blocking youtube recommendations

youtube i love you, but you're bringing me down

in a bastardized interpretation of fitness landscapes, i've recently been thinking about how every decision i make is a step in some direction in an infinite mountain range. in this space, my altitude isn't environmental fitness. it's something more like "personal value" or "amount self-actualized" where you can imagine standing at the peak of a hill in this endless mountain range as being highly satisfied with myself, highly engaged in my life.

some steps are uphill and take more effort. some steps are downhill and take less. sometimes it's necessary to take a step downhill to conserve energy, or to get to a different path on the mountain. but too many steps down and motherfucker, you're in a depression.

watching youtube is almost always a step downhill. that in and of itself isn't a bad thing - i really do think youtube is one of this century's triumphs - the issue is how easily youtube turns a single step into a scree run. i've had nights of binging youtube so bad that my eyes ached, and then instead of stopping, i continued to watch just with one eye open at a time. deranged.

but captivating people is youtube's job. the effectiveness of its recommendation algorithm is what determines the size of the pie that it divvies up and dishes out to an ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of content creators. better recommendations = more time on youtube = more advertisements watched = more money to go around. at no point will any of this system's structural incentives prompt someone to say "you know what? i think youtube's recommendations are too good. let's degrade them a little"¹

so if youtube's addictive and unlikely to change, and i will always like to occasionally watch things on it, what is to be done?

block recommendations.

install ublock origin and add the following custom filters:

youtube.com###dismissible:matches-path(/watch)

youtube.com##.ytp-endscreen-content:matches-path(/watch)

this will hide the sidebar and the thumbnails that show up at the end of the video: the website equivalent of moving the bowl of M&Ms that you have in your kitchen to a jar in the cupboard. i've been doing this for a week and the difference is extremely noticeable. i still check out my subscriptions each day and watch videos there that catch my eye, but afterwards, i just close the tab.²

stupor evaded, i can consider an option that might take me uphill. write, read, play music, reply to that message, go for a walk, meditate, just generally cultivate some fuckin' eudaimonia.

the nice thing about this is that i can also turn it off when i want. some integral parts of my personal development were catalysed by a youtube video i discovered hours deep in a binge, many songs i love i first heard on random youtube mixtapes. i can still make the time for that and switch off the filters temporarily, it just turns it into a conscious decision, not something that happens through my focus being sapped in the middle of something else, a process that is slowly turning us into a herd of mediocre dilettantes.

is this just an ornate elaboration of "no pain, no gain" ? yes. have a million people already written about how web 2.0 makes us unhappy, actually ? yes. is this cow thing i've got going on with the pictures ridiculous, romantic, and self-pitying ? yes

doesn't matter. if you suspect you might be watching too much youtube to get up the mountain, this is my recommendation.