I often find myself stuck in a Youtube rabbithole when I am there to search for a video.
All because of auto reccomendations and a well curated feed.
Is there a way to stop this!
I wish to use it as a library of sorts for assistance in life not to get stuck there.
If there any hacks or utilities you use to carefully select what you wish to consume do share!
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Skip the Homepage. Bookmark the Library, so that’s the first thing that you see.
You could also start your search from somewhere else like Alfred.
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I’m using Vookmark, which is like Instapaper for video. Cool things is they have an Apple TV app for watching later videos you set aside.
The service is a little buggy but I’m gladly paying the subscription.
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I use Invidious which is an open source project that is essentially YouTube without the google parts. I’m using it to have a single RSS feed I can subscribe to which pulls all of the latest videos from my YouTube subscriptions (it can take a couple days before they reach this feed)
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+1 for Invidious
If using the site (as opposed to RSS) you can configure homepage to show vids from subscriptions only.
I saw a tip on Reddit recently suggesting IINA (media player app—very elegant and Mac-like) to play YouTube videos. youtube-dl under the hood —very cool. Also supports 4K (unlike Safari) and waaay more efficient than opening FF/a Chromium browser and using YouTube’s web interface. So I click on a thumbnail in Invidious, then drag the ’watch on YouTube’ link into IINA in the dock. Extra steps but worth it.
Another suggestion: schedule time in your calendar for watching YouTube. Will hopefully help you to be more intentional about how much time you spend on it. If you’re outside scheduled time, no YouTube! (Or Invidious+IINA if you’re persuaded 
)
Addit: of course another big benefit of Invidious is that you are refusing to feed Google all of your viewing activity etc.
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iina also has an extension for safari and chrome which will handle the opening of the current page video in iina (instead of dragging to the icon)
Mmm I saw this but was put off by the permissions request of the extension, though I realise there is probably no way around that and I don’t have any serious concerns about privacy violations by this particular app
It’s probably bad, but I often don’t worry about privacy violations in open source apps 