zlacker

I can totally relate to this feeling of frustration with doom scrolling - I was in the same boat a few months ago, especially with YouTube. Fortunately, I managed to break free from the cycle by tweaking a few settings in YT itself (no special browser extensions needed). These are the changes that helped me:

Main settings that gave me a starting point:

1. Uninstalled YouTube app and now using only the browser version (on mobile and desktop)

2. Turned off Watch History in https://www.youtube.com/feed/history - "Pause watch history" (you can only pause the watch history and YT will periodically remind you to turn it back on. OH yeah, nice try Google!).

3. Turn off AutoPlay (toggle switch on the video player toolbar)

4. Tweak all the settings in https://www.youtube.com/account_playback - disable info cards and video previews (the setting that makes the videos to play when you hover over thumbnails)

After making these changes, your YT homepage and History page will be empty spaces - no videos at all. It is so refreshing! As a bonus, now YouTube shorts show only short-forms content from the channels you subscribed to. So it is more meaningful than some random junk.

Additional habits that helped me:

1. Subscriptions - I subscribed to specific channels that I want to follow - eg: Dave2D, MKBHD, fav cooking channels, NPR etc. and watch their videos via Subscriptions link

2. Topic-specific playlists - save interesting videos that I want to save for later - e.g: 'Health', 'Good recipes' etc.

3. Related videos - When a video is playing, YT shows a bunch of 'related videos' on the right. Most of these videos were not really related to the video, instead they are just trigger content. So I do two things here:

     - select the 'Do not recommend channel' from the vertical "..." menu in each video.
     
    - if the related video is genuinely interesting to me, choose the menu option 'Add to watch later'

With these changes, I watch videos in one of three ways only - by searching for specific topics, or selecting from my playlists, or browsing through Subscriptions.

This was a big shift from a "push" to a "pull" model and has effectively stopped my doom scrolling habit in just a couple of weeks. I feel like I am watching YT on my own terms now.

>>annjos+(OP)
congrats on your success. rather than fight against the myriad dark patterns employed by youtube, one can also opt to bypass their slimy frontend entirely. for example you can enjoy the same videos with no toxic settings via:

invidious

freetube

pinchflat + jellyfin

MPV + yt-dlp

tubular/newpipe (mobile)

>>annjos+(OP)
Oddly enough, a big help for me has been not using an adblocker for sites like Youtube. I can only watch so much before I just become enraged by the sheer number of ads in a 20 minute video that I just rage quit the app.

>>hirvi7+69
That's an interesting point. I get what you mean. I hate videos that start with an ad. And if the next video also has an ad, I am more likely to give up and go elsewhere. You are right, it is counter-intuitive, but it works.