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?
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