YouTube is designed to keep you addicted to watching videos. These apps stop YouTube from becoming a distraction and keep you from wasting time on it.
It's a scenario we are all too familiar with. You get a link to a YouTube video, you watch it, and then you watch a related or recommended video, and soon you're down the rabbit hole of distractions. It's not a coincidence though, as YouTube is made in a way to keep the user engaged. You need to actively fight that, with extensions and apps that make YouTube less addictive and distracting.
1. Unhook (Chrome, Firefox): All-In-One YouTube Distraction Remover
Unhook is one of the best extensions to make YouTube better. It's a swiss army knife tool to deal with YouTube distractions, removing or blocking most of the ways to waste time on the site. Here's a list of what it can do:
- Hide homepage feed (and redirect you only to channels you subscribe)
- Hide the sidebar for recommended videos, live chats, playlists, and transcripts
- Hide end-screen video wall and cards
- Hide comments
- Hide subscriptions, headers, footers, trending, explore, and other distractions
- Disable autoplay
- Disable annotations
You can individually select options for each of these features. Unhook also has a simple on/off switch, so you can disable Unhook temporarily if you come across a video where you do want to engage in the comments or live chat.
Download: Unhook for Chrome | Firefox | Edge (Free)
2. YT Scribe (Web): Read Transcripts Quickly Instead of Watching Videos
Did that 10-minute video only have a minute's worth of actual useful stuff? Stop being tricked into wasting time on videos by using a tool to read its transcript. It's a quicker way to find what you need. In fact, sometimes, you can entirely avoid watching the video.
Copy-paste a video link in YT Scribe and the app will transcribe the video. You can see a time-coded version or just a plain text version. It uses machine learning to transcribe and punctuate the text, so it won't always be a perfect transcript. But it's good enough to scan the video's contents and find what you need to.
The app has dark mode and light mode options, and lets you search YouTube from within its website. There's also a handy Chrome extension to quickly launch YT Scribe when you're on any YouTube video.
Download: YT Scribe for Chrome (Free)
3. Clickbait Remover for YouTube (Chrome, Firefox): See Real Thumbnails From Videos
When it comes to wasting your time on YouTube, not everything is Google's fault. Often, creators will generate a thumbnail for their video that is different from the content itself. These clickbait videos are a tremendous time-waster, and there's finally a way to fix that.
Clickbait Remover changes the thumbnails you see on YouTube, instead choosing to show what the actual video contains. You can set it to something from the start, middle, or end of every video. Picking the middle is usually the best strategy as you get to see the actual content of the video.
The extension also turns all-cap titles into lowercase or first-letter-capitalized sentences, making for a cleaner screen. The before-after comparisons are striking, and you'll never be able to go back to old YouTube once you see the difference Clickbait Remover makes.
Download: Clickbait Remover for YouTube for Chrome | Firefox (Free)
4. YouTube Time (Chrome): Customizable Time Limiter for YouTube
There are some excellent browser extensions to block online distractions with time limits, but if your only problem is YouTube, then get YouTube Time. It's an app to set time limits for YouTube, with a lot of customizations.
You can set a daily time limit, or set a different limit for each day of the week. By default, the clock resets at midnight, but that can be changed too. Then, as soon as you start YouTube, you'll see a clock in a corner that displays how much time you've spent on it. YouTube Time won't count time when YouTube is minimized or out of focus.
YouTube Time knows that you sometimes will need to override the extension, and has included a limit for how many times you can override it. Of course, you need to exercise some discipline and try not to go for overrides. Also, YouTube Time lets you control whether it works on YouTube Kids, if you're sharing your computer with children and don't want their consumption to count towards your hours.
Download: YouTube Time for Chrome (Free)
5. ReacTube (Web): Watch Ad-Free YouTube Without Going to YouTube
A simpler strategy to stave off the distractions of YouTube is to watch YouTube without going to YouTube. ReacTube is a fast and minimalist frontend for YouTube where you can search for and play videos.
Each video plays as a small pop-up window, with the option to change its quality. The app uses YouTube embeds, which are natively ad-free. You also won't see the Watch Next screen at the end of the video here, so you won't fall down the rabbit hole.
ReacTube also includes a button to download any video you watch. You won't be able to access subscriptions or other features here, but that's a small price to pay for a fuss-free YouTube experience.
Why You Should Use Tech Instead of Willpower
All of these apps and extensions are trying their best to stop you from wasting time on YouTube. But you might ask why you need them, and if you'd be better off simply using your willpower and self-discipline. No, you wouldn't.
Several studies and experts have said that productivity is about setting up your environment to relieve the burden on your willpower. Tech giants are trying to find ways to make you give up on your willpower and spend more time on their apps. These tools finally block those tactics and make it a fair fight.
