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Comment by TyrunDemeg101 | Hacker News Reader

A nuclear option that's worked extremely well for me is going into Youtube's settings and disabling history.

I no longer am even able to see shorts, they don't get suggested to me.

However, this is an extreme nuclear option and also disables the entire 'Home' and for-you type content. You can search and watch videos, but it flips it so it is 100% intention driven. Which means discoverability and browsing is non-existent. You're still able to see your existing subscriptions but that's it.

It's REALLY helped me disconnect from the addictive dopamine of the infinite, short type formats. YMMV

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This is exactly what I’ve done for my Google settings after feeling more and more upset with what the Youtube homepage was showing me. Not so much in that it was necessarily contrary to what I may have wanted to watch, but more-so me thinking “My god.. is this what I’ve become?”

I now much prefer to open Youtube (quasi)tabula rasa. I still have subscriptions set up so I can follow “vetted” accounts, but for other things I now rely on that intentionality.

The one minor bummer is that Youtube won’t remember your spot in a video, say if you’re watching in your phone and want to continue on your desktop (or vice-versa). Not the biggest hassle to manually check the time and sync it up, though.

Yea - the not remembering a spot in a video IS a slight inconvenience, but for me it's a small price to pay in order to not get sucked into HOURS thrown away chasing the next 'hit' of dopamine from shorts.

I think this is the best way of using Youtube if you're trying to avoid brain rot and doomscrolling. This way helped me alot and gives you full control over what you consume.

For an older Internet user, it feels baffling that returning a website to a state where it shows you what you search for, and what you subscribe to, is considered an extreme nuclear option.

Amazon and Spotify and Netflix are all enormous examples of not just giving you what you asked for (->recommendation engines).

They were there all along, just less egregiously.

Even PageRank (the secret sauce in the original Google search) is arguably a recommendation engine.

You can just use PCA of some feature then use cosine similarity, this has been known forever.

I'm also an older Internet user, but I assumed that it was a nuclear option to so dramatically change the expected behavior that without warning people they would be quite shocked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have been happy with the serendipity of YouTube’s algorithm generally. I followed an external link to a YouTube video about an exotic piano, and played a few related videos afterwards. These were videos about other unusual musical instruments, such as very high-pitched and very low-pitched wind instruments. And somehow that was part of a process leading to Japanese metal bands.

Dopamine-driven behavior in ourselves is certainly to be watched for.

That's weird. They keep showing me rage-bait videos with like 100 views. I'd much prefer pianos and Japanese metal bands.

I DO miss the discoverability. I really do. But my self control for watching shorts ends up being incredibly self sabotaging. I truly wish I could permanently disable shorts in some way. I wish I could use my DNS to block shorts, but alas they're not distinct.

It doesn't break subscribed channels though so I just bookmarked that page as my youtube page.

This doesn't seem nuclear, this seems WAI. YouTube gives you the option of only seeing what you want to see.

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