I’ve been losing a lot of time to YouTube lately. I don’t even know why. In a down moment, I just find myself heading to the homepage and watching whatever comes up (usually weird Tears of the Kingdom builds).
If you’re doing the same thing and you feel bad about it, don’t: This isn’t your fault. Some of the smartest psychological researchers, data scientists, and programmers on the planet are working to ensure that the YouTube homepage is as addictive as possible. We’ve all heard about how the YouTube algorithm can go terribly wrong, mostly in the context of radicalization. But even without that extreme result, the algorithm is a huge time sink—a system designed to keep you watching videos for as long as possible.
Some people like this, but if you want more control over how you spend your time, I recommend avoiding the algorithm entirely. And Google just made that easier: Now, if you turn off your YouTube watch history, there will be no recommended videos on the homepage. Here’s how to set that up.
To get started, head to the My Google Activity page. This allows you to control what kind of information Google keeps about you, including which websites you visit, your physical location, and your watch history. Click on your YouTube History.
You will be asked whether you want to pause your history. Click the Pause button.
That’s it! You can optionally delete your entire YouTube history, but you don’t need to in order for this to work. Head to the YouTube homepage and you won’t see any recommended videos, just a prompt to turn your history back on.
Isn’t that peaceful? No more impulsively watching things—now you’ll have to actively seek out them out.
Turning off the algorithm doesn’t mean giving up on YouTube entirely—it just means watching it on your own terms. Of course, the search function still works, so you can find things that way.
My main recommendation, though, is to get acquainted with your YouTube subscriptions. This page, which you can find on YouTube’s homepage by clicking Subscriptions, shows you all of the latest videos uploaded by all of the channels you’re subscribed to. Scroll through this, and I’m sure you’ll find some videos you’re interested in.
The problem with the YouTube algorithm, like most recommendation algorithms, is that all it can do is predict what you want based on your past behavior. It knows who you have been but not who you want to be. Maybe you watch a lot of celebrity gossip right now but would rather be the kind of person who uses their downtime to learn about gardening. The algorithm makes that hard because it shows you the kinds of things you’ve had a tough time resisting in the past. A subscriptions feed full of gardening channels, though, is only going to show you the kinds of things you wish you were watching instead.
It’s a little bit more work, but it gives you a lot more agency than a black box algorithm ever could. Give it a shot.
