For years now, I’ve been using an extension in Chrome called Enhancer for YouTube to control the YouTube experience: speed, feeds, algorithm, etc. But it always seemed like overkill for my needs and the settings page was bewildering in the number of decisions to make. So I rarely tweaked it.

And for the last little while, I’ve found myself going down way too many YouTube algorithm death spirals. So irritating. I needed a way to calm the experience down.

Enter Unhook. The extension works in Chrome/Firefox/Edge and its main job is to hide lots of aspects of the YouTube site: the sidebar, recommendations, playlists, the screen cards that show up at the end of a video, comments, shorts, etc., and disable some behaviors like AutoPlay. Now, when a video plays, all I see is the video: no sidebar, no recommended videos, no comments. So peaceful.

Unhook can even hide all the videos on the Home page and redirect the browser to show your Subscriptions page instead.

Within a few minutes of installing this extension, I could feel myself calming down. I now go straight to my Subscriptions page, scan the channel videos that look interesting, and add the videos I want to see to my Watch Later list.

For me, the Watch Later list is like my Amazon Wish List: it’s where my impulse clicks go to die. If I really really want to see a video, then I’ll see it now. Otherwise, it sits on the Watch Later list till I get to it.

Or not. At the end of the year, I run another Chrome extension, YT Watch Later Assist. The only thing I use this extension for is to delete all the videos that have piled up in my Watch Later list. If I’d really wanted to see those vids, I’d have seen them. If I’m meant to see them, they’ll surface again somehow. If I didn’t see them, and my life still feels OK, then I didn’t need to see them.

I really wish I had more self-control to resist the YouTube algorithms and the satisfaction of quick-hit videos. I also wish I could control myself around peanut butter. But in both cases, the only way for me to control my impulses is to remove the stimulus.

So, until my self discipline improves, I have Unhook and it’s doing well by me.