How I spend less time on YouTube | Hacker News Reader

How I spend less time on YouTube

pawelurbanek.com

182 pointspawurb209 comments

> Am I the only one who launches YouTube just to watch a single tutorial and ends up devouring dozens of fine-tuned recommendations?

I'm hitting 40 next week, and seeing others asking for recommendations of videos on "programming a microcontroller" (or programming related) is something I can't understand.

One day I sat and watched some of the videos they were recommending, and in most of them there were a person talking for 40 minutes while showing the screen.

Also, the video, at least to me, makes the person doing the tutorial to be seen as "more authoritative" than through text, even if you can tell the person talking has little experience with microcontrollers (or whatever, if you have experience in the field).

The same applies for "making a gradient in Gimp". I don't want a 5 minutes videos. Give me a bullet-point list on text. 20 seconds read. I can "rewind" easily and repeat a step I missed.

I will always prefer text for some types of tutorials. I can "ctrl + f" and search for the parts I want, and see the code examples in peace, without rushing them while someone is talking.

I might watch a video tutorial for, I don't know, fixing a dishwater. But I guess I am just getting old.

People learn in different ways.

Video is great for many things, but step by step instructions/tutorials ain't one of them.

I disagree. It is great because you can actually see where the steps are performed. It's sometimes faster than reading a bullet point than finding out where on the screen it is.

And I did NOT grow up on videos, I just think they're neat.

Of course, there are times when I dislike them too. It's not always black and white.

> you can actually see where the steps are performed. It's sometimes faster than reading a bullet point than finding out where on the screen it is

If and only if the steps are performed in the correct order without any fluffs. In one particularly bad example that I saw someone was showing how to use an updated feature in Photoshop. The sequence went something like

* the instructor showed the old way of doing things

* they then did 'undo' a few times to get back to the point where the new feature was different

* they started showing the new way

* they then realised they'd made a mistake earlier on - missing out a step in the new sequence

* they did undo a few times

* they did the step they'd omitted

* they then carried on from that point

I had to watch several times to work out the actual sequence of correct operations. To my mind they should have re-recorded from the beginning rather than show their disrespect for the viewers.

There are very badly written articles as well though.

Yeah, but I can also usually tell an article is bad in a 15 second skim. Videos aren't always so generous.

The easiest form of media to create is unedited video.

The hardest is edited video

This. Although I have discovered why the jump cut is so popular! Actually, even inexpert jump-cutting does improve things though, so worth doing.

Extensive use of jump-cuts lets you edit single-camera monologues as if they were text. Much easier & cheaper than doing re-shoots, using multiple cameras, et c.

I can personally attest that this style was extremely off-putting to us oldsters (millennial here—yeah, we're getting old) until we'd had a few years to get used to it. It's not something you see in traditional video media unless a mistake happens, or you're watching some kind of weird art thing.

It’s funny that unedited, poorly rehearsed “presenting style” has in a way taken on a life of its own. Speaking to a director off-camera, quick jump cuts of multiple takes, drawing attention to flubbing of lines, are all sort of techniques used in YouTube videos to show “authenticity” to the viewer (ie, I’m just a regular person making these videos).

I was listening to a podcast recently and noticed they left in some banter before an interview started. The banter added nothing to the discussion since they weren’t even talking about the topic yet. Its sole purpose was to make the chat feel informal and, in my opinion, “more real”.

Meanwhile radio shows were taking out individual ums and errs, even in the analog era.

This has been shown to be not true many times over.

Different subjects need to be taught in different ways, but there are optimal ways to present information that works for everyone.

No one is a "visual learner", there are topics that are best presented in a visual format.

Where’s this list of the so called optimal ways to present information that works for everyone?

No, it's not about the "optimal way", it's about the oft-cited the factoid "90% of people are haptic learners, 30% are visual learners, 15% are auditory learners, 25% are text-based learners". Somebody did an experiment and found out 90% of subjects remembered something later when they had to learn to do it, but only 25% remembered when they had to read it. (All numbers made up, does not matter in the context of this comment)

Of course, this completely misrepresents the experiment! After learning to do something, you are 90% likely to retain it for a certain duration, after you read about it, you are only 25% likely to retain it, so in aggregate you only retain 25% of what you read.

The idea was never to find people who are "visual learning type" or the "non-learning-by-doing type".

That's what became of this idea in education through the game of telephone that mangles experimental results on their way from developmental psychology and cognitive science into education departments, and then into future high school teachers during undergrad lectures. Even my own high school teachers in Germany talked about learning types as if there was such a thing.

Sorry if I was unclear. There is no singular optimal way of teaching. But for every subject, there is an optimal way to teach it. And usually that optimal way is a combination of visuals, auditory, reading, etc.

Way too often, someone achieves understanding when information happens to be presented in an optimal way for that information and they instead believe that the way was optimized for them rather than for the information.

Then they get stuck on "I need to watch videos to truly understand it".

Ok, where’s the list of the optimal way to teach every subject?

Anecdotal counterargument: I am a visual learner. For almost all topics I learn about, watching a video is by far the most effective, fastest, and most impactful way for me to grasp and remember new concepts. A very large part of my education in math, science, machine learning, music theory, filmmaking, screenwriting, visual effects, history, and chemistry was video lectures/essays/content.

I agree that the famous "three/four types of learners, everyone belongs to one of them" factoid isn't true, but disagree that "No one is a 'visual learner.'" I am a visual learner.

This is a self report of a self assessment. So the most unreliable form of reporting coupled with the most unreliable form of assessment.

I believe you believe all of that, but I don't believe it is true. Even in your case.

Have you seen Ben Eater's videos?

I love his videos, but not because they efficiently present tutorial content. He's an amazing teacher because he demonstrates an attitude/approach to learning that would be difficult to convey through text.

Wow, this guy makes me a bit sad, because I did a 4 year Elec Eng degree and the guy that taught semi conductors was so bad. Almost everyone failed the exam because they had no idea what he was talking about (lots of the other modules were good). I (re)learnt more from watching a few of these videos than I did in a semester at university.

Are there any websites/services that curate the best videos on specific school topics? With broader coverage than Khan Academy?

Searching on YouTube find thousands of matches, and I am exhausted after 20 minutes of previewing search results.

I looked at my department website, it's 25+ years since I started uni and the 2 lecturers I had the most trouble learning from are still there. One is had of department! He was a good guy, I just didn't "get it", but the other one was awful at teaching. He did have amazing credentials from Stanford and another top tier uni in the States before coming over to the UK. Teaching was never a priority at that uni!

