You open YouTube for a minute to figure out a plumbing problem. One hour later, you’re halfway through a documentary on creatures that live in the ocean’s depths.
Trust me, it’s not you. We all blame ourselves, but the app is engineered to pull you in like this. You can take back control without uninstalling the app.
I adjusted a couple of settings, and YouTube went from a time sink to an actual tool. Here’s the step-by-step.
YouTube is a bottomless soup bowl
In 2005, researcher Brian Wansink ran a famous experiment with bottomless soup bowls. The bowls secretly refilled themselves, and participants had no idea.
Participants ate 73% more soup than the control group and didn’t feel any fuller. Our brains use visual cues, like seeing an empty bowl, to know when to stop.
Tech designers took that principle and created the infinite scroll. So the first thing I did was turn off every feature that let content keep flowing on its own.
I stopped Autoplay to prevent one video from leading to the next
Autoplay works like a bottomless bowl. When a video finishes, another starts, and you don’t get a chance to stop and step away.
For users under 18, Autoplay is off by default, but for everyone else it’s on. Here’s how to turn it off:
- Tap your profile picture in the lower-right corner.
- Tap the Settings gear icon in the upper-right corner.
- Scroll down and tap Playback under the Video and audio preferences section.
- Toggle Autoplay next video to Off.
Turning off Playback in feeds gave me a chance to choose what to watch next
There’s an even sneakier feature you don’t want. You might have seen videos start playing on mute while you scroll through the home screen.
It’s meant to pull you in before you even choose what to watch. Worse, if a video plays for just a few seconds, the algorithm counts it as a view in your watch history.
Here’s how to turn it off:
- Go to Settings.
- Tap General.
- Turn off Playback in feeds.
Short-form content will eat your attention span. The recently launched YouTube Shorts Timer finally hands control back to the viewer. To do so:
- Tap your profile picture.
- Tap Time management.
- Tap Shorts Feed limit and select your time limit.
I set mine to 30 minutes a day. After I hit it, a pop-up shows, and the feed pauses for the rest of the day.
Adult accounts can dismiss the pop-up, but the pause is enough to pull me out of the trance.
Turning off the Shorts shelf reduces the temptation
Time limits don’t fix the fact that the Shorts shelf sits front and center. Another way to stay out of the rabbit hole is to get rid of the visual trigger. To do so:
- Scroll down your Home feed until you spot the Shorts shelf.
- Tap the vertical three-dot button in the upper-right corner of that section.
- Select Show fewer Shorts.
I cleared my watch history to stop the algorithm from pushing junk content
Every video you watch shapes what shows up next. Watch one ragebait clip, and your feed is full of them for days.
To fix it, go to Settings > Manage all history. I find the offending videos and remove them.
When they’re gone from your history, the algorithm no longer uses them to suggest what’s next.
If your feed is completely out of control, you can do a nuclear reset by deleting your entire watch history in Settings.
This usually leaves your homepage blank until you start watching new videos. Fingers crossed you get better suggestions now.
I unsubscribed from channels I no longer watch to improve my experience
When you subscribe to a channel, it’s basically super-like, and the algorithm keeps feeding their videos to you. It’s a good idea to unsubscribe from the channels you’ve outgrown.
A lot of the channels I subscribed to started great, but eventually went off track. For example, cooking channels that only do viral gimmicks now, or tech reviewers who have turned into unboxing machines.
I turned off YouTube notifications to stop being pulled back in
Notifications on YouTube are relentless. They keep pulling you back into the app even when you don’t want to be there.
Go to Settings > Notifications to turn off the constant pings. Even if you don’t want to block all notifications, make sure to turn off Recommended videos.
The notifications are not even from channels you follow. They are the algorithm baiting you into another binge session.
With these settings adjusted, YouTube feels a lot quieter. And when I open it, the home screen isn’t clickbait after clickbait.
YouTube should work for you, not the other way around. The attention economy thrives on your zoning out.
Changing these settings is a small but powerful act of rebellion.
