Intentional YouTubing

I love YouTube. There are so many great channels and accounts on there to follow, publishing incredible videos. My family and I use it so much that we justify the £19.99 per month Family Premium service that removes all of the adverts and gives us a bunch of other features.

A conversation with some friends today made me remember that I use YouTube in a slightly optimised way. I hate getting drawn into whatever the algorithm thinks is hot, trending or likely to pull me in for a long ‘engagement’ session, where I open the app and later look up to find that hours have passed. I’ve found a simple way of reducing the likelihood of this.

I have all of my YouTube history turned off.

This is what I see when I open the app on my iPad:

A beautiful, blank YouTube home screen.

When I go to YouTube it is usually to do one of these things, which I can now achieve without getting distracted:

Intentionally searching for something specific

Going to my subscriptions feed, a chronological list of videos from channels that I follow

Going to look at my ‘Watch Later’ playlist of long videos that I didn’t have time to watch when I first came across them

To set this up, press the settings cog in the YouTube app and go to ‘Manage all history’. Here you can go to the ‘Controls’ tab and turn off your YouTube history, to enjoy an almost1 algorithm-free existence:

YouTube history turned off.

One downside of turning off your YouTube history is that the service will never remember your place if you leave a video and come back to it later, as your progress is part of the history of what you watched. This is inconvenient, but I wouldn’t trade this feature for not having a zen-like home screen.

You will still get suggested videos next to the one that you are watching. ︎