Once I got a job as a software dev I quickly started preferring text based tutorials and docs. As a student I would always hunt down the “best” tutorial video for a given topic.

I’m in the same boat as you but I just don’t consume YouTube at all. Sure I’ve looked up repair things or a tutorial if it’s less than 10 minutes. I have to have something specific to watch I don’t just keep watching related videos. Watch a movie trailer I wanted to see, then peace out. Maybe it’s partially an age thing or perhaps just some people get that dopamine release easier from YouTube. I will say the exception is that I have spent time watching videos of people building things as long as it doesn’t have narration or hot takes from the people. I guess in general I can’t get behind any of the standard issue YouTuber speak and mannerisms, it’s all very similar (at least that’s how I feel with the popular videos).

text is for learning, video is for entertainment, the problem is that people are confused about what they are doing

Yet I've found video lectures and documentaries enlightening as well as a method to teach me something I did not know.

I'd also think that fiction novels are more entertaining than 'educational'.

This statement is reductive - either medium can be for learning or entertainment, it’s a matter of content and audience.

This is true for certain kinds of tasks, particularly programming or anything very instruction-oriented. However, for practical tasks, like installing a bathroom faucet, a short and succint video is gold. Now that YouTube has chapter labels, it's even better.

That said, YouTube is clearly going downhill for a host of other reasons, but hands-on tutorials remain one of its best forms of content.

I recently watched some good videos on making sushi, wouldn't watch any programming ones though.

I believe it's a generational thing. We, in our late thirties, didn't have so much video content, we studied from books, learned from written content. Younger generations adapted to use videos as a learning aid, sometimes as the main learning platform. We won't ever be able to understand how they work. Their brain just adapted to this kind of learning medium.

For me video talking about code is slow, unsearchable, unskimmable. I cannot easily go back to more difficult parts and reread (watch) them at my own pace. I cannot use them as a quick reference. Even my photographic memory doesn't work with videos, there's just something more powerful with black on white words and formulas.

Also completely agree about youtuber credibility. Being easy going, with good lighting, nice looks and neat surroundings makes them sound authoritative on the subject they talk about, especially to the newcomer ears, without any real backing.

Early 30s here. Possibly to your point and completely anecdotally, I generally have a much harder time learning via text than I do from a more kinetic learning environment or watching a video... but I wish it was the other way around. All of the benefits described above for why text is better I totally agree and I get generally frustrated trying to find the relevant part of the video but for whatever reason seeing the thing I am trying to learn visually demonstrated is immensely more powerful that reading it.

I actually have a pet hypothesis that it has something to do with imagination. I'd be curious if anyone has studied the effects of visual media on imagination and how it impacts kids ability to take written content and understanding it versus the same with visual content. I have a suspicion that before the prevalence of visual media it was even more critical to have an active imagination to be able to synthesis written content and that we've lost a bit of that in younger generations as we've moved toward a reliance on visual learning. I have nothing to back any of this up of course just something i've thought about when reflecting on myself.

I've recently tried to get back into making art. I had a very active imagination as a child and would draw for hours on end. Now the inspiration isn't there and I have a hard time just visualizing scenes or landscapes.

Thank you for sharing that!

Imagination is a "mental muscle" that must atrophy with disuse.

Off-topic, yet relevant (for you):

When I upvoted your comment, your karma crossed 500, so you should now see up/downvote buttons in hn :)

I have just added video tutorials to all my R workshops and have had a _huge_ boost in satisfaction among students (mostly < 30). I can't understand it — the videos are slow, inexpertly produced and have nothing that is not in the text. The students love it though and there is no way I'll be able to run the sister course next semester without also adding videos.

Easier to multi-task maybe? Its really easy to do other things while listening to a video and then jumping into the parts that sound interesting as compared to reading where its necessarily a very active experience.

I'm around 20 and I prefer text over videos. I find videos too long, sometimes exaggerated. Even if I have to watch a video, that has some "content" I'd increase the playback speed to have it done faster. In my opinion, visual instructions give in a lot of unnecessary information than textual instructions. This makes it harder to imagine when watching a video than reading a, say blog.

Perhaps your students read slow or very inefficiently. Since their reading skills are poor and they value their time very highly they can easily budget their time against a video with a defined length vs reading a text that could take more time due to said reading skills. Also, with features like adjusting playback and skipping over parts they understand faster without having to worry (ie: they can't just skip a paragraph or page of text because something might be mixed in with the stuff they understand).

I'm also middle aged and I've started to kind of like video tutorials for totally new subjects. There's often little things that the web tutorials miss that I catch when watching. That said having both is optimal, in my opinion.

For things I'm already familiar with, usually calling the man page is enough.

Gen Z programmer here. Can confirm that video content is by far the best way I learn new information and skills. I think having grown up with the modern internet has shaped my brain in a way that makes it so video feels more natural than it might for folks even 10 years older than me. It's definitely fascinating to look at the effects the internet is having on society over longer time periods.

Are you sure it's not just that video content "feels" like you are leaerning even when you aren't? This is a documented phenomenon that underlies "infotainment".

I'm sure. The work I do on a daily basis is comprised of at least half skills i learned from videos, and that percentage is even higher for my hobbies.

It just seems so slow to me. Here's another 15 minute video of what could be a three minute blog post. Be sure like comment subscribe!

As always, ‘it depends’. I know he’s not YT strictly speaking but I love learning from Wes Bos. But the first time I watched him I was like holy shit boy, slow down! I thought it was terrible.

Then I learned some more, which got me to the stage where I knew what the hell he was on about, and now I love him. Information at its maximum density.

It's always better if they speak a bit too fast, since you can pause at any time to digest what was said.

I watch most videos at triple speed or above. Takes some getting used to, but my brain got accustomed to it over time and now I can watch 3-4 times more youtube than everyone else in the same amount of time!

Even when you do that you can't beat skimming and finding exactly what you need in a text. In a video it's clunky to scrub around and hope you hit the relevant info you need.

24 years old here, I think videos are great for an overview of a topic, but that's it. Most of the time when I'm relatively comfortable with a subject I want either an "how to" or a "reference", and for these I think written content is way better.

> For me video talking about code is slow, unsearchable, unskimmable. I cannot easily go back to more difficult parts and reread (watch) them at my own pace. I cannot use them as a quick reference. Even my photographic memory doesn't work with videos, there's just something more powerful with black on white words and formulas.

You also can't copy/paste code, and if your vision isn't perfect/the code isn't zoomed enough, you have to use a whole screen for the video.

