On Content, Time and Hiding YouTube Shorts
- The internet contains a lot of information, opinions and entertainment (content).
- The total amount of content is far greater than any person could consume in one lifetime.
- Some of the content is good because it enriches me emotionally, socially, spiritually, economically, etc.
- Some of the content is bad because it is irrelevant (to me), low quality (does not enrich me) or harmful.
- It is likely that bad content outweighs the good content.
I, personally, have a finite amount of time on earth.
What to do with my finite time?
Over time, more and more platforms have moved to algorithmic delivery of content, both in feeds and recommendations when you're looking or have finished looking at content. YouTube was a relatively early example of this: the YouTube homepage is mostly recommended videos, especially since around 2013 when they removed the option to have your subscription feed as the default page when logged in.
If you are logged in and have some YouTube history, it's likely that many of the videos will be appealing!
I know that I've watched hundreds (maybe thousands) of videos that YouTube has recommended to me. But I also know that, sometimes, I want to do things other than watch YouTube videos. This is often a shocking revelation. YouTube's ability to recommend and provide videos that I find interesting and engaging is almost ceaseless and my self-control is often poor.
I also know that I have a bunch of channels that I subscribe to because I like their videos so much that I want to make sure I'm aware of new ones. To be honest, I think that those channels and their videos are usually enough. If a friend or other person whom I trust/respect shares a video with me, I will usually watch it - this is not too dissimilar to how most media was distributed for most of human history.
Restricting the supply
- Videos from channels I subscribe to, and
- Videos from other people.
Frustratingly, YouTube provides almost no way to do this yourself. Why would they? YouTube makes more money from ads and data the more time you spend watching videos on their site. This is not "evil" but it is "not good", from my moral perspective.
The only small fix you can do very easily is to bookmark your Subscriptions feed page:
https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions.
It's a good starting place - defaulting to the traditional reverse chronological feed -
as long as bookmarks are a method you typically use to reach websites.
Being more thorough
We can go further though. That is, if you use Safari on a Mac, which allows you to set a default custom style sheet to control the appearance of sites that you visit beyond what the creators of those sites intended.
Screenshots
Hover (or tap) to compare YouTube before and after setting up the custom CSS.
Homepage
Video page
