I have a problem with youtube. I watch so much of it and I rarely feel like what I’m watching is fulfilling. Sometimes I find myself in the middle of a video essay on a subject I don’t care about, or an educational video teaching something which I’m certain I won’t remember tomorrow. Why did I even click on this in the first place? What made me think that this would be a good use of my time?

Youtube Is Not As Useful As I Once Thought It Was

It’s been like this for over 13 years for me. The number of times I’ve sat down to eat with youtube probably vastly outnumbers the times I’ve sat to eat without it. But I’ve only started to recognize this as a huge problem recently. I was somewhat aware about how much time I’d spend on youtube, but I never viewed it as something detrimental. After all, youtube has shaped my political inclinations, helped me study for school, given me hobbies and interests, and introduced me to so much great art over the years.

In the online language learning community, there’s a pervasive idea about how we acquire language called the input hypothesis, which linguist Stephen Krashen originally wrote about. Put simply, it’s the idea that second language acquisition can be sped up by focusing your study on “input”: consuming material in the target language that involves reading and listening. This contrasts with studying through “output”, the process of writing and speaking. This is the theory behind how I structured my study routine with Japanese, and I’d say it’s been highly successful at getting me to a proficient level.

Why do I bring this up? An earlier tendency among the community that I’ve seen is to completely avoid output, effectively taking a vow of silence in their target language to focus exclusively on listening and reading media in the language they are studying. In fact, I was one of people that subscribed to this application of the hypothesis. The idea behind this practice is that output will come naturally to you once you have achieved a certain stage of proficiency in understanding the language through input. You would get the benefit of streamlining your learning process and avoid developing an accent in the target language. At some point in my studies, I had consumed so much Japanese media that I had a vocabulary of roughly 13,000 words, passed the JLPT N1, and could understand almost everything in everyday Japanese. Which made it all the more embarrassing that I was not even conversational at that point in time.

What actually helped me start to output? Starting to output. Not more input. It’s the only way you’re ever going to get used to doing it. It’s true that input is the only thing that teaches you actually understand the language, but neglecting to output during your learning journey comes with a risk. You can become uncomfortable and anxious with outputting, and you may start to associate outputting with the feeling of failure; which is what I experienced.

This is applicable not only to language learning, but to youtube as well. The act of watching a youtube video is analogous to immersing yourself in “input.” Actually, it’s not just analogous, because watching a youtube video in your target language is a way of getting input. I can watch a hundred videos of baseball games, but that won’t make me a pro baseball player. Youtube offers possibly the biggest library of art in the entire world. Has spending over a decade of my life religiously watching this art made me a better artist? No. Input is useful because it allows you to form your own mental model, a “deeper understanding” of the subject you are immersing in. When it comes to putting this mental model into practice, the only way you can improve your skill is not by further developing your mental model, but by doing.

The Addictive Side of YouTube

Okay, so I can reason my way out of over-consuming educational/informational youtube content. Maybe on some subconscious level, I understand that the next video I want to click on is not necessarily going to inform me. But the reason I get the urge to watch youtube isn’t because I’m consciously seeking knowledge, or something like that. Sometimes, I see the thumbnail and title of another video and it doesn’t even look all that interesting…

So why do I click on it?

Here are some recent videos in my youtube history. All three of these videos are ones I remember watching on my tablet in bed before going to sleep just yesterday. At that time, if I took a step back, just a second, to think about what the content of these videos could be, I probably wouldn’t have clicked on them. No hate to any of these creators, but it’s easy to say in hindsight that these videos were a waste of my time, with which I probably could have spent getting some well-needed sleep. I don’t play survival Minecraft or Tetris, and I don’t even know why the hell I decided to watch that video on Teletubbies. The problem here isn’t that I made a bad decision “choosing” to spend my time watching these videos, but in a sense, it’s that I didn’t really make that decision at all. Sometimes I click on videos because I want to have it on in the background while I look for a more interesting video to watch. Sometimes a thumbnail grabs my attention and I just click on it without thinking about anything at all, like what the video could be about or whether I’m even interested in what the thumbnail presents. Sometimes it’s because of that stupid autoplay feature that somehow keeps turning itself on.

It feels like there are a lot of features in youtube’s UI and algorithm that interfaces with my brain and makes it turn off. Some things that come to mind are:

1. The way the algorithm is so responsive to videos that you have recently watched.
2. Videos playing as a preview within the thumbnail, something that can’t be disabled at all in the mobile app.
3. Its infinite scrolling nature and the recommended section (you never “run out” of videos).
4. Picture-in-picture (playing videos in the corner while you look at recommendations).
5. The gutting of features that encourage interpersonal interaction, like private messaging and video responses.
6. The algorithm’s tendency to fixate on categories of videos that have mass appeal (movie/TV scenes, podcast content, clickbait).
7. The algorithm’s tendency to fixate on videos with overly long run times (video essays).
8. Youtube shorts and autoplay.

I found youtube shorts so egregious that I have an extension to block them entirely on desktop and I jailbroke my tablet to get them off of the mobile app. But not all of these “features” that I listed can be avoided so easily. Most are baked into the system and can only be avoided by not using youtube at all.

Solutions?

For the better part of a year or two now, I have been looking for ways to better manage my “relationship” with youtube so I don’t end up wasting time there. Most have come in the form of extensions that limit screen time or certain features features on youtube. These can be site-specific, browser-wide, or system-wide.

Unhook

Unhook is a browser extension that lets you hide your recommendations, youtube shorts, your home feed, and a bunch of other stuff. I have found that its effectiveness is largely dependent on your own willpower. It does work to make youtube much less engaging, so you might find yourself spending a lot less time there, but it is incredibly easy to toggle youtube features back on, especially if you’re feeling particularly tempted one day or are just inattentive to your own discipline like me. In my experience, I would turn the home feed back on and leave it like that for days or weeks, before I eventually become cognizant again about how much time I’m wasting on youtube and turning it off again. And then, the cycle would repeat…

I have to say, though, that this is my favorite extension out of all the ones I am about to introduce, and it’s the only one I haven’t completely abandoned.

LeechBlock NG

LeechBlock NG is another browser extension which lets you set limits for yourself for websites of your choice, before locking you out of the site. You can set limits depending on the day of the week or the time of day. In my experience, this one, also, is only as effective as your discipline is strong. You can set a long, complicated password to the options page that configures this extension to deter you from removing your own limits, but typing in this password is trivial. I got used to typing in the password so much that it was like the password didn’t exist at all.

The Screen Time Setting on iOS

If you use an iPhone/iPad, you probably know this one. It is laughably ineffective. It literally gives you a button to bypass the limit you set for yourself once you hit it. Maybe if you have the self-discipline of a Buddhist monk, you will find this setting useful. But for me, it just turned into an minor annoyance incredibly quickly that didn’t deter me from using youtube at all.

Others Configuration-Based Strategies

• Setting youtube or your entire desktop to black-and-white. This is possible with LeechBlock NG, or various Windows/Linux software. It’s supposed to limit your dopamine response or something.
• DeArrow, an extension that removes clickbait thumbnails and video titles.
• Tuning recommendations. You can somewhat influence youtube recommendations by clicking the three dots under the video thumbnail and clicking “Not Interested” or “Don’t Recommend Channel.”

I have found all of these configuration-based strategies to be ineffective in my case, but I go into some amount of detail here in case any of you reading think this might work for you. All of these rely on the user’s own discipline, expecting them not to roll back limitations or settings they have set for themselves to reduce their youtube usage. Tuning recommendations doesn’t work very well since youtube will always sneak uninteresting or addictive videos back into your feed.

A more extreme config-based strategy to limit youtube usage I have heard about is setting youtube.com to 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts file. This effectively blocks your computer from talking with youtube’s IP entirely. I have never tried this so I don’t know how effective it is, but it seems like it would be harder to self-sabotage yourself, since “turning it off” isn’t as simple as toggling a button in a UI.

The Actual Answer

You have to hate youtube.

Over time, I have come to realize just how much time this site has robbed from me. Sure, youtube has introduced me to good art, niche communities, and even shaped my personality. But then I think about how it’s still possible for me to have come into contact with these things I enjoy even if I had never interacted with youtube in the first place. I may have even discovered much more art and become much more learned if I had spent time reading books instead, as I used to before I started habitually using this site. Youtube has made so many horrendous changes to its site ever since I started using it in 2011, making it more addictive in the name of driving engagement. Why should I stick with it?

I can’t expect myself to be happier just by installing a browser extension and calling it a day. To solve my youtube addiction, I have realized that I must change my entire mindset. The only strategy that has worked for me is to adopt this hostile attitude towards youtube, and replace the time you would have spent watching youtube with something that truly fulfills you. These two points are key. So much so that I will say them again.

1. You must feel a visceral disgust with the algorithm and the design that makes youtube what it is. Realize how it has wronged you. Demand its apology.
2. Have in mind what you would like to do with the time you have, now free of the suffocating grasp of the algorithm. Maybe try writing it down. When you feel the urge to watch youtube, do it.

For me, some of the fulfilling things that I try to do instead of watch youtube are: reading, practicing coding, consuming Japanese media, and browsing the Internet Archive.

Perhaps this blog post is a bit premature, since just yesterday I found myself mindlessly scrolling in bed on my tablet again. But I’m enthusiastic because changing my mindset is the only solution that has actually worked to decrease the amount of time I spend on youtube. In essence, you need to remove the temptation you feel in the first place. About a month ago, I deleted the youtube app from my phone. I intend to keep it that way, and I have not experienced a real urge to reinstall it. I haven’t deleted the app from my tablet or blocked it on my desktop computer, because part of me is scared to quit youtube cold-turkey. The idea has been in the back of my mind ever since I read this blog post by SophiaJT, who actually did quit outright. Every day, this idea seems more and more doable.

For those of you reading this that are struggling with the same problem I have been struggling with, I sympathize with you. I hope you will join me in this journey of getting better.