I'm in my early 20's, grew up watching YouTube, and still find textual documents superior for learning in almost all cases (with the exceptions being concise and intrinsically-animated things, like a lot of 3b1b's videos).

I don't think that there's nearly as much adaptation as there is just people getting used to watching video content and liking it more. That is, greater enjoyment, but not greater comprehension.

I suspect that nearly everyone who thinks that they "learn better from videos" just enjoys the videos more (which affects how well they perceive their own learning efficiency - humans are notoriously bad at self-assessment especially in the cognitive realm) and/or has attention issues that are mitigated by the more engaging nature of a video.

It depends on the type of activity for me. For maths or computing, I prefer a text by far, video is too slow and doesn't allow me to go to the essential. For jazz guitar and bike repairs, video is where I learn the most.

Remembering lectures, I used to sit in them, watch and take notes. It was only after when reading back through the notes and looking into the problem area I could hear and make out what I didn't really catch first time.

So videos with slides, and notes, and tutorials/practice all can help. It does for me anyway.

But its a learning medium that's fundamentally terrible. Seriously, pull a transcript of any 15 minute youtube video. It will take you a few minutes to read. Why waste your limited time to extract the same exact information waiting for someone to gesticulate on a video, young or old? It's like sitting through a college lecture where the professor dryly reads directly out of the textbook and you wonder why you are even paying tuition.

I do exactly this. Pull the transcript, search for the key terms, jump to that spot in the video if it requires the visual aid.

I'm in my mid-30s. Certainly didn't grow up with video content. I have a shelf full of books which I've learnt a lot from. But I've also learnt an enormous amount from videos. They are good for different things.

Take food, for example. I have books that go into great detail about how to make bread. Each ingredient (of which there are only four) are discussed in detail. The history of bread and its influence on culture is covered. But when it comes to kneading dough, nothing beats watching someone do it. Even the best book in the world can't replace that.

I learn a lot from watching others work. When I watch videos I'm learning more from what they don't talk about than what they do talk about. I think it requires being selective. There are some videos of really talented and skilled people out there who might not be great communicators. These are treasure. On the other hand, there are shiny videos with attractive presenters filled with trivial fluff you could have gleaned from one page of a text book. Like with anything, you just have to learn what's worth your time and what isn't.

really annoying, pretty sure because they incentivize watch time

I’m old too (43) and I enjoy short videos that get to the point as well. If a video is too long or takes too long I’ll just skip ahead and until I hear them talking about specifics.

There was a point a few years ago where there was this sudden shift to longer videos on YouTube. I think part of it was greater engagement is seen on such videos, leading to more ad time. As a result though, the actual quality of the content is down but I would say the “showmanship” is up. In a longer video, you have to be good at delivery and keeping people interested, so it starts to favor entertaining speakers. So now people watch videos for a large part because they want to “hang out” with the presenter. Also, Twitch is essentially just hanging out with someone. Anyway, now I’m just rambling like an old man.

Agree. If a video on how to tighten a bolt or change gas in a mower is 36 mins long then that's a total waste. I don't want to hear somebody's rambling life story if I'm trying to directly find info. Short and sharp videos get more view from me. I agree also that Twitch is a waste of time. Never understood the utility of watching somebody doing some task.

Youtube changed their advertising rules such that videos of less than 10 minutes didn't get ads so everyone padded their videos to be at least 10 minutes long.

They also prioritize watch time as a metric (and a payout stream for Youtube Red)

There's definitely a ton of low quality videos doing things that might be better presented in text, the worst examples being videos of text. They're easy to make and YT makes it easy to monetize them so people make them without caring how practical it is, and people watch them for various reason.

I've utilized a few myself (42, I think), and it's usually because it's the first thing I found and I'm a complete beginner, so anything will help point me in some reasonable direction. I've even specifically watch "programming a microcontroller" and "making a gradient in Gimp" videos. I have very little experience in those things and, even if the presenter is just going through the steps, there's visual hints that help me navigate the intimidating interfaces those things come with. If I need text for future reference, I can usually find it in a matter of seconds. Maybe even easier than before if I've learned a few new keywords from the video.

As far as the "more authoritative" thing, that can only be solved in the viewers mind. Learning to control that bias is good for life in general anyway.

I think for me it depends. Video's are better if I'm completely out of my depth or its a big project or its something thats new to me. Text can skim over small but important details, videos usually don't (obviously they can edited out, but thats an active process of removing it, rather than a passive process of just not adding it). But if its something I know a decent amount about, I'll always go with text.

Where it gets a bit more interesting is that middle ground. Usually I prefer text in theory, but a lot of the articles written about it are filled with as much fluff as videos, but then you also have cookie popups, ads, location and notification requests, ect... which can make videos sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

I'm in my mid 20's so I don't know if its a generational thing, I might be just an outlier but I couldn't say for sure.

I'm 19 and I agree with you. For most things, text content is the best way to learn.

I'm in my late 20's and practically grew up with YouTube. I can't stand watching tutorial videos for anything technical. The content is not searchable and not even close to as fast as text.

What's annoying are those tutorials like on OpenCV that just repeat the steps outlined in the manual.

We're going to apply a mask to find the red cup, ball, etc...

I made a personal chrome extension that hides the YT content you first see to stop hijacking my original intent of coming to YT.

I still like YT though, watching Ben Heck's videos or random Japanese fishing/cooking shows.

It's not only you. I feel the same. Whenever I stumble upon a video for a programming related tutorial ( mostly AWS ), I want a text copy by the side so that I can get what I want and move on.

Maybe Youtube should give ability to "seek to" on its autogenerated subtitles in the sidebar. I would find it useful at least.

I feel the same logically. I’ll be 35 in a couple weeks and I’m also an avid text fan, but lately I’ve noticed that I shift to video searches for things a lot faster. I thought about it a little, and I think that maybe I’ve started doing that because text search is a mess today. SEO has won on text search, but it takes a lot of effort to produce a good video. I can often find a good video for some things faster than I can hunt down a good text overview or tutorial. Then of course, I’m often more interested in the text included in the description because it will point to what I need in more detail.

I'm older than you and I definitely prefer text for programming related tutorials but I'll jump straight to videos for more practical things.

Reading a recipe is fine for a lot of cooking, but some things like "How to spatchcock a chicken" benefit greatly from a video demonstration.

Similarly I took up knitting a while ago, and watching videos was the only way I could learn the techniques, trying to do it from written instructions was impossible.

Always text over video. When people say they prefer video, they don't know better, haven't actually been learning anything or are extremely lazy.

For example, to do a gradient in Gimp, you should know a few shortcode keys. Now how do I look up which key to use again? Load the video and keep fiddling with the player until I hit the right moment where he explains this little detail? It's extremely annoying to look up anything in a video.

