How I Tamed My YouTube Addiction
I used to say that I beat social media addiction by deleting Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and all other traditional platforms from my life. Yet I'd omit the fact that I still racked up nearly 3 hours of YouTube per day. This year, I finally found a way to get my attention vampire under control.
This guide is mostly targeted for people using a Google Chrome-based browser (Chrome, Arc, Vivaldi, Edge, Brave, Opera, etc.) on Apple devices, but you can apply the gist to your own setup with alternative tools.
Browser Extensions
Unhook - This is the heavy-hitter; doing the majority of the work for taming the addictive power of YouTube. It can reduce the UI to just a search bar, perfect for finding only what you're looking for and offering very little incentive to stay on after the video is over. My setup shows only videos from channels I'm subscribed to. The list hardly grows more than a few videos each day, making it quick and easy to see what's new without getting sucked into the slot machine of recommendations.
SponsorBlock - This can auto-skip sponsored segments, self-promotion, and other time wasters on videos. It cuts down on my watch time by showing me only the content I care to see, saving minutes each day, or at least a few seconds of me having to scrub the playhead manually.
DeArrow - "...for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube. The goal is to make titles accurate and reduce sensationalism. No more arrows, ridiculous faces, and no more clickbait." When the video thumbnail shows some dude talking to his camera for 43 minutes, I'm FAR less likely to give it my time.
These 3 extensions, along with watching videos on 1.25x speed, has cut down DRASTICALLY on my watch time (averaging ~30m a day).
iOS Control
Having all these extensions doesn't help anything if I'm accessing YouTube from all my other devices. Therefore, I deleted the native apps and enabled parental controls to block the entire domain. This is only slightly inconvenient, but if I really want to watch something, I'll send the video link to myself on WhatsApp and open it on my Macbook in the future.
Apple hides this stuff really deep, here's the path:
Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > App Store, Media, Web, & Games > Web Content
Then Enable "Limit Adult Websites" and add links to https://youtube.com & https://m.youtube.com.
One Last Line of Defense
Youtube was the biggest time suck, but far from the only site that left me feeling tweaky. I took a similar approach with Feedly (RSS news reader) and reddit (no explanation needed). I also blocked them on iOS devices and went a step further for Mac OS:
Focus App - Blocks distracting sites, but not at the system level since I don't want to dig through my settings every time I need a quick skim. From the menu bar, I can unblock everything for 5m; perfect for quick peeks with an automatic timeout for safety.
Good Luck!