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Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

Be careful with YouTube. For years people have talked about social media's effect on mental health, but personally, I've found the biggest hit to be YouTube.

Their recommendation system is really the heart of the beast. It's essentially a dopamine reward system, not too dissimilar from a slot machine at a casino. Pull the lever (refresh the page) and get random results! It sucks you in to a cycle of refreshing, finding videos you're interested in, clicking, rinse, repeat.

Personally I found myself losing hours per day to this behavior and gaining very little from it.

Far more productive, is going to YouTube for something SPECIFIC. Use the search function to find what you're looking for, and watch those videos, but never use the homepage or sidebar recommendations.

There are actually google chrome plugins which will totally remove the recommended section:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...

View on HN

YouTube is weird, it seems to be so incredibly different, depending on the user.

I get what you're saying about the reward system, but I normally run out of content I want to watch and recommendation engine isn't really suggesting anything interesting. That's after watching a few videos every other evening.

There's a few channels I subscribe to, and I do regular clean up, like twice a year, and remove the subscriptions I'm no longer interested in. YouTube mostly shows me the new videos from those channels an a few similar videos and then kinda gives up.

Two thing I would not recommend is using YouTube without a subscription and be sure to log in. The default videos on the front page are all terribly, and the ads are amazingly bad. In regards to the ads, I think that people in smaller markets are a problem for YouTube. They simply don't have enough ads so they can't actually target them in any meaningful sense.

Unhook is a godsend. I'm still spending too much time on YT but at least I am not sucked in by the endless Algorithm of never ending videos.

Unhook for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

FreeTube (freetubeapp.io) implements options for that too, I've found it wonderfully effective to keep me focused.

> It sucks you in to a cycle of refreshing, finding videos you're interested in, clicking, rinse, repeat.

Well then I guess that I'm lucky that the recommendation system almost entirely fails to find videos that I'm interested in!

If you're already subscribed to what you consider to be the best channels and they're feeding you more content than you have time to watch, then the recommendation section becomes almost useless. As long as you're using grid view and hiding videos you've watched or aren't interested in. Of course you can still waste hours this way but at least you won't have to keep refreshing in hope of good content.

>Far more productive, is going to YouTube for something SPECIFIC. Use the search function to find what you're looking for, and watch those videos, but never use the homepage or sidebar recommendations.

Unfortunately the search is far from independent of the recommendation algorithm.

This is where DuckDuckGo shines. I never go to the YouTube homepage since I just search `thing i'm looking for!yt` and it takes me straight to the search results for "thing i'm looking for."

Granted, I've never watched much YouTube, but that curbs it even more.

I use Alfred on Mac for this. Targeted searches to any website/service you can think of (you can add your own). Such a time saver.

Similarly, most browser will let you set up a custom search such that you wouldn't even need to go to DuckDuckGo. For example I have "yt" as the alias that searches YouTube. Basically it takes the phrase you enter and puts it into the search query parameter of YouTube.

> Far more productive, is going to YouTube for something SPECIFIC. Use the search function to find what you're looking for

I'd sometimes forget what I came for based on the recommendations from the homepage. Not that I was logged in and saw interesting stuff -- not even -- just the sheer uselessness of what people apparently watch the most (clickbait titles, soccer match replays, gasping surprised face with all-caps title, you know the type). Adding that part of the homepage to the ad blocker, using the pipette tool in uBlock Origin, helped a lot. Or add the youtube search to your address bar (firefox: add keyword search, or go via ddg bang commands) so you don't have to open the homepage to get a search box.

> Far more productive, is going to YouTube for something SPECIFIC. Use the search function to find what you're looking for, and watch those videos, but never use the homepage or sidebar recommendations

I've found myself doing this more recently, but I also like exploring. I think my goal is to not start from recommendations, but a specific curiosity, and roll from there.

Then again, there are plenty of creators that will bring me things I never even thought to consider. 3blue1brown was mentioned in the article, and I have notifications turned on for them because I know for a fact I will watch the entire video.

I completely agree. I replied to another comment with more anecdotal evidence but people are absolutely missing how dangerous YouTube is because of all the focus on FB. Content is getting worse as creators focus on spammy click bait and DO NOT let your kids anywhere near youtube... even the YouTube for kids. They will end up getting sucked into that dopamine reward system you mention, consuming the most banal content.

If you prefer ublock origin filters I have the following:

  youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"]
  youtube.com###related
  youtube.com##.html5-endscreen

The first one, removes the homepage, the second one the list of videos when on an already existing video, the last one, the end screen tiles.

This is a big reason I largely only watch YouTube either on the treadmill or while folding laundry. When a YouTube video I want to watch is up I'll force myself to get on the treadmill to watch it. By the time it's over I'm tired enough to feel very "done" with YouTube.

I had the same problem as well. The unhook extension works great. I also uninstalled the YouTube app on my mobile and only use the browser.

I mostly watch long form lectures or discussion podcasts on YouTube.

I don’t get that same rush, you describe. Many short videos are the problem?

lol bruh have you ever used tiktok

> lol bruh have you ever used tiktok

Please don't make low effort posts like this here.

oh i forgot we aren't allowed to joke here

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