You also waste a shitload of time because you can't just skim through all the stuff you already know.

Video tutorials are only popular because Google boosts Youtube videos over text in search. The creators don't care that it's a bad medium for you, because it's an excellent medium for them. Way more revenue to gain from a Youtube video then some blogpost

For things like fixing a car part or home repair video is much better than text. There's nothing like watching someone do it, quickly seeing the exact location of things and how they should be moved.

This isn't true. Once you know cars enough, the same thing applies to car repair.

I just need the torque specs for the bolts, I don't need or want to watch a whole video.

Most people aren't car experts

Most people aren't software engineers, either.

I think it is an "AND" vs. "OR" thing. Your examples are great for those use cases, but there are others where having the long form is really good.

For example, Jon Gjengset's Rust series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O0Nt9qY_vo

You are right, a tutorial is even better if it has text AND a video :) laracasts does this extremely well.

Always text over video? I disagree. Things like Khan Academy work much better than reading a textbook for a lot of people.

Also, video guitar tutorials (Justin Sandercoe's are great) are wonderful because it gives you something to play along to.

Agree. I was exclusively talking about programming / computer things tutorials. And from my memory, Khan Acadamy always has so much more then just video and text, which is even better! Very short videos help too.

This has got to be the worst example you could have used: clearly video is better for this, right? You are talking about a sequence of steps in a GUI... sure, the least important one of those steps might have a keyboard shortcut, but that would be something you'd find later (and I don't think anyone is suggesting replacing a quick reference card with a video) and isn't a "learning" step. A textual description of this is going to be extremely awkward, attempting to describe dialog panels and icons and explain the semantics of color choosers... even the process of actually using a gradient tool is something that involves angles and lines and mouse placement: it isn't some abstract transform or fill, it is something that has a required direction semantic.

I am 40, I learned to program using physical book instruction manuals, I absolutely love reading things, and yet it just feels so obvious that if I want to learn how to use a gradient tool I would want a video. If I couldn't get a video I would want an animation. If I couldn't get an animation I would want a flip book of screen shots. If I couldn't get a flip book of screen shots I would tolerate some illustrated prose... but if you couldn't even get me the illustrations I am frankly at an age where I simultaneously know that life is short and yet there is virtue in patience and so I would work on something else until I could find a video (or another human to show it to me in person, which would probably be the best option) rather than waste my time trying to interpret someone describing a purely graphical concept using text.

For mechanical stuff (dis/reasembling equipment) it makes some sense, because diagrams are never as good as an HD video at showing where that screw hole is or how to pop off a clip. At the same time, I can't watch most of those videos at less than 1.5x!

Often, the first google hit on "how to do X" is a video when, as you say, a bulleted list would be easier to follow. Maybe ads are better monetized on video so the incentive is only to create that content?

Every now and then I find a video tutorial for some computer thing very helpful—specifically, the kind where someone does something beginning to end with a screencast—simply because every single damn text tutorial was skipping one or more steps or pieces of context that I guess they thought were too obvious to mention. This is usually for set-up or config stuff, though. For programming I agree that videos are almost universally painful to watch and low-value. I can't begin to understand people who head straight for YouTube when picking up e.g. a new programming language or library(!).

However, for cooking technique and building/home-repair/car-repair, videos are a game changer. Simply amazing. Actually, that goes for sports stuff, too. I find reading about all those things nearly worthless, and watching someone do it while explaining, a much better use of my time.

For me it depends on my mood. If I am in a rush and I quickly need to find how to do something, it can be hard to find Youtubers who are concise. But other times I want to hear everything there is to know about the process.

As a good example, across the PC building space, there are two Youtubers who actually refer to each other both Gamers Nexus and JayzTwoCents. In Jayz videos he knows he provides a summary so will refer you to GN for more in-depth detailed content.

I 100% agree that for repairing stuff and sports related topics that videos help a lot. When I used to work on my car it was helpful to see how things were typically done and then when I read the repair manual it filled in the gaps of knowledge because I knew the way it is usually done. When I was doing a lot of power lifting it was really helpful to learn from video how to do lifts safely and correctly. Then as I went from lifting to cycling and eventually to endurance running it provided me a way of learning good form by watching a real human explain and demonstrate instead of just imitating what I see in real life.

Sometimes though technological tutorials/videos end up being this 80% junk to 20% treasure ratio for me. However, that 20% is stuff I have watched very intently and actually learned something.

Video tutorials for great for introductions to new subjects of study (at least for me) — they can help provide a good intuition for complicated subjects. At the very least, there are plenty of lectures one can watch and follow along with a textbook. It’s never a replacement for reading a great manual for getting into the details or real one-on-one training or real documentation, but [good quality] video is still a great supplemental tool for learning.

> Also, the video, at least to me, makes the person doing the tutorial to be seen as "more authoritative" than through text, even if you can tell the person talking has little experience with microcontrollers (or whatever, if you have experience in the field).

And with the dislike count gone we've lost the only way to tell at a glance if a tutorial is worth spending time on. Good luck finding a thoughtful critique in the comments.

I am a teen and I feel about it exactly like you, so it's not you getting old.

for many things i prefer <2 min videos over text. I.e. how to create a graph in excel. Video would go like click here, here and then here. Article would go like first press ctrl+L then next to this, below that, your version may be different, click the button, then you will see xyz, on bottom right select this, .......

Video tutorials are great for when the thing being interacted with is a user interface. They suck when they are just narration. People talk too slow.

They become great again when the video is stuffed with visual information and you kick the speed up to 1.5x.

I say this as some one who hates video being the default information channel.

Although to be fair I don't think it's just you getting old. Maybe the number of examples you need to see to classify something new goes down as you get older, but it's not like there aren't an endless stream of videos that could be short paragraphs of explanatory text (or 30 second clips instead of ten minutes of 'hey it's ya booooi SaladStreams here to hit YOU with the latest windows 10 tips!!!')

YouTube is the best place for instruction because everything in text now is just marketing. YouTube gives creators a way to profit from genuinely useful content, even if it’s not the best medium for it.

This is one of the reasons Tiktok growth is exploding. Like Twitter, it forces creators to apply some editing and think about what really needs to be in their video. Contrast this to YouTube which incentivizes stretching a 15 second idea into a 10 minute waste of time.

My big problem with YouTube recommendations isn't that they're so good that I get sucked in; it's that they're so bad. I would happily spend more time on the site watching interesting videos if they only would show up in my recommendation feed.

