Social media addiction and quitting* YouTube

Published on 03. April 2025 by 0np, 875 words

Beginning of the month I've challenged myself to abstain from watching YouTube. You might have noticed the small asterisk in the title - let me explain.

Googles Video platform has a rather big place in my day to day life.

• I absolutely adore multiple hour long videos of super niche topics like "SM64’s Invisible Walls Explained Once and for All" by pannenkoek2012 or "ROBLOX_OOF.mp3" by hbomberguy.
• As netpolicits is near and dear to my heart, I also watch videos such as "Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs" by Folding Ideas or "A History of Facebook's (& Meta's) Decline" by Tantacrul.
• Math and Science videos are also frequently on my watch list such as from 3blue1brown or AlphaPhoenix.
• If I want to feel existential dread I sit down and open up a video from exurb1a.

I could go on and on.

But something has changed over the years.

At one point in time I got sucked into Shorts. Got five Minutes of slack? A few shorts will fill the time. You got a funny meme from your friend? The next fifteen shorts will almost autoplay. But not all shorts are equally bad. I enjoy the political satire from Sidney Morss or the silly sketches from Plankton. The videos from Alberta Tech make me cherish the fact that I'm not working in software engineering.

But those are all just small jewels among the gigantic abyss of low effort, stolen content, AI slop reading reddit posts out loud, or rage bait political clips. It feels like a big slot machine, where with each flick to the top you get the chance of a new dopamine hit. Not to speak of the constant ear worms due to the background music of most shorts that seem to change day to day.

There were also other changes. Recently, YouTube decided to auto-translate a lot of video titles against my will without any way to opt-out. It physically hurt my eyes to see this auto-translate fail in every possible way to convey puns or technical terms into my native language where they make absolutely no sense. But it doesn't stop there. Even the audio gets auto-translated sometimes, which sounds worse than Microsoft SAM back in the day.

Something must change.

Reclaiming my sanity

I started this month with the goal of not watching so much YouTube anymore. I know that, only by sheer force of will, this challenge would not go on for long. But I deployed safeguards:

• First and foremost, I've deleted YouTube from my phone. This immediately broke the habit of regularly opening it and getting sucked into Shorts again.
• I've also deleted the YouTube app from my TV. It seems I can't install it again without making an account with Samsung, so it's actually gone for good.
• I installed the Firefox add-on LeechBlock on both my laptop and my phone. Initially, I thought of going the DNS blocking route with Pi-hole. But this would have required more tinkering in my local network and with Tailscale, although this guide doesn't look too bad.

Remember the asterisk in the title? I made one small exception in my challenge, which is during dinner I'm watching one video. I could've also switched on some other video streaming site, but that would've been beside the point. To avoid relapsing again, I've put up additional guard rails:

• LeechBlock allows me to set a daily time limit after the site gets blocked.
• The Firefox add-on Unhook gives me a few options to tone down the invasive nature of the YouTube algorithm. For example, you can disable shorts or the comment section altogether, or hide recommendations.
• SponsorBlock would help avoiding those annoying ads embedded in the videos themselves. They take a toll on one's sanity in a whole different way, but that's a topic for a separate blog post.

It was worth it

After 31 days, the result of this challenge is a huge success. My overall time spent watching YouTube was reduced from multiple hours a day to only a few hours a week. I noticed a lot of big and small positive changes throughout this month because of it:

• My mood overall has improved significantly. I worry way less because I'm not bombarded with all the bad things happening all at once every day.
• I noticed a lot of my time with YouTube was driven by FOMO and to some extend also by parasocial interactions with the different creators. You kinda start caring about those strangers, in a weird way?
• I finally started to catch up on all my different little side projects, like finally starting this blog.

Further research led me to this Wikipedia page on problematic social media use, which fits well and resonates with the experiences I've made this month. The way the modern internet is setup and how we use it shapes our daily habits and the way how we view the world. Taking back control is possible by being cognizant of dark pattern exploiting your vulnerabilities for attention and self-defense using open source tools.