interested in the topic of the video.
Personally, I’ve found it helpful just to let the title’s be my guide.
Here’s what it looks like when I go to YouTube with thumbnails disabled in Unhook:
Using the Unhook YouTube Browser Extension
Unhook YouTube has a ton of settings to make YouTube less addicting, beyond what I’ve shown here.
Here’s a list of all the options Unhook has as of this writing:
- Hide Homepage Feed
- Redirect to Subscriptions
- Hide Video Sidebar
- Hide Recommended (Related Videos)
- Hide Live Chat
- Hide Playlist
- Hide Fundraiser
- Hide YouTube Shorts
- Hide End Screen Videowall
- Hide End Screen Cards
- Hide Comments
- Hide Mixes
- Hide Merch, Tickets, Offers
- Hide Video Info
- Hide Video Buttons Bar (share, likes, dislikes)
- Hide Channel (profile + subscribe button)
- Hide Video Description
- Hide Top Header
- Hide Notification Bell
- Hide Irrelevant Search Results (“Related to your search”, “Latest from”, “Searches related to”, “People also search for”, etc.)
- Hide Explore and Trending
- Hide More from YouTube
- Hide and Redirect Subscriptions
- Disable Autoplay
- Disable Annotations
My favorite settings are Hide Home Feed (with the option to redirect to the Subscriptions tab), Hide Shorts, and Hide Thumbnails.
Using Unhook YouTube on a Phone
Sadly, you can’t do this in the YouTube phone app. But the simple workaround is just to uninstall the YouTube app from your phone, and only access YouTube through your phone’s browser. Unhook has a mobile app that works as an extension for your phone’s browser.
It’s a little more cumbersome than just using the app, but in the case of trying to avoid distraction, a little bit of friction is actually what we’re after.