Instead, I get recommended the same old crap, all coming from a small set of the same video categories over and over again (except for the occasional America's Got Talent or any other clip that've reached over 100 million views). It's not like I don't like airplane and board repair videos, but it's not the only thing that I'm interested in, which YouTube seems to think.

Show me something new! Try recommending a video about how to grow flowers or about Titanic rather than thinking that the only thing I'm interested in are whatever I've been watching for the last couple of months.

I've found the same thing. I like snowmobiling and I like Dota 2. Surely in the billions and billions of hours of content on YouTube, there's something else I would like as well, but the algorithm seems content to only ever serve me up videos from two categories.

Some kind of forced flavor in an "I'm Feeling Lucky" or "Discover Weekly" format would be a great improvement I think.

The recommendation engine does tend to hover around recommending more of the same topics you like, because it looks like it's mostly driven off "people who like the stuff you like also liked this other stuff".

The solution to that is to bootstrap the engine with a variety of topics. I'm subscribed to channels about game design, film critics, engineering, urban planning, math, sudoku, beat saber, figure skating, history, and stand ups.

This much does mean the homepage gets pretty diverse and once in a while new topics do show up.

Lately YouTube started proposing "Wanna watch something new?" and offered me a tab "New to you" with only videos from creators I've never watched before.

That was a good change of pace for once, instead of showing me videos I've watched less than a week ago.

The best way I’ve found to spend less time on YouTube is realizing that the vast majority of content is pure garbage and just stay the hell away from it. These days I only visit it when I need something specific (a tutorial on how to do a particular thing, a video the kid wants to watch, etc). And of course uBlock origin is enabled to spare me from the “unskippable ads that are longer than the video itself” experience.

The bar is certainly lower. Lots of stuff that amounts to a PowerPoint presentation full of stock art/video with poor narration.

Yeah it's exceedingly rare that better, more parseable information isn't available in text somewhere. Unfortunately though, it is becoming more common for people to make a video instead of a well written tutorial or guide or better documentation.

My strategy is to have a curated list of subscriptions (in an RSS reader - I don't have a Google account) and just stick to those. I very rarely explore outside of that exactly for the reason you mention.

While I agree that "the vast majority of content is pure garbage", I have to make an argument that a non-negligible portion of the site delivers high-quality educational videos with excellent research. The curiosity-seeking part of my brain is subject to being very easy to get hooked on this.

YouTube has some of the best, highest quality free content available on the internet today.

Stay away from the crap, remove it from your recommendations, subscribe to some good channels. It’s that simple.

Don’t if that’s not your thing but you’re missing out. If you change your mind here are a few exceptional channels to get you started, they should cater well to a HN style audience:

Technology Connections (misc tech)

Wendover Productions (Logistics)

DefunctLand (Documentaries on old defunct stuff)

Not Just Bikes (Cycling, public transport, urban design, walkability)

Practical Engineering (civil engineering)

3Blue1Brown (Math)

Some of my highly recommended uncommon subscriptions:

Cathode Ray Dude (really obscure 90s tech nostalgia)

Techmoan (obscure old tech nostalgia)

Jeremy Fielding (engineering)

Hand Tool Rescue (antique restoration)

Machine Thinking (history of technology/industry, especially pre-1900)

Usagi Electric (vacuum tubes, minicomputers, etc.)

Jeremy Fielding has a video series showing how he built an 6 motor Industrial Robot Arm from scratch. Includes welding and machining aluminum, electrical wiring and programming the controls for the motors.

Definitely worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4njCTv7IRbyf3XfhUcp_...

+1 on Techmoan and Hand Tool Rescue

I'd also like to throw

- My Mate Vince (Tries to fix electronics, older toys etc)

- Wristwatch Revival (Very long, very well narrated watch repair videos)

in the ring.

I'd also add:

Tom Scott (basically the human version of Atlas Obscura)

SmarterEveryDay (Former missile flight test engineer who does deep dives into science topics he's curious about)

ThinMatrix (indie game developer who's building a custom game engine and game from the ground up)

Adam Neely (music theory)

Jan Misali (linguistics and obscura)

Numberphile (math)

PBS SpaceTime (physics)

Simone Giertz (engineering)

Journey to the Microcosmos (microbiology)

Cody's Lab (all sorts of stuff, but he's currently in the multi-year process of building his own freaking Mars habitat)

Ian Hubert (indie filmmaker who creates better work than most of hollywood, including absolutely massive CGI projects)

Kirsten Dirksen (tiny houses and alternative architecture) https://www.youtube.com/user/kirstendirksen/videos

Matthias Wandel (wookworking) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCckETVOT59aYw80B36aP9vw

Sabine Hossenfelder (physics and science) is now publishing quite regularly on youtube.

Patrick Boyle (markets) is criminally undersubscribed IMO.

I personally disagree with the Wendover rec. Sure, they talk about logistics, but I find that they offer little to no new information that you couldn't glean from a cursory Google search. Sure it might not be something I knew about, and I might be interested in it every so often, but they clearly prioritize quantity of quality. Since they often cover random topics, I find myself questioning why I should even care.

It's narrative porn - shallow but engaging. How do you test that? Just replace the narrator and the entire value of Wendover productions disappears. Other channels are pretty good though.

I watch Wendover on mute with subtitles sometimes so clearly you're wrong.

That the narration is good quality is a bonus. Calling it shallow and "one google search away" (parent) is absurd, his videos take weeks of research.

It's okay not to like the channel but know your criticisms.

Speaks volumes that you think it takes weeks of research.

It speaks volumes that you don't. The guy has a whole team dedicated to this.

He released a behind the scenes about his process on Nebula. Oh let me guess, he's making this up for clicks too?

And i could reimplement Dropbox in a weekend with curl and SFTP.

You can’t watch videos on nebula without signing up - which makes you the product, just as you are on YouTube.

It's okay not to like the comment but know your criticisms. Those were but my own opinions, but you seem to take things personally, as evidenced by your other replies in this thread.

Between Wendover and HAI, they crank out content at a pace that hardly suggests "weeks of research". What's truly absurd is suggesting anything to the contrary.

Sad to see 'Not Just Bikes' lumped in with these great informative videos.

Not Just Bikes is extremely opinionated and is frequently swept up in emotional arguments and comparing apples to oranges. Shame really. But it definitely gives people the ammunition to pretend to fight for change (where in reality they are fighting for unrealistic expectations and to get their oranges into apples) and this leads to a feel-good feeling.

The rest of the list are extremely informative and interesting to many with next to no bias.

NJB quality is extremely high, that is a fairly objective fact.

