Making YouTube usable again
YouTube has gone through a fair amount of enshittification. Let’s make it better in a few steps. Google is actually quite helpful in this regard - if you know what you’re looking for.
In your YouTube activity controls:
- turn off the history and delete any saved history,
- turn off personalised ads,
- delete ‘YouTube survey answers’ and ‘YouTube Customize Your Feed Feedback’,
At first you might worry: What if I forget I have already watched this video and I will waste time watching it again? Well, then it probably wasn’t important in the first place and you have forgotten about the activity due to the sheer amount of stuff you have watched. Nothing to be ashamed of. It’s like watching a favorite movie twice. While personalised ads sound nice (if forced upon, let’s watch something ‘useful’), every click and search on the platform is used to target you with personalised ads to increase revenue. The purpose of ads is to make money off you, the product. The less personalised ads you watch, the lower the chance the advertiser will be successful in their act, i.e. the conversion rate drops. Last but not least, any customization to your feed places you at a disadvantage, because you are more likely to keep watching whatever the platform feeds you. If outraging content does the trick, then that is what will be suggested. Your worth is measured in the time you spent watching, which is also known as engagement.
The above exercise will result in a clean home page with no recommendations, no available shorts, and only videos of channels you have actually subscribed to. You will see shorts in your subscriptions pane, if those channels produce such content.
Also, while you’re at it, it might be worthwhile to delete any interactions you have associated with your account, but it’s slightly more work, as you must delete each category separately. An argument can be made for using the platform without an account, but you won’t have the clean user experience displayed above and your subscriptions feed.
For an enhanced experience, I recommend installing Firefox with the following extensions:
In Firefox privacy settings, available at about:preferences#privacy:
- Enable strict tracking protection
- Uncheck ‘Fix major site issues’
- Check ‘Tell websites not to sell or share my data’
- Check ‘Block pop-ups and third-party redirects’
- Check ‘Warn you when websites try to install add-ons’
- Disable Mozilla telemetry, by unchecking:
- ‘Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla’
- ‘Send daily usage ping to Mozilla’
- ‘Automatically send crash reports’
To support content creators, consider donating directly.
On a closing note, YouTube is by no means an exception. Surveillance capitalism is a business model where companies collect data and monetize users by selling their future behavior. The user experience must be degraded to make the platform more addictive, thus ensuring the platform continues to grow. Therefore, we should all make an effort to educate ourselves and others to consciously interact with the product, rather than being the product.