Watching one quick video during a workday isn’t too bad—the problem is that YouTube, like chip companies, go out of their way to make sure you can’t have just one. There’s autoplay, a sidebar full of video recommendations, and so many more features designed to get you to keep watching all day.
We’ve talked about how to avoid falling down a YouTube rabbithole in the past, but if those tips don’t go far enough, you can customize or even entirely replace the YouTube interface. These actions not only make it possible to hide all of those tantalizing features, they can also keep that adblocking warning from showing up to pester you.
[Related: 3 ways to avoid falling down a YouTube rabbit hole]
Untrapp: Remove clutter from YouTube
Untrapp is a free browser extension that lets you customize the YouTube user interface, allowing you to remove recommendations, comments, and more. To get started just install the extension—it’s free for Chrome and Firefox, while the Safari version costs $2. Install this extension and you can customize over 150 different things. For example: you can remove the recommended videos from showing up in the sidebar when you’re watching a video, or remove the comments from every video page. You can also set the YouTube homepage to be your subscriptions, instead of the algorithmic recommendations, allowing you to follow channels you want to watch instead of letting YouTube guess for you. You can blur thumbnails, you can disable UPPER CASE HEADLINES, and stop thumbnails from auto-playing when you hover your mouse over them.
Untrapp even lets the truly hooked set up a schedule to block YouTube at a particular time every day or block particular channels altogether. If you’re not comfortable with your YouTube habit, Untrapp is well worth checking out.
Invidious: Replace YouTube’s…
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