That you don't like the fact it gives cyclists "ammunition" sounds like a You problem :-)

Yes it is opinionated though. I don't think it's possible to talk about what he talks about without being opinionated, because there is such a large section of the population that blindly loves cars to the point that it's become a religion, so everyone talking about improving things for bikes and public transportation looks like... Ammunition for attacks, right?

But he doesn't compare apples to oranges. He compares how different cities function. He showcases how things can work. The potential every city and country has with some better planning.

It's a shame (and a little telling) you don't like him. If you want less opinionated channels about urban planning there is City Beautiful for example. I don't think the production quality is as high, even if the guy is an actual city planner.

I never said the quality was bad. MKB is the best quality on YouTube (usually) and he's entirely about subjectivity.

You can have high quality whilst also realising that the video is not made to be purely informative or educational.

>That you don't like the fact it gives cyclists "ammunition" sounds like a You problem :-)

??? Why are you talking about cyclists? I never mentioned cyclists.

>I don't think it's possible to talk about what he talks about without being opinionated

It is, and that's the crux. Though it's a lot more boring and harder.

>But he doesn't compare apples to oranges.

He very much does. I don't even need to argue on this point, it's that visible.

It's a shame indeed, but I have good reasons.

I'm not sure what your point is then because the list was meant as a list of high quality channels that touch on subjects that likely interest an HN audience. Not as "here are the ten least opinionated channels on YouTube".

Being engaging is a requirement of being high quality. Someone who isn't engaging, even if their videos are very informative, will quickly lose his viewers. This is a problem because quality of the research isn't enough if nobody makes it to the end of the video.

And no, once again, he doesn't compare apples to oranges. He shows how things can work. He shows the potential. His channel is essentially just an opinionated tour of how urban design works in the Netherlands.

It's not like he says "Phoenix AZ should work exactly like Amsterdam and be designed exactly this way".

> YouTube has some of the best, highest quality free content available on the internet today.

OP's argument hinges on "vast majority of content" and then you rebute it with the narrowest possible list of examples. You just made a strawman of OP's claim.

It's a discovery problem. The vast majority of content on the internet is crap, so better have a talk to your ISP and get rid of your useless line, right?

Once you do subscribe and watch good channels and subscribe to them, you will find that the recommendation engine is extremely high quality and will do the rest of the work.

There is basically zero crap on my YouTube homepage. It's all high quality now. I often get recommended videos and immediately subscribe to their channel. It's nice not to be afraid of clicking on videos on my homepage because I know all of it is great!

I find that uBlock Origin (or Brave) isn't enough for YouTube.

If you use Piped [0] you can only watch the updates from channels you are subscribed to without ads, intro, sponsors/promo etc.

[0] https://piped.kavin.rocks

That site is using Sponsor Block:

https://sponsor.ajay.app/

...which, for those not familiar, is available as a browser extension. It crowdsources timestamps for non-necessary parts of youtube videos, and can automatically fetch those timestamps and skip over them in videos you're watching.

...and since Piped a webapp with account signups, it works on mobile browser as well without any extensions and you can manage channel subscriptions as well.

What helped me was moving channels from YouTube subscriptions to RSS feeds. Thus I stopped opening YouTube homepage and play videos straight from RSS client.

RSS URLs are https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<chanel_...

this is an excellent tip for someone who doesn't want to sign up to youtube/google just to be able to follow a channel.

For specific playlists: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<playli...

There's also the youtube subscription page. https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

If you only use youtube to watch videos posted by your subscribed channels, then go to the page that youtube fills exclusively with all of the videos posted by your subscribed channels. It's wild to me how many people use the homepage to consume their subscriptions.

I’m getting a 404.

See where the OP put <channel_id>?

You have to copy and paste the YouTube channel ID into that space, and then you can use the whole URL in an RSS feed reader.

A really convenient workaround is the extension called Unhook. It's very neat and lets you to control many aspects of your Youtube experience. Available both for Chrome/Firefox:

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

2)https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

This looks really nice, so I'm going to give it a shot.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Just implemented this! Thanks for posting! For those who don't click, he suggests some uBlock Origin filters to remove the suggestion lists from YouTube. For example, currently I'm watching a video and all I see is THE VIDEO - no list of suggestions off to the side.

I guess we can say YouTube's suggestions are "too good"! I might just apply this to my work computer. I'll probably keep them around for my casual viewing on personal machines since I find some new stuff with them.

It'll be interesting to see how this changes my browsing!

Glad to hear you find it useful!

Can confirm this approach works, based on my experience over just year or so. Have not blocked the landing page recommendations but I'm never logged in. And so they default videos are so outside of my taste, it's easy to ignore.

Still, sometimes i actively go on actively binging one video after another (from Veritassium, for example). But that's on me :)

I reduce my time on YouTube by going there with a specific subject in mind, search on it, and use yt-dlp to download the likely candidates and watch them offline. It has the added bonus of being able to re-watch them offline without going back to YT.

It's similar, now that I think about it, to my shopping routine. Research what I want, go in, grab it, and get the heck out.

I've learned over the years that if I don't want to buy too much or spend a few hours watching videos I could do without, I limit my interactions voluntarily.

I "subscribe" to any channel I think is decent, supposedly it helps their numbers, but I rarely use the YouTube interface to figure out what to watch next. My real subscription list is my RSS reader and I'm highly selective about what goes in there. When I do watch something on the site, I habitually put it in theater mode right away, which hides the suggestions. I'm sure lots of people would set theater mode as the default if it were an option. I'm sure it's not on purpose.

What I really want is all my subscriptions to get auto-downloaded into Plex. And for Plex to have better library management tools from the player, so I can delete after watching or move to a category.

Then show me all the algorithmic stuff when I'm on the website so I can find better stuff to subscribe to.

From a user-perspective that would be a great user experience, but would remove any possible way for YouTube to show you ads and pay the bills (and keep you “engaged”).

Could be a premium-only feature, I guess?

The algorithmic stuff could actually be good if you could use it on demand and control its parameters, like a supercharged search page.

There are times I want to discover new content, it would be nice to be able to set the algorithm's parameters just right for a particular topic and see what it has to offer, then rinse and repeat for other topics.

I was actually looking at building a script like this. Have you found anything that does it already? If not, I was just going to make a small python script with readonly access to my Youtube account that pulls down my Watch Later video IDs and feeds them to youtube-dl on my NAS. Sounds like a fun Christmas vacation project.

