I appreciate the post. Implemented it and immediately I feel like I am off the attention treadmill that youtube puts me on. Thanks
How I spend less time on YouTube
21–30 of 220 posts
Re: How I spend less time on YouTube
#22The 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” experienc…
The bar is certainly lower. Lots of stuff that amounts to a PowerPoint presentation full of stock art/video with poor narration.
Re: How I spend less time on YouTube
#23I got off yt after seeing how much time I was losing with a time tracking app.
Re: How I spend less time on YouTube
#24What 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?
Re: How I spend less time on YouTube
#25What I do to minimize the trash heap of sponsored content on the homepage is I have a youtube bookmark to my channel. It's empty and has no videos. Then if I wanna see something, I just type it in. I don't have to see a single piece of content I'm not interested in at that moment.
Also you could just use enhancer for youtube to hide sidebar content.
Re: How I spend less time on YouTube
#26This is the way. Only subscriptions.
Re: How I spend less time on YouTube
#27You 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'm using https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed
This extension adds keyboard shortcuts as well as a UI to all elements (YT and other sites). I have 'G' set playback rate to 2.2x.
Re: How I spend less time on YouTube
#28You 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 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.
Re: How I spend less time on YouTube
#29It'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.
Re: How I spend less time on YouTube
#30YouTube 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.