Watch only what you want, not what YouTube endlessly feeds you. A chrome extension to liberate you from the infinite distraction cycle of YouTube.
Download the extension on the Chrome Web Store. Alternatively, here's how to manually install the latest version from GitHub (which may be broken at any given time due to testing and WIP new features):
- Download the entire repository as a zip file (on GitHub: Clone or download), then extract the zip file to a folder.
- In Chrome, go to
chrome://extensions. - In the top right corner, make sure "Developer Mode" is on.
- In the bar that shows up, click "Load unpacked" and select the repository folder you downloaded.
- After confirming everything, the YTL icon should show up in your extensions tray. If you go to YouTube.com you will be greeted with a newly liberated layout.
You'll have to manually download the new files or Git pull every time there's an update through GitHub, and Developer Mode extensions will trigger some potentially annoying messages in Chrome, so it's not an ideal method, but can be used for testing if you really want.
Like other social media platforms, YouTube is very good at showing you content that you want to watch but weren't planning to or looking for, making it super easy to get distracted and get sucked into one video after another and suddenly lose an hour of your day. Yet there are so many valuable resources and videos that you can't find elsewhere: tutorials, event coverage, specific creators you subscribe to who you know always publish high-quality content worth watching. For many of us, the value of YouTube makes it worth the sacrifice of even its most distracting possibilities, and it's impossible to just cut away.
What if it didn't have to be this way? What if you could have the good of YouTube, see the content you want to see, without the platform constantly trying to drag your attention through an endless stream of productivity-draining drudgery?
This is the philosophy behind YouTube Liberation. It's time to rise up, lose your chains, and join us as we march our way towards a better YouTube!
YouTube Liberation works by hiding elements that lead you towards new content you don't intend to see, without compromising any core viewing features. These elements include:
- The entire home page of alg-generated recommendations
- Video recommendations on watch pages
- Comments sections on watch pages
- Extraneous UI elements, replacing the full sidebar with a much more minimal one and removing most topbar buttons
YouTube liberation does not at all compromise:
- Subscriptions and trending pages
- Channel pages
- Playlists
- Video stats, description, etc.
What are considered vital core features and what are considered distracting elements varies from use case to use case and person to person. For certain kinds of videos, comments might be more constructive than distracting. For creators, notifications and easy access to uploading might be important (though that's why YouTube Studio exists...). Thus, one feature I'm working on adding right now is the ability to customize what gets hidden and what is shown, with a recommended configuration as it is right now.