There are multiple articles automating this task using youtube-dl. There's also a recent project called tubesync[0] that provides a GUI and advertises itself as the sonarr/radarr for Youtube

[0] https://github.com/meeb/tubesync

I've been using TubeArchivist for grabbing newly posted videos in my subscriptions. It will grab the meta info and thumbnails as well. Has a built in video player, so you can watch the videos directly within the web app.

https://github.com/bbilly1/tubearchivist

Another one I've used before is Tubesync- although it doesn't have a built-in player. But it has the ability to integrate with Plex.

https://github.com/meeb/tubesync

Tubearchivist is great! They even added support for ARM which means that you can put it on your RPi or smth.

A Plex UI for YouTube would be fantastic indeed. Does that exist?

The official UI has some weird bugs. Like, when i listen to a long video, and then seek back to some position near the beginning, it gets stuck loading forever.

At this point, running youtube-dl via mpv on it is faster than the official UI for me. I set ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=480]+bestaudio/best[height<=480] in the mpv config so i dont use up more bandwith than my eyes can consume. Youtube-dl is somewhat wonky some days, tho.

I use this technique of DOM filtering with uBlock to defeat "engagement" features and improve site experience a lot. My problem comes with pages where the HTML element classes are not semantic, but compiled by a tool like tailwind, e.g.

  <div class="erslblw0"> ... </div>

For example, if you go to nytimes.com and use uBlock's 'zapper' to select an element to hide, you'll get a query selector like this:

  .erslblw0.css-163q563 > .css-13dv6mc

These are dependent on the build, and can change day to day. Has any one come up with a solution for this situation, beyond painstakingly manually constructing positional CSS selectors (nth-of-type, etc..)?

I turn off "viewing history" and then only subscribe to the channels I am interested in, and ONLY visit https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

Take it a step even further and just follow these channels via RSS and watch with mpv. Don't even point the browser to the site at all.

Thanks! I'll look into that. Is there a good way to track a "to watch" list using youtube RSS and MPV?

PSA for all, you can go into your YouTube settings and disable Search History (and a bunch of other things? It's been a while), and surprisingly the algorithm more or less respects that. It completely neuters the algorithm, it won't target you worth a damn, and YouTube becomes a lot less engaging overall. Highly recommend for everyone.

I only get the option to disable that when I've completely deleted my (Youtube/Google) cookies. If later I go to the Settings, it wants me to log in (which I am not going to do). Does anyone here known which button lets me revisit these settings without logging in?

Pretty much. My life went downhill after I discovered that I had disabled search history and re-enabled it

Why not disable it again? I just followed GP’s instructions and am looking forward to my life going uphill.

I am in a new job as of lately, and found myself wandering a lot in youtube, reddit and twitter. I also used ublock for removing the recommendation section and it makes my life much simpler. We should use an adversarial approach to all those UX hyper optimizations from big cos. I also had to install LeechBlock to limit my time on time wasting activities, now I sleep better and have an easier time focusing on work stuff, even just freeing some mind-CPU to accomplish more meaningful tasks. Glad that I am not alone in this battle for our own sanity.

It's nice, unfortunately the filters break also playlists, which is unfortunate, because those are actually created by me for distraction-free watching of stuff that I'm really interested in.

Are there any tools that will download either the metadata or even the entire video from my YT subscriptions, and that just runs natively on my Linux system (i.e. no Docker/container stuff) ? Something I could look at that isn't YT but would show me the latest (if any) stuff from channel's I've expressed interest in?

I've seen tubearchivist and tubesync, mentioned below, and these just don't operate with the sort of technology I'm comfortable with.

I was expecting a /etc/hosts entry :D

The main problem with youtube is lack of control. I would pay youtube if it allowed me to fully control and monitor how it works so that I can fine tune it's behaviour to fit my needs.

For example I would like to:

- disable recommendations in some contexts (similar to how OP does it)

- label videos and let youtube to classify videos into these set of labels, so that I can either block of filter videos accordingly (eg. I could label certain videos as "junk" and would keep those hidden unless I really want to see such videos)

- search by video length, eg. show me only talks which takes about an hour

- say, show me something I found entertaining, but I have just half an hour, so that after the time is up, it no longer shows such stuff

- setup a "watch budget time" to spend or disable service during certain time periods

- see metrics about my watch behaviour, so that I can fine tune youtube options accordingly

I would be even ok for youtube to show me some ads based on my behaviour, if I have some control over it. Eg. disable ads with too small target group or ads I find annoying.

And while there could be some monetization options (eg. you configure your account not to show you something or don't provide service in given timerange - but you would be able to cancel that for a fee :-)) I doubt that it would make sense for them from business perspective: it would decrease the value of the advertising they are selling while it would cost a lot. So in the end I'm not sure if I would be able the real price of all this.

On Android there is Kiwi browser with desktop uBlock extension can do this blocking.

My problem is that I spend too much time on HN. :)

I appreciate the post. Implemented it and immediately I feel like I am off the attention treadmill that youtube puts me on. Thanks

YouTube started as such a great way to explore niche interests but has, as the author describes well, turned into a large hooking mechanism and I hate it for that.

Used to spend a lot of good quality time watching videos on there and interacting with like minded people but now YT is blocked on my network.

Personally I can really recommend the „Unhook YouTube“ extension. It’s really customizable and allows you to remove autoplay, recommendations and even the homepage. It’s really easy to configure and really did help me reducing my time spend on YouTube without breaking the entire website.

I can vouch for DF Tube (Distraction Free for YouTube™).

Same here, extensions such as unhook youtube have helped me reduce my youtube addiction. I also unsubbed from some channels that released videos a bit too often (like LTT)

URLs for the spoken extensions:

https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/youtube-recommen...

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

I also love Clickbait Remover (1) to get rid of the customized thumbnail and instead show a random snapshot from the middle of the vid. These days the thumbnails are all noise and no signal anyway.

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

I am going to be the voice of dissent here. In September my OTA antenna fell and I never put it back up. I have Netflix but I usually don't watch it.

What I spend most of my time on is YouTube and I consider that time to be quality time. I like falling asleep to Adrian's Digital Basement.

In the past few weeks the homepage changed radically and basically broke recommendations for me, even when signed in. TBH I was kind of bothered how quickly it would adapt to what I was watching, pushing me quickly down rabbit holes. However, with the new change it does not seem to learn very quickly at all, and every time I go there the same dozen videos or so that I probably don't want to see (but don't want to mark "Not Interested") are there. It really can't take a hint.

That, and it keeps finding away around my ad blocker. I used to use YouTube for jam/backing tracks to play guitar along to. That's completely broken if an ad interrupts it! Talking about dang frustrating.

