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Comment by farleykr | Hacker News Reader

One thing that made a huge difference for me was turning of my watch history. If you do that you get a message on the homepage saying that it can't recommend videos until you turn on your watch history. Not very visually pleasing but it keeps me from scrolling through recommendations and now I only watch videos when a channel I follow puts out new content or when I choose to specifically search for something.

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Oh my, you just saved so much of my time! I had no idea you could control so much. YouTube is so clean now! Thank you.

Oooh yes thanks for this, instant disable. History could be convenient at times, but hey not as much as my sanity.

I want to point out that you can do a similar thing on reddit too. There's a setting for disabling recommended posts on the home tab. Combine that with unsubscribing to all subreddits (maybe except /r/nosurf) and you get a detoxified home tab.

I tried to do something similar with twitter (now known as X), but it doesn't seem to work.

Another benefit is that the mobile app’s “Shorts” menu also stops working if watch history is disabled. Sometimes the app takes me there on launch, and now I’m greeted with a message saying I can’t explore an endless feed unless my watch history is active. Fine with me!

I've also found that just deleting your history occasionally can be beneficial as it keeps you from going down a rabbit hole of repetitive but addictive content to watch new things.

This is my favourite YouTube feature! It makes the home page lovely.

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