Comment by susam
4 hours ago
Fortunately, I could never get used to the small screens of mobile phones as a serious computing or web browsing device. So my use of my mobile phone is limited to basic tasks like making calls, sending messages, and sometimes, reluctantly typing emails when I don't have a laptop handy.
My primary computing and web browsing device remains my laptop, with Emacs and Firefox being my main tools. One thing that does manage to distract me sometimes is YouTube recommendations. As a result I have written a little userscript for myself to disable shorts and recommendations: https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.j...
So far the userscript has been successful. As a side effect of disabling the recommendations sidebar, the video panel expands to occupy a larger part of the screen which I quite like. Here is a screenshot: https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png
Also, I still depend heavily on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern attention media too.
I tried something like that with Chrome Extensions but it doesn't age well. WHen it worked, it surely saved me some time to do more productive things: https://github.com/oldeucryptoboi/Homer
Try Unhook (desktop) and Untrap (iOS). At this point, my YouTube experience is just the channels I subscribe to, and the video player. It reduced my usage to almost zero.
I'm not exactly curing cancer, but my media consumption is more moderate and mindful now.
Same thing can be achieved (mostly) by disabling youtube watch and search history. It causes the home page to be blank, and all recommendations under any video are usually from your subscriptions, related your subscriptions, or directly related to the video.
You don't want any recommendation or algorithms at all. This is intended to make you waste time.
If I want to watch a video I go on my subscribed list, check what's new and decide what to watch. Don't need some fancy algorithm to tell me what I should do.
These also remove suggestions and comments
This is the simplest and most effective solution, Cheers
Just add channels you like to your rss feed. It works great with freshrss.
Or if you want to get fancy use tubearchivist with the Jellyfin plug-in.
"Just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here
TIL tubearchivist has a Jellyfin plug-in. Cheers.
Writing with a pen has a lot of unseen benefits.
Fine-motor skills connected to memory, etc.
Doesn't take much to find the science.
Also, avoiding interruption is good for your train of thought.
If a train of thought doesn't matter, then stay online and leave your phone able to interrupt you.
It's your "choice" (tm)
Seriously, try everything including the things you don't think will work for your sense of peace, so you know, IOWA (I over-worry always)
Peace to you all.
If you press t key you will get a full width video player.
Screenshot not found.