I think have a basic human need to fill time with video or similar content. Before, it was tv, after, it was youtube, now it's mostly tik tok for me. The ancestor of all this is probably watching the campfire for hours.

How I spend less time on YouTube: I spend ~0 time on YouTube. I’m definitely not the average user, but I find video content overwhelming and usually low signal:noise. So I just don’t consume it for the most part. I’m sure I’m missing out on stuff that I’d find valuable, but the vast majority of the time I find the same content summarized in a tweet or thread with links to readable reference material where appropriate. And usually that’s how I get introduced to the video I’m not gonna watch in the first place.

Love to be downvoted for… finding videos overwhelming.

More likely you’re being downvoted for the casual non-solution to a common and real problem people are wrestling with. If people were all talking about how they try to avoid over-eating, saying “oh I just don’t over-eat. That’s my solution” contributes little to the conversation.

I felt that:

1. Acknowledging that some people find consuming video content challenging is always worth mentioning. It’s not the problem being discussed, but it’s a related problem with so much content being on YouTube. Your analogy would be closer as “I very seldom eat, because I don’t react well to food.” Which is obviously absurd when put that way.

2. The fact that transcripts or summaries are often available is a contribution, as it presents another potential option for those who want to access one piece of content without falling into a recommendations hole.

You can also play faster than the 2x speed limit cap using

document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate=4

is there a way to also make this the default max play speed without entering it in console?

I find that the audio gets out of sync when playing faster than 2x. Have you also noticed that - and perhaps have a solution?

I'm using https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed

This extension adds keyboard shortcuts as well as a UI to all <video> elements (YT and other sites). I have 'G' set playback rate to 2.2x.

I use the "video speed controller" extension. You can set it to whatever speed you like, and it will default videos across all websites to that. You can also set exceptions for things like Netflix. There is no way to set YouTube default speed unfortunately, hence the work around.

The way I've done this is to be quite aggressive and only allow content from my channel subscriptions appear on my landing page. Anything else that shouldn't be there gets a "Don't Recommend Channel" ding.

If I'm looking for new material such as tutorials or documentaries, that kind of thing then I search in a separate non-logged in browser profile so the YT algorithm doesn't try to pollute my signed in account with junk. This has mostly worked quite well for me.

I have gone from spending at least an hour a day on YT to basically nothing in just the past weeks. The reason for this is that YT removed the dislikes count. The like vs dislike ratio was the only way to know the quality of a video before watching it, and after getting really used to that it feels like a totally waste of time to watch random videos just because yt recommends them.

I wrote the following CSS for the Stylus extension to keep me focused--it blocks out suggested videos at the end of a video, the videos in the sidebar, and the comments section:

.style-scope.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer,.style-scope.ytd-comments,.style-scope.ytd-mealbar-promo-renderer,.html5-endscreen.ytp-player-content.videowall-endscreen { display:none; }

I simply installed a browser extension to block YouTube recommendations. Haven’t surfed YouTube on my laptop since

Phone is a different story tho

Thank you for sharing. I use extensions blockers to block feed on linkedin and facebook. Will try for youtube too!

I don't know who asked for it to be like a social network, but I did similar thing with GitHub removing the social sidebar and reactions on the home screen making it less distracting with github.com##aside[aria-label="Explore"], #dashboard.dashboard .reactions-with-gap

I think I'm inadvertently escaping this by viewing all videos in theatre mode! I find it hard to keep my focus on video and instead look for long texts that explain them. But nothing beats well produced videos. Its the same as well explained topics in text with good diagrams.

I recently found a distraction-free youtube client which works very well:

http://yt.dudzik.co/

Problem is sometimes if you click on a generic youtube link, it won't automatically open up the link in the distraction-free client.

I personally find IdiotBox[1] to be better than this as it opens links in ad free youtube embeds and also links channel and other information alongside the video itself.

P.S. you can replace the “watch?=“ part of a youtube url with “/embed/“ and get a distraction free view of the video.

Or you could just open it in mpv or something.

1. https://codemadness.org/idiotbox

I do the same thing for linkedin. Pick and select the "timeline" post page or whatever it is called and block it. Completely eliminates the social media bloat so I can focus on the only reason I still keep a profile on there. Now mostly for just chatting anyhow.

I've found that recently, when I disable search customization and video history, Youtube indeed appears to not remember previous videos I've seen and to recommend only videos related to the one that just ended, and I'm fine with that.

Android users may enjoy NewPipe: just lets you watch the video, no ads, no suggestions.

In the article there is mention of using ublock to block elements. I didn't even know this was a thing. I zapped the recommendations block on home as suggested in the article.

How do you review what you have blocked/removed and re-add it?

Go to the settings and the My Filters tab. Your latest added filter should be at the bottom.

Thanks for this, I did find the filters via that route. But thought there might be a quick shortcut for the site you are on.

I got off yt after seeing how much time I was losing with a time tracking app.

The News Feed Eradicator browser plugin (available for Chrome and Firefox) supports hiding the recommended videos on both the YouTube home page and in the sidebar next to videos. It did wonders for my focus.

I use the browser extension https://unhook.app, it works great and you can choose to hide/show specific elements.

Is there something that we can use on iOS to hide recommendations?

I should post things like this too. Ublock is great for this kind of thing, and same blocking the landing page, and comments but not playlists.

Making Youtube more inconvenient makes me happier.

Thing is - YouTube has got one of the best recommendation engines - much better than Netflix. So I wouldn't blame ourselves but the algorithm doing its job.

I prioritise reading, read on Kindle and on Readup https://readup.com/

So the recommendations are useless crap, but also the author keeps clicking on them? After the 10th time doing that didn't they learn better?

Thanks for sharing this! I just implemented this.

I didn't realize uBlock had this capability. It runs faster than other extensions I've tried. Cheers!

Youtube's recommendations for some reason are pitiful next to TikTok.

It may be an inherent advantage of the super-short format.

Never managed to get stuck in a Youtube rabbit hole, as my hardware has been so utterly useless.

It's sad knowing that YouTube has done very little to optimize its browsing UI and the algorithm has remained largely stale over the years. As such, it's hard to enjoy the platform beyond the absolute necessities of watching a tutorial, podcast, or catching up on news.

Turn history off and/or watch via DuckDuckGo

I use chrome plugins that hide recommendations.

Just use the full screen mode or theatre mode

This is the way. Only subscriptions.

I just update my hosts file haha

You can do the same with StackOverflow's "Hot Network" questions, and "New from our blog"... How is that not a dark pattern, I'm trying to find how to do blah in Java, and a question about world building would pique my interest...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com