YouTube is one of the only social products I still find genuinely useful. It’s where I learn how to fix things around the house, where my kids watch a marine biologist explain how octopuses see color through their skin, where I go down rabbit holes on guitar technique or game design. The library is incredible.
But out of the box, YouTube is also a slot machine. Shorts, autoplay, a homepage tuned to whatever is most likely to keep you scrolling, thumbnails engineered in Photoshop to bait the click. The product that could be a library is shipped to you as a casino, and that’s the version most kids meet first.
A few friends with kids have asked me what I do to make YouTube tolerable in our house. The short version: I treat YouTube the way I’d treat a TV with a hundred channels and a bored producer. I turn off the parts that are designed to hijack attention, and I keep the parts that let me (or my kid) go looking for something specific. Here’s the setup.
Use YouTube on desktop only
Delete the YouTube app from your phone. Use YouTube in a browser, on a computer. The friction is the feature — it turns YouTube from something you reach for in line at the grocery store into something you sit down to use. It’s also the only place the rest of these tips work; mobile YouTube is a walled garden Google controls end to end.
Turn off the addictive defaults
- Turn off autoplay. Toggle on the player.
- Pause watch history. Settings → Your data in YouTube → YouTube Watch History → Pause. Quiets the homepage and recommendations.
- Hide Shorts. Collapse the shelf on the homepage, or remove it entirely with an extension (below).
- Turn on Restricted Mode and use a Supervised Account for kids.
Install an ad blocker
uBlock Origin — free, open source, Chrome and Firefox. (On iOS, AdGuard or a network blocker like NextDNS is the equivalent.)
Add two extensions
- Unhook — hide the homepage feed, sidebar recommendations, Shorts, end-screen suggestions, and comments. I hide everything except subscriptions and search.
- Clickbait Remover for YouTube — replaces engineered thumbnails with the first frame of the video and normalizes ALL-CAPS titles to sentence case.
Make subscriptions the front door
With the settings above, the only way into YouTube is search or a channel you deliberately chose to follow. Subscribe carefully. “Do you want this person in your house every day?” is a surprisingly good filter for kids and adults.
Why bother
I think a lot about the difference between pull media and push media. Pull is when you go looking for something — a book, a search, a specific channel. Push is when something is shoved at you — a feed, an autoplay, a notification. Pull media tends to be enriching. Push media tends to be exhausting. YouTube contains both, and the defaults are pushed all the way toward push.
The goal of all of this isn’t to make YouTube less fun. It’s the opposite. When the autoplay stops and the homepage goes quiet and the thumbnails stop screaming, what’s left is the thing that was always good about YouTube: a deep, weird, generous library of people teaching you stuff. That’s the version I want my kids to grow up with.
It takes about twenty minutes to set up. It